This morning I read about John Malvo, the now 27-year-old man who terrorised Washington, DC about ten years ago by sniping at people from a car with high-powered rifle.Malvo expressed remorse and said he had been a “monster”. He said that the worst sight, an image that constantly haunts him, was seeing the eyes of the husband of the FBI investigator he shot while the couple was loading supplies into their car. Malvo said he could not get the look on his face out of his head. He said it made him feel like the worst kind of scum. He hoped the families of the victims could just forget about him and move on with their lives, but of course they cannot. They might be able to move on with their lives, but you do not simply forget something like murder.That brings me to the issue of abortion. For the last several decades in the United States there has been a war over abortion on demand and a debate about the humanity of the baby. People on one side de-humanise it and call it a “foetus”; people on the other side pull out ultrasounds and intrauterine photographs to show that it is a baby indeed. More to the present, though, it seems that the human nature of the foetus or baby is not in question. It is a human life in the process of developing, and since human life is constantly developing, where does one draw the line and say that THIS human life is expendable?In my practice I meet women who are dealing with the guilt of having terminated a pregnancy. To them there is no question about it. They sometimes ask themselves, “How could I have killed my baby?” They too will never forget about it. They can move on, and often they can have other babies, but they never forget.Murder is the supreme disregard for the uniqueness of another person’s life and the selfish insistence that one comes before the other to the absolute negation of the other.And that brings me to the young man who was gunned down on a bus recently in Sandys. That was part of the turf battles between gangs in which people who often grew up and played together as children are pulling out guns and shooting each other dead. Each case of such murder is an act of absolute negation, a dehumanising act that reduces one to a “victim” and the other to a monster. These people all have names. Each murder leaves behind a crew of friends and a number of family members. The anguish, the emotional suffering that these friends and family go through is tremendous, and the supreme act of selfishness on the part of someone leaves a permanent scar. People can move on and live their lives, but they never forget.And that brings me to forgiveness. Murder does not just do damage to the victim and his or her family and friends; it decimates the killer. The killer is both ontologically and phenomenologically guilty. That is, the killer stands in a state of guilt before God and society. The subjective guilt he or she might experience is not the only matter. So, here’s the situation: unless the killer is forgiven, he or she remains condemned to a state of guilt. That is what haunts a person. That is what haunts Malvo. He cannot escape the fact that he is responsible for the suffering, the terrible loss of another human being. Not only did he kill people, he also changed others’ lives for as long as those people live.He is living out a life sentence and pays a little each day for what he has done. He lives in a prison, and it has walls and stuff you can see. He also pays each day with the remorse and self-loathing that nobody but him can really see. Nobody but him dies a bit more each day in his unique state of guilt. Just like the people he killed were each unique, he himself is unique and uniquely guilty.God said, “You shall not, for in the day that you do, you will surely die.” Without forgiveness each shooter in Bermuda will surely die. You might as well just turn the gun on yourself, because when you fire, you kill two people yourself and the other. When you fire you cause heartache to your family and friends and to that of the one you shoot. Without forgiveness, that is where it stands, and it will never be forgotten, and it will never be let go until you have paid society to the last ounce and until you pay God with your entire physical and spiritual life. There is no way around it. There is no attorney who can get you off. There is no lighter sentence to be bargained down to. There is no simple “time” to do that takes care of all of it. You may even think, if you have not been caught, that you are getting away with it, but there is no getting away with it. The longer your physical existence on this earth goes on, the darker and more dismal, even loathsome it will become. You may enjoy a moment in the relative sun, but you will pay. You will. Without forgiveness, you will grow to hate yourself and the life, such as it will be, that you live.There are four sources of such forgiveness: society, the victim and/or the victim’s family, oneself, and God. That is a complex situation. How does one “make it up” to society? Go to jail. How does one make it up to the victim or the victim’s family? You can’t. They have to find it in them somehow. How do you make it up to God? Die. Either that or believe in the fact that Jesus died in your place and you accept God’s forgiveness based on the fact that someone else has made it right. How do you forgive yourself? Some kind of combination of all those others. Often there is no way, and one, like John Malvo, must live with the self-loathing for a lifetime. Best not to allow oneself to get into that condition to begin with.