Beyond Violence: The Path Through Grief to Spiritual Evolution
The recent shooting at Annunciation School in Minneapolis continues to haunt our collective consciousness. While the news cycle moves forward—with yet more senseless acts of political violence—the Annunication tragedy leaves deep scars and pressing questions for our religious community: How does a young person educated in a Catholic school become capable of such violence?
There are no simple answers. Research consistently links exposure to media violence—including video games, television, movies, and music—with increased aggression in youth. Violent video games, in which killing is winning, is one of many influences on the behavior of youth today. While violent video games alone do not cause violence, when combined with depression, isolation, or family dysfunction, they can become catalysts for aggression. Some scholars suggest these games may serve as virtual rehearsals for actual violence, particularly when killing becomes synonymous with winning.
Violence is woven into the fabric of existence itself. Darwin described evolution as “red in tooth and claw”—a process that advances through struggle and death. Indeed, approximately 98% of all species have perished throughout evolutionary history. Yet paradoxically, death does not triumph. From destruction emerges new life, more robust and resilient than before. As Saint Paul wrote: “Death, where is your victory? Where is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:55).
Today’s unprecedented pace of evolutionary change leaves us struggling to adapt. Our relentless pursuit of perfection and accumulation paradoxically diminishes our humanity. We find ourselves increasingly anxious, depressed, and disconnected—quick to defend our positions, slow to connect with others. American culture still celebrates the “Marlboro man”—the lone individual who conquers opposition through force or cunning and rides off victorious. This ideal of rugged individualism is not merely unrealistic; it is fundamentally anti-human because it denies our relational nature.
Modern physics reveals what ancient wisdom long knew: we are intrinsically interconnected beings. As physicist David Bohm observed, beneath our apparent separateness, we share common cosmic roots and participate in the same cosmic process. This deep interconnection explains why violence anywhere wounds us everywhere. We feel its impact in our hearts and bones because we cannot escape our fundamental unity.
Feeling helpless against violence, however, we risk becoming violent ourselves—frustrated, angry, volatile. Thus, violence can breed violence in an escalating cycle. While spirituality offers an antidote to violence, we need an intermediate step: learning to grieve. We must weep for innocent lives lost, for possibilities destroyed, for the breakdown of community. Our culture mistakes grief for weakness, but this rejection of mourning leaves us spiritually impoverished.
Ancient cultures understood what we have forgotten: personal and collective mourning binds communities together in the midst of tragedy. Crying, wailing, dancing, drumming—these rituals express the deep pain of loss while affirming life’s preciousness. Grief awakens us to what matters most. It is a profound response to loss that deepens our capacity for life, love, and growth. Without grief, we can become mechanical, lifeless. If we cannot grieve, we cannot truly love. When we fully feel the pain of loss, our hearts become more tender, more open. Someone who has grieved deeply often becomes more compassionate toward others’ suffering. They develop what we might call “emotional muscle”—a greater ability to hold both joy and sorrow simultaneously. This is not about becoming hardened by suffering but rather becoming more fully human through it. Grieving for the loss of life humanizes us.
Even God grieves. The divine suffers within us the pain of loss—only a God who suffers can truly help us. God’s love is unconditionally present within us, infinite and ungraspable, making the impossible possible, to see life beyond death. God is ultimate mystery and to dwell with God is to dwell in mystery—a space not of easy answers but of transformative questions. In our violent age, the essential question becomes: How can we love more and better in the face of violence? Confronting violence with opposition—whether through actions, words, or protests—may provide temporary relief but such actions cannot achieve lasting transformation. Something deeper is needed.
The philosopher Henri Bergson recognized that while evolution carries us forward, conscious human effort is needed to transcend mere survival. Human spirituality, he argued, is essential to our evolutionary journey. What distinguishes humans is our capacity for spiritual transcendence: acquiring new minds and hearts that perceive new worlds. Jesus of Nazareth and Francis of Assisi, both living in violent times, taught that transcending violence requires an inner revolution. The fullness of life emerges from within, through practices of silence, fasting, prayer, and solitude. These disciplines connect the surface self with the deeper Self, where the divine is born.
Humans possess a capacity for mystical vision that distinguishes us from other animals. The mystic sees from a different center and loves from a deeper wellspring of love—a vision that seems incredible to the world at large. Jesus exemplified this mystical vision, perceiving possibilities invisible to those who could not see or who saw superficially.
Surprisingly, technology offers its own form of transcendence, imagining new planetary futures. Yet technology without spirituality can become dangerous, amplifying our destructive potential without developing our inner capacity for wisdom and compassion. If we seek to transcend ourselves with technology, the first question we must ask, toward what end and why?
Evolution has brought humanity to unprecedented levels of intelligence and self-consciousness. Our transcendent nature, however, demands spiritual development equal to our technological prowess. To awaken to this deeper nature is to grieve the losses in our midst while committing ourselves to a higher life—not beyond this world, but revealing the hidden potential of this world for greater life and love.
To live between loss and life is to grieve deeply—for young lives lost, for all lives lost, for communities shattered, for our collective failure to nurture the human spirit. Perhaps our modern culture cannot get beyond violence because we have not yet sufficiently grieved.
But grief is not the final word; it is a form of awakening to life on a deeper level. It must lead us inward, connecting us with the infinite love that draws us toward greater life. We cannot correct the tragedies of the past, but we can transform our lives toward a better future. The way forward is inward.
Our most urgent task today is helping younger generations discover their inner center—teaching them not just to succeed in the outer world, but to thrive in the inner landscape where true transformation begins. Only by embracing both grief and spiritual growth can we break the cycle of violence and fulfill our evolutionary potential.
The choice before us is clear: evolve spiritually or risk destroying what evolution has taken millennia to create. In choosing the path of inner development, we choose the power of love, the possibility of the impossible—a new world born from the heart of the divine mystery we call God.
View print-friendly version
43 Comments
Leave a Comment
Related Posts
Why Christianity Is Uncomfortable
In a recent conversation with a colleague, I was made aware that children born from 2023 onward will be AI children. They will never have known a world without being…
Sister Ilya you give us real hope. You show us where we’ve been and where we are headed. And the choice is then obvious. That we can get this right. Choose right. Thank you so much. ❤️
The blog starts with an assumption about Catholic education: “educated in a Catholic school become capable of such violence?” The assumption I conjecture and argue as unhelpful, is that Catholic schooling can innoculate against violence” or like the flu shot reduces the symptoms the innoculated suffer!
I have always wondered about the Christian missionary becoming allies of the Government programs to take the ‘Indian out of the Indian” quote from Duncan Campbell Scott
I am a settler on Turtle Island and having completed my elementary school education in a missionary school in Pakistan (established in 1850’s) I can tell of similar instances of ‘Duncan Scott Campbell from North America’ that can be found in the Christian missionary school activity in South America, Africa and Asia.
My name for instance is an outcome of the practice of missionaries baptizing school students (often without parental permission), since the came to the subcontinent in the 15th century!
Having the baptized child take that family name of the priest was the norm. (Whoever was Fr. Fernandez, I guess I owe him a debt of gratitude to him, NOT! I do believe that my forefather’s baptism’ was a transformational event, the Christian faith of my ancestors and mine is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, kept alive by my foremothers and forefathers living their faith, not a Spanish priest named Father Fernandez.
Rodney Stark writes in “The Rise of Christianity – How the obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Become the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries” [1996] “In fact, of course, the rise of Christianity was long and perilous. There were many crises, points when different outcomes could easily have followed.”
So, in the perilous rise of Christianity, we must never ignore the anthropological rise of present-day Catholic ‘society’ in all parts of the globe. Recommend Hans Kung “The Catholic Church – A short History” [2001].
The violence displayed in the United States of America, on school children to social influencers to elected leaders, is a troubling issue for all. Even though it is unlike the experience of its northern neighbour Canada, here we do experience a trend in that direction, which is the social inaction leaving victims and bystanders!.
We need to view this broadly, not just gun violence but what the trauma school children from my experience within Canadian society.
Trauma, very broadly in bullying, intimidation, and social isolation, not just as a victim but by being witnesses to another school mate experiencing that trauma. Both victim and witness, suffer after the incident, in the lack of social action within in the school to address that violence!
Domestic violence has victims! More often mothers and children. If not directly being traumatized, then it is in witnessing it. They also experience a lack of social action to address their trauma.
There is trauma from misogyny, religious abuse (Antisemitism, Islamophobia, et al), from the colour of one’s skin, LGBTQ+ with each having victims and witnesses. Lack of social action to address their trauma, is the issue.
Society must not remain as bystanders to trauma, instead we must answer the call to be an ally of victims.
Rodney Stark tried to make the point, that early Christianity was compassionate to the misogyny, infanticide, mortality and increasing urbanization.
He highlights, Antioch – 4th largest city – in the Roman Empire, founded in 300 B.C.E. had an estimated population of 100,000 in the 1st century A.D. With a population density of 117 per acre compared to today, where Chicago with 21 inhabitants per acre, San Francisco 23, New York 37.
Manhattan Island with 100 inhabitants per acre today is dissimilar to Antioch, as in Manhattan there are high rise buildings (mitigates vertically the density) whereas in Antioch most building never exceed 5 stories!
Stark concludes “Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with the myriad of urban problems.
He further writes “To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope (2025 Jubilee of Hope). To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity offered a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.”
There are complex and overlapping causes of the current state of affairs that you describe, discussed ad nauseum nowadays and on many definitional planes — economic, social, political, technological, religious, etc. Nationally, my view is most of them can be traced back to America’s failure to look at its emergent shadow-side which began post-WWII, followed by a decline in the nation’s character and standing in the world, accelerated by (1) the baby-boomer or ‘Me’ generation, (2) a breakdown in social structures at all scales (starting with marriage and family), (3) catalyzed by the assassinations of the 1960’s when America lost its innocence, and began to lose trust in its leaders and authorities as sources of integrity, (3) leading to the mushrooming of fear/distrust/suspicion creating more radical divisions and factions ushering in the paranoid era of conspiracy theories.
My wife and I have lived through all this, and discuss these trends and their aftermath often, we of the baby-boomer generation. And we both agree that its toxic effects have corroded and coarsened our national character and degraded our standing in the world in slow but noticeable ways — more so of late. Ironically, said degradation has it parallels in global warming and climate change, which our current administration denies, and whose momentum is near or past the tipping point, depending on your source(s). We neither have a pessimistic or cynical outlook, but as two lights in a dark valley do what we can to dispel the darkness, urging other to do the same in whatever individual or collective form that may take.
Religion and religious viewpoints are equally splintered, shamefully including Christian. We are experiencers of the Cosmic Christ and his Spirit in our spiritual lives, and while I write often on Teilhard’s cosmogenic synthesis, particularly Christogenesis, see little evidence for same on a global scale emerging along evolutionary lines. That is, unless framed as the Christ defined it revealed sharply in his parable of the Sower, particularly that of the wheat and tare’s rendition described in Matt 13. There a proliferation of darkness and light will grow side by side until the harvest, whereupon, reaching critical mass, there will be a great separation of darkness and light, each assigned different fates according to the higher powers. I see the tension and gulf between the factions of the divide having increased in the last seventy years, in America and on the world stage, couched in other terms — political, military, economic, etc. We’re not biblical literalists, nor spiritual by-passers, but do believe those words and his integrities are true, having trust and confidence in the errancy of his words. Comfort in these times against an overwhelming tide of divisive deeds and forms of darkness to the contrary that have a long history of reaching this juncture.
I am sorry to say that I left the Church a long time ago. I believe in the teaching of Jesus and took the risk of witness to Him in teaching my 8 children to follow the Will of God as I understood it with the help of Thomas Merton.. I am thankful to God that they learned to honor the God of Love and hope they will pass on The True God of our universe. These are my constant prayer and witness, that we give voice to the Living God for the sake of all.
I am 93 and the mother of eight, grandmother of fifteen and great grandmother of sixteen, all from the blessing of our God. None of this happened because I followed the church. but because I believed it was the WII of God for me.
We are having a vigil tomorrow for the 18,500 children whose lives have been lost in Gaza. It will be silent but a huge banner with their names written there, will be carried, as the names will be read out. We will finish on Parluament Hill. It is one way we are grieving together here in Ottawa, folks from all faiths or of none, but recognizing and weeping for our common humanity.
Hello, I agree with the author’s foundational principle.Humanity must evolve spiritually. This is a transformational process involving the development of deeper understandings and (individual/communal) recognitions and responses to sufferinf and grief. In analogical, mystical, and theological terms, Jesus’ sacrifice and death on the Cross provides the portal and wellspring for new life and hope on Easter. Coincidentally, as alluded to in the blogpost, we as humans need to realize that we are “hardwired” to associate ourselves in tribes. Brandon Stover writes: (tribalism is) a survival mechanism that once kept our ancestors alive on the African savannah but now threatens to tear apart the very fabric of our democracy.” In neurological terms – a human being’s amagdyla has the capacity of “hijacking” the coordinated activites of various brain functions. This is especally true in terms of alarming, fear-triggering scenarios. The rational prefontal cortexes we possess are more recently evolved and require additonal time for assessing and rationally responding to complex circumstances.
Moreover we are prone to be more ompassionate toward persons who we identify as other members of our tribes. This psychological principle worked well when we resided in small tribal communities. It doesn’t work nearly as well in larger, more diverrse societies, especially when the society’s citizens are influenced by a diluge of virtually and profanely targeted fearful, dangerous messages and motives. I’ll paraphrase Dr. Jerome Lubbe recalling that he suggests that we need cognitative and completive time to differentiate when a bear is attacking us and when we are anxiouis about some upcoming event such as a deadline to compete a task. This example is something of a gross analogy. It is similarly true that we will reach healthier, less violent outcomes when the various components of our brain connect to one another. We are capable as a species for neuroplasticity. What a divinely inspired aspect of interdependence and “Communion.” We spend so little time engaging in mindfulness and other spiritual practices. We also will feel safer, I think, when we risk expanding ourselves into other communities we don’t basically observe as being members of our own tribes.
If God is suffering, and thereby able to be compassionate toward us, then the Buddha’s realization that life is suffering must be the same in essence as the statement of God’s suffering.
Then the existence of violence in the world can be seen as an acting out of one’s own pain and suffering. The Buddha’s admonition to eradicate one’s suffering from within, by insight into the nature of one’s habitual craving, has then the same effect as Christ’s teaching of love. For love opens us to the presence of pain and suffering in the other person, just as overcoming our own pain and suffering allows us to feel compassion for all others in their pain and suffering.
Beautiful, Sister Ilia. This was Soul food that I longed for today. Thank you! Blessings, Sister Patrice Hilda ~
Thank you for these comments. Your observation near the end about Spiritual growth seems to be an important answer the question put forth in the first paragraph about how a person educated in Catholic schools could commit such an act. in my experience it seems that I’ve noticed many problems affecting young people who recieved a more strict religious instruction. The comment you made in your book “Not Yet God” also seem appropriate here. That is “He (Jesus) challenged Jewish customs and laws that put law before spirit, excluding those who did not conform.
This was a great read. Thank you Ilia. I find it practically impossible to wrap my head around our children killing our children. And every time I encounter a news report of yet another school shooting, I think of my three grandnephews ages 10 and younger. Our parents would never even have conceived of the idea that school or church could be a violent and unsafe place where children can be murdered. The unthinkable has become – God help us – routine. Another school shooting. But, this one, during Mass. My neighbor commented to me, “It can’t get any worse.” However, our lesser selves will probably find a way.
We are a very violent country but apparently not a sufficient number of us seem to realize that and/or wish to do something about it. We lack the collective will for change, for transformation. Our behavior is violent, our words are violent, and we don’t seem to know that. And yes, violent video games and playing with “toy guns” is a game? As you note, there is no one cause or simple answers but what else can we expect when we live in a country where there are more guns than people and I often think that as a nation, we’ve lost our soul. We’ve become our own idols.
I recall many years ago, I think it was a Time Magazine cover with the headline, “God is dead.” I feel as if we’ve lost our sense of spirituality, our souls, our ability to reflect and to just plain, Be Still. We’ve lost our connectedness to our earth, to one another, to our God or any sense of the spiritual; we’ve lost the desire for spiritual growth and are, spiritually starving. You put it quite well….technology without spirituality. As I think about all we’ve accomplished, I also think of all we’ve lost. Our better selves so to speak. And we cannot nurture in our children what we ourselves do not value.
As you noted, confronting violence with opposition is one thing but are we people of peace? And what totally confounds me is that we have a big show of the “they’re in our thoughts and prayers” routine but yet, we seem to lack the collective will to change and to go a step beyond and transform. Perhaps this moment in time is the grieving period and recovery of our spiritual lives is yet to happen?
The Sunday after this latest tragedy, I noted that the side doors to the church were locked a few minutes before Mass started. I can’t begin to tell you the profound sadness I felt. No, I did not experience a sense of safety and well being behind those locked doors. I was nearly numb with sadness. And your article got right to the point; I guess I was also numb with grief over what has been lost. What have we done to ourselves? I do grieve what we have lost, but, I’ll continue to hold fast to that Sermon on a Mount over 2000 years ago when we were challenged to consider, “Blessed are…..”
Thank you for a very thought provoking reflection!
Indeed the most urgent task today is to educate our children in the ways necessary for them to understand the problems of today and to enable their spiritual development. As Thomas Berry said “Human relationships cannot be healed until human-earth relationship is sorted”, deep connection with nature is the starting point.
And this is not necessarily a generational thing, I believe that epigenetic changes in DNA can be inherited, and if this is true spiritual changes in children may be passed on to their offspring; evolution made tangible.