God and the Unrepentant Killer
How does a loving God hold us accountable? Some light Lenten musings.
The man was in his fifties, and on his way out, due to a fast moving cancer. He was a native New Jersey-ite, but claimed he had no family anywhere. We, the staff on the hospice inpatient unit where I worked, assumed he didn’t want us to call his family due to some unfinished business he didn’t care to finish. While a tagline in hospice at that time was, “there’s no one size fits all,” there were nevertheless truisms floating around which proved to be problematic. Like, helping a patient work out their unfinished business makes for a more peaceful death.
This man, whose name I don’t remember, was not having a peaceful death, and he wanted it that way. This perplexed all of us on the interdisciplinary team. Our first job was to relieve a patient’s physical pain, the nurses being the purveyors of the magical drug cocktails that eased a patient’s journey. Even the decor in the private rooms was chosen for comfort and beauty, each wall decked out in flowered wallpaper, a rocking chair next to the hospital bed, curtains on the windows. Of course, no amount of Laura Ashley chic can dispel the odor of antiseptics.
Sometimes it was clear, even among those patients who couldn’t speak, that what looked like physical pain, was not. Sometimes a patient did their emotional work silently. The hero of this story was a prime example of the latter. He had a thin, ravaged face that looked racked with anguish. It was painful to watch.
After I explained who I was and why I was there, I asked him if I could sit down. He nodded. I pulled a straight backed chair up to the side of the bed. I gripped my clipboard (its hard edges so comforting) and led him through the required battery of questions on the Spiritual Assessment Form. Though he offered that he’d been raised in the Catholic tradition, he refused all manner of assistance on the checklist. No to a priest, no to prayer from me (the Spiritual Care Coordinator and in-house Chaplain), no to spiritual counseling in general, and no, there was one to invite in for a visit.
I could have left him alone once I’d checked all the boxes and he’d told me I had nothing to offer him. I was learning that being unable to crack a wall as thick as the one he’d thrown up didn’t make me a failure. But before I left, I had to try, just one more time.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to talk to a priest?” I asked, as I gathered up my papers. “I can ask one to come in. There is a priest on call from the hospital.”
“No. I don’t want confession. I don’t want to be forgiven.”
Ooops. He’d opened a door.
I leaned back in my chair.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked him, “it’s OK if you don’t. Many people don’t. I’m not here to be God’s PR agent.”
“Oh I do! I do believe in God!” he said. “There is a God. And I am going to hell!” His ravaged face exuded a quiet rage.
I was hooked. Of course he wasn’t going to hell. My own theology, so different from the Catholicism of his upbringing, would not allow that. If God was Love, the Love I viscerally experienced as being within, beneath, above, and surrounding all existence, how could anyone, ultimately, not be cleansed by that love, once they’d returned to whatever mystery first bounced us into this world.
But my job was, as they taught us in Divinity School, to “meet people where they are.”
“It sounds,” I said, “like you believe you’ve done something that can’t be forgiven.”
Silence.
And then I thought, oh shit. I am so naive. He said he wants to go, deserves to go to hell. What if he’s a rapist, a murderer, a hit-man, a pedophile! He had to have done something truly evil to want to be punished as passionately as this. And statistically speaking, amongst the thousands of people I’d helped walk the hospice gang-plank, there had to be some serious predators in that cohort.
“Personally,” I said, “I think God’s love is more powerful than anything you could have done. I mean, we are certainly not more powerful than God.”
But was I being honest? Wasn’t there a part of me that wanted rapists and murderers and child molesters punished? Wasn’t there a part of me that wished there was a hell where they’d get what they deserved? Was I layering papier-mache over my heart, over my doubts, wounds, fears, anger, disgust?
“No,” he said, “I am going to hell. And that is where I want to go!” It was if he were chewing on shards of glass, the way his mouth twisted as he spoke. “I do not want to be forgiven. I do not want to feel better. I want to be punished. I want to go to hell.” It was chilling, the ferocity with which he chomped on those words.
We volleyed back and forth a bit more, though he couldn’t have been clearer. I began to feel mean, as if I were standing in the way of a make-a-wish winner. I also, if unwillingly, felt a strange admiration for the man’s tenacity. Think about it. Isn’t there a kind of virtue in wanting to go to hell if you’ve destroyed someone else’s life? I mean, who the hell wants to go to hell except for an exceptionally repentant person? Meaning, one who is truly remorseful. But didn’t remorseful people usually want to confess?
I considered telling him all of that. I may have. In any case, my own theology suddenly tasted facile on my tongue. Everything I said in the face of this man’s absolute dedication to ultimate accountability for his sins sounded like a pat on the head. A “now-now there fella, it’ll be alright, it’s not that bad.” Clearly it was that bad. What did he want? What was he doing?
I think he wanted to be held accountable. And it was a shock to realize that my theology could do nothing to help him. People could hold him accountable, but at this point, on his deathbed, the only one he wanted to hold him accountable was God. But which God could do that? Mine, the God of Love? Or his, the God of Hellfire and Damnation? How does a God of Love hold people accountable for actual sins?
I am powerless over this situation, I told myself. I need to surrender to that reality. Out loud I said, “Well, I’m going to leave you now.” But I suppose I had to have the last word. Or maybe I wanted to leave him with a thought he could grab onto, should he want it later, if terror overcame his fierce resolve. I had seen only two people go towards their death in a state of fear, and it had been terrifying to witness both times.
I said, “I apologize if I have pushed you too hard. I can see that you have a strong conviction. I personally do think God will forgive you, whether you like it or not. I am a Universalist, and we believe that all souls are saved. We believe Love is way too powerful and big and mysterious a force for any one of us puny humans not to be purified by its fire. I believe the fire of Love is far hotter and far more powerful than the fires of hell. And I think you’re already in hell right now.”
That felt deeply true to me in that moment. And it does today.
And yet.
I’ve thought about the unrepentant sinner on that hospital bed often over the years. And I’ve thought about my own need to make others feel good, even when they don’t want to. As I write this my husband is depressed, following two major strokes, and a couple of small ones, in less than a year. I, and his doctors, and various therapists, are doing everything we can to figure out how to make him un-depressed.
“I have a right to be depressed,” he tells us. “Of course I’m depressed. I am a stroke victim.”
I want him to call himself a survivor, not a victim. I want him to be less depressed, so I don’t have to feel his feelings. It’s hard not to feel the feelings of someone you love, especially someone who rotates through your daily orbit. It is not easy to detach with love, when desperation and sadness are in the air. But my spouse, Michael will not settle for forced cheer or platitudes any more than my dying murderer/rapist/hit-man/pedophile in Hospice would, though for entirely different reasons, let me assure you.
But Michael has erected a kind of force field of resistance around his body, that reminds me of that man on his deathbed. I suppose he’s had to, to keep all of us would-be saviors at a safe distance. He is tending a garden I have not yet entered myself. Being a decade older, and in poor health, he is a few concentric circles closer to The End of his story, than I am mine. Well, at least for today. So what do I know? I can’t know what it looks like from his perch.
I wonder what The End of the Story looked like for the dying man in hospice, as he balanced at the edge of the ledge. He worked so hard to keep his force field of resistance right up to the moment he took his last breath. I wonder if his worst fear was of falling for an easy forgiveness. If he did that he’d lose the absolutely clear, if searingly painful honesty he was so fiercely holding onto.
In holding up God as Love, was I dangling a horrible temptation? The temptation to slide into a warm bath of not only forgiving, but forgetting. Of oblivion. For him it was essential that he not be offered confession or communion with another human. It was important to not feel better.
“The truth will set you free.” (John, 8:32). I can’t help but think he was afraid that was true. That if he confessed, he would be set free. Maybe he didn’t want to be free, when his victims, likely were not. He would be lighter and they would forever carry the burden of trauma.
In my mind I named this man “the unrepentant killer.” But if any of what I conjecture is true, then he was not unrepentant, more like uber-repentant.
And I’m left with a question about my own theology. If the dying man’s belief in a literal hell was what allowed him to preserve the painful honesty he needed to retain his resolve, would any other theology be able to do that? It was like he’d placed his own body on the sacrificial altar. He was playing both Abraham and Isaac. Obedient to the end. Only God could save him.
“Come as you are,” so many churches say on their signs, out front. But we don’t really know what to do with sin, especially our own. He did. He was determined to face whatever might come, and he was coming as he was.
It is said that it is God who forgives, not us, but we play God with each other all the time, dispensing and withholding judgment. The man on the ledge meant it. Only God could do the forgiving. And he’d not yet faced God. He was determined to show up on God’s plane, whatever and wherever that is, with no excuses on his tongue. No white-washing. No protective armor. No spiritual anesthesia. Nothing to make the journey easier. Eyes wide open.
That is f-ing brave. If you stand where he stood. Believe what he believed.
One of the priests at the Episcopal church I attend, Reverend Keith Esposito, said in his sermon last week: “Lent is not self improvement month. We are letting go, not taking control of our life … We are decreasing so God can increase.”
It’s weird, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who, though hanging on so tight, had so fully let go of control as my unrepentant killer in New Jersey. Of course, it is possible that all he’d ever done was leave the cake out in the rain. Perhaps he was just a great big drama queen about death and God and sin. But nah. You had to be there. He was for real.
My faith is not as absolute as his was. Nor as stark. And I won’t know if my faith is stronger than my fear until I’ve reached that ledge on which he stood, and peer over it myself. Lent is a time of letting go. All I can do to prepare for the Big Surprise, is to practice letting go, in life.
An intriguing question. It dovetails with the classic question, "Would God forgive Hitler?" Thank you.
Beautiful exploration. I know my sin separates me from connection: to God and others. I feel sad that this unrepentant man was alone in his death . He chose it and it was his right to do so. The beautiful thing about God: he gives us choice.
Hugs to you and Michael.