Maybe it's about redemption

If you ever think about shirking your duties—just remember, it’s always much easier to suck it up and do it yourself rather than have others come in to “gently” remind you and then make suggestions about how you should do it. Believe me on this one.

I have a perfectly good explanation on how the blog got so behind -- it started over Lent, then culminated with Holy Week. Without those key events (and honestly, a little personal grieving though that’s such a tacky excuse to lean on) and pictures posted and written up, I wasn’t completely confident about launching into new items of possible interest—like the death of Osama bin Laden, the rightness of retribution, and thoughts about what a Christian response should be. By Christian response, I’m talking in the singular, but I'd have to guess not killing is probably right up there with the main Thou Shalt Nots.

In fact, if I had been doing my job I would have said that the whole conversation about Osama made me think about the death penalty. Even if I personally and emotionally think in my heart, even if he’d been caught alive and then received the death penalty later, it wouldn’t have bothered me one bit, I keep going back to Sunday School and something Joe Monti said once, that we don’t have to be right in our hearts to do the right thing, which I guess we hope is the Christian thing.

Not that long ago, I was reading a couple of books on the death penalty—one, which is very well known, “Dead Man Walking” by Sister Helen Prejean. One striking thing about folks who end up on death row (aside from wrongful convictions) is the heinous nature of some of the crimes. Things so bad and depraved, you wonder first how a person could commit such an act and live with themselves ever again (sociopaths excluded since I’m not sure they have a conscience) but then secondly, you wonder how people like Sister Helen comfort them and bring them Christ’s love.

You wonder how when the conversation naturally turns to the horribleness of the crime and the victims and the victims’ families and all the lives that are destroyed, you wonder how one single nun manages to remember that life is a gift from God. And I think God’s greatest gift. And Christ’s greatest gift to mankind? Love your neighbor perhaps? Or the possibility of forgiveness and redemption.

I do think Christ was on to something. We don’t have to be depraved killers to need a clean slate every now and again, to ask for and receive forgiveness. Nor do I think we have to be amazingly spiritual nun types to comfort those in prison, to befriend the friendless, the lost, the lonely. None of it has to be perfect. Nothing in life is, or so it seems so far.

We can fall short and cease trying. Or we can fall short and every day, or the day after, or the week after that, start all over with God’s love, and begin again.