Columns

IN EXILE

FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

Several years ago, in Canada's prairies, not far from where I was born and raised, a man named Robert Latimer killed Tracy, his severely-handicapped daughter. He put her into the family truck, hooked a tube to the exhaust-emission, sealed the windows and doors and let her fall asleep.

He wasn't malicious in intent. He loved his daughter. In his mind, this was an act of mercy. He couldn't bear to see her suffer any longer. Nobody doubted his sincerity. His daughter was almost totally disabled physically and mentally, lived in constant pain and there was no favourable prognosis of her ever getting better or of her pain ever lessening. So he, in as humane a way as possible, ended her life.

Her death became a national story, a drawn-out court-battle that lasted for years, ending up in the Supreme Court of Canada, and a country-wide moral and religious debate that has bitterly divided families and communities.

The death of this young girl, Tracy Latimer, raises an issue we can't agree on today: What's the value of a human life that is severely disabled?

What's the value of a life such as Tracy Latimer's? Biblically, the answer is clear: When someone is deemed expendable – for whatever reason – at that moment, she or he becomes the most spiritually important person in the community: The stone that is rejected by the builders is the cornerstone for the building. This means the Tracy Latimers in our lives are a privileged place where the rest of us can experience God.

One central revelation of the cross is that there is a privileged presence of God in the one who is excluded, in the one of whom society says: "better that she should die for the people."

Scripture is clear on this. Already in the Jewish Scriptures, we see the prophets emphasize the idea God has special sympathy for "orphans, widows, and strangers." At that time, these groups had the least status, the least power and were deemed the most expendable.

The prophets' message was revolutionary: God has a special sympathy for those whom society deems least important and how we treat those persons is the litmus test of our faith, morals and religiosity.

Jesus takes this a notch further. In his teaching, not only does God have special sympathy for those whom society deems least important and most expendable, but God's presence is identified with them: "Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me!" Jesus identifies God's presence with the outcasts, with the excluded ones and he tells us that we have a privileged experience of God in our contact with them.

Nowhere is this stated more clearly than in Jesus' death on the cross: The crucified one is the rejected stone, the one deemed expendable.

But the crucified one is also God and there is a special intimacy with God that can be had only in standing, as did Mary and John, near the cross, in solidarity with the crucified one, the one who is being excluded.

Sometimes that's hard to see and accept because the excluded ones are not always innocent and loving. For example, the Oklahoma-bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was executed last summer.

Unlike Jesus, McVeigh didn't radiate innocence, love, moral integrity, repentance, nor most anything else that speaks of God's presence. So how is he the cornerstone for our building?

By his exclusion, by his being deemed expendable, by being the one executed.

At the moment when his executioners lashed his arms to a table and the lethal injection was brought in, Timothy McVeigh became the Christ-figure: a man helplessly stretched out, the focus for moral reflection, the central figure in the community, and the one who, for that moment and in that situation, becomes a privileged presence of God because, as the cross makes plain, God is specially present in the excluded one.

Many of us are familiar with an incident recorded by Elie Wiesel. In one of the Nazi death camps, a prisoner had escaped and, in retaliation, the Nazis took a young boy, hanged him publicly and forced everyone to watch this horrific spectacle. As the young boy dangled on a rope in front of them, one man cursed bitterly: "Where is God now?" Another man answered: "There, on that rope. That's God!"

One of the revelations of the cross is precisely that – in the crucified one is the presence of God.

(Website: www.ronrolheiser.com)