Forgiving mass murder is the most Christian thing I've ever heard of.
The big news of this week was the Supreme Court's rulings on Obamacare and gay marriage. Few things could make that look small and unimportant. Moral greatness from members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, S.C., is such a thing. I'll write about the Supreme Court next week.
"Hate won't win," Alana Simmons told the confessed killer of nine members of the church. "My grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate. Everyone's plea for your soul is proof that they lived in love and their legacies live in love."
Sounds like ""Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do," doesn't it?
The shepherds, living and dead, of this flock are mighty heroes of their faith. Their example survived the massacre of many of them. Killed were lead pastor Clementa Pinckney, 41; Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; Ethel Lance, 70; Susie Jackson, 87; and the reverends DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45; and Daniel Simmons Sr., 74.
Their white killer showed up at to the historic black congregation on Wednesday, June 17. The members welcomed the stranger into their Bible study. He later pulled a pistol and shot them down, mouthing racial garbage.
Two days after the killings, the shooter appeared on a video monitor for his courtroom arraignment. Church members who showed up to ask God to have mercy included a survivor of the attack whose son was killed right in front of her. I never had faith that could have survived anything like that.
I tell my kids that the Christian religion definitely gets one thing right: forgiveness. People think that's some gift to the forgiven, letting him off the hook. It's not. Oh, it might inspire or shame him into changing his ways, but don't count on it. No, the value of forgiveness is that it frees the forgiver. All the hate, all the anger, all the resentment, all the feeling that somebody owes you a debt -- which you'll probably never collect -- goes away. You're free.
One week after the shooting, the congregation met again for Bible study in the same basement room. "This territory belongs to God," Interim Pastor Norvel Goff Sr. told the roughly 150 people gathered there, according to news accounts. This week's theme, fittingly, was "The Power of Love."
"I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," Martin Luther King Jr. said once. The members of "Mother Emanuel" just set a very, very high bar for the rest of us.
The most liberating form of forgiveness is self-forgiveness. I hope the shooter repents and spends the rest of his life -- however short that may be -- atoning for both the shootings and the hate. And I hope those of us who have judged someone just for having some skin pigment we don't have thinks of the members of "Mother Emanuel" too.
I have no qualms about the death penalty, which South Carolina's seeks in this case. But my very un-Christian attitude is that, if this shooter doesn't repent, he isn't put to death. I hope he sees his call for whites to rise up and "do something" hateful goes unanswered every day for decades. I hope we all, including black and white, do something all right -- something to repudiate racial hatred every day. Banning flags was nice, but I'm looking for something with a lot more substance.
I happened to watch "Come and See" last weekend. The 1985 Soviet movie graphically shows the horrors of racial hate in World War II. By the end, a boy loses just about everyone he'd ever known and in the most awful ways imaginable.
He has a rifle, but all that's left to shoot is a picture of Adolf Hitler. He fires, again and again and again.
With each shot, newsreel footage of Germany's horrors and Hitler appears in reverse, as if the young Belorussian's shots rewind time itself. He keeps shooting until he sees -- Hitler's mother holding baby Adolf.
And the young man stops. He's a decent human being, so he cannot shoot an innocent. He cannot or will not go where his hate leads him. He marches off with the partisans to fight evil however he can, probably to die doing it, but he'll never become what those killers are.
He was free.
Commentary on 06/27/2015