A troubling thought

This morning I was saying my prayers, and I prayed for the dead at Virginia Tech, and then for their friends and family. Then I thought to pray for the parents of the murderer ... and I paused to consider whether or not I should pray for him. Of course I should pray for his soul, but it was hard to do. I did it against my will, because as a Christian, I recognize that it's the right thing to do. But I didn't want to.

After prayers, I logged on and found this sobering personal reflection from Reihan Salam. Reihan writes about how when he was 21, he was living in Washington, away from home in Brooklyn, and was suffering severely after having his heart stomped by a girl:

I was depressed. Dangerously depressed, I'm afraid. I made it to work every day and I think I did a decent job, but as soon as I returned to my own cocoon I felt awfully hopeless and alone. My army of good friends was still in Massachusetts and New York, and I languished in the District. I vividly remember reading books all night in my dank basement bedroom, listening to the song "Photobooth" on endless repeat. It was bad. Really, really bad.

One day he came home and found his mom waiting for him. She lifted him out of the pit, made everything okay:

On the rare occasions when I reflect on those really rough weeks I think about how lucky I was to have friends who were attuned to my pitiful mood, and to have a crazy, wonderful mother who'd go to tremendous lengths for me. So when I hear that Cho Seung Hui was "a loner," my heart hurts. Not as much as it does for his victims, not by a longshot, and not nearly as much as it does for the thousands of women and men who take their miseries and anger out on themselves. But there you have it.

That's a painful truth, but it struck home. Reihan's entry put me in mind of the spring of 1986, when I was in my second semester as a college freshman. I was living alone in a dorm room, and seriously depressed. I was still pining away over unrequited high school love, and felt incredibly and crushingly alone in the world. I was in such a state that I couldn't concentrate on my classes, and would walk to an off-campus bar most nights, and drink until I couldn't stand any more, then stumble home and listen to the Velvet Underground until I fell asleep. By the grace of God, I got pulled out of that hole by the advent of a marvelous life-loving lunatic from New Orleans named Joe Zahavi, who became my roommate and my friend. And I got out of it by starting down the road to religious faith after discovering Kierkegaard, and Thomas Merton. But Reihan's post got me to thinking about 19 year old me, lying there in the darkness and solitude of that dorm room, filled with self-hate, listening to sad music, unreachable. My anger and depression was never directed against other people, only myself, and I doubt I ever seriously thought about suicide. But I was closer to that trap than I ever have been, and it's a little frightening to think back at how things might have turned out for me had I continued drifting down that dark river.

With that in mind, it pricks to read this quote from a story in today's NYTimes in which Cho's teacher recalls meeting with him three timesin individual tutoring sessions. Cho would show up in sunglasses. “He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,” she said.

Understand, I'm not trying to sentimentalize this mass murderer. I'm trying to understand how a human being gets to the place where he can commit mass murder. In the summer after 9/11, I was still so consumed by anger over the mass murders committed by the terrorists (as well as the Catholic church scandal) that I was grinding my teeth at night, and was distracted in various ways by the anxiety it caused. So I agreed to my wife's request to see a Catholic therapist and learn how to let go of the anger. The therapist began by suggesting that what Mohammed Atta et alia had done was something that was within my capacity as a moral agent to do. I angrily resisted this, for obvious reasons, but the therapist was working to get me to see that what those terrorists had done, their act of infamy, was something that I was capable of under certain circumstances. The idea, I think, was to move me toward understanding their act as all too human, and helping me to find some sort of forgiveness, of letting go. It was an infuriating thought, and I don't know how far we could have gotten with this line of thinking in therapy. Our sessions ended abruptly after about a month when the therapist yelled at me for about an hour and told me I was tempting hell by having written critically of John Paul's handling of the sex-abuse scandal.

Maybe his taking the "you could have done this" tack re: the 9/11 terrorists was as unprofessional and wack as his abusing his position to berate me over my stance on the scandal, I dunno. But I think he was right, in the end, about the terrorists' actions being something within my, and anybody's, capacity to carry out, under the right circumstances. It took me years to be able to put my hands around that thought. I still can't pray for the souls of Atta and his despicable confederates, but I can't see them anymore as entirely alien to me. I'm not sure what to do with that either, and I absolutely don't want to relieve Atta, Cho, or any murderer of responsibility for their evil actions. We must reject the French maxim, "To understand all is to excuse all." But thinking of the miserable and wretched Cho, that tormented boy overtaken by deranged malice, it is impossible for me to think of that awful college semester, and how lost I was before I was found, and how grateful I am for the mercy of rescue by love, and by Love Himself.

Why didn't Cho find the same lifeline? Had it been offered, but he was too lost in a fog of self-pity and loneliness that he couldn't see it? That mystery, I'm sure, died with him, and with those poor souls he pulled into the grave with him.

UPDATE: On the way to work, I thought of something that I was involved in back in 1992. I was a reporter at The Washington Times. One day I was checking voice mail and instead of deleting the message from the cranky guy who left them overnight, I decided for kicks to listen to it to the end. In that message, "Jeff" threatened to kill the president. I played the message for my editor, and we called the Secret Service. They arrested Jeff. Jeff called my office line the next night, and said chillingly, "Doubtless, yours was a patriotic act" -- and he then reestated his threat to kill President Bush. The Secret Service came out again, and arrested him a second time (a miscommunication with the local authorities in northern Virginia, where Jeff lived, caused him to be released after the first time).

The Secret Service agent told me that Jeff fit the classic profile of an assassin. He was a white male, early 30s, a loner who lived in a basement flat in Alexandria, and who lived a quiet, solitary, nondescript life. Jeff had gone through an intense religious period at some point in his life, the agent said, and claimed to have been brutalized in some unspecific way by his father.

A few months later, I saw Jeff face to face when I took the witness stand in his trial. He looked so small in his suit. He looked, to be honest, like Pee-wee Herman. I felt kind of guilty for having reported him, so mousy and afraid did he appear, but there was no doubt in my mind that I'd done the right thing. The Secret Service was perfectly clear that men like him fit the demographic and psychological profile of the political assassin to a T.

Jeff was convicted. I don't know what happened to him, but he did leave me one more message on my office voice mail. I can hear his sad, faraway voice in my head now as I type this: "When I saw you on the witness stand, in those glasses, I thought: 'I could have been like him, if people hadn't done things to me.'"

Had people "done" things to him, or was he imagining things? The federal agents did say that his father had been abusive, though they didn't say how. I have no trouble believing that Jeff had been a shy, put-upon outsider. He looked like the type. He looked like a whipped puppy, actually. But he had threatened to kill the president, and he had to be held responsible for his actions. Pity for him did not obviate this fact. Still, there he was, a pathetic human being, lonely and confused and mistreated and filled with hate, or self-hate: a sinner.

But he was stopped before he visited harm on the president, or anyone else.

Be kind to people. Who knows what kind of battle they're fighting.