How should one respond to a tragedy? What feelings, words, and actions appropriately address the horror, loss, and pain that attend such events?

We must ask that question in reaction to the evil manifested at Covenant School in Nashville on Monday. Shortly after 10 a.m., a shooter invaded the school and killed six people, including three 9-year-old children, before the police killed her.

Predictably, certain segments of the public (especially of the very online type) have already framed the tragedy in political terms. President Joe Biden already renewed calls for additional gun control legislation. And, since the shooter was born a woman but seemed to identify as a man, the shooting has already opened a new battlefront over transgenderism.

These debates have their place. We must ask what precipitated this evil deed and what steps we might take to stop this long-standing and heart-wrenching cycle of school shootings.

But not now. Let us not forget, rush, or weaponize another response: lament. The word describes a deep, fervent expression of grief and sorrow. First and foremost, we must give the families and friends of the victims the time and space to lament their unspeakable loss.

But we need a practice of public, corporate lament as well. We must so feel, so act in order to come alongside those families and friends, to, as the Bible says, “weep with those who weep” (Romans 5:12b). So doing acknowledges something of the magnitude of their loss and does not leave them alone in their grieving. It reinforces that we are a people, a community, with bonds beyond the transactional or ephemeral.

This corporate lament respects the preciousness of life — not life as merely an abstraction but as a gift worth protecting and defending. Our grief should make us see the lives so brutally, unjustly ripped from this world. We must see the names, hear the stories, and know who these beautiful children and adults were.

Lament also forces us to confront together the existence of evil. Most would never downplay the murder of children and those educating them. But we might avert our eyes, both literally and symbolically. We might change the channel, click to a new webpage — anything to not confront the horror interwoven into this news. Yet we must face the fact that we live in a world broken by the stranglehold of evil’s tentacles. Lament of evil provides a springboard to countering its pernicious purposes.

Relatedly, lamenting together helps us recognize the existence of tragedy. Much of modern politics seeks to eliminate the tragic through new medical breakthroughs and enhanced safety measures. These efforts are not without merit. But our lives cannot shut tragedy out entirely. To think we can risks its own avoidance, wherein we fail to give ourselves space to grieve because we refuse to recognize that there are legitimate reasons for so doing.

Public lament brings together confrontation of evil and recognition of tragedy in an admission of mortality. Much as modern politics seeks to eliminate tragedy, so it runs from death. Yet evil and tragedy tell us that death is inevitable and threatens even the youngest, most innocent among us. To ignore these inevitabilities and possibilities might give us the false dream of eternal life in pursuit of utopia here. We must disabuse ourselves of such fantasies if we are to see truly and act rightly.

Finally, a properly ordered public lament gives us some place for hope. The truest lament is a prayer. That prayer does not bypass the preciousness of life, the existence of evil, the persistence of tragedy, or the reality of death. But it does not mourn as one without hope, instead looking to a day where we will trade “beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isaiah 61:3).

Let us so lament now, both for and with the victims’ loved ones. The 1928 Book of Common Prayer includes a burial service for children. The liturgy includes the prayer, “O MERCIFUL Father, whose face the angels of thy little ones do always behold in heaven; Grant us steadfastly to believe that this thy child hath been taken into the safe keeping of thine eternal love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” Yes, amen.

Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.