Pathetic prayers and holy defiance

The end of the letter from Dom Christian.  The entire letter is reproduced here:

  http://www.moines-tibhirine.org/images/stories/Testament/manuscrit.pdf

Elizabeth Scalia, who blogs as The Anchoress, has a post up entitled "A prayer for Somalia, and for the pathetic killers who face eternal darkness."  I was taken aback by both the title and the prayer.

I was reminded, too, of the very different stance evident in the letter left behind by Cistercian monk Dom Christian de Chergé, who was abducted and subsequently killed by terrorists in Algeria.  In it, he prayed:

I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems to prevail so terribly in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down. 

I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.

(I learned of the story of the monks of Tibhirine from a poem by the luminous Marilyn Nelson, which I enjoin you to read, the full text is here.)

Scalia begins by asking us to place ourselves with the hundred of peoples who died and were injured in the bombings, to see beyond the numbers to the human stories. As we did for those struck down in Las Vegas.  But then she shifts to praying for the "pathetic killers," a prayer she characterizes as "holy defiance." She prays (or quotes someone else's prayer, it's unclear): "for the murderers who will spend eternity apart from the Source of All Love, that they may yet turn away from what is dark, and into God’s marvelous light."

She prays for their redemption, not their condemnation, but I wish there were more mercy, more a sense of that those who killed are as much children of God as those they killed. Dom Christian ends his letter with

Yes, I want this thank you and this goodbye to be a "God bless" for you, too, because in God's face I see yours. 

May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.

I am praying for those killed, and those who killed. But I'm praying, like Dom Christian, that I will be graced with a moment of clarity that lets me forgive, in the hopes of being one day a happy thief in Paradise.  That I will grasp that what it means to put on Christ: to forgive, to redeem, to die, to rise. That prayer, I think, might truly be "holy defiance."

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Read the entire letter from Dom Christian here in French, here in English.