I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak-not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. So many of us have become afraid and angry.
I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. The ways in which I have been hurt-and have hurt others-are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering.
I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt.
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