I have always been a devoutly irreligious person. I’m not an atheist. I think that creed assumes we know far more about our circumstances than we actually do. But I found very little appealing about the religious tradition within which I was raised, and I’ve not been drawn to others. However, in recent years, I have developed some reverence for a certain aspect of Christianity’s founding tale.

“Love your murderer” is, I think, an ethical aspiration. That one ought to love in some fashion every human being does not mean that people shouldn’t be held accountable. Murderers and other doers of foul deeds should be punished to deter others, should be tasked with restorative work where such work can be done, should be segregated from society and deprived of some freedoms as long as they remain a danger to others. Failing as a society to insist on those things would be failing to love the humans more broadly. (I hope it goes without saying that we should love our murderer because they are human, not because they are our murderer.) But when we punish, deter, or restrain our fellow humans, that ought to be an occasion of sad necessity, not joy or righteous vengeance. We should be very humble in any suggestion that pain we impose constitutes “justice”. Taking pleasure in the harm or punishment of someone who has hurt us is understandable and effusively forgivable, at a personal level. At a social or political level, however, it is noxious. It deforms us. It provokes us to terrible acts, sometimes in the name of, rather than in opposition to, the law. Individually, it is understandable when we sometimes take self-righteous pleasure in other people’s harm. I do, far too often. But it is the opposite of an aspiration. It is a lapse.

Obviously, the Christian story is an example of a person loving his murderers. And for that alone, it draws from me a certain respect. But a few years ago my wife and I had a child, and the part of the Catholic Holy Trinity I identify with shifted, perhaps egoistically. It occurred to me that there is so much focus on the son, who forgave his own murderers. But what about the father, who is called upon to forgive the murderers of his child? “Love your murderer” is an ideal I can at least conceive of aspiring to. But “love your child’s murderer”? Intellectually, the case is the same. We owe love to the humans, unconditionally and universally. That is the foundation of human virtue. But, as the kids say: I. Can’t. Even. I can’t let my mind go there. It is too great a betrayal, at an emotion level, of the star around which I orbit.

My theological sophistication is about candy-wrapper level. But for whatever it’s worth, I consider this aspect of Christianity’s founding myth or event remarkable, and underemphasized. “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do,” represents a profound plea from the lips of a man being painfully murdered. That a parent, one with fire and brimstone readily at hand and a notorious history of smiting, would forgive is perhaps even more astonishing, even more wonderful.

The history of Christianity, especially at the social and political level, imperfectly evinces this ethos which I draw from, or project onto, the tale. Nevertheless, I think the ethos offers crucial lessons for us now. All of our political factions, even the ones who coined the pejorative term, slip frequently into “othering” one another. I take that to mean a withdrawal of the love, or even the aspiration of love, from some group or class of humans, often because “they” are purported to be vicious or guilty or dangerous, to have harmed us or our values or people we hold dear. There is a lot in our social affairs that needs changing, and there will be losers as well as winners from those changes. In a broad sense, I think if we act well and wisely, there will be many fewer losers than we fear, because our misarranged society exacts terrible costs even upon most of its “winners”. We reform society out of love for humans, to create scope for greater flourishing. But when people are harmed, whether transiently or durably, that counts as a cost, regardless of how wicked we persuade ourselves are the losers. That there will be losers is no excuse for inaction, in the same way that our love for a murderer mustn’t inhibit us from sober punishment. We owe a duty to all the humans. However difficult it may be to quantify human welfare, as best we can we must find ways of improving it. But the eggs we must break are losses to be minimized, not righteous smiting of the vicious. To whomever you are shouting at, owning, canceling, legislating against, you owe a duty of love. Aspire to love even your murderer. If you are better than me (and I assure you, you are), aspire to love even your child’s.

Happy Easter, to all those who celebrate it. And to all of those who don’t.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2021 at 11:25 am PDT.
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