It was a muggy November evening when I received the message that my mother had been murdered. I remember very little about the following days except that I woke up the first night to the sound of my own screams. Otherwise, I was numb. I didn’t cry or show any depressive symptoms or outward signs of grief. I insisted on a quick return to normalcy. My friends, disturbed by my attempts to brush off the tragedy, arranged an appointment with the Catholic chaplain of my university.
I briefly told the chaplain about my mother’s life. She had been a sex worker and a Buddhist. She was the most valiant person I’d ever known. She was imperfect, complicated, and she hurt me in ways I am still working through to this day. Though she did her best, she had little choice but to be in and out of my life. This transience culminated one day in fifth grade when, because of chronic school absenteeism, the Child Protective Services took me away from my family to live in foster care.
After that day, abandonment—the feeling of being ripped away from my loved ones—permeated every moment of my waking life, and it came to be associated in my mind with death. I couldn’t think about my mother without remembering that she would eventually die. I understood the day I was taken away from her to be the dress rehearsal for her death. After two years in foster care, I returned to live with her for a while in Nashville. But when we found ourselves in a motel, she decided to send me to live with another foster family in South Carolina. She came there once when I was in tenth grade and it was one of my happiest moments in high school. Every other promise she made to visit was broken.
Despite all the unmet commitments, I couldn’t help but idealize her. I had more faith in her than I had in God. Disappointments from God were always abstract—his absence I had grown used to—but my mother’s disappointments were real. Her absence filled and disturbed my life.
I felt immense guilt that I had ever blamed her for abandoning me because of circumstances out of her control and that I had abandoned her by attending an elite university. Yet I resented her even more for the pain I felt. The cycle of guilt and resentment grew so cancerous, her absence so haunting, that it came to taint my every relationship.
The chaplain assured me that God would have mercy on her soul. I thanked him and left his office. He hurried out behind me to make sure I was really doing okay. I hated him in that moment—him and all my Catholic friends. I was angry because many in the American Church do not publicly preach mercy. While this pastor was a kind man whose Sunday homilies emphasized the mercy of God, the conservative wings of the Church condemn people like my mother, if not by word then by implication and deed.
Indeed, the Church had never been a comfort to me when it came to death. Since my confirmation in high school, I had to prepare for the eventuality of losing my loved ones not just in this life but in the next one as well. According to the Church, they probably were not going to make it to heaven—my mother included. The priest’s well-intentioned consolation only reminded me of that. But I couldn’t believe in a heaven from which my loved ones might be excluded. Before my mother’s death, I had tolerated the contradiction as one of God’s mysterious ways. But after my mother’s death, it became intellectually and morally unacceptable.
I never left the Church, but I did search for answers elsewhere, in what might seem like unusual places: Karl Marx and the Black radical tradition, specifically the political writings of James Baldwin. Unexpectedly, these two writers helped me rediscover my faith—as did the fourth-century Church Father Gregory of Nyssa, whose writings seemed to offer a synthesis. In these three writers, each of whom preached their own notion of universal salvation, my faith was recovered and strengthened. And from this universalist faith that God will redeem and bring back every one of his lost sheep, I gained the most surprising gift: the capacity to forgive my mother, the woman who murdered her, and myself.
Despite my grief, I was able to finish my last semester of college. The whole world was on fire that year. A pandemic tore through the country and brought society to a screeching halt. A Black man named George Floyd was murdered by a policeman. With his last breath, Floyd cried out for his mother. Millions rose up in rebellion against the horrific injustice. The ugliness, racism, and rot at the foundation of American empire were exposed.
But none of my college friends saw it that way. For some, broken windows and a burned police precinct were enough to completely invalidate the movement; the call for law and order drowned out the call for justice and any empathy for Floyd. Their response to Covid wasn’t any better. In the face of calls to quarantine and wear masks to protect the vulnerable, they took refuge in a bland libertarianism.
That was the year I let go of any remnants of political or ecclesial conservatism I had been holding onto. After four years at one of the best universities in the world—four years of being wined and dined by some of the leading lights of conservative Catholicism—I suddenly realized that the people I had been hanging out with had no problem seeing lethal force used against protestors pleading for justice and no scruples about valuing their meager personal freedoms above their neighbors’ health.
Like most college conservatives, I had steered clear of Marx, reading only the fragments of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts I had been assigned in a seminar. But dissatisfaction with the answers offered by both conservatives and mainstream liberals drove me to seriously engage with his thought. What I found transformed me.
I let go of any remnants of political or ecclesial conservatism I had been holding onto.
Though he is often understood as an economic determinist, Marx believed that human beings are unique among animals in taking responsibility for themselves and others in a way irreducible to their environments. That’s not to say the environment is irrelevant, of course. “Men make their own history,” he writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” But Marx underscores that personal responsibility can only be real within a concrete history and a shared community.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, studying Marx helped me process my mother’s death. Instead of attributing her death to contingency and emotions running hot or, as some Catholics might, to the mystery of an evil that transcends explanation, I began to see it within a broader historical setting that demystified my grief.
My mother was a fighter. She had to be, given the abysmal, one-against-all conditions working Americans are subjected to: the part-time jobs—waitressing, retail, stripping—that pay nothing, the motels and cars where you’re forced to find shelter. These conditions eventually take their toll. The robberies and murders we read about in the papers usually come from desperation and fear, a struggle to survive. Awful working conditions, unaffordable healthcare, and threadbare social welfare have deadly consequences. Engels put a name to this phenomenon: social murder.
For the Marxist, the concept of individual responsibility is not enough; we also need to consider collective responsibility. Reading Marx, I realized that the grief I felt for my mother was the grief I ought to feel for every man, woman, and child pushed over the precipice by a machine that could not care whether they lived or died, except insofar as they contributed to profit-making. Grief for my mother led me to anger at the fate of hundreds of millions of others who, like her, were struggling to survive. And that anger led to the desire to build a society centered on human dignity and democratic self-determination.
At the heart of Marx’s political thinking is class struggle. The bond between the oppressed transcends borders and unites all of us. Yet I was left to ask: What was it that bonded my mother and her killer? From Marx, I moved to James Baldwin, also an emphatically universalist writer. But where Marx’s hope for emancipation was grounded in class solidarity, Baldwin’s emphasized the relationships between persons, not just their roles in the economy. In the contours of finite personal interaction, Baldwin finds an infinite well of meaning. Each person is a microcosm without whose perspective the cosmos itself would be incomplete. We live not just for ourselves, but for others—through love.
Core to Baldwin’s writing is the idea that the individual person is a universal being whose freedom grants him or her the capacity to be either monster or savior. “Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you,” Baldwin told one interviewer. “What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”
Marx provided a background for my grief, and Baldwin helped fill in the foreground, especially my unexamined feelings about my mother’s killer. I had never met the woman locked up in prison a thousand miles away, and I’d never experienced the anger toward her one would expect. Instead, I felt the kind of despondence and dejection you experience in the face of a natural disaster: you can’t hold a tornado or a hurricane morally responsible. But my indifference was more spiritually corrosive than my anger. In anger, there’s a recognition of a breach or violation and, in turn, of the agency and personality behind the act. In my indifference, my despair, I didn’t see my mother’s killer as another person, but as an object, an abstraction. I was indifferent to whether she lived or died, escaped prison or rotted there for the rest of her life. But my despair was really a form of cruelty—the same cruelty we tend to feel toward all the imprisoned.
I thought about Baldwin’s words on despair. “I never have been in despair,” he said, “I can’t afford despair. I can’t tell my nephew, my niece. You can’t tell the children there’s no hope.” Baldwin’s insistence on the necessity of hope awakened me to my callousness. I saw that the plight of each and all is my own plight. Reading Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s book on prison abolition, Abolition Geography, I realized that central to my mother’s inability to stay involved in my life was the same predatory carceral system that kept the woman who killed her, as well as tens of thousands of other vulnerable women, from their families and communities. I cried finishing the book.
Reading Baldwin transformed my mother’s killer from an abstraction into a real person with a name and moral agency. To start with, I stopped calling her “my mother’s killer.” She had a name. In the coming months I found myself saying it: Lakeisha.
Our society usually opts for the retribution of imprisonment rather than the harder work of restoration. It’s profitable for the prison industry and gives those of us on the outside a sense of smug security knowing that the criminals are all “in there” and the good people are “out here.” But locking Lakeisha up had not resurrected my mother. All it had accomplished was taking Lakeisha away from her own children and community. The path to political liberation must lead through personal reconciliation. In Baldwin’s words, there’s only one proper place for the prison to go in the just society: out of existence.
Baldwin deepened Marx’s universalism, but after three years of intense study, there was still something missing. I had bracketed my faith from my politics, not knowing how to integrate the two. I needed to return to theology. That summer, I asked a Greek Orthodox friend to build me a syllabus of Church Fathers to read. My friend was a theological universalist—he believed Christ would save us all and rooted his faith in patristics. I was intrigued but cautious, aware that many Catholic theologians condemned hard universalism as a heresy.
Gregory of Nyssa believed that God created the human being with only one end: a final unity with the universal body of Christ. Gregory’s On the Making of Man is a sophisticated exegesis of Paul’s conception of the body of Christ in Romans 12. Gregory writes that our individual body parts—our hearts, noses, toes—depend on the whole body to be what they are. Likewise, the body depends on each part to be fully what it is. In this sense, the whole body dwells in each part; each part in its unique manner is the body. The fate of the particular is identified with that of the universal.
When the account [of creation in Genesis] says that God made the human being, all humankind is indicated by the indefinite character of the term; for the creature was not here also called “Adam,” as the narrative that follows relates, but the name given to the created human is not the particular but of the universal.
In Marx, there is the political imperative to redeem every member of the international working class. The only way to save one of them is to save them all. Marx insists that “labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” In Baldwin, this universalist politics is given a personal dimension. And in Gregory, Marx’s politics and Baldwin’s personalism are realized in the person of Christ. Each person is not merely a part of Christ; each person is the Christ. God is found nowhere else but in the love that binds all persons together throughout history into the body of Christ. To fight for those one does not know becomes a sacred act animated by the divine.
Still, I had doubts. If, as Gregory and other universalists have it, there is nothing we can do to prevent our salvation, do our everyday lives lose their existential stakes? What were the implications of universalism for my relationship with Lakeisha?
Then, one Christmas Eve, God answered this question with a kind of vision. Every December, I think of my mother, whose birthday is on the fourteenth. But that December, for the first time in four years, I thought of Lakeisha, too. I thought of her children. I thought of how both she and my mother had been snared and dragged through the prison system their whole lives. I thought of how similar they were. I thought of the great tragedy that these two women were marginalized, exploited, and tossed aside by society. The very words “killer” and “victim” flatten their lives. Both women had disappointed and hurt their loved ones, yet they were also let down by those who loved them. But this describes all of us. In the end, nothing separates me from them. We are all equally the products and producers of a fallen world.
Pain raced through my chest as I thought about this. It was the same pain I denied when my friends came to comfort me right after my mother’s death: not simply the pain that this woman had taken my mother away from me but also the pain my mother had caused me over the years. She wasn’t there when the social workers took me away, when I won my first track race in high school, at my high school graduation. I also remembered the pain I caused her. Several times during college she had texted me, begging for a response, and I had refused to reply. In that moment, I became conscious of the evil I had spitefully loosed upon my mother and the world. All those acts of anger, hate, and fear—all belonging to one terrible original sin. For the first time in my life, I recognized my mother neither as hero nor villain, but as a person.
I looked through the window of the coffee shop where I was reading when I had this epiphany and up to the bluest, crispest sky I had ever seen. Against that clear blue sky was a black ball of hate and fear—my spite, my mother’s neglect, Lakeisha’s crime, all of it contained within the evil and pain of a sinful world. But it was suddenly all swallowed up by the sky. I saw how small evil was compared to the vast, immeasurable love that animates the cosmos. What had before seemed impossible became as natural as breathing. In the following days, I was made tender by the divine gift of mercy—I felt reborn.
I found Lakeisha’s prison email address and wrote to her. I said that I wanted to be her friend. I admitted that I did not know what her support system was like or even whether she was repentant for what she had done to my mother. I wanted her to know that, if she did feel guilty, she didn’t have to anymore. For the next few days, I prayed anxiously. I didn’t need her to respond to my message, but I needed to know she had seen it.
She responded a few days later. The first few times we wrote to each other were awkward, but as the emails and phone calls continued through the coming months we settled into a routine. Eventually she was no longer the woman who murdered my mother, and I was no longer the son of the woman she murdered. We were friends.
I found God’s face in that experience. It was a face I had been searching for my entire life. I saw my mother, myself, the world in that one act of forgiveness. Our particular words of forgiveness flowed from the universal words of forgiveness Christ spoke on the cross and back through our lips again: his forgiveness of those who crucified him became ours; our forgiveness of each other became his.
Though their motivations differed and were articulated in very different ways, Marx, Baldwin, and Gregory of Nyssa all shared the same sense that some kind of universal salvation was possible—and that any salvation that wasn’t universal would be insufficient. This hope is what allowed them to forgive, struggle, fight, and forge bonds of solidarity that extended far beyond their immediate circles to persons they had never met. The same hope is realized whenever those of us outside the prison walls see ourselves in those inside. God’s forgiveness is only fully consummated in our opposition to any system that works to conceal our common origin and end as children of God, and in our strife and struggle for a just society.
Many, of course, despise universalism. To the cry of the oppressed that “no one is free until all are free,” the oppressor answers that they would prefer to be forever bound by chains if the alternative is the oppressed’s freedom. But as the open sky attests, no one, above all the oppressor, is free from the pulse of freedom that drives the masses of humanity out of their chains. The infinite depth of God’s love embodied by that blue sky does not just exist “out there,” but in every one of us. There is nothing any oppressor of any age can do to blot out the sky: the very same sky Christ himself looked up to when he uttered his—our—words of forgiveness.
Reproduced with permission by Commonweal.
