It was a ghastly, horrible, disgusting, ruthless crime—there are hardly enough adjectives to describe what David Shearing did.
In 1982, Shearing shot and killed George and Edith Bentley, and their daughter and son-in-law Jackie and Bob Johnson, while they were camping at a B.C. park. And if that weren’t enough, he kept the Johnson’s two daughters, the Bentley’s granddaughters, Janet, 13, and Karen, 11, alive for most of the next week while he sexually assaulted them. Then he killed them too.
Last week, Shearing failed to win a parole application.
In reporting the story, a Kelowna newspaper placed two contrasting quotations on its front page.
From Shearing: “My actions will always cause me to feel an overwhelming sense of shame.”
From a friend of the victims: “Thirty years later he is the same sick, callous, remorseless monster he was in 1982.”
Those two contrasting quotations reveal the clash between ideals and reality.
The reality is that each parole hearing feels—in the words of a niece—“like another scab has been ripped off and we bleed again.”
Thirty years has not softened the anger, the bitterness.
But the ideal, as I understand the Christian faith in which I was reared, is forgiveness.
Is what Shearing did forgivable?
I can’t presume to judge those who judge Shearing so harshly. I’ve never been in their situation.
The Parole Board agreed with them. Shearing, they ruled, remains too great a risk to release into society.
Students of comparative religions look for a dominant theme in each of the great religions: Judaism, obedience; Islam, submission; Christianity, forgiveness.
Granted, the history of Christianity does not always support that characteristic. The Crusades were not particularly forgiving. Nor were the witch hunts, or the Inquisition. Although the Inquisition at least aimed at forcing its victims to repent, thus making them eligible for forgiveness.
Personally, I do not believe that anyone is ever beyond God’s forgiveness. Not even David Shearing.
Theoretically, we should emulate God and forgive him too.
But theory doesn’t cut it, when you’ve been cut to the heart.
Genesis claims that humans were made in God’s image. Although I normally avoid taking the Bible literally, I think the wording is important. Humans were made in God’s image; God was not made in human image.
The fact that humans may not be able to forgive a crime as hideous as Shearing’s doesn’t mean that God cannot forgive him.
God is the ideal towards which humans aspire.
We need such an ideal, whether or not we can attain it. Without ideals, we sink into a morass of individual desires. My welfare trumps your welfare; I can squash you like a bug, and not care. Universal selfishness shatters unity.
To counter that anarchy, every religion develops ideals. Sometimes they embody those ideals and give them a name. Like God. Or Krishna. Sometimes they turn those ideals into a philosophy rather than a being.
However it’s done, we need those ideals. Especially when we fall short of them. To remind us of what we could be.
