I Will Call You Children of God

by Kellina B.

It was around noon on Sunday in January, 2004 and I was sitting in my car in the Dominick’s parking lot waiting for my mom to bring out her groceries.  My cell phone rang and it was Br. R. from the high school where I taught Theology.  His voice was serious and he said that he had some bad news, our student, Mario Gonzalez died in a gang related shooting that morning.  Mario was shooting at someone in a car and missed, that same car ran him over and then shot and killed him. He was not an innocent victim, he initiated this act of violence, he was ready and willing to die for his gang and he did.

Mario, was a fourteen year old freshman at HTHS.  He was very intelligent, was doing very well in his classes and the teachers and students alike really enjoyed being in his company.  He was such a positive and charismatic young man.  As a teacher I could count on him to answer a question or get a conversation started and there wasn’t a freshman girl who didn’t have a crush on him.  He has so much going for him, why would he do such a stupid an irresponsible thing?

Like the vast majority of the students I taught, Mario was in a gang, and a very active member. His father, mother, uncles and cousins were all involved so this was an easy progression for him.  In school, the students, including Mario did a very good job of keeping gang-life outside of the classroom, it was kind of an unwritten rule that the students had, to keep that aspect out of the school, they didn’t need their gangs to keep them safe inside HTHS and for the most part I think the students were relieved they didn’t need to “represent” all the time, they could take a break from it during the class day. As their teacher, a white upper middle class woman, I was very disconnected from that part of their lives.  I assumed it was just part of the culture they belonged to and never addressed in Theology class. If I ignored it, it didn’t exist.

After the news of Mario’s death couldn’t ignore it any longer, even through Mario had only been at HTHS for five months he carried a strong presence. School on Monday was not fun! There were students who knew this young man very well, there were students who knew him as an acquaintance, and there were students who never talked to him before in his life, they were all crying and distraught.  Even if Mario wasn’t a friend, it seemed like every student had a story just like this one about a cousin, friend or neighbor, and this Monday morning was stirring up those feelings.  The smell of death, young death, filled the school for the next few days.  It was so sad to see these young men and women in so much pain.

This was the first student that I taught to die in a gang related shooting; unfortunately it isn’t the only one.  But this incident really changed the way I thought of my students, I got a window into their world, and it changed the opinion I had of young gang members.  A young person in chosen by a gang and there is little a child can do about it, once you are part of that world, you can’t escape it, you must embrace it.  At the funeral home at Mario’s wake, sitting amongst a sea of Latin Kings, I understood, gangs are not some distant perpetrators that I read about in newspapers, they are sitting in my classroom. “We might think that we all welcome conversion and healing, but when it comes down to it, conversion and healing demand that we change, we risk, that we give up our comfortable and complacent and familiar ways and move into the strange, the unknown, the challenging”.(Ludwig p.4)

The school certainly did not condone this act of violence, after all Mario knew what he was doing, I am sure he was pressured into it but none the less he was out that cold January morning ready and willing to kill someone.  So many new questions emerged for me and how I was teaching in this school to this type of at risk student. How as a Catholic school community were we supposed to address this?  Am I really doing a good job teaching theology to teenagers who go out and shoot and kill on the weekends? How do I minister to these young people who carry so much pain and suffering with them? “When I see that I am not in charge, I can begin to glimpse that God, in all of God’s mysterious otherness, is” (Ludwig p.6)

It was at this point I took a hard look at my ministry and changed some of the ways I taught.  I had to look at the gospels that I was teaching in my scripture class differently, I had to show my students that the reign of God is at work in their lives.  Teach that the structure that they knew was nothing compared to that of what Jesus teaches about Kingdom living.  Once I was able to see into the lives of my students, I could help share Jesus’ preaching and teaching more effectively.

I wish that all young people had the opportunity to be safe in their communities but that isn’t the reality. “Jesus speaks in parables to attack fundamental beliefs of his hearers…to reverse their expectation and to overturn their “irreversible” truths.” (Ludwig p. 4) We have social and economic structures in place, whether they are good or bad, as a theology teacher I have the unique opportunity to look beyond those social structures and teach about the Kingdom, to instill in young people that God and Her love transcends the violence, and poverty, and that my students can know real love and community if they can live out the message that God shows them.