This case and Gannon have affected me deeply.
These are my thoughts about appeals for forgiveness and prayer, and the ugly problem of Leticia Stauch.
Forgiveness is the abandonment of a debt. It’s a pardon. It’s grace, in place of demand for a full accounting. We forgive loans and unfulfilled promises and obligations, to ease burdens, or for practical reconciliation of a tangible or metaphorical ledger. We forgive behaviors and transgressions, instead of seeking commensurate sacrifices. We forgive (some) crimes to allow for new and better choices.
Forgiveness is a reckoning with a wrong. That’s all it is. A settlement of sorts.
Forgiveness isn’t an absence of anger or the presence of peace, or a return to joy. These are all distinct things with distinctly unique functions that aren’t interdependent. My observation is that our society has re-invented forgiveness to mean feeling a certain way, or rather, not feeling what we judge as ‘toxic’ emotion and thoughts, or spiritually ‘lesser’ attitudes.
The truth is, people feel extremely indignant and outraged about what she did because she was extremely depraved in her extreme conduct, and she caused a little child to be terrified and to suffer deeply, then die. Outrage is the correct response to the outrageous. It may be healthy to regulate intense emotions about her over time, so we’re not in toxic overdrive, but that’s very different, in my opinion, than needing to forgive Letecia Stauch. I don’t view this distinction as a spiritual deficit. I view it as moral clarity.
This is my only prayer:
That Gannon is found. And, that Gannon’s family is fortified by the love and support of those who stand with them, near and far. That they have the endurance they will need to simply face another day. That they develop increasing resilience to get through coroner’s findings, grotesque facts of what was done to their son, a trial where there will never be commensurate Justice, and a life that now includes Absence.
My prayer is that their love for Gannon fuels and sustains a will to persist when they are alone at night, in the awful silence of deep Loss and the throes of traumatic suffering, and wanting God to take them too. Because this really is as bad as they think it is.
There is no ‘closure’, there is no grief model that even approximates what they’re experiencing, you do not ‘heal’ from the absence of someone. The pain of Gone is not an illness with a duration. Rather, Gone is the stars shattering at your feet, the sun extinguishing, and the moon spinning away. There is no day from now on where they will not be sad, even when they know joy.
I hope Gannon is home soon.
“Grief is Love’s Shadow. The Presence of Absence. An unbearable weight of emptiness.” - John Mark Green
