I’M ALONE IN THE CHURCH, the only light coming through the stained glass windows, the votive candles burning in front of the shrines to Mary, Joseph, and Saint Clare, and the presence candle burning in front of the tabernacle. I’ve been kneeling on the bottom step below the altar since I returned from the meeting with Leonard and Angela Jenkins.
I look up at the cross, bearing the image of the suffering savior. God became man, perfect, sinless, who became sin for the entire world. Guiltless, allowing himself to be beaten, ridiculed, spit upon, and nailed to the rough wood for the guilty. A willing victim of the greatest injustice in all man’s tortured history.
I close my eyes and think of Leonard, a man far from guiltless, far from sinless, who is about to plead guilty to a crime I know
