by

The past several months, I’ve been thinking a lot about Brock Turner. (If you need a refresher on who he is, look here.) My interest in his case has to do with suffering: who gets to claim the space of the cross? When Turner’s father wrote that he no longer enjoyed ribeye steaks the way he once had, the internet erupted in scorn: surely his suffering is nothing compared to that of the woman (I’ll call her Emily Doe) he sexually assaulted while she was unconscious behind a frat house dumpster. “Poor baby,” went the ridicule: Turner’s suffering was weighed against the cross and found wanting. [fn1]

Emily Doe, meanwhile, was the heroine of the feminist internet for the statement she read at Turner’s sentencing, in which she thoroughly and eloquently castigated him for failing to perceive her as a human being and treat her accordingly. She made her own suffering publicly visible in a way that the trial could not, and she did so in a potent attempt to reclaim her dignity from the abjection of that night. She was claiming the space of the cross for herself, as a way of validating her own experience, but also of calling the person who crucified her to account.

What’s interesting here, though, is that Emily Doe takes Turner’s suffering seriously, commiting the very heresy for which the internet mocked his father: “See one thing we have in common is that we were both unable to get up in the morning.” Or, further: “Nobody wins. We have all been devastated, we have all been trying to find some meaning in all of this suffering.” Further still, she takes an explicit interest in Turner’s redemption: “I hope you will become a better more honest person who can properly use this story to prevent another story like this from ever happening again. I fully support your journey to healing, to rebuilding your life, because that is the only way you’ll begin to help others.”

Whereas Turner’s father was trying to argue that he had already suffered enough and therefore should only get probation, lest he never recover from the trauma of this incident, Doe also wants him to live a meaningful and productive life, but she believes that his path to that end requires that he face the horror he committed. So she, from her perch on the cross, invites him to look and live.

I’ve come to believe that Doe had a higher estimation of Turner than his own father did: Turner’s father asked the judge to go easy, because his son was fragile, but Doe believed that Turner could survive an encounter with the full horror of his actions. Beyond that, she believed that the only life worth living for him lay on the other side of that encounter. Remarkably, she loved him enough to give him the fierce critique that he so justly deserved.

It’s easy to look at the horror in the world and believe that we’re all damned, that humanity just plain sucks, and that there is no escaping our propensity for being awful and cruel to each other. Evidence for this position is so abundant that I can’t fault anyone for taking it up.

Even so, my faith is in what survives, what’s left over after death and darkness have done their worst. There are so many people I love on whom death and darkness have done a real number, plus an encore or two (or three or four). And yet I see so much grace at work in them, in part because they have managed to find words of comfort and kindness for others even as they were sinking in the mire of their own private hells. Something survives, and I think that even if the darkness gets you and you die, that grace is not extinguished. A kind word or small act of love lives on in someone else: I cannot believe that all of the goodness in the world can die out, and as long as it’s there, something of you lives on in it. So no, we aren’t all damned. We are all beautiful and alive, in spite of everything (and I mean EVERYTHING).

And I think that all we can do in this godawful world is to love what survives in other people however we can. I’m learning that this often requires a touch so gentle as to be almost imperceptible, because what survives in us is hardy, but it also tends to be wounded almost to the quick and terribly, terribly afraid. I don’t yet know how to be that tender: I strain to imagine it, but I sense its possibility. I get this kind of love wrong all the time—in part because it’s almost impossible to get right—but I trust that love is there whether I live up to it or not. Love is what survives, finally. And what survives in us is that which love will never let go, because it cannot and still be love.