Yesterday afternoon, I took a tour with a group of citizens of our local police department. This is a very small city, but a policeman told us that we have seventeen known gangs in this city—and an even greater number of “disciple groups,” those who aspire to membership. The problem, still growing, is so severe that the city has had to establish an FBI liaison. What, someone asked, is their motive? The policeman said, “They need to belong.” He offered no other motive. Gang membership, or aspiration to it, is the response to ostracism.

Most people, I’d guess, who are far enough advanced into adulthood to remember some things they choose to forget when they’re younger, remember some experience or other of group rejection—maybe just a school clique—whatever. And if their memory is willing, they remember how painful it is.

When we ostracize, we participate in the crucifixion. (See the first part of this post.) If our exclusion of someone doesn’t seem that extreme to us, we should remember how it feels to the one we’re ostracizing.

A few days ago, Troy Davis was executed by the state of Georgia, though he protested his innocence to the end. Like Christ, he suffered the ultimate ostracism. To imprison someone is justifiable: A person who has exhibited anti-social behavior that endangers the property and persons of others has to be removed from society for the protection of its safety, but execution has another motive entirely, and when we consent to its administration, we participate in that motive. When we consent to the administration of legalized abortion on demand, we participate in the ostracism of children. I don’t know if abortion is “anti-life”; that term seems to me to abstract the practice, to place it in the realm of philosophical discussion. But in its concrete physical expression, it’s certainly anti-child.

After the tour of the police department, I asked the officer who heads the task force on gangs whether he’d be willing to hazard a guess about how many gang members were rejected by their fathers. “I don’t have to guess,” he said. “Every single one of them is an abandoned child.”

I taught Beowulf for a number of years to high school seniors. I always explained Grendel by explaining ostracism, the ancient human attempt at self-purification by projecting our sins on another and rejecting that “other”. We create our own monsters.

When we are ostracized ourselves, as catechized Christians, we know that our Lord is the prototypical victim, the scapegoat, laden with the projected sins of the tribe and driven away—to suffer slow death of the body and the worse death of the spirit, by exclusion, by denial, by not “belonging.” We should first give thanks to God for our catechesis, for that is the very staff on which the Holy Cross is exalted; it is Gospel itself. Because of it, we know whose company we share, whose arms are open wide to us, to receive us as one of his own. Because of it, we have the power to say, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know…” And we forgive—with ease, with pity, and with joy. We can even love them.