Some More Thoughts on Torture

In regards to Torture, and specifically to waterboarding, we, as Christians, have further dishonored God by using the same Baptismal waters (in essence all water can be seen as healing and cleansing and thus sacred) we wash ourselves in and with for our personal and spiritual rebirth, to destroy the God given human dignity in another person. This is sacrilegious and a sin in its greatest sense. We have sinned against our God by taking away the humanity of a soul made in the image of God.

Jesus stepped into the river with us because, to paraphrase Barbara Brown Taylor, he did not want to be separated from us. Baptism is the new gift of life and we “invite the newcomers to step into the river with Jesus, so that their beings are wrapped up with all other beings: the well ones, and the hurt ones, the brave ones and the weak ones, the successful ones and the ones who cannot seem to get anything right.” Waterboarding sanctifies evil and dismisses as insignificant Jesus’ communion with us at the river’s edge.

I pray for those souls we have abandoned and violated through deliberate acts of harm and for those, especially Christians who understand the sacredness of Baptismal water, who have lost their souls, which are, as Professor Thistlethwaite asserts,” the root from which decency arises”. The truth is we all fall a little farther from our Father when someone is tortured. The intimacy of torture carves out the heart of the torturer and leaves an empty shell for the world. Emotion and compassion are entirely suppressed. Whoever was the torturer stays the torturer and the tortured are likely never to fully reclaim their humanity again.
Help us to remember our Baptisms and our vows to love one another, all made in the image of God.

Amen.