Book Review: When Thoughts and Prayers Aren't Enough by Taylor S. Schumann
A five-star review, personal bias notwithstanding.
“I am intimately acquainted with the horror and suffering guns inflict, and even more intimately acquainted with the goodness of God. Nothing in me knows how to make these two things fit together.”1
On this day thirteen years ago, a man holding a rifle walked into a school and shot my dear friend Taylor Schumann. She was at her desk job at New River Community College, completing a normal day of work and planning for her upcoming wedding. Then a man with a sick vendetta attacked her and several other people with a gun.
It seems very trite to say that Taylor is one of the strongest people I know. We have been friendly acquaintances for several years, and became close (thanks to the internet) over the last twelve months. I have seen up close how brave, tenacious, vulnerable and good Taylor is— throughout long-lasting aftershocks of her shooting experience, through sleepless parenting nights, difficult personal relationships, more medical crises and a book about peace that earned her death threats. With every hit, she has remained kind.
In 2021, Taylor published her first book, When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey into the Realities of Gun Violence. I “met” her online shortly after the book was released. For far too long, I resisted reading it, though I liked Taylor as a person and wanted to be her friend. I’m not sure why I didn’t just order her book. Maybe I was hesitant about reading something that would heighten my own propensity for anxiety. Maybe I didn’t want my worldview challenged further. Maybe I was afraid of what I’d find.
I grew up in a home without guns. I married into a home with guns. When pressed, I would say I’m pro-reasonability—that I think the second amendment is important, but that gun violence takes far too many lives and needs more parameters. But I could be easily swayed by either side— the strict constitutionalists who argue against any infringement of the Bill of Rights, or the plowshare-crafting pacifists who want to melt everything down and start anew.
I wish I could say my mind was changed about guns without needing a personal anecdote. In a way, I suppose it was. The ground was tilled years beforehand with a slow and steady breaking down of preconceptions and assumptions. I had been deconstructing some of my most rigid religious and political beliefs since my early twenties—marrying a Responsible Gun Owner didn’t change any of that, it just added nuance and, sometimes, disagreement.
“We’ve desperately tried for decades to hold a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other and we have no hands left to serve each other, or Jesus.”2
Reading Taylor’s book was, to be trite again, eye-opening. Eye-watering, too. I cried for my friend so many times in the first few hard chapters. Thirteen years ago, Taylor’s left hand was permanently disabled by a bullet, shrapnel shards embedded in her body when she hid from her attacker in a utility closet. Yesterday, we texted about potty training woes. Taylor survived, and I have the privilege of knowing her and hearing her story. But so many people didn’t. So many people have no story to tell, because their platform was shot from under their feet. Last Christmas I stood waiting with a woman in a local supermarket and, with one tendril of conversation that led to another, she told me her only son had been killed in an act of gun violence that summer. There are no words to say to something like that. If there were, I wish I could have thought of them.
One of the aspects of memoir that resonates most deeply for me is when the personal becomes universal. When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough starts out with Taylor’s own testimony of survival, recuperation, setbacks, disappointments, and coming to grips with her altered life and the fact that her tragedy was—is—one of many before and many to come. The personal narrative shifts into research-driven fact reporting in the second half of the book, tracing the history of gun culture in America and the (failed) attempts to legislate it into something akin to harm reduction. Taylor’s writing is straightforward, sincere, and life-affirming. She is not trying to take your freedom. She is writing about what you can do to help ensure it for others.
I learned a lot (another trite-ism) from Taylor’s book. Some of it I already knew. Some of it was deeper and harder to read than I had anticipated. But all of it left me grieving the way we have failed so, so many people. The tools for peace—for limiting accidents, investing in community, pausing tragedies before they can start—are in our hands.
My hands both function, physically, at 100%. I am luckier than my friend. But with hers, including the one that was harmed forever— what a wildly tragic and yet hope-brimming thought that practical fact is— she wrote a beautiful, heartfelt letter to the world and to the church. Don’t let it be in vain.
Schumann, When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough, 109.
Schumann, 203.