Write for God

I left home with my laptop this evening to have dinner at a café with Wi-Fi. A quiet dinner with my thoughts, my notes and a list of the writing projects I’m considering sounded like a good idea. Besides, the 6 p.m. news would only bring reports about the latest Florida debacle that makes me wonder about the future and the soul of my home state.

At 6 p.m., the state executed Mark Schwab, a child murderer and rapist, who was the state’s first judicial murder victim since the torture of Angel Rios, who took 34 minutes to die when needles were inserted into the tissues of his arms instead of his veins in December 2006. Governor Charlie Crist, a politician who’s never let convictions stand in the way of where he stands on an issue, appointed a self-serving commission that included Harley Lappin, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the warden in charge of Timothy McVeigh’s execution., to study ways to kill people more efficiently in the Sunshine State. 

The panel made recommendations and Governor Show Pony waited until the U.S. Supreme Court decided that our method of killing other human beings was neither cruel nor unusual before announcing that Florida would once again begin performing judicial murder. Ever the grandstander, Crist selected Schwab as his first Death Row victim. In an increasingly cruel and bitter world that’s full of violence, who among the state’s residents would object to killing a pedophile who sodomized an 11-year-old boy? Schwab’s crime was never in doubt and it was ghastly.

Mark Schwab was a calculated choice by a calculating politician. The notion of the death penalty sickens me to the point where tonight’s dinner was hard to swallow, but the venom expectorated by average people like the ones sitting near me at the café is impossible to listen to without a cast-iron stomach. Soundbites and blogs are full of ugly hate, of hopes that Schwab was tortured to death, of regret that he didn’t suffer more.  I despair of humanity when a judicial murder takes place because I see such monstrous beings inside so many others who seem to have lost the spark of divine grace we are all born with. “Beware of all those in whom the urge to punish is strong,” wrote Friedrich Nietzche. “The executioner and the bloodhound peer out of their faces.”

I wanted to sit away from TVs playing Fox News and CNN. I didn’t want to see comments equating someone’s murder with justice for a child whom he killed. It often occurs to me that the very victims whom our society murders to avenge are in the bosom of a God whose presence is full of mercy and forgiveness. Those who are with the Father wouldn’t want anyone to murder in their names.

A few days ago, I watched the most amazing episode of “48 Hours Mystery.” The show is usually a somewhat lurid mystery with a beautiful victim, a killer who gets his and an ending that makes the viewer feel that justice was done.

Last week’s episode was remarkable because it had the strongest Christian expression of forgiveness I’d ever seen on network TV.  The episode detailed the murder of several members of a nuclear family in Sugarland, TX. As the story unfolded, it became clear that the father who survived and the dead mother and son had been shot as part of a plot by the oldest son. The son was captured in Mexico and been returned to Texas to face charges.

At his trial, the father pleaded with the jury and the judge not to give his son the death penalty. They would be killing the only surviving member of his family, he told them. Besides, he had forgiven the shooter even before he knew his son was responsible.

Forgiveness had been a gift from God, said the father, because He knew who was responsible before anyone else. Forgiving your son for killing your wife and younger son could only have come from God, said a man whose walk of faith touched me when he said that they were in Heaven, that he would join them and that he wanted his older son to be there, too.

The pseudo-tough prosecutor and the few members of the jury who spoke to “48 Hours Mystery” talked about justice and the father, like our Heavenly Father, talked about love and forgiveness.  We prodigal sons and daughters are always welcomed back by the Father, as he knew from his Christian life. Even his son could be forgiven by God for murdering the mother who gave him life.

Tonight, I didn’t want to hear hate and bloodlust after Mark Schwab’s death. I chose to write and listen to chamber music with my laptop at a café where flavored tea and banal conversations at other tables were in order. 

God will judge Mark Schwab and those whose souls are black with hate, but who imagine they’re on the side of justice. May God grant them all the gift of forgiveness.