Sermon in Favor of Looking Evil in His Ugly Face

On Wednesday night I jogged past to see for myself: the small Heights bungalow a mere four blocks from my home where, sometime between 1971 and 1973, serial killer Dean Corll and his teenage accomplices raped, tortured, and murdered boys from the Heights.  The boys killed in this particular house were not the first or last of Corll's 27 known victims--a record number that anointed him the worst serial killer in U.S. history until the more infamous John Wayne Gacy, who admittedly "imitated" Corll, beat him with at least 30 victims.

The current owners must have children, because their Christmas decorations--LED lights in brown lunch bags and happy snowmen--whisper of craft time around the dining room table.  The house warmly glows in the dusk, a direct counter to the sudden chill that creeps up my bare arms.  Do they know?, I wonder.  They couldn't possibly know, I think, and still have bought that house.

As I pick up my jog again and head home, I wish I didn't know either.

But I do know.  I want to know.  I was dying to know.  Everything.  Every last detail.  So I've read articles, I've read true crime books, I've driven to each locale.  I'm doing research for my own writing, I tell myself, a half-truth.  And anyway, it's my neighborhood.  Shouldn't I know its history down to even the deepest, darkest secrets?

The real truth is both less noble and more spiritual than my little justifications.  I've always read true crime books, mystery novels, detective stories.  When I was a voracious adolescent reader, I picked up whatever my parents left lying around the house, and some of those books detailed sinister crimes.  My mother, an anatomy teacher and would-be forensic pathologist (she was taking a course, I remember, called "Blood Splatter Patterns and Entry Wounds" and often left the house reminding us in a casual voice that she would see us after she "worked on the cadavers") unwittingly fed my interest in history's notorious and lesser known psychopaths.  And Anthony Hopkins won an Academy Award for his depiction of Hannibal Lector right smack dab in the middle of my most formative years.  In my adulthood, I've seen every episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, all fourteen seasons worth.  Twice.  That's 654 hours of television.  I'm now watching them a third time with my husband.

Why the fascination with such evil?

It wasn't a fetish--I didn't much enjoy how I felt when I read those horror stories.  Nor did I want to emulate the sadism of the killers, the ineptitude of bystanders and police, or the haplessness and grief of the victims' families and communities.  No thank you on all three counts.  But I did--and do--want to know.

Tonight, while I cook turkey chili, my husband picks up Jack Olsen's The Man with the Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders and turns it face down on the kitchen counter.  He doesn't like the cover photos, old black and whites of the Candyman himself--they give him a serious case of the heebie jeebies.  Let me read to you while you cook, he says, and thumbs through Best American Spiritual Writing 2012, hoping, perhaps to undo any bad juju I've invited into our home with my latest obsession.  Without realizing it, he starts reading from Terry Eagleton's "The Nature of Evil", first published in Tikkun.  How apropos.

I am struck immediately by these lines:

It is only by identifying with this polluted, cast-out thing (which in early sacrifice usually involed eating it) that the city can be saved, that which is torn and bleeding can be made whole, justice can be accomplished, and life can be snatched from the jaws of death.

Eagleton's saying we have to ingest it--the nothingness, the evil--to escape it.  If we merely try to block it out or recast it as a funny zombie, say, or sparkly vampire, we've still not looked the thing in its naked, horrid face.  Olsen writes about Houston, "Violence is as much a part of the city's heritage as the post oaks and the bayous."  Isn't the same true about the heritage of all human beings?

I don't know.  I've always preferred an acknowledgment of violence, even in my churches. Much of what keeps me "Catholic" is my body.  I love the physicality of the mass (all that genuflecting, and call and response, so that all the bodies and voices become one body, one voice, so that even if you don’t go to mass for years, your body will still know what to do), the physicality of the sacraments—the Eucharist, the anointing of the sick, the word anoint coming from the Latin “to smear or rub”, and the violent physicality of the churches themselves, the holy water, bloody crucifixes and the heady incense and candle smells.  To me, Catholic churches are bodies, mysterious and grotesque and elaborate.  And violent.  So many other churches smell like bleach. 

More importantly for me, I feel like the more I know about evil, its various facades in the mortal world, the more I admit it exists and ingest the reality of "bad things", the more I know I can't control it.  There is no panacea for this, the hard fact of which scares the crap out of me, but also relieves me of an inexplicable burden.  The more darkness I ingest, the lighter I feel (of course, you can overeat too).  If I can't erase the darkness, then my job becomes simply to walk toward the light with all my might, dragging as many people as I can with me.  That's a wholly different and, in some ways, less arduous task from pretending the darkness isn't there. 

I remember standing outside that yellow house on Wednesday night, a house I expected to bulge and brim with its own crepuscular history, and how it shined from within at me—its brown bag lanterns and fairy lights flickering like little armored warriors that stand guard against the descending night.  

Amen.

Dean Corll