On a winter afternoon in Toronto not that long ago, a series of shots rang out in a high school parking lot and when the confusion had cleared, three young people lay in the snow with bullet wounds. Several days later, a newspaper sent a reporter out to the same schoolyard to ask some of the students who had been there that day what it had been like for them. "To many students," the reporter subsequently wrote, "the shootout appeared scarcely more exciting than a video game. Inside the school, members of the chess club heard the shots, peered out the window, saw the gathering crowd and went back to playing chess."

One student told that reporter, “I’ve seen people more shocked than that from someone passing out. No one was crying. Some were joking.”

In John Donne’s metrically cadenced world, when things died, they did so dramatically and in a sudden and absolute sense. The bell tolls for thee! No longer it seems. Today, when things die, they do so gradually, by degrees, necrosis in the smallest increments. It is a frightening thing when what is dying is akin to values or to sensitivity — things, after all, that make us human.

Such visceral immunization to shocking incidents as those students displayed is a phenomenon more transfixing, more chilling and more appalling than even the events that give rise to them. The moral lassitude and numbness that accepts violence and wrongs as a commonplace is in many ways one of the evils of our times. It is a sin that crosses the generations, starting with parents, once immunized to pornographic television images of napalmed bodies in Vietnam or skeletal children from Ethiopian famines. And today the children of these people kill and maim for sport in video games deemed harmless since they contain neither nudity nor graphic sex.

This lack of commitment — of what the French call engagement — in one’s surroundings amounts to a kind of death in life, a torpor of the soul. It is a decline in feeling, a decline in caring, all the more sinister for the gradual way in which it can come upon us. No bell, sadly, ever tolls sonorously to herald the demise of compassion.

One of the great dangers of life in today’s frenetically paced world is that the acceptance of huge changes that we have learned to cope with on a daily basis may also have inured us to the little things. We see avalanches and sea changes and we take them in stride, and yet we so easily miss the microcosms, life’s erosions and the difference that a grain of sand can make in the scheme of things. When shots fired in a school parking lot become less interesting than a game of chess, something has gone terribly wrong.

Recently, I engaged a close friend in a prolonged conversation via e-mail about repercussions to the residential schools crisis and in the course of that, one of the eventualities we discussed was a social climate in which the moral influence of organized religion would be diminished or perhaps hardly be evident at all. This is a prospect that makes me profoundly uncomfortable. All the more so when one is confronted by some of life’s more dismal eventualities such as when people get shot without bystanders seeming to care much about what they have witnessed. We ought to care deeply about such things and the place to learn this caring, this communion with our fellow humans, ought to be in church. Take that away, and the world is diminished.

And yet in the end, it may be useful to think now and again about a world without churches and without the reflective moral suasion that they bring to our lives, often in spite of ourselves, often without us paying any attention to them at all. The British poet Philip Larkin, very much an unchurchly person, once paused in an abandoned church and mused about what would become of such places when they “cease out of use.” He also wondered why it was that he had bothered to stop there at all. He wrote:

It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies,
And that much can never be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Indeed, we should hope that such wisdom never shall be obsolete and that there will forever be places in which to seek it – both places of the heart and physical spaces “proper to grow wise in.”