The story is as old as time. From Cane and Able, to the Sicarii and the Zelots in Ancient Israel. It’s a story that has been told and retold through the lives of such men as John Brown, Michael Collins, and Che Guevara. On April 20th 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered their high school near Littleton, Colorado and started shooting. The incident left fifteen dead including the shooters.
The Columbine shooting was in a very real sense my baptism into the question of violence. As a high-school student at the time it was the first time I ever really entered into the story and the struggle of those who believe the only voice they have left is through the shedding of blood. I was horrified as I’m sure all of you were with the incident, but it nagged at me like no story had before. I needed to understand why. I had a number of friends at school which by outward appearances looked just like Harris and Klebold (trench coats, metal bands, video games), these were people I felt I understood and could relate to. My proximity to their context brought me to a place where for the first time I was able to look through the eyes of the marginalized aggressor. I began to see how the shooters felt they needed to kill. How there was no other power left to them to persuade or communicate. They truly believed they had no other choice. In their mind the system had failed them and the last option was war on the system. It caused me to question where I stood, with the shooters or with the system. It opened up history to me in a whole new way, and I slowly began to recognize that the narratives that guided my perspective were not always right.
·What should a slave’s response to slavery be?
·How should a poor man respond when every option to feed his family is taken away?
·What happens when the most sacred things to you are appropriated to justify something abhorrent?
·How does a scapegoat find redemption?
Empires are often built on subjugation and a myth of redemptive violence, and power is found in being on the “right” side of the story, which often meant the magnetization of the “wrong” side. Often the only means of communication left between these two sides is through the medium of the sword. At the time of the Columbine attack I was also rediscovering my faith. Jesus was quickly becoming the center of my life and my perspective. As I read the gospels I knew there had to be another way. One in which the dichotomy was broken, a third way. Columbine also helped me frame the incarnation in a new way. God was in the business of making peace and he had called me to work within a new paradigm, that of a peacemaker. God had a new story to combat the old, and I began to see it all around me. Dr. King told it, and so did Maximilian Kolbe. I heard it through Mother Theresa, and Óscar Romero. 
Two years after Columbine the old story repeated itself again, this time on a massive scale. On September 11, 2001 a series of coordinated attacks gave voice to another group of marginalized people. It was nothing new, in their original plan Harris and Klebold had plotted to hijack a plane and crash it into a building in New York City too. However for me it was different. Columbine had helped me find how God’s vision for peace. As the world began to respond in violence I knew of another story with a lot mere power. I knew a third way.
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