INDEPTH: TABER SHOOTING
Breaking dividing walls
Martin O'Malley, CBC News Online
Shortly after the shootings in April 1999, CBC News Online's Martin O'Malley traveled to Taber. He stayed with friends while he wrote three columns on the tragedy, and the grief it left behind.
We were sitting around Len and Bev Ross's living room late Monday
afternoon, eating take-out pizza with the television carrying excerpts of the memorial service for Jason Lang, officially called "A celebration of the life of Jason Michael Lang."
Flowers and stuffed animals sit in the snow in front of W. R. Myers High School in Taber, Alta. on Thursday, April 29, 1999. One student was killed and one injured in a shooting at the school on Wednesday. [CP PHOTO/Mike Ridewood]
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Then came the part where two of Jason's friends stood at the lectern by the flowers and just talked about their friend. They talked the way any two 17-year-olds would about a friend, about Jason's music, about his high spirits, the work he did in Mexico last year building houses for
impoverished Mexicans, and his new car, a used Camaro. That's when Bev
leaned forward, putting her saucer of pizza on a ledge beside the TV
and broke into tears.
Len said he would have liked to attend the memorial, but he would have
been a mess. "My bladder is lodged right behind my eyeballs," he said. Besides, he couldn't attend the service because he had to take
a 1,200-pound bison down the highway to Medicine Hat to have it slaughtered.
We all wept, all day. My breaking point came at the service during the singing of "Breaking Dividing Walls," a hymn not familiar to me from my Catholic upbringing. The audience clapped hands
at "Break," as in "We will break dividing walls." Premier Ralph Klein, Aline Chretien, Justice Minister Anne McClellan, Reform Leader Preston Manning, all of them sitting in the front row across the aisle from the marvelous Lang family.
It was a stunning service, the best of its sort I have ever attended. Bev and I watched from the gymnasium of D.A. Ferguson Middle School,
which is connected to W.R. Myers High School. I am in some position
to judge, having been raised a staunch Roman Catholic, having attended
Jesuit institutions right through university, having covered religion for
The Globe and Mail. I've always liked Anglican ceremonies, but this was no scripted High Church service; this was from the heart.
As Rev. Dale Lang told the audience, "When I speak of the heart, I'm
not talking about the pump, I'm talking about the essence of who you are." He also said, "This is not about religion, or denominations - or any of
that stuff." That was the breaking point for Len, the bison rancher.
They could name the town after Rev. Dale Lang now. Len knows him.
Lang likes to sing, accompanying himself with his Fender electric guitar. He also likes to fly hot-air balloons. Many times Len has
seen The Reverend Lang hanging in the high blue sky about Taber,
balloon floating over his bison herd.
Lang asked the students in the crowded auditorium, "Whose school
is this?" A murmur of a response.
"You can do better than that," Lang said. "Whose school is this?"
"Our school," they replied, quietly.
There was a quiet gasp in the gymnasium during the memorial service
when Lang announced he was going to walk out the auditorium doors
with his family and walk to the spot where his son, Jason, was killed
last Wednesday. He led the procession, then stopped at a wreath at the exact spot where the .22-calibre bullet ripped through Jason's throat.
There he said a prayer to reclaim the school, to make it safe again for
the kids, preaching love and forgiveness, cradling an old
leather-covered Bible in his left arm.
I'm a father and I don't think I could have done what Lang did, and
if I tried I couldn't have come within a thousand miles of his eloquent, elegant, loving, forgiving message. Here was a father
who had taken his son out last Wednesday morning to teach him how
to operate a manual transmission, just before the boy went to school
that awful day. Here was a father who went to work the following
Sunday, four days after his son's death, to conduct his regular Sunday
morning service at St. Theodore's Anglican Church, a lovely,
old, wood-frame church in a residential neighbourhood. He broke down at the altar, on his knees, prompting the congregants to come forward to
comfort him.
At the memorial service Monday, there was a
spontaneous burst of applause toward the end when Lang asked God
to bless the family of the 14-year-old boy accused of the shooting, and
for the boy himself. Lang alluded to the stories of bullying. He said the boy and his family probably are in more pain than anyone else in this
close-knit town of 7,200. I have never witnessed the central
Christian message expressed so cogently, so sincerely. Not in any church
of any denomination, anywhere in Canada.
I trailed along behind the vehicular procession to Taber Memorial Garden
after the service and private funeral. It was a long procession, with cars and vans and pickups and RCMP cars. Jason's friends drove the
black Camaro in the procession. They had erected a blue
canvas tent over the grave and gathered in the shade of the tall
evergreens on the northern outskirts of town. It was a hot, dry
afternoon, with puffy white clouds in the blue sky. I parked on the
shoulder of the highway and found myself praying my old Catholic
prayers.
I found myself thinking of my first car, which I got in 1957
when I was 16. It was a metallic-green 1950 Meteor. I remember looking
at that magnificent car from my bedroom window, impatiently waiting
for morning so I could drive it to school. I got it about this
time of year, with summer approaching, roads to drive, adventures ahead and soaring joy in my heart. Not the pump, the essence of me.
I thought back to the service and the second time Lang asked, "Whose school is this?" They said, "Our school."
"C'mon, I've heard you at basketball games here, Lang said
"Whose school is this?"
As one this time they responded,"Our school!"
"Thank you," Lang said.
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