Today at 2 p.m., I am facilitating a meeting of teachers and educators to discuss existential health in schools. We scheduled this conversation weeks ago, without knowing that we would gather the day after children and a teacher were killed at an elementary school in Oregon.
The meeting carries a particular weight today. Questions about belonging, vulnerability, and the conditions children need to participate in life will accompany us into that conversation. I am stepping outside my regular editorial schedule to publish this additional article because those questions deserve public attention, alongside the urgent work of understanding what happened and protecting children from further violence.
On ** Thursday afternoon**, a sixteen-year-old forced his way into Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, by shooting at locked doors. Three children, ages five, eight, and eleven, and a teacher were killed. A seven-year-old and another teacher were critically injured. According to police, a community member followed the attacker into the school and fatally shot him.
In the BBC account, teacher Kathy Sheil Smith described trying to keep children calm as the gunman approached. Some children prayed while others consoled their classmates. She described the fear that teachers were facing their own deaths in the place where they had come to teach.
I keep returning to the children consoling one another. They had arrived at school with lives already underway, carrying interests and worries that belonged to childhood. Within minutes, they were trying to help each other endure something no child should have to understand.
Soon enough, the familiar arguments will occupy the space around their suffering. People will identify the issue, assign responsibility, and reach for the explanation they already trust. The phrase “it’s about guns” will arrive quickly, and although firearms belong at the center of any serious discussion of how this violence happens, I do not believe they exhaust what we need to confront.
I see a crisis of existential health. By that I mean a crisis in the conditions through which human beings learn to inhabit life, recognize the reality of other people, experience belonging, and understand that their actions carry obligations beyond themselves. That is a larger claim than an argument about weapons, and it requires us to examine more of our society than the moment someone pulls a trigger.
A firearm is a material means of killing, and its availability and lethality have consequences. Any account that dismisses those consequences fails the people whose bodies receive them. An existential account of violence must remain accountable to the physical conditions that make violence possible.
But identifying the instrument does not complete the explanation. We still have to ask what brings a human being to the point of entering a school and killing children, what opportunities existed to interrupt that trajectory, and what a society owes the people now left to live with its consequences.
These questions do not compete with responsible firearm policy. They extend the scope of responsibility beyond it. Reducing access to a means of mass violence and cultivating the conditions of a livable human world are related obligations, each with work of its own.
The danger in our public arguments is the relief that comes from deciding we have located the whole problem. Once we possess the explanation, we know which side we occupy and whose failures to condemn. The children remain dead, while the argument restores our sense of being people who understand what happened.
An adequate response should leave us less comfortable than that. It should ask something of our institutions, our communities, and our ordinary ways of living that survives the next change in the news cycle.
My work in existential health begins with the human relationship to being alive. Meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, freedom, and self-trust are often treated as philosophical subjects, but people encounter them in the substance of daily life. They appear in whether someone feels worth knowing, whether a future seems inhabitable, and whether asking for help threatens their sense of who they are.
Existential health is the capacity to engage those realities without having to abandon oneself or deny the humanity of others. It does not require constant happiness or a settled answer to every difficult question. A person grieving a profound loss still participates in life when grief has somewhere to go and their relationship with the world remains open to care.
Through the ** Center for Non-Religious Spirituality**, the
A school shooting exposes the inadequacy of treating existential health as an exclusively personal achievement. Whatever capacities we cultivate within ourselves develop in relationship with the world around us. It is difficult to nurture trust while repeatedly discovering that the institutions responsible for protecting life have learned to accommodate its preventable destruction.
The question therefore reaches beyond how an individual copes. It concerns what our arrangements make possible, what they undermine, and which human costs we have become willing to accept.
Children learn about the world before they possess language adequate to describe what they are learning. The response to a frightened question, the presence of a dependable adult, and the experience of being welcomed back after a mistake all contribute to their developing sense of reality. Through ordinary encounters, they begin to discover whether vulnerability invites care.
School participates in that education regardless of what appears in the curriculum. A classroom communicates something about authority, attention, and belonging through the way life is organized inside it. Children learn whether their voices matter and whether adults notice when something is wrong.
Violence enters that developing relationship with the world. For a child who has heard gunfire outside a classroom, a closed door acquires a history. Returning to school involves more than resuming lessons, because familiar surroundings now hold knowledge they did not hold before.
No one should presume that every survivor will respond in the same way. Children have different experiences, relationships, and needs, and their futures should never be reduced to what happened to them. Respecting that individuality also means acknowledging the magnitude of what they have been asked to carry.
The existential injury concerns the terms on which life feels available. A child deserves room to become absorbed in learning, friendship, and play without continually negotiating whether it is safe to be present. When that room is violated, the work of protection continues long after the immediate danger has ended.
The attacker was sixteen, and the reporting available as I write offers no adequate account of his motivations or inner life. His age raises painful questions about human development, but it supplies no permission to invent a history for him. We do not know what he believed, what others had observed, or what opportunities for intervention existed.
I will not turn existential distress into a speculative diagnosis of a killer. Most people who struggle with meaninglessness, isolation, humiliation, or despair never harm another person. Many direct extraordinary effort toward protecting others from suffering they know intimately.
An account that moves casually from alienation to murder stigmatizes people who need care and mistakes a possible area of inquiry for an established explanation. Intellectual honesty requires us to tolerate what remains unknown, especially when an event creates enormous pressure to explain it immediately.
Yet uncertainty about this attacker does not prevent us from examining the environments in which young people develop. We should ask where they learn to handle rejection, how they distinguish humiliation from an injury that demands retaliation, and whether adults recognize troubling changes before those changes become a crisis. The answers require patient investigation rather than a theory imposed on a stranger.
Existential health contributes to that work by asking how a person’s relationship with life and other people is developing. It offers a field of attention, not a prediction that loneliness will become violence or a promise that belonging will prevent every atrocity.
After a tragedy, communities turn toward the work of helping people recover. That work is indispensable, and it deserves sustained resources rather than a brief period of public concern. Families, teachers, and children need support that remains available when the cameras leave.
I am also troubled by the ease with which resilience becomes our preferred language for what follows. Used carelessly, it shifts attention toward the injured person’s capacity to adapt. The conditions that produced the injury recede while we celebrate the human ability to continue.
There is a moral difference between supporting someone through unavoidable suffering and praising their ability to endure a danger we have failed to address. Human beings will encounter loss, uncertainty, and mortality under even the most caring social arrangements. Our shared vulnerability does not excuse adding preventable terror to their lives.
A child who returns to school after a shooting deserves admiration for whatever courage that return requires. The adults responsible for the surrounding world still owe that child more than admiration. Recovery must not become the means by which everyone else is released from responsibility.
In , I explore our capacity to participate in life rather than remain suspended outside it. That participation depends partly on conditions no individual creates alone. We ask too much when we urge people toward openness while leaving them to absorb the costs of our collective unwillingness to protect it.
Education already shapes existential life, whether schools acknowledge that responsibility or leave it unnamed. A student learns something about worth when every achievement becomes a comparison. They learn something about belonging when difference attracts ridicule and adults look away.
This does not mean teachers should become therapists or assume responsibility for every failure of the wider culture. They already carry demands that exceed any reasonable understanding of their role. An existentially informed education would require support for educators and changes in institutional priorities, rather than another task added to an exhausted profession.
It would make room for questions young people are already living. What happens when I fail at something important to me? How do I remain myself when acceptance seems to require becoming someone else? What do I owe another person when I am angry, and where do I take pain that I do not know how to carry?
Those questions deserve thoughtful encounters across the life of a school. Literature, the arts, conversation, and the handling of everyday conflict all offer opportunities to develop the capacity to live with complexity. A student who learns to describe an experience with greater precision gains an alternative to being governed entirely by it.
I develop this argument further in ** “Existential Education,” White Paper No. 12 **in
None of this provides a formula for preventing school shootings. Its value is broader: children deserve an education that takes their humanity seriously before suffering forces adults to notice it. Helping them become employable while neglecting their relationship with being alive is an impoverished understanding of preparation.
In my years as a minister, and later through spiritual direction and existential work, I have become increasingly wary of explanations that arrive before we have listened. Religious language sometimes served that purpose in the world I left. Secular language is equally capable of turning a living person into a problem for which we already possess the answer.
I do not want existential health to become another vocabulary that performs concern while leaving our habits intact. If the field has anything useful to contribute here, it must deepen our attention and make our responsibilities more concrete. Naming a crisis has little value unless the name helps us respond to it more honestly.
That response includes accessible care, credible pathways for reporting threats, responsible attention to firearms, and sustained support for those whose lives have been altered. It also reaches into the less visible life of a community: whether an adult notices a young person withdrawing, whether someone is able to seek help without disgrace, and whether cruelty is treated as ordinary entertainment.
No single institution controls those conditions. Responsibility is distributed, but it must remain identifiable enough that everyone does not assume it belongs elsewhere. The school, the family, the healthcare system, and the wider community each need a clear understanding of their part.
A society reveals its priorities through what it organizes itself to notice. If our attention becomes most focused only when a person is dangerous or a child is dead, we have allowed the emergency to define the boundaries of care.
I return to the children consoling one another because their response contains something we should recognize without romanticizing. In the presence of terror, they reached toward another person. Their care was real, and the circumstances demanding it were intolerable.
They should have had the rest of the afternoon for ordinary things. The children who died should have had years in which to become people no one yet knew they would be. To speak of their lost futures is also to acknowledge the limits of every article written in their wake, including this one.
Existential health asks whether our ways of living support a human relationship with life worth inhabiting. In the aftermath of a school shooting, that question belongs in public life, alongside the practical decisions through which protection becomes real. Its seriousness is measured by what we are willing to change.
We cannot promise children a world without suffering. We owe them a world in which their suffering makes a sustained claim on us, and in which protecting their opportunity to live receives more than our grief or anger after it has been taken away.
