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.
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I am relieved to see that question posed. The esotericism of philosophic and theological pondering is, I understand, legit and necessary. What seems to be missing is its ‘translation’. What is missing as well is the kind of translation that is ‘incarnation’. We tend to ‘rest’ in the contemplation, the beauty of idea. However ideas without a return to grounding and consequentials and implications as well as verified, modified and evolved in/by context are ultimately soul-less. That is what organized religions seem to do. Worse – by affirming the validity of generality or value (political, social, personal as well as religious) we feel un-constrained to violate their integrity in conclusion from them. Roman Catholicism is the expert at this. Let’s face it, current United States of America politics is equally so. Freedom of speech is the liberty to lie and deceive. Joseph Card. Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI is another prime example of Catholicism. Unless we understand the living of knowing and believing, the testing of knowing and believing we are at risk of ideology, of untruth. Nowhere is this more obvious and harmful than in the affirmation of the equality of person and its violation in deliberate exclusion and diminution of women, racial and ethnic and sexual difference. Best example for me: Canadian Gen (ret’d) Romeo Dallaire a warrior by vocation, training, living and Ratzinger (as CDF prefect) used virtually identical terminology to describe ‘femininity’. Ironically the soldier argued for equality and inclusion, the “teaching Pope” argued for exclusion and thus diminution.
with all due respect, the most urgent need facing us, before any rescue if any younger generation, is to grieve, and constructively use the positive energy of grieving, to repair Mother Earth. There is no Plan B for us to move to( thank goodness or we would destroy that as well).
Mother Earth is the first woman of Love gifted to us by that powerful Creative Presence. We have shown that Presence just what our level of appreciation truly is. In my mind I hear the bible passage, “can you find 100 million people who Love?”
Ours is a society so concerned with the absolute “politically correct” that all sense of social justice has somehow become mush. The teaching of critical thinking needs to be a priority before the tackling of technology and its advances in AI, games, and media. Otherwise, how can we be sure socially just and nonviolent ways of advancing the future are occurring?
This is education that is not occurring as children are home-schooled, schooled in highly “cult-like” fashion, or not taught the skill because the one teaching does not know it.
In this Anthropocene age, the age of “the 6th extinction” we humans are the cause of extinctions and not natural events. Last extinctions were the outcomes of natural forces, large, cataclysmic events Since the arrival of Homo sapian (literally wise one) we have intentionally shaped the earth to our liking. The most recent, and frightening, example, being 3 Gorges Dam in China which has actually altered the elliptical orbit of our planet.
Yes, its one to put thinking back in schools. Not just any thinking but Critical thinking influenced by social justice, values, and nonviolent behavior. Embed at with a strong Stem and Ecotheology and there MAY be a chance
Video games? Guns? Good grief. I’d love to know if anyone here has any experience whatsoever working with pretty much anyone on the fringes of society i.e. homelessness, mental illness, disability, etc. because I’ve had decades and not once has anyone even slightly concluded that the foundational problems in their lives boils down to growing up with too many violent video games or sports or the like (and no, it’s not because they’re stupid or uneducated). Hell, as part of healing for young men in a drug and alcohol I worked at the UFC (not the absurd WWE pantomimes) was an amazing tool to build awareness of both the responsibilities and empowerment of realizing one’s individuality and freedom in a world that didn’t understand where it stopped and they began (or vice versa). It also communicated physical contact (which many had never truly experienced) in a respectful and fun way. Here’s a little advice to those who have barely scraped the edges of difficulty in life. Watch a UFC bout. You cannot say to life, “Wait! That hurt. Stop for a minute.” Life hits and it hits hard.”
The Western world is hurtling towards unprecedented centralisation of authority in the form of Digital ID and programmable money, the utter hijacking of fiat currency into a debt that is about to be wiped out by the few with stable coins. On the one hand it has the power to transform the lives of the entire planet (if humanity genuinely, as opposed to playing dress-ups from the sidelines, awakens to the reality of its oneness) and on the other hand it can enslave the entire planet.
Individualism isn’t the problem. It’s the relentless attack on individualism causing such a sense of powerlessness, fear and reaction. Egoic consciousness arose out of the evolutionary process. It’s something to be traveled through personally. Young men have been consistently vilified as toxic on the simplistic notion that they’re part of a certain demographic “prone to violence”. We’ve even witnessed a Prime Minister refer to a Netflix fiction on male violence in the UK as a “documentary” while doing nothing whatsoever to stop the inflow of illegal immigrants… lol even this obvious truth that civil society cannot sustain it’s structure such radical changes to its demographic is labeled “racist”.
The one notion of Christogenesis, or rather certain illogical conclusions about it, that I find difficult to digest is this idea that oneness somehow dissolves human individuality. Any argument built on this false premise is obviously going to result in simplistic ideas about both the source of violence (Seriously, have you read Clockwork Orange?) Regarding violence as essentially evil is absurd. Perhaps reading Annie Dillards Book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek might instil a little nuance in the thought processes.
It is my firm opinion that Oneness consciousness can only be “attained” via traveling into and through the obvious truth that we are both one AND seperate. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if that weren’t the case. It occurred. There’s no putting it back in the box to support a certain worldview. We are individually responsible i.e. empowered, to travel the path through ego consciousness into Oneness consciousness. It cannot be forced, either positively or negatively.
The true cause off the polarisation occurring around the Western world are generations of “Christians” who weren’t Christians at all but playing dress ups on the sidelines. I’m too old to take much notice of anyone’s opinion who hasn’t gotten their “hands dirty” living it out. I’ll listen to the individuals like Saint Francis’ of the world.
It’s not only violent media, it’s how our society has become obsessed with romantic love as the ideal and only love, and the cultural scripts and neurology of romantic love which creates violence and pure selfishness. When people are not loved genuinely and authentically we become detached from other humans and the cosmos and this loneliness starts the process of violence.
Well put. I would contend that the root of western Christianity – Roman Catholicism – has contributed mightily to this problem. We have ‘bifurcated the reality of love as ‘eros’ or ‘agape’, castigated the one and elevated the other rendering both in or sub human. Attempting to reconcile the futility of that tradition merely offends and confuses rather than teaches. The seeming domination of the “war on secularism’ is not so much a denial of materialism as it is a vacating of incarnation and abandoning of the genuine God-presence in creation.
I agree with so much that is asserted here, that grief leads to spiritual growth and that said growth is integral to our ability to heal our society moving forward.
However I fear that we are far beyond the days of blaming violent media for violence in adolescence. It would be far better to speak to the central role of access to firearms and lack of gun regulation which empowers the unwell to commit terrible acts.
Nothing happens in a vacuum, and I’m far from attempting to deny the influence of violent media and games on youth culture (you yourself note that violent media doesn’t cause violence in and of itself). However, to compose this article in a way that only references violent media as a major cause for youth violence holds within it a subtext that it IS the cause for youth violence. Many other countries in the world consume and are exposed to the same levels of violent media as U.S. citizens and youth and almost all them pale in comparison to the number of mass shootings.
My feedback: If we want to speak about cultural violence, then let’s write an article examining all facets of that. If we want to assert that effective grieving is a key element to our spiritual growth, then let’s not simplify a complex subject like cultural violence into a simple statement of “it’s probably violent media”.
I am with you, Dan, on this. It is not one or the other, it is the toxic combination of violent media. and access to guns. The makes for a very dangerous world…and not to exclude the need for systematic metal health education, and access to therapeutic support. Without all begin considered equally, we are never far away from the next heartache of a shooting. And as I say this, I am aware that I have omitted the advantage of being raised in a system of values and spirituality as some religious training and practice provided many of us in the. past.
Thank You.😌