Like everyone else I would guess, I have been horrified, appalled and spiritually and emotionally paralyzed by the news regarding the recent rescue of the three young women in Cleveland.
Like most of us, my first response was that no punishment, no public humiliation and certainly no legal prosecution could be great enough.
This man, this human being, called ‘a monster’ by his own family, has committed a sin so great, so full and so all-encompassing that we can barely take it in.
I get the feeling sometimes that there is a public contest that I am not aware of; a contest to be the most vile human being to walk the face of the earth.
By this standard, the sleazy and corrupt politician or depraved Hollywood celebrity, or even the most blatant racism and exploitation that we see nearly daily in our headlines, is no match for evil that will forever haunt that Cleveland neighborhood and be tied to Ariel Castro and his crimes.
His evil is so great that the house where it took place will certainly be torn down leaving a permanent tragic hole in the neighborhood.
Every family involved, every neighbor, even those of us who look on in horror, will be forever stained by this horrific, sustained act.
Also by Morf: And God said, ‘Let there be Guns.”
And like everyone else, my first impulse is to put as much distance as I can between this ‘sin’ and my own.
But is my, or your sin, really so different?
When I see photos of this ‘monster’, I don’t see a monster. I see a pathetic, broken and haunted man under a bondage few of us could even begin to imagine.
Yes, he welcomed, and probably even cultivated, a sin that grew to consume and overwhelm him.
But if we imagine that we are so different, we too sin.
I would like to imagine that Ariel Castro is a slimy creature of another species. I wish I could convince myself that he and I have nothing in common.
There are those who hold that no sin is greater than any other, that any sin breaks our relationship with God – and each other.
But this sustained act of depravity defies us all. There literally is no punishment great enough.
And our mercy and restoration toward his victims cannot be great enough.
Perhaps that is the point; only God himself can punish – and restore – to the degree necessary.
On a human level, it seems, no healing is possible. But this is one of those times when we see, far too closely, the depth of sin that lies, dormant and restrained within most of us, but waits, like some surging, seething ‘monster’ within each one of us.
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Morf Morford considers himself a free-range Christian who is convinced that God expects far more of us than we can ever imagine, but somehow thinks God knows more than we do. To pay his bills, he’s been a teacher for adults (including those in his local county jail) in a variety of setting including Tribal colleges, vocational schools and at the university level in the People’s Republic of China. Within an academic context, he also writes an irreverent ESL blog and for the Burnside Writers Collective. As he’s getting older, he finds himself less tolerant of pettiness and dairy products.
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