Osler's Razor

Many of my posts this week were about the Kairos Conference in Atlanta, and there is a reason for that-- it was transformative for me in ways I did not expect. Frankly, I expected to go down there, give my lectures, and talk to like-minded folks about the death penalty. All that happened, but that wasn't all.

Sometimes a conference like that goes off in a direction you don't expect.

The moral core of the conference was seized, gently, by the surviving victims of murder victims, whose stories were more compelling, complex, and convincing than any of the arguments the rest of us might have made.

Bud Welch talked about his daughter, Julie, who died in the Oklahoma City bombing. He did describe going to meet Tim McVie's father, and his evolving feelings about the death penalty, but mostly he talked about his daughter. With each layer of detail, she became more real and complex and missed, and the entire discussion more important and troubling. Troubling, because it does matter what we do in criminal law... it is all tragedy, all of it, and all of us and the judges and juries were not going to bring that girl back, ever.

Marrieta Jaeger-Lane, in turn, told the story of her daughter, Susie, who was abducted and killed at age 7 during a family camping trip. The anguish of a mother was hard to hear. But it turned to something else, somehow-- before the killer was captured, Marrieta came to forgive him and pray for him. It was confounding. She might as well have described how she learned to fly or become invisible for many of us. It was the best kind of challenge.

Faith (if it is faith) takes us to inexplicable places, and drags us to moments of meaning we long to avoid. My own life has taken me to the tragedies of others, but few of my own; I don't know the lingering stench of unfair death. My faith has not confronted that challenge, and I wonder how I would do. Could I forgive? Would I become hard and cold? Julie and Susie and Nancy and the others are gone, but those left behind have a rare power within them, unimaginable to me. If I were one of them, would I be brave, Christ-like, forgiving? I hope that I would, but fear that I wouldn't, and that makes me admire them all the more.