The first time I heard the song “I Don’t Like Mondays” by Irish new wave band The Boomtown Rats, it was during an episode of The West Wing. The song is about a 1979 school shooting in San Diego, California, and it played quietly while the show’s President Bartlet gave a speech after a school bombing at a swimming complex. “The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight,” the president says.
That moment, the song, and the show’s depiction of grief have shaped the way I see things. As a chaplain, I have stood with families after shootings and seen that grief up close. In hospital waiting rooms, trauma bays, and late-night phone calls, that line comes back to me. The song has become the background to my own questions, my witness to violence, and my sense that I cannot walk away unchanged.
I grew up watching horror movies with my dad: slashers, monsters, and masked villains. For me, it was just entertainment, a way to escape for a couple of hours. But lately, it’s harder to tell the difference between what’s fake and what’s real. A few days ago, I watched a movie where someone was shot in the head, and I started crying without knowing why. Later, I saw a real video, one I hadn’t searched for, of someone being killed, and it looked almost the same. The shock wasn’t just about someone dying. It was realizing that killing has become so normal that I couldn’t tell which world I was in at first.
This past summer, during my Clinical Pastoral Experience, an intensive chaplaincy internship, I felt like I lived through three lifetimes as I cared for patient after patient. Emergency room doors opened, gurneys rolled by, and families arrived out of breath and out of words. I kept thinking: This is senseless, but it can change. It doesn’t have to happen. We could add one more step between a hand and a trigger. We could make “easy” a little less easy. I grew up in the South, where guns were common. I don’t mind if someone owns one. I just want to protect people from the worst moments of a bad day.
Four is the number of adults who came through the ER doors with wounds they would not survive.
Three is the number of children I watched die because of a bullet.
Two is the number of children whose lives will be forever changed because they found a gun.
One is the number of emergency baptisms I performed, with my hand trembling on a newborn’s forehead.
Zero is the number it should be. Behind each number is a face, a circle of people, a story that deserved more chapters, futures now unfinished.
What sticks with me is not the numbers themselves, but the reasons they came about. An unlocked gun in a house. Careless storage. A moment of anger. A trigger pulled. And what stays with me most is that it could all have been different.
I still hear the voice of the family member who stood in the ER hallway, stunned, and asked me, “How could God let this happen?” There is no easy answer. I didn’t have words that could take away her pain. But I have come to believe that being present, not explaining, is often the most sacred gift we can give. In moments like that, I return to one truth: God has never not been with us. This helped me accept the mystery I cannot solve.
The early church theologian Origen says tragedies are not God’s plan, but the cost of real freedom: “This freedom of will incited each one either to progress by imitation of God, or reduced him to failure through negligence.” Still, Origen insists God is not passive in the face of suffering. “By the ineffable skill of His wisdom,” he writes, God is “transforming and restoring all things… to some useful aim, and to the common advantage of all.”
Tertullian, writing in the voice of the Latin church fathers, reminds us that the Trinity consists of distinct persons who share a “common power, common substance.”This means the cross is not divine theater. God is not watching from a distance as the world suffers. In Christ, God takes on the wound of human violence. So when I hear a gunshot or hold the hand of a grieving aunt, I am not standing in a place God has left behind. What Christ endured, God endures still.
So when someone asks, “How could God let this happen?” I can’t give a reason, take away the grief. But I can say this: God has never not been with us. God is with every victim of gun violence, just as God was with his Son under the weight of the cross. God was in the waiting room, at the bedside, and in the tears of the grieving relative who asked me that question.
If the Trinity is not just a mystery but the name of the God who saves, then it is also a model for how we live. Each person of the Trinity calls us into a way of being: presence, prevention, and community.
The Spirit calls us to presence. The Spirit’s comfort is found wherever we dare to stay close to pain. The church cannot turn away from blood on the floor or grief in a waiting room. To say God is triune love is to say the Spirit is already there, breathing comfort in sighs too deep for words. We must be there too in the vigils, at funerals, and during late-night phone calls.
The Father calls us to prevent harm. This divine parental care works through our freedom, not apart from it. Believing in the Trinity means believing God acts in history, and that our choices matter. If adding one more step between a hand and a trigger can save a life, then we must act. Common sense should be just as common as ownership: locks, safes, keys kept apart, and a culture that protects children and calms anger.
The Son calls us to community. In Jesus, God does not live apart from others, but enters human life fully: teaching, healing, weeping, and breaking bread. The persons of the Trinity are always in relationship with each other. If we are made in that image, our lives cannot be only about personal rights or private choices. They must be shaped by love and focused on the good of everyone, especially those who are vulnerable.
The Trinity is a mystery the early church never tried to fully explain. Origen speaks of the freedom that allows tragedy, and the providence that works toward healing. Tertullian reminds us that the Son’s suffering is God’s own, not separate from God’s life but part of it. Together, these truths steady me.
So the pastoral task is clear: to stand in the ER, to hold trembling hands, to whisper prayers over broken bodies. To fight for one more safeguard between a child and a bullet. To live in community, because the God we believe in is community.
And still, the line comes back: “The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight.” Yet our faith says it will not always be this way. The angels are witnesses, pointing to the God who enters our suffering and bears our wounds.
That is the hope I carry: Even in the ordinary horror of a trigger pulled, the extraordinary love of God does not let go.
Image: Unsplash
