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Today 38 year old Mother, Rachelle Grimmer shot her two children Ramie (age 12) and Timothy (age 10) and then herself. This happened at a Texas Health and Human services office after a stand off with police. It all began with Grimmer revealing a gun to a caseworker after being unable to get food stamps. As of story time the children have survived but are in critical condition. Rachelle Grimmer did not survive.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, after listing a horrific litany of violent transgressions against children by adults (including one child beaten and forced to eat excrement and another seized and torn apart by dogs in front of his mother), Ivan Karamazov offers this extended reflection:

Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its centre, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose. I am a bug, and I recognise in all humility that I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, though they knew they would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity them. With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that cause follows effect, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds its level — but that’s only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live by it! What comfort is it to me that there are none guilty and that cause follows effect simply and directly, and that I know it? — I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven’t suffered simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That’s a question I can’t answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I’ve only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

That is a lengthy quote. Ivan expresses a wide range of emotions: from a desire to see punishment for those who would perpetrate such a heinous crime against a child to a hope for all things – even the vilest offenders – to be brought into reconciliation with God but finally he comes to a rejection of God. Essentially for Ivan, no ultimate ends justify the means. Eternal punishment perpetuates suffering. Universal salvation for Ivan makes a mockery of the offense and our desire for justice. Even if every last vile offense is forgiven, all are reconciled to God and each other and all created things are in harmony for Ivan it does not justify the suffering of one child beaten and forced to eat excrement or another torn apart by dogs.

At the end of the day I hope with all I have that Ivan is missing something, some piece, something only God in God’s infinite wisdom can understand and that somehow someday harmony will come, and all will say of the God revealed in Christ, “Thou art just, O Lord!” And somehow in someway that we cannot really envision right now God will be all in all.

But when we read stories like this one, we ought to feel Ivan’s sorrow and his rage, as only a person who really believes in a God said to be at once all powerful and benevolent can rage (and Ivan does believe – he just rejects the God he believes in). If we can’t feel deeply Ivan’s sorrow for the suffering of children and sympathize with his anger, then perhaps we don’t really believe in this God we claim to believe in.

In fact from Job to Christ himself on the cross and many places in between the Old and New Testament scriptures provide ample example of those who express their sorrow and indignation to God. This space in the tradition to express lament and frustration – culminating in God crying out to God ‘Have you forsaken me?’ – is perhaps the main reason I am Christian.