Sometimes sitting down to enjoy a cup of coffee and read the newspaper opens up a spiritual and existential crisis. Mine came about this Saturday as I read an article about criminal justice. There are five men who as teenagers committed murders in the mid-’90s in Oregon and were sentenced to especially long prison terms. I knew the victims in two of these cases. Last Friday the Oregon Supreme Court ruled for new sentencing hearings in one of those crimes.
I’m not sure what justice looks like, for young men who did something so heinous when they were 15, or for the victims and their families. Maybe rehearing parts of these cases to make new sentencing decisions is the right thing. Maybe not. What I do know is that it is painful to relive these stories. To remember the phone call to our house when police needed my mom to come be with the family. To recall the salacious details enumerated in the newspaper. To think back to the funerals. I long to talk to my dad, a juvenile justice professional at the time, who was part of some of these cases.
As a person of faith, I recognize that it’s not always easy to find the right path or to determine the best, most reconciled and holy way through a situation. Nothing will ever change the reality of these murders, the lives brutally ended, the destruction wrought by these acts. It is tempting to want to leave the old wounds closed, but in reality, they never close. These four deaths shaped my life in ways big and small. These crimes that happened will always be part of me, and so while I want to hide from the pain, my faith calls me to confront the difficulty of grief, anger, and lament. Maybe then we might find some semblance of justice. Sometimes all we can do is sit in the ash heap and name that things are not as they should be. I trust that God is with us in those spaces. For today that is comfort enough as I pray for the victims, their families, the perpetrators, their families, and the professionals of the justice system trying to find the best answers in these incredibly complex spaces.
-Eilidh
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