One Prayer, Even for Her

Most of us have a reflex when we hear of a horrific crime, a brutal murder.

We read the headline, feel a flash of revulsion, maybe say something under our breath about what that person deserves, and then keep scrolling.

Sometimes we linger long enough to feel sympathy for the victim and the family.

But do we ever pray for the person who committed the horrible act?

This week in the news we heard of a botched execution in Tennessee, that of Christa Pike.

I've read what she's done. I won't soften it. Her crime was horrific. I read about how even years later, in the early 2000s, she attempted to murder a fellow in-mate, too.

I know almost nothing of what she is enduring, but I have taken it upon myself to pray that through whatever suffering is hers, her soul might be saved.

There is much that could be said about the case itself, about capital punishment in general, about justice owed to the victim and her family.

All of it matters. But none of those question change the one fact I cannot get around: this is a woman God created, and whom He continues, in this very moment, to love into existence.

That's not just sentimentalism. It's the truth.

The book of Wisdom puts it this way: "For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. How would anything have endured if you had not willed it?" (Wisdom 11:24-25).

Nothing holds itself in being. Every heartbeat, including the heartbeat of a murderer, is evidence that in His mysterious, unfathomable mercy, He still loves us.

If God has not withdrawn the gift, then He has not withdrawn the hope.

 

St. Thérèse and the Man Nobody Wanted

Whenever I hear of horrible crimes, and those who committed them, I remember St. Thérèse of Lisieux and Henri Pranzini.

In the summer of 1887, before she entered Carmel, Thérèse was a fourteen-year-old girl reading about a man convicted of a brutal triple murder in Paris—including the murder of a child. The newspapers described him as unrepentant, hard, vile beyond hope.

All of France seemed to want him dead. Thérèse wanted him saved.

She did not know him. She had no way to reach him. So she did the only thing a fourteen year girl of faith could do: she prayed, she named the infinite merits of Christ, the Church, and every saint.

And she asked God for a single sign of his repentance, not because she doubted God’s mercy but, as she honestly admitted, for her own encouragement.

The day after the execution she read that Pranzini, on the scaffold, had turned at the last moment, seized the crucifix held out by the priest, and kissed the wounds of Christ three times.

She wept. She called him, for the rest of her life, her first "soul" saved.

What strikes me is not merely that she prayed, but that she claimed him.

A girl who would in about a year become a nun and thereafter never leave the walls her convent took spiritual responsibility for a condemned stranger.

She understood something we forget: the saints are not those who love the lovable. They are those who have let the love of God pass through them unfiltered, and God’s love does not check credentials.

 

What Scripture Asks of Us

St. Paul leaves us very little room to pick and choose. "First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone" (1 Timothy 2:1).

Everyone. The Greek is simply pantōn anthrōpōn, all human beings, without qualification.

And Paul tells us why: God "desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4).

Our intercession is not an attempt to change God’s mind about a sinner. It is an act of aligning our will with a desire that is already His.

Centuries earlier, God had already told His people how He regards the wicked: "As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live" (Ezekiel 33:11).

If God takes no pleasure in it, how can we? Satisfaction at the destruction of a soul is not righteousness. It is a failure to see as God sees.

Remember Christ's words from the cross.

Christ, in the very act of being murdered, prays: "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34).

Hanging beside Him is a criminal who had, by his own admission, earned his sentence. He asks for one thing, and Jesus answers: "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43).

The first soul we know for certain entered heaven through the death of Christ was a condemned man dying under a death sentence.

 

Prayer That Moves Souls

We may never receive the consolation Thérèse received when she opened the newspaper and saw the object of her prayer kiss the wounds of Christ.

Most of the time, we pray into silence. We will not read in the newspaper that a soul turned toward God in its last hour.

But I believe a single prayer has the power to move worlds, and even souls, which are often far more stubborn an immovable than planets.

"The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective" (James 5:16). Not because we are impressive, but because the One we pray to is.

Here is the hidden grace in all of this: praying for the vile does something to the one who prays.

It is very hard to despise a person you are begging God to save. Something softens. The contempt that felt so justified begins to look like what it is, a small refusal to let God be as merciful as He wishes to be.

Thérèse did not become a saint in spite of Pranzini. He was part of how God formed her heart.

 

A Practice for This Week

Try this. The next time a crime fills your screen, do not scroll past. Stop. Say the name of the one who did it, if you know it. Then pray, simply and honestly: Lord, You made this person and You love them still. For the sake of your infinite merits, your suffering and death, save this soul. I ask for nothing in return.

Do not wait until this prayer until you feel compassion on a criminal or a murderer. Do it especially when everything in your heart says otherwise.

And if you are willing, join me in praying for Christa Pike. Not instead of praying for Colleen Slemmer’s family, pray for them, too, just as fervently.

The cross held out to Pranzini is the same cross held out to her, and to us. "God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). While we were still sinners. None of us was ever anything else.