Dr. Tiller and rehumanizing ourselves (Part 2 of 2)

(AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

The responses we examined to Dr. Tiller's murder and to his practice via Twitter demonstrate how present our personal darkness is. It doesn't matter how good we might appear to be, we all tend to turn our enemies into objects. It's true of enemies we don't know, and it's true of enemies we love.

For example, if I were to grade myself as a dad I'd give myself an A-. I think I can give myself this grade because my 6-year old son still crawls up onto my lap and my twins still run to greet me when I walk in the door. They know I love them and they respond with energy. 

Lately, though, I'd give myself a B because anxiety has been getting the better of me. When, say, my twins are hitting and screaming at each other, I have been yelling even louder, "Quit screaming at each other!" or "Why don't you listen? Do you like me yelling at you?" I stomp around until they are crying enough to stop whatever they were doing. Later the sheer ridiculousness of this hits me, and I realize they are crying because in those moments I withheld my love from them and they felt it.

Or, as Chris Hedges had put it, I turned my kids into annoying little objects so that I could be powerful, so that I could control them. I didn't hit them, I didn't scald them with an iron...but in those moments that proclivity was there.

Artist Makoto Fujimura, who lives three blocks from Ground Zero, has written a book called Refractions in which he talks about peacemaking in a post-9/11 world. He writes:

"Developing a habit, a culture of repentance, will require us to walk straight toward the darkness, including our own imaginative power of vengeance. In the months after 9/11, many times as I walked home...I was reminded of how my sense of justice so easily leads to vengeance toward others. I was convicted of the terrorism in my own heart, of my desire to act out of vengeance and not out of love for my neighbors."

To de-objectify our enemies--our kids and spouses, Dr. Tiller and Scott Roeder--or better, to re-humanize them, requires us to walk into the darkness of our "imaginitive power of vengeance" and do the hard work of replacing it with repentance and forgiveness.

Andy Crouch says in Culture Making that families are the basic unit of culture. So if I want to do my part to make the world, our society, my city, a better place I have to start with myself and with my family. If I want terrorism to end, I have to first end the terrorism lurking in the shadows of my mind.

We are all of us as calculating and cold-blooded as Scott Roeder--there's no getting around it. Each of us has a clear opportunity now to turn 180 degrees, to repent, to seek forgiveness and show love again. We can face the darkness in ourselves and in the circumstances surrounding Dr. Tiller's death and work to create a culture of repentance, a society of human beings, in which our kids will be raised.