Finding solace in faith after shootings provide another reminder of horrific day

It’s my Catholic faith that helps me get past these miserable times after yet another senseless mass shooting.

The latest tragedies in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y., arrive less than a month before my personal anniversary of gloom on June 28 – the date four years ago when five of my newspaper colleagues were shot to death in an Annapolis newsroom.

For me, any mass shooting, which seems to come with more frequency every year, stirs memories of getting a phone call at about 2:40 p.m. nearly four years ago while I was preparing for my 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift on The Baltimore Sun’s sports editing desk. A coworker summoned me to the office early to help with a story on an active shooter at the Capital Gazette newsroom – a place I called my work home for more than 30 years. 

A career journalist, I dutifully hopped in the car and headed to work, but not before placing a couple cell phone calls to friends who still worked in the Annapolis office. Not five minutes into the trip I pulled off to the side of the road to cry when a vacationing friend returned a call and told me that he’d gotten reports that at least five people were dead and which coworkers were likely to have been in the office at the time of the shooting.

Memories come flooding back of finding out the names of the five who’d been killed – four of them were close colleagues, one was one of my best friends for nearly 25 years. John McNamara, Wendi Winters, Rob Hiassen, Gerald Fischman and Rebecca Smith were all gone.

Memories are mostly a blur of being interviewed by coworkers for profiles on the victims and putting together the next morning’s sports section. Memories are much more vivid of seeing my friend’s wife’s anguished pleas for information on social media and breaking down in tears again when I saw the photo of my dear friend on the 11 p.m. TV newscast. Funerals and memorials all followed within days.

Each year at this time and at times when something as simple as a Nationals baseball game (McNamara’s favorite team) or a certain song, makes me want to drop into a depressed funk, my Catholic faith sustains me.

Rather than dwell on some gruesome detail of the shooting, I think of the great qualities of my late friends and colleagues. And then my faith tells me that because of those qualities, they are more alive than I am. 

I think of how Rob always went out of his way throughout the newsroom to make a small gesture to a coworker that could make your day. You’d write a column or a headline that you really didn’t give a second thought about. But there was Rob telling you what a great job you did. I know it always put a little hop in my step and helped me get through a long day or night.

I think of Gerald, painfully shy at times, grinning from ear to ear when he won the “ugly Christmas sweater contest” – the Jewish guy one-upping all of the Christians. 

I think of Wendi’s unending kindness, her devotion to any cause in the community that struck her fancy, from blood drives to charity fashion shows. She always kept a candy dish on her desk. When we had a writer in the sports department who had trouble keeping up his blood sugar, we “borrowed” a few of the candies. When I explained to her why her candy dish was nearly empty, she simply asked what kind of candy our diabetic coworker preferred. From then on, the dish was always well-stocked with that type of candy.

I think of Johnny Mac’s daily gestures of kindness to his coworkers. Like the time two nights before he was shot when he waited more than an hour after his shift was complete so that he could hold an umbrella for a handicapped colleague so the slower-moving coworker could make it to his car without getting drenched by the rain. 

You see, my Catholic faith tells me that those people – by their good works and compassion toward others – are truly in a better place. 

It’s those blessings and qualities that I prefer to dwell upon, not the anguish of one evil person with a gun on a late June afternoon.

I only hope folks in Uvalde and Buffalo can find the same kind of solace.

Email Gerry Jackson at gjackson@CatholicReview.org

READ MORE ON THE SHOOTING IN TEXAS:

• Pope prays for Texas shooting victims, calls for stricter gun laws
• Texas bishop says mass shootings ‘most pressing life issue’

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