Elliot Rodger is the name of the young man who, last week, stabbed and shot people in a horrible killing spree. The awful massacre at Isla Vista has made many people think and write about how the shooting is all about race or all about women or all about guns. Nina Ippolito writes in the Daily Banter that:
In the wake of such disasters, it is all too easy to give into the urge to diagnose — and, presumably, treat — the social illnesses that gave rise to yet another killing spree by a disaffected and unhinged young man. However, while Friday’s heinous acts have raised myriad issues, from misogyny, to mental illness, to gun control, to bullying, to social alienation, to autism, to racism, to attitudes toward virginity, to the scourge that is themen’s rights “movement,” this disaster cannot solve a single one of them.
Her conclusion is her title: Elliot Rodger’s Massacre Isn’t About You. She’s right, it isn’t about us. It’s about God.
Elliot was a man who clearly had a lot of hate in his heart towards all kinds of human beings. He’d been rejected and hurt, but the people who hurt him didn’t hurt him because they were Asian or because they were women. They hurt him because they’re fallen human beings. They’re human beings who were incapable of giving him the unconditional love that he so desperately wanted. He was pursuing an infinite love from finite beings and they let him down. His rejection turned to hate and his hate turned to violence.
Amidst reading the coverage from this tragedy, I’ve also been involved in a really great conversation with my friend Betsie on the nature of marriage. To reinforce one of my points, I was re-reading parts of Fulton Sheen’s Three to Get Married. I came across a quote that I loved and thought represented my ideas on marriage perfectly, so I was typing it up to send to her. The excerpt is as follows:
“Only God can give the heart wants… Eternity is in the soul, and all the materialism of the world cannot uproot it. The tragedy of the materialistic psychologies of our day comes from trying to make a bodily function satisfy the infinite aspirations of the soul. It is this what creates complexes and unstable minds and divorce courts. It is like trying to put all of the words of a book on the cover. Eliminate the Divine Third from human love, and there is left only the substitution of cruel repetition for infinity. The need for God never disappears. Those who deny the existence of water are still thirsty, and those who deny God still want Him in their craving for Beauty and love and Peace, which He alone is.” (pg. 32).
The one thing that all the bullying and hate in the world have in common is their lack of God, who is love. Our culture seems to teach that sex and money are the paramount goods, the only things worth seeking. This kid had money and so, from the world’s point of view, all he was lacking was sex. But, what Rodger actually needed was not a girlfriend and it wasn’t sex. I’d argue that even if he did have a girlfriend he still wouldn’t be completely satisfied. What he needed was someone to reach out to him and to show him what being loved unconditionally feels like. I don’t know what his relationship with his parents was like, but I do know he wasn’t wanting for material objects. Were they teaching him what love really looks like?
I can’t judge Elliot Rodger’s heart; it seems like he was mentally unwell. What’s undeniable is our failure as a culture to teach him how to direct the desires of the heart.