Holy and Innocent / Christmas Day 4

Holy Innocents. A sweet phrase for a jarring story. December 28th is the third of the Christian Commemoration trifecta. It finds its origin in the Nativity story of the book of Matthew.

There, when the Wise Men alert King Herod of Jerusalem to the "magical, mystical" child whose "star" they are following, Herod gives them the "Bethlehem" prophecies, and tells them to bring word back to him about what they find in Bethlehem, the city which is supposed to birth a messiah.

Warned by a dream, the Wise Men bring Herod no word. Herod’s cruel panic moves him to have all the boy children of Bethlehem under the age of 2 killed. And in the text, there’s a reference to the prophet Jeremiah, who writes: "A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."

(Note: most scholars doubt the historicity of this story, since, though Herod actually had a long list of cruel deeds to his name, killing all the kids in a town would not be one which the historians would have forgotten to mention).

I write this while the world comes to terms with the assassintation of Benezir Bhutto, a courageous woman running against the would-be dictator Pervez Musharref, in Pakistan. She was neither holy nor completely innocent, having run the country in the past before being ousted, with a husband who amply rewarded himself, illegally. But no one ever deserves violent death.

On Bill Moyer’s Journal, there’s an interview with Tom Cahill (How the Irish Saved Civilization) about capital punishment. Cahill is writing a book about a death-row inmate from Texas, Dominique Green (executed after the Supreme Court refused to grant a stay in October 2004), whose crime (murder) was questionable (he was one of four kids robbing a store, the white kid was never charged, the older two black kids ratted on him, the youngest).

He became a new person in prison, learned to read and read voraciously, came to read Desmond Tutu’s No Future Withoug Forgiveness, a work coming out of Tutu’s work on the "Truth and Reconciliaion Commission" in South Africa, that "remarkable yet harrowing attempt by South Africans to come to terms with the gross violations of human rights committed throughout the apartheid era by offering amnesty and forgiveness rather than punishment and dismissal."

He passed the book around on Death Row, insisting that others not only read it, but forgive those who had wronged them, and to ask forgiveness of those they’d wronged. Cahill, who is friends with Tutu, managed to get the young man and the Archbishop together for a meeting before the execution.

Execution, according to Cahill, is not about righting a wrong, but it’s about a culture committed to death, which demands sacrifice, whether people are actually guilty or not, whether people could be rehabilitated or not. Most compelling about his argument, for me, was the reminder that people who are well-off (O.J. Simpson, for example), are never put to death in America.

He noted that a country retaining a death penalty cannot join the European Union.

I looked it up and found that the U.S. is number 5 among the top ten killers of prisoners in the world, right after China, Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq.

Holy Innocents. The massacres, the innocent who fall victim to the violent, the land which is being mauled by development, the climate mauled by human impacts, the innocent critters pushed into extinction. How to reclaim, to embrace the vulnerable, before the violent and powerful (and I’m of this group) erase them, and even the beauty of their memory, from the earth.