LOVING THE LEAST AMONG US—IS IT NOBLE OR OUTRAGEOUS?

By Edwin Cooney

As I’ve asserted numerous times in these musings, I don’t love anyone because they are perfect and, as far as I’m aware, no one else does either.

I recall many times as a youth being publicly punished and wondering -- as I obeyed the teacher’s command to “stand in the corner, Eddie” -- whether my friends would still be my friends at lunchtime. Fortunately, they usually were. Still, most of us feel best about ourselves when we’re publicly acknowledged for our heroic deeds.

Nevertheless, there have been occasions when I’ve felt sympathy for someone even when that person has been rightly punished for outrageous behavior.

Christian scripture reminds us that Christ spent more time with the dregs of society than He did with the righteous. After all, the righteous didn’t need Him.

This was forcefully brought home to me a few years ago by an article in the New York Times. Times reporter Dan Barry introduced me to a man by the name of Roy Ratcliff. Mr. Ratcliff was then the sixty-year-old pastor of the Mandrake Road Church of Christ in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was like most ministers you meet or read about: reflective, spiritual, and possessing that special capacity for tolerance that comes with his profession. There was only one thing that marked him from any other preacher you’d ever meet. That difference was that since 1994 he’d dwelt in that special place of the outrageous.

As he told Dan Barry of the Times, he had never been to a prison before April 1994. Now, as Christ and his Disciples often did, Reverend Ratcliff visits prisons all the time.

While visiting his first prison, Reverend Ratcliff was introduced to a rather tall, blonde, and good-looking prisoner who wanted to be baptized. He’d sinned the worst of sins. He was among the most despised of his time. He knew that baptism wouldn’t cleanse him of his earthly crimes against humanity. However, he’d heard that, were he to be accepted into God’s realm, even he could start over.

The young man was just 34 years old that May 21st. He was sentenced to spend the equivalent of fifteen life sentences at the Columbia State Prison in Portage, Wisconsin. He believed that he should have received the death penalty for his crimes and the Reverend Ratcliff agreed. However, there was no death penalty in Wisconsin.

Still, the prisoner told Roy Ratcliff that he was increasingly aware that there is something beyond life on earth. In order to experience that meaningful place, he would have to be baptized and, indeed, he was anxious for the experience.

So the good Reverend Mr. Ratcliff did baptize the still youthful looking Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer. Within months, Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison and thus the “taxpayer” was relieved of having anything whatsoever to do with his upkeep. For that, most were quite grateful, it would seem.

However, herein lies a powerful irony! The “taxpayer,” were he to express his gratitude, would have to express that gratitude to a triple murderer by the name of Christopher Scarver. Scarver was not only in jail for a brutal murder -- I’ve yet to hear of a gentle murder! -- but he killed Jesse Anderson, another inmate, at the same time he dispatched Dahmer. Is that not both outrageous as well as ironic?

The really outrageous thing is, of course, the willingness of Reverend Ratcliff not only to baptize Jeffrey Dahmer, but even more to let it be known that the least among us remained Roy Ratcliff’s friend.

As Reverend Ratcliff told the Times’ Dan Barry, he has been both embraced and ostracized within his church and throughout the religious community for having baptized and befriended Jeffrey Dahmer. However, Reverend Ratcliff had the temerity to say that he believes that he is a better man for having done so.

Of course, it’s much easier to love the pretty and the righteous. However, the forces which cause all of us to do what we do and be who we are, very often are beyond our control. That there might be those among us possessed of sufficient power to love the least among us is, it seems to me, the most fortunate of blessings.

The Reverend Roy Ratcliff has not, like me, merely visited that outrageous place — he lives there, I believe, in heroic humbleness.

Furthermore, by the title of the book he has written describing his relationship with young Dahmer, one can tell that the Reverend Mr. Ratcliff fully comprehended the significance -- and the ultimate power -- of God’s greatest gift to you and me, the most imperfect of beings.

The book is entitled: “DARK JOURNEY, DEEP GRACE.”

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY