St. Jeffrey Dahmer

On Grace

A Question of Aesthetics

Between 1978 and 1991 Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 people.

That sounds like a lot, sure, but we have to put that number into context. Napoleon for example killed about five million people during the aptly named Napoleonic Wars. Given that those stretched from 1799 to 1815, this comes out to a shocking 312,500 murders a year, compared to Jeffrey’s paltry 1.3. And do people hate Napoleon? No. Of course not. France keeps an Arch dedicated to the man to this day. They love the guy. He’s depicted in renaissance style art with his stupid little hand inside his coat. The Pope himself gave the guy his crown. Yet Jeffrey, poor, maligned, misunderstood Jeffrey… he kills a measly 17… and he’s the monster? Where’s his papal crown?

The double standard is simply staggering.

The lesson is that if you’re going to be a mass murderer you have to do it with pizzazz. I admit… Jeffrey’s murders were, shall we say… unglamorous? Napoleon was out there with plumed hats and dazzling ribbons and coats and marching around on a white horse with a saber. I get it. I do. That really does make it better. People are loath to admit it, but the reality is that morality, mostly, is determined by aesthetics. If you look pretty people will let you get away with just about anything. An uggo however, or someone who’s just kinda gross… eck. Look you troll, you’re not attractive enough to break the rules. Okay? Just how it is. And Jeffrey… I mean… he wasn’t a bad looking guy… but his murders were just so, I don’t know, low class? I mean, hitting someone in the back of the head with a dumbbell and then dissolving their body in acid after you had sex with it so you could flush it down the toilet…

It’s just not up to WASPish sensibilities.

It’s gross.

Right?

In the end (besides the rape and murder and necrophilia and dismemberment and cannibalism), Jeffrey’s real crime was just being gross.

Can we admit that?

I mean think about it. Stalin. Right? Stalin. How many people did he kill? Directly and indirectly about nine million or so. But a whole lotta people still really like the guy. He was a sharp dresser and had a killer mustache and, most importantly, never personally got his hands dirty. He had other people to do the killing for him and they were the ones that had to deal with all the mess.

And don’t kid yourself.

Murder… primarily… is a mess.

Have you ever seen one?

I have a buddy, crime scene investigator, he tells me stories. When you first arrive to the scene of a murder it’s like, I don’t know, the worst case of projectile vomiting you’ve ever seen with a corpse thrown on top of it. Imagine that. Imagine trying to clean up gallons and gallons of bloody vomit and then to make it worse there’s this leaky one-hundred and seventy-five pound body lying in the middle. It’s just awful. The amount of Clorox wipes you’d need would set you back a pretty penny at Costco.

Stalin and Napoleon got to separate their image from all that. Their personal brand was clean, noble, and pristine. Dahmer on the other hand was a middle-class kid who’d been in the Army, lived with his grandma and worked in a chocolate factory. He had to do the messy bits himself and removing a skeleton from a man’s skin isn’t without the need of plastic bags. The aesthetic was all wrong and frankly Dahmer just didn’t have the hairline to pull it off.

Che Guevara. I mean… Look at that hair. Beautiful face. Needs to shave the beard for sure but just under that scruff is a Argentinian sex symbol. Old ladies in Cuba still light candles to this man to this day.

A Young Stalin. Gorgeous facial symmetry. Luxurious mane. Wonderful fashion sense with those patterns.

And then we have Old Mister Comb-Over. Suit jacket and tie. Ew.

My point is, if you want to murder people and not be hated… you need to have your aesthetics on point.

Dahmer just didn’t, and that’s a shame.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not defending the man here. Listen. Listen… don’t you get mad at me. Don’t… don’t you get mad at me dear reader. Listen, when Dahmer crushed Steven Hicks’ skull with a ten-pound weight in 1978 it wasn’t good. Okay? Nobody’s saying that. When he drugged and beat Steven Tuomi to death with his fists and cut the head of and kept it in the basement… I’m not saying that was nice. Okay? I don’t defend the actions of strangling a fourteen-year-old boy and boiling his body in bleach or drugging a man outside a gay-bar and having sex with the corpse. I don’t. Eating people is bad! How much more do you want me to say!?

Right? So, come on everybody. Chill. We’re all on the same page. Cannibal murder? Not good. It is not good.

Okay? I’m simply pointing out the inconsistencies in what we get collectively outraged at. That’s all.

What I’m saying is that Napoleon looked like this:

and so it’s okay to have monuments to him even though he kinda-sorta did a bunch of massacres.

And Dahmer on the other hand looked like this:

and spent his life rummaging around in bloody garbage bags…. so… it’s not okay to have monuments of him.

I mean… those glasses. Come on Jeffrey. You’re not even trying.

My point is that most people don’t have Morality. They have a sense of Beauty and often get the two confused.

As maybe recent events have shown, there are a lot of people who don’t actually care about whether or not Jews are killed. What they object to about the Holocaust… on an instinctual level, is rather the way in which the Jews were killed. Gas chambers and ovens and mass graves are just decidedly not sexy. If the Nazis had just shot them all… well, a part of me suspects society wouldn’t have ever really much noticed. If the Germans had killed them in a “cool” way, like, I don’t know, throwing them to lions a la the Roman Colosseum… society might have even regarded it as kinda neat.

As I said, what most people call Morality is actually just Aesthetics. They simply don’t have a developed enough sense of ethics to be able to tell the difference.

In the same way, Homeless People are “bad” in the public consciousness mostly because they are smelly. Disheveled. They do the gross, low-class and unaesthetically pleasing drugs like meth and heroine. Stuff with needles. Stuff that’s cooked in a bathtub. “Good” drugs are classy and come in very dignified, very official looking packages. You know the wine mom with her afternoon Percocet, the wall street whiz with his beautiful white powdered cocaine. Looks like sugar. Keep it in a nice little hygienic bag. As I’ve said before, the only rule that exists in America is: be hot and keep up appearances. Everything else is forgivable.

I, personally, don’t think it’s that way with God though.

Believe it or not I actually have a point in bringing up all this. Because Dahmer, despite his heinous and evil crimes (of which there were many) was just as capable of receiving God’s mercy as anyone else. And before you scoff at that I want you to pause and consider if you’d likewise scoff at such a statement being made about Napoleon, or Che, or even George W. Bush. Men who, objectively, killed far, far more people. Deaths which are frankly quite hard to justify. People leap to castigate the actions of extremists and serial killers, as they rightly should, but… listen. Don’t throw stones from your glass houses here people. Me and most of my readers are Americans after all. You think we didn’t also kill a lot of kids in the middle east? You think all those bombs just hit only their intended targets? Dahmer had actual skeletons in his closet but a lot of our people in our country have metaphorical ones. Cheered on a lot of bad stuff. You know, the only reason the U.S. hasn’t been indicted for War Crimes is because our official policy is that if anyone ever tries we’ll invade The Netherlands.

This is true, by-the-way.

International “Law” is by no means evenly applied.

Yet, somehow, when I tell people that I believe Jeffrey Dahmer is in Heaven, they tend to get angry. Outraged even. Like, in the true sense of the word as in they start to get red faced and begin screaming. It’s okay. No big deal. I know they’re reacting on aesthetics and emotion and not from reason or principle. They’ve never considered that it’s equally outlandish, if not more so, to suggest that Franco or Mussolini or even President Truman (I mean, he did drop two atomic bombs after-all) might have been the recipients of God’s grace. And yet many people do suggest such, and when they do they are not met with the kind of red-face foul-mouthed anger that will confront you for daring to say the same of a gross, low-class murderer like Jeffrey Dahmer. I even dare say that it makes a kind of sense. After all, Heaven is supposed to be Beautiful, isn’t it? So just, on a gut level, you can’t imagine someone who dissolved fingers in a bucket of battery acid as being a good fit. And yet, for all that, there is more reason to hope for the Salvation of Dahmer than there is for any of the other men mentioned.

Because Dahmer, you see, repented…

Putting a Price on Grace

American Evangelicals are easy to ignore. That’s good. Their ability to fly under the radar serves a great spiritual purpose. If the man who’d baptized Dahmer had been a Catholic or an Episcopalian, you know, somebody respectable, then people would’ve had to have paid attention. Taken it seriously. The world would have had to have grappled with the fact that a “real priest” from a “real church” was making the claim that Dahmer, evil incarnate, chief of all sinners…

Was saved.

It just… I mean, it just wouldn’t do.

Imagine the pain, the mental pain of society at large if a clean-shaven priest with a collar and a nice wristwatch had shown up to Jeffrey’s cell instead of a pastor from a little-known denomination centered mostly in Alabama. Imagine if there’d been a jar of holy water and a liturgy and a book of rubrics instead of a little prayer said while standing in a dingy whirlpool set-up for physical therapy. The outrage! The cognitive dissonance. “God forgave him!? Dahmer!? Jeffrey Dahmer the murderous necrophilic gay cannibal? That’s not possible. He has to go to Hell. That’s justice. I would not worship a God who wouldn’t send him there. A God who could let off a man so horrible with a simple ‘I’m sorry.’ No. I refuse. If a monster like Dahmer goes to Heaven then I don’t want to be there. It’s not right. It’s not fair. Such a God is not worth my love and…

What?

Oh.

Oh okay. It was just a redneck with a Bible? Never mind. False alarm.”

Do you see?

God is good and his mercy endures forever and if you needed to be able to dismiss Jeffrey’s conversion as illegitimate then he gave you ever reason to do so.

And a lot of people do need to be able to do that. Psychologically. Spiritually. Morally. We don’t want forgiveness to be that easy. There’s something deep inside us that turns in revulsion from the idea that a man will not get punished for his crimes. Sometimes I think the whole history of Christianity has been nothing but that. Nothing but the desperate struggle to get rid of Forgiveness. To shove Mercy back into its bottle. Indulgences, purgatory, mortal sins, confession, anathemas… maybe… maybe there’s something in all that that has only ever been fueled by the desire to put a price on Grace. The need to feel better than someone else. To be Justified by Comparison. To feel that we’re all getting what we deserve and to know that I’m In because I can see clearly that that person over there is Out. That I have my t’s crossed and my i's dotted and they don’t. I’ve been to church. I’ve said the rosaries. I’ve made the pilgrimages.

I did the things.

I earned it.

And the idea that somebody… anybody… could come up and simply ask to be forgiven by God… and get it…

Well what’s the point?

Why did I bother?

Why did I put in all the work to be a good person if this… this sinner, this absolute monster could just waltz into God’s graces after a lifetime of evil? Just by asking.

I’ve worked in my father’s vineyard all my life and this sinner only for five minutes, yet, at the end of the day we’re to receive the same pay?

No.

No.

And what of the families of those he killed!? What about them!? How can God be just, if he does not punish this wicked monster? How could those people sleep at night believing that their Father in Heaven has let their child’s murderer into his Heavenly gates? It’s perverse.

It’s wicked.

Where is the justice in that? Where is the mercy given to the families? No. I refuse to believe it. Dahmer must be in Hell or all of this is waste of time and God is evil.

I require that. That’s a cosmos I can live with.

…

A lot of people feel that way.

“For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” — Jesus

Debts Great and Small

A certain man owed a debt to the king.

A large one. Roughly equivalent to about twenty years’ wages.

The man had a wife and children and though he’d tried to pay down his loan… it was just impossible. Mouths to feed, tutors for his children’s education, medicine, home repairs… money was always going out faster than he could bring it in. The king had been patient and had given the man extension after extension to try and make amends but finally it seemed that the king’s patience had run out. A summons had arrived at the man’s doorstep.

The king wanted to see him.

Debtors’ Prisons were very real in those days and so was slavery, and the man was afraid for in the settling of debts The State could consider just about anything as an asset up for forfeiture. His wife and children could be taken from him and sold as slaves to settle the books, his house, his farm, all his livestock too… He himself was probably facing years of bondage and hard labor, and with interest rates being what they were…

Essentially he was never getting out.

He and his family were going to die in chains.

The day of the summons came and the man entered the court and immediately threw himself down on his face before the king and begged for mercy. “More time!” he pleaded. “Please! Please more time! I will pay you back I just need more time! Please! Please don’t take away my life. Please don’t take away my family.”

The king’s eyes softened. Moved with compassion he sighed and with a wave of his hand brought one of his accountants near. Taking the ledger from his assistant, he struck a line through the man’s account, canceling the debt in full.

“You’re free,” the king said to the man at his feet. “I release you of your debts. Go in peace.”

Well!

As you can imagine the man went away with great rejoicing. How wonderful! What kindness! What mercy had been shown to him! The smile plastered upon his face stretched from ear to ear as he walked home, full of anticipation at the idea of sharing the good news with his wife. How happy she would be! What a blessing to live under such a gracious ruler! This morning he’d woken up in a state of panic, fearing for his very life. Now? This afternoon? He walked back to his house with a spring in his step, feeling fifty pounds lighter and ten years younger.

But then he saw somebody.

Him.

Him.

That layabout day laborer who still owed him money. Joshua. The lying thief. Out of the kindness of his heart he’d loaned Joshua a few thousand to cover his wife’s medical bills because he’d shown up to work one day with a big sob story and acting all hysterical. “I’ll pay you back,” Joshua had promised. “I swear it. I swear I’ll pay you back.”

That was five months ago.

Five months.

Five months he’d been trying to get a penny out of this guy and nothing, and now here he was, just sitting in the town square talking with some friends.

Did Joshua even realize how much anxiety he’d caused? Did he even care how much agony had been spent night after night worried about how the king was going to be repaid? No. No of course not. And sure, Joshua’s loan wouldn’t have made a dent in that enormous debt the man owed the king but that was beside the point. It was the principle of the thing. The man… He had been made to worry. To suffer… and here Joshua was, not a care in the world, apparently completely lacking any of the respect towards him that he himself had showed the king. You know, at least he’d had the good sense to be afraid.

“You bastard!” The man said as he grabbed Joshua and shook him violently in a fit of rage. “You lazy thieving bastard! Do you realize the terror you have cause me!? Pay me what you owe! Pay! Now!”

“Master!” Joshua cried as he fell upon his knees before the man. “Forgive me! I have been trying but work is scarce. Give me one more month and you shall have your money. Please. I beg you.”

But the man would have none of it. He summoned the guards who came and roughly dragged the laborer kicking and screaming away to prison and the man went home and slept soundly in his bed.

Time passed. Eventually another summons arrived at the man’s doorstep. Perplexed and thinking his business with the king settled, the man dressed quickly in his best clothes and went swiftly to the palace to see what the king wanted. “What is this you have done?” The king asked before the man could even finish the customary bows and greetings. “I have heard of your dealings with your brother and I do not understand it. I forgave you such an enormous sum, how is it that you have held such a small one against another?” The man tried to stutter out a defense of himself but before he could finish the king was pointing at him and speaking to his guards. “Take him away,” the king said. “Throw him in prison until he has paid the last penny.”

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

Measure for Measure

That’s a story Jesus told.

See, it’s your right to demand that people pay for their crimes if you want to. It is. But just know that the only person God is going to hold to that standard is you, so maybe be careful in asking for it. “Forgive,” Jesus says, “… or you will not be forgiven.” The measure you use to judge others will be likewise used to measure you. If you then hold someone else out as irredeemable… well… I just don’t think that’s a smart move.

Jeffrey was a great sinner, of course. There’s no denying that. But if God can’t have mercy on him then he can’t have mercy on any of us, for the vast majority of mankind is likewise bloodthirsty, as recent events have proven all too well. It is… shockingly easy… to get people to scream for death. To denounce others as inhuman.

God sees that too.

The fact that you’re doing it from behind a computer while well dressed and not trading in bloody garbage bags doesn’t mean God didn’t notice. Far from being scandalous or perverse, the idea that Jeffrey Dahmer was capable of redemption should be a great joy. It is to fully internalize how deep a price was paid on the cross. How wide a stretch of sin it covered. If Jeffrey can be forgiven then we all can be. If Jeffrey made it to Heaven then what Saint Paul said was true and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that can ever separate us from the love of God.

Amen.

…

After his baptism in the prison whirlpool, Dahmer spent one hour each week with the pastor who’d baptized him. They’d sit down together under the supervision of a guard and read the Bible and pray and talk. Like all of us would I think, at the time the pastor admitted that he doubted Jeffrey’s sincerity, perhaps hoping, like so many, to find a way to not have to deal with the troublesome thought of this killer one day being in Paradise. Such doubts faded however when, after one session, the pastor rose to leave and Dahmer blurted out that he was very sorry for what he had done and that he wished he could undo it. He said he was glad to be locked up, for he feared himself, and what he would do if released. He didn’t want to kill but couldn’t control himself, and he said he thought the state should have put him to death for all his crimes.

“I agree with you,” the pastor said. “You should’ve been put to death.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey responded. “Am I sinning against God by continuing to live?”

The pastor paused.

“Are you thinking of suicide?”

“Yes.” Jeffrey answered. “I deserve to die.”

“God has the authority to kill you, as does the state, and both have decided not to. Don’t you go and do it on your own.”

“Okay.”

“Try to be the best prisoner you can. Obey the rules. Do no wrong for as long as you have left to live.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be back next week.”

“Okay.”

So it went.

Week after week, month after month. Jeffrey did his chores, worked, kept his nose clean, prayed in his cell, and studied the Bible with the pastor from the little denomination nobody’s heard of and that everyone can dismiss as “not real” if they need to. Every Sunday his mother would call. She would ask him if he was doing alright and his response would always be the same. “It doesn’t matter Mom,” Jeffrey would answer. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”

To the day of her death from breast cancer in November 2000, his mother maintained that she loved her son and always would. To the day of his death which came much sooner, Jeffrey would say the same about his mom.

Prayer. Work. Obeying the rules. Bible study and chats with his mom. That’s how Dahmer spent the last months of his life. And then, in 1994, about six months after his baptism, fellow inmate Christopher Scarver bludgeoned Jeffrey to death with a metal pipe. Thought to be a schizophrenic but never officially confirmed, Christopher later said that God had told him to do it.

And maybe God did.

Recounting the tale, Christopher said that Jeffrey did not fight back, nor scream, nor protest. He simply took the blows, one after the other, as though grateful they had finally come. Guards stopped the attack before Christopher could finish but the damage was done. Dahmer was rushed in for medical care, but it was too late. Within the hour, Jeffrey was dead.

Roy, the pastor who’d baptized Jeffrey, presided over the serial killer’s funeral on December 2, 1994.

He turned to God because there was no one else to turn to, but he showed great courage in his daring to ask the question, ‘Is heaven for me too?’ I think many people are resentful of him for asking that question. But he dared to ask, and he dared to believe the answer. — Roy Ratcliff, eulogy for Jeffrey Dahmer.

The Saints Who Don’t Deserve It

You know, in the Catholic Church we have a tradition of devotion to saints. Men or women thought to have lived a Godly life or, at least, thought to have died a Godly death. People who the Church has decided are in some way or other worthy of imitation. People you’re supposed to be able to look at and identify with, to draw inspiration from, to think, “Hey… if they can make it… maybe I can too.”

And okay. You know, I grant you that the odds of the Church ever officially recognizing Dahmer as a saint are small. G.K. Chesterton can’t even get on the rolls because of some specious accusations of antisemitism, so I doubt that a man who kept a decapitated head in a bucket is going to make it passed clerical review.

Ah! But that’s just the point.

For so many sainthood has come to be seen as something unattainable. Something that you have to be a special person possessed of special abilities and special temperament to achieve. All the onus seems to be on us, the individual. What we can do. What we can achieve. We all-to-often get the sense from these saints that redemption is something that you can earn.

You know…

If you just work hard enough.

But that’s not it.

You can never pay off your debts. You can only be forgiven them. And that mercy, that mercy freely given that you can only keep by again giving freely away…

That’s the gospel.

And what better exemplar of that than Jeffrey Dahmer.

The man everyone rightly reviled, a monster… who nonetheless asked forgiveness from God and dared to believe that he could have it.

Ora Pro Nobis.

Amor Vincit Omnia.