#joshua could murder an entire village in cold blood just because ‘he felt like it’ and girlie would be like ‘excellent job your grace’

[inkyclive]

Joshua supremacy 😭😭😭 I’m so soft for him. Just let me be his little princess. He can make all the rules idc

omg he’s so gorgeous and like the thing about him—at least in my opinion/my own personal interpretation—is that while he is genuinely so sweet (almost sickly so at times!) and so kindhearted and so so tender, he is also so used to being served and so used to being the Boss, the undying’s precious phoenix prince, the king of everything, and it comes out in these tiny little wisps and hints in certain interactions; a vaguely bratty comment, a gentle yet vehement assertion, a soft chuckle beneath a gloved hand……..

all of this is to say, i think he’d fucking love to have a partner who lives to serve him and be his precious lil doll (to the point where he may even feel guilty about how much he loves it, because he knows it isn’t necessarily right, but he just can’t help but feel this way about you <3). he wouldn’t push it on you, and he wouldn’t hold you back from doing things you wanted to, either, if he deems them good or beneficial for you—he’d definitely encourage you to do things if they were things you wanted to do/made you happy—but oh, to have a baby who’s syrupy sweet and devotedly doting and hangs on his every word; to have a precious lil princess who gazes up at him as if he’s painted the entire night sky by hand, speckled the stars across the atmosphere and carved out the moon himself; to have a soft sweetheart who clings to him in every way possible, hands curled around his fingers or wrists or biceps when he takes you for a walk in the gardens or when you sit down for a meal (always beside him, never across from him, protocol be damned), who snuggles in his lap or straddles his thighs and nuzzles their sugar-sweet lips against his neck or collarbone or jaw, who obediently never leaves his side unless it is absolutely necessary <33333 that sounds like a perfect dream, a paradise, to him <3

[chocosvt]

⚬ pairing: demon!minghao x reader ⚬ word count: 3478 ⚬ warnings: blood, bodily injuries, death ⚬ genres: god i don’t even know... angst, unrealized pining and romance, weird tension, reader is just as evil as minghao?

✧✎ synopsis: three-hundred years have passed, and the second son has awoken from his slumber, waiting for a new soul to devour.

✧✎ a/n: this au was many things, and in finality, it morphed into this. usually i have a lot to say in my author’s note but today i bring you nothing! enjoy!

Three-hundred years had passed, and you knew due to the bell tower.

Its reverberations shuddered throughout the town, permeated the density of the smoke curtain which had swallowed the sky for centuries, and vibrated the very oxygen that fluttered in your lungs. It was a calling to check your mailbox, for reaching inside unveiled a folded note. At first, you glanced to your neighbour across the street, to the elderly man who lived on your right, and finally to the pig-tailed girl who’d just celebrated her fifteenth birthday on your left.

Yet they had retrieved nothing from their mailboxes exempt from a soft-spoken prayer, a testament to their gratitude that their lives had been spared. But you—you were the unholy meal.

With a sharp arrowhead of stone pressed to the skin between your shoulder blades, you were forced into the cavernous opening based midway along the mountain. It fed deep into the earth’s heart, and as a watchman pierced the spear’s tip further into your flesh, you began the cold, damp descent that would lead you to a deserved death, a death that could no longer be prevaricated.

After a painful stumbling over jagged flints and pieces of crystal, you emerged into the Blood Room, where three other contenders from the town were already aligned. There was not one look exchanged between either meal; however, you did recognize a specific helix piercing and the russet locks of Joshua, who you recently spotted dragging a body down to the ravine where the forest waterfall bubbled. Still, despite Joshua’s inept piousness, you knew he was not a meal worth being served.

A watchman approached you with a pocketknife. Splaying out your fingers, you observed calmly as he created a small incision against a distinct line travelling the length of your palm. As the dark, crimson fluid leaked from the wound, it was then collected in a glass dropper. Each watchman approached a scroll which hung from the stone. A drop of Joshua’s blood was tested first. It rolled about halfway down the sallow paper, which was impressive to say the least, indicative of even the boy’s worst transgressions. 

The next possible meal had their sample beaded onto the scroll, though it had soaked up rather quickly, even before Joshua’s, and you knew their sins were pitiful and their soul was much too pentant. Similarly, the blood of the other meal drew short. You couldn’t help but think the contenders were quite pathetic. 

At last the glass dropper containing your blood was being set against the paper. A slight squeeze, and the liquid bulb started its trickling. It streamed down boldly, leaving in its wake a luminous red tint that outshined even Joshua’s viscid plasma. You watched the bulb surpass one meal, then glide past the second meal, and just as you anticipated, the droplet rolled to the very end of the scroll. In fact, it began dripping onto the dust of the icy floor.

“The test concludes.” A watchman rumbled, his voice bouncing against the rock. His spear pointed toward you criminally. “Your blood runs the thickest and your heart beats the slowest. You are the unholy meal. The second son has awoken from this three-hundred-year slumber, and it is your soul he will devour so that he may be appeased and tire.”

You fought to keep an emotionless, flat face.

“Feed him well, for the weight of your blood carries more sin than purity.”

Briskly, the latter three contenders were swept away.

Joshua may have thrown his first corpse into the waterfall and watched it gush like a leaf down the black ravine, but his single body could not compare to the hundred that you’d left to float for years.

The bare bottoms of your feet were engrained with shallow cuts and stained by the powder to the numbing stone. You had not eaten or drank for over forty-eight hours, and your strength, which could often be as robust as great titanium, had seemingly dwindled to an emaciated, dried flower.

From the tales your mother relayed amongst your youth, you knew it was important to not make a face in the presence of the second son. Unlike his older brother, Jun, who would only be appeased by a meal who smiled and flaunted their guilt, Minghao chiefly adored a meal who showed no more emotion than the limestone tumbled along the mountainside. It was best to please the Demon Sons before they untied your soul from its fleshy bindings and swallowed it whole.

Or else in their next awakening, they might demand a meal of the entire village.

Minghao gestured to the garnet-coloured mat which had been lain across his bedroom floor. There were bowls of flavourful rice, steaming, clay pots filled with different soups, plates warmed by sliced bread and tin cups almost overflowing due to the plentiful wine inside.

“Hungry?” He asked, to which his soft, wispy voice was rather surprising.

Your countenance remained blank, unmoving, apart from your mouth. “Yes, I am starved.”

“Sit,” the second son invited, “I want you to be satiated and full, until you feel sleepy.”

Heeding his order, you sat cross-legged on the side of the mat opposite to the demon. His robe, embroidered with ruby lace, rippled behind his feet when he walked, and the collar’s diamond shape revealed underworldly markings which drew attention to the pale expanse of his chest. Even through the material cloaking his arms, you could faintly decipher the kohled tattoos. You had even recognized the familiar symbols chiselled into the walls during your trek to the demon’s chamber. When Minghao took his seat, he grabbed one of the black horns curling from his hair and dug his thumb into the pointed end.

“They are becoming weak,” he admitted, “I’m sure my brother’s wings are close to shattering from his broad shoulders. I’m sure the nerves are peeling and laughably brittle.” Minghao reached for a bowl, using wood chopsticks to fish the orange, tangy rice into his mouth. “You know, as first born, he is granted those wings. It’s his rite.” He lowered the bowl, a faded grin crossing his lips. “I remember, he used to embellish them with the bones of his meals, hanging their cervicals and metacarpals and pieces of their skull across each wing like a charm bracelet. But myself? It is not my meals’ bones that I save.” He shook his head, picking up another sticky rice ball.

Suddenly, the demon paused. “Are you not going to eat?”

It was difficult to speak when the interior of your mouth felt coated with chalk. Inclined by fear rather than your hunger, you reached for a bread loaf, then broke its golden crust in half, listening to the satisfactory crackle.

“I was absorbed by your pretty voice,” you spoke with not a single intonation, “forgive me.”

As you tore a piece from the warm inside and poked it into your cheek, the pottery bowl which he held broke into pieces due to the crushing grip of his hand, orange rice and clay shards spilling onto the mat. You had visibly flinched. The demon’s body trembled as he inhaled a slow, subdue breath. 

“Dearest, if you ask me to lend my forgiveness, I will pierce a stake through your beating heart and pull it out onto my plate.” His teeth were claws in his mouth as he growled. “Do you understand?”

You hid your quivering, bottom lip by bringing a tin cup to your face, the slick formula of the wine flowing down your throat. It was thicker than the wine you drank at home, and there was a copper-like aftertaste that almost rendered your expression to pucker, but you remembered to keep staid.

“I understand.”

The void, starless nature to his gaze disappeared. Instead, his eyes returned to their settled oak. Allowing more wine to soak against your tongue, there was a distant familiarity to its unique flavour.

“Are there things you regret?” Minghao retrieved you from musing, and spooned some rosemary soup into his mouth.

Once more, you took another sip, swished the alcohol between your cheeks, and swallowed. The demon observed you with an intent eye. Something flashed against your memory. It was a pale face drained of its pink and lively colour. In fact, it was your husband’s face, Soonyoung’s face, right before you tipped his body over the ravine’s misty edge and into the gurgling chasm below.

He had been your last murder.

“I regret…” You began, lowering the wine, “I-I regret…”

A stutter. An emotion. An inkling of your distress. 

Minghao’s grasp around the soup pot tightened and the tattoos needled into his flesh seemed to slither as though they’d been disturbed. Your mind grew stifled with obnoxious imagery. It was too much, all at once, and this dizziness spun at the centre of your cranium like a comet in orbit.

You leaned further over the wine, staring blurry at the liquid.

“I regret… I r-regret…”

Then it came to you, the underlying taste of the wine. So familiar because you should have known it better than anyone, especially considering your habitual dirty work, how often that fluid caked under your fingernails and spattered your clothing. No, it was definitely not the bones Minghao kept. 

A moment later and you fainted onto the mat.

You awoke to a damp coolness folded against your forehead, and to Minghao who sat at the edge of his bed, where he had rested for three-hundred years. He removed the cloth and began dabbing it along each arch of your cheek, cleaned your jaw’s long edge, and at last wet your lips until they gleamed. Expelling a subtle breath, you kept your face as blank as possible.

“How do you feel?” He set away the cloth in order to sweep his sleight fingers down your temple.

“I’m well,” sounded your meek voice, “you have taken care of me.”

In between the black fringe that feathered the demon’s lashes, you met his eyes. Minghao’s hand slid to your throat, where his palm pressed flat against its column and his fingers curled taut with the sensation of hot steel. 

He felt you gulp.

“I implore that you bathe. Rid yourself of this fabric which has been stained by wine and broth. I will leave you undergarments and a robe.” He leaned in closer to your face, and you couldn’t help but glance at his jagged teeth when he said so adoringly, “my wish is to paint you. I would like clean flesh.”

Clad in nothing but the undergarments, Minghao stood before your body, holding a wooden bowl. The inside was smeared with a rustic-coloured substance that almost bore the same consistency as honey. His chosen brush had fanned bristles, and when he stroked their wetness along your skin, it was a smooth, somewhat ticklish feeling. You found yourself enjoying it. Specifically the longer strokes, ones that began at the top of your shoulder and licked across the soft underbelly of your arm, only to gently flit away at the brittle bones in your wrist.

He decorated you in content. 

As the boy lowered to his knees and illustrated unintelligible runes against your inner thigh, he was focused, sharp. Another dip into the wooden bowl, and Minghao moved to paint your other thigh. You examined the horns pushing between his hair. Without thought, you stroked your hand against one, feeling the small grooves that created every divot. The demon never stirred, but continued to paint down your leg, and you wondered if he truly hadn’t noticed your touch or perhaps quite liked the way you caressed him.

Despite the fact you were merely prey being toyed with until dinner time, when you looked at the demon who touched your skin and treated you with such reverence, you felt this unbeknownst tenderness in your heart.

As Minghao instructed you to raise a foot, he immediately stiffened.

“What is it?” You questioned flatly.

He set the bowl and brush down.

“Dearest, the soles of your feet are cut and raw. It appears worse than usual.���

You wobbled slightly, almost losing your balance. “I was shown no kindness on my journey to meet with you. Because I am your meal, I can ignore the stinging.”

“No,” Minghao shook his head and rose up, “I will wrap your feet in precious calendula leaves. The paint will dry quickly, then you can sit.”

“If I may ask one thing,” you remarked, fiddling with the sleeves of your robe, “how painful is it to have your soul devoured?”

Minghao plucked the last few calendula leaves from their flowers. The petals were rather striking, the aurora of a setting sun as you mother always described. It had been a longtime wish to see the sun one day, though considering your fate, such a dream must remain only that. The leaves swathed each foot with the help of a clear, sticky gel.  

“Very painful.” The demon responded. He shifted next to you on the bed, then grabbed one of the orange flowers. “This is why we sleep so far beneath the crust, so the people do not hear the meal’s delicious screams.” He grasped your hand which had suffered a slit from the watchman’s pocketknife, and he began to rub a flower bud across the wound.

“Do you remember your last meal?” You asked, staring at Minghao rather than the skin’s miraculous healing.

The demon looked straight into your eyes as he grinned. “I do remember,” he sounded wistful, “it had been three meals, since the man I consumed in an even further past had greatly upset me.” Minghao dropped the flower, slowly interlaced his fingers with yours, squeezing.

“I had treated him well. I cleaned his cuts, I allowed him to bathe, I offered him my finest silk, and then, when we ate, I asked him what he regretted.” His hand became colder than ice. Minghao’s eyes started to widen, illuminate with a shiny madness, and when he leaned in closer your every facial muscle was begging to twitch. “He cried to me. Can you believe it? I had never been so upset. It caused me to fill with rage. He wept for forgiveness, absolution, a relief from his pain. Who am I, but a being who takes pain like a supplement? In that moment, I leapt across the dinner table and devoured him. His soul tasted like salt and alloy. I could not eat his heart, which was given to my brother. He will always eat the heart, because it so plumped full of your terrible emotion.”

The demon’s hand fit to the side of your neck, his thumb stroking along a particular vein where your pulse was thundering. “Well,” he sighed, “not your terrible emotion, but most peoples.”

In that moment, you took your deepest breath, and did not respond until you were certain that not one note of your voice would tremble. “I understand.” You placed your hand overtop the demon’s as it continued to cradle your neck, “did you paint this man too?”

“No,” Minghao shook his head, “I use my paints sparingly.”

With a soft fingertip, he began to trace a thin line he had brushed. It started at your jaw, then fell down the length of your warm neck. It dragged across your collarbone and in between your chest. Over the ribs, to your stern hip. The fingertip circled sweetly against your inner thigh a few times, and at last glided to your knee where the demon’s touch drifted away like a summer breeze.  

“You are the most beautiful meal I have ever seen,” Minghao murmured, holding your gaze which threatened to water, “I was delighted to accent a body like yours, so gorgeous and strengthened by sin.”

Since your arrival at the demon’s bedroom, you knew it was vital to preserve a blank face, and yet, it came to a point where you could not restrict the whims of your emotion. A tear bled from your eye, your bottom lip started to quiver, and your brow pinched together in a wrinkle. There was fear to your gradual outbreak, but it was an infinitesimal fraction compared to your gratitude, that the second son could somehow honour you more than your own unfaithful husband, who’d been your last body discarded into the ravine. 

In reality, how different were you to this demon? Year after year, the suppleness of your heart became hardened with immorality, pummelled of its empathy and completely wrung from compassion like a soaked, heavy towel. A common routine: dragging a corpse through the wildlife, your lips pursed and whistling the tune you’d overhear the pig-tailed girl humming on her front lawn. Dump the body. Return home. Peel an apple, bake a pie, and feed a slice to your next victim, watching the froth dribble from their lips as you sipped your drink and folded a leg over your thigh. But that was life under the cinder sky. It’s what kept people mad, what kept the demons fed. Either flee or have the light of your being rubbed into another dark ash. 

The demon immediately turned rigid. 

His spine bristled straight and the tattoos started to crawl beneath his robe, rustling like serpents who navigated the tall grass. You figured your death would be the most painful, since you had not only broken at the last minute, but soiled the significance to Minghao’s paints, casted the illusion that you were not appreciative of his gestures. In a snapping wrench, he practically tore you from the velvet blanket, dragging you to a door in his bedroom.

When it was opened, a frigid wind dusted at your face, and a slender corridor was revealed, stretching so far that it led into complete blackness. With a hand against your lower back, Minghao shoved you into the tunnel.

“Go,” he demanded, his words echoing off the stone, “go and do not turn back.”

Your voice was breathy, confused, “I don’t understand. I-I—”

“It leads to an opening at the opposite side of the mountain. You will leave, and you will never-” he gripped your chin, and his gaze intruded even the most clandestine pockets to your soul, “ever return to this town. Escape these cinder skies. I will not repeat myself.”

Before you could make sense of anything, before the door could be slammed in your face, your solace left to the rock and damp air, you slipped a hand around the demon’s neck and kissed him. His mouth was just as soft as his voice, and when he angled his head to better taste the tears that  stained your lips, you felt it would be impossible to make this journey alone. The silk of his tongue brushed inside your mouth, causing your knees to tremble, therefore you gripped weakly at the demon’s hair. His sharp teeth pricked your bottom lip and it welted ever so slightly with blood.

“Come with me,” you begged, pressing your forehead to his, “please, do not go back to sleep.”

But Minghao merely giggled, and the fact that such an innocent sound could leave the chest of a demonic entity had disoriented you. 

“What creature are you?” Minghao hummed, “that I can see your emotion and only want to hold you closer? Maybe it is because you are the first meal to bare no regret. You know your flesh is stitched by the sin of your own hand. Even your sweet tears. Oh! My brother would adore you! Though he would’ve devoured you by now no doubt.” He gave a gentle shove, removing you from his body.

“Will you please come find me?” You entreated.

Time was of the essence. The tenebrosity seemed to have a curl on your ligaments, tugging you backward into the tunnel. 

Minghao smiled, his hand reaching out to wipe the blood from your sore lip.

“Dearest, I will come find your dark soul anywhere,” sounded his honest purr, “but I suggest you travel hastily. If I leave, I must first wake my brother, and the rage of a demon whose slumber has been interrupted... It cannot be compared to anything. I’m afraid you’ll faint again.”

Trusting that Minghao would seek you out, you began the journey down the tunnel, your hand swiping against the stone and your feet taking calculated steps. Amongst the black air, there was no concept of time. Seconds, minutes, hours, they felt ineffectual in a place where not even your own fingers or toes could be seen. Eventually, you came to a light that burned against your eyes, and emerged at the opposite side of the mountain, like Minghao promised. And as you padded into the jade forest, you felt one final vibration shake the pine needles scattered across the earth, heard some boulders from the mountainside crumble down in swirling, dry dust clouds. 

Shuddering, you knew it had been the abhorrent cry of the first born son. And for once your compulsion to escape the grey skies was a real desire. 

✧✎ a/n: yes.................... :) thinking that i could also make an au for jun in this universe? i will have to do some Major Thinking. i still have nothing to say! like i don’t know where this au crawled out of, but it’s Here now. it’s pretty morbid n freaky sfeheff but nonetheless i hope you liked it and as always i luv hearing ur guys TH0TS. 

[ruminativerabbi]

Forgiveness

It was back in the summer of 1986 that NYPD Officer Steven McDonald, then only twenty-nine years old and with only two years of service behind him, was shot three times by Shavod Jones, a boy of fifteen. Jones had been hanging around the Harlem Lake Boathouse near the northern end of Central Park with two friends when Officer McDonald, thinking the boys looked suspicious, approached them and initiated a conversation. Jones responded by pulling out a .22-caliber revolver and opening fire, squeezing off four shots. One shot missed entirely. Of the other three, though, one hit McDonald in the head just over his eye, one hit his throat (and later made it impossible for him to speak normally), and one shattered his spine, paralyzing him from the neck down. The stricken officer was immediately rushed to Bellevue Hospital, where he underwent hours of complicated surgery. He survived, but was left to live out his days as a quadriplegic able to breathe solely with the assistance of a ventilator. All three boys were arrested on the spot by other policemen patrolling the park.

New York was a dangerous place back then. There were, for example, 1907 murders in the city that year, as opposed to a mere 609 in 2015. I was already gone—we were away for nineteen years beginning in 1983, living in Israel, Germany, Canada, and southern California—but I recall all too well just how inured we had all become to the level of mayhem that seemed almost natural to the urban environment by the mid-80s. But even given the level of violence to which New Yorkers had become used—you may recall the line from Rent: “I’m a New Yorker—fear’s my life!”—Officer McDonald’s story was still horrific.  But his story was not only not over as evening fell on that awful day. It was actually just beginning.

The world kept spinning. The story faded from the headlines. The McDonald family found a way to cope, to move forward. Patricia McDonald, today the mayor of Malverne but then a pregnant newlywed facing a future that even a few months earlier would have been unimaginable, gave birth to a boy whom they named Conor Patrick.  Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor, the then archbishop of New York, presided at the boy’s baptism in the Catholic Chapel at Bellevue. That the archbishop of New York would personally preside over the baptism of a child born to a police officer grievously wounded in the line of duty was not that surprising, nor was his willingness to conduct the ceremony in a hospital. But what was extraordinary was Officer McDonald’s statement, which he read aloud following the ceremony and in which he publicly forgave the boy who shot him. “I’m sometimes angry at the teenage boy who shot me,” he said, “but more often I feel sorry for him...I forgive him and hope that he can find peace and purpose in his life.”

I remember reading those words back then. (To see the article about the baptism that appeared in the Daily News the following day, click here.) And I remember wondering what kind of man would have it in his heart to forgive someone who had brazenly and unhesitatingly attempted to murder him. It is certainly not without importance that Shavod Jones was just fifteen in 1986, but I didn’t have the sense that Officer McDonald forgave Shavod Jones specifically because of his age….

Steven McDonald died at North Shore University Hospital just last week after suffering a fatal heart attack. Strangely, his death came just a few days after Dylann Roof was sentenced to death after being found guilty of charges stemming from the cold-blooded murder of nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in federal court in Charleston. And there too the specter of forgiveness loomed over the proceedings, at least as I myself watched them unfold.

Not all, but some of the relatives of the Charleston victims followed Officer McDonald’s lead and publicly forgave their loved one’s murderer. Nadine Collier, a daughter of victim Ethel Lance, spoke in court early on in the proceedings and publicly forgave her mother’s murderer using the same unambiguous language Officer McDonald did. So did the Reverend Sharon Risher, another of Ethel Lance’s daughters. Felicia Sanders, whose son Tywanza also died that day in Charleston, went on record formally forgiving Roof and publicly praying that God judge him mercifully. The sister of another victim, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, said simply, referring to her family, that “We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive. I pray to God for your soul.”

Shelter Rockers all know how important Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower has been for me personally, both as a remarkable work of post-Shoah philosophy and as a moral guide, and I’d like to bring that story to bear in my effort to understand Officer McDonald’s behavior and the behavior of the relatives of the Charleston Nine mentioned just above.

For readers new to Wiesenthal’s book, its backstory will be very unexpected and challenging. In 1943, Wiesenthal, then thirty-five, was a prisoner of the Nazis assigned to a work detail near Lviv, once called Lvov, today the largest city in Western Ukraine but then the third largest city in Poland. The plot is a bit complicated, but the essential detail is that Wiesenthal ended up working in a hospital, where he agreed to a nurse’s request that he visit with a twenty-one-year-old S.S. officer named Karl who was dying of his wounds. Karl’s story tells is beyond horrific, even by Shoah standards, and involved his participation in the brutal murder of Jews in a Russian village in a way that resists description in normal language: to use words like bestial or barbaric to describe the Germans’ actions would be to say almost nothing at all. And then Karl, having confessed to his role in the slaughter, gets to the point: “The pains in my body are terrible, but worse still is my conscience . . . I cannot die . . . without coming clean . . . In the last hours of my life you are with me. I do not know who you are. I only know that you are a Jew and that is enough . . . In the long nights while I have been waiting for death, time and time again I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him. Only I didn't know whether there were any Jews left . . . I know that what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer I cannot die in peace.” Wiesenthal listened, then stood up and left the room without saying a word. When he returned the next day, Karl had already died.

The Sunflower is a collection of essays long and short by all sorts of interesting people—including Primo Levi, the Dalai Lama, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Desmond Tutu, Albert Speer, and forty-eight others—answering Wiesenthal’s question, “Ought I have forgiven him?” The contributors are a varied lot, and their answers vary accordingly. No one, as I recall, dares castigate Wiesenthal for his silence, but some nonetheless write passionately in favor of forgiving. Others feel he did exactly the right thing, that only silence could possibly have constituted a rational response to Karl’s request. The Christian responses are mixed, as are the other non-Jewish ones. (One of the most interesting is the one by Dith Pran, author of The Killing Fields and himself a survivor of mass murder on the level of genocide in Cambodia, and he thinks that Wiesenthal should have provided the forgiveness Karl needed to die in peace.) The Jewish responses are also mixed, but not in the same way: some express a reluctance to decide at all, but the overwhelming majority write that it would have been morally wrong, even reprehensible, to forgive…and precisely because Wiesenthal himself wasn’t one of Karl’s victims and so lacked the standing—or the moral right—to forgive a murderer on his victims’ behalf.

Applying that line of reasoning to the relatives of the Charleston Nine who spoke publicly of forgiving their loved ones’ murderer works if what they meant was that they personally felt aggressed against and were thus prepared to forgive the perpetrator for what he had done to them, not what he had done to his victims. I can accept that. But Officer McDonald’s gesture was of a different nature entirely. Here was a man who himself was the victim of the pent-up rage and unbridled violence of his assailant. Unlike Wiesenthal and also unlike the relatives of the dead in Charleston, then, he truly was entitled to forgive. And his act, therefore, was all the more remarkable.

Was it real? If the judge at Shavod Jones’ trial had turned to Officer McDonald and said, “Well, if you forgive him, then so do I. The defendant is guilty as charged, but free to go,” would McDonald have been dismayed or pleased? (This is a fantasy question—judges cannot “just” let people convicted of attempted murder go free because their would-be victims agree to it.) Asking it that way is perhaps unfair…but, even more so, it’s to miss the point. Officer McDonald understood that greater than the burden of quadriplegia would be the burden of spending a lifetime weighed down by anger and the thirst for revenge, and so he looked at his boy-assailant and, instead of wishing him dead, wished him peace. It’s that willingness to forgive that I found and still find so remarkable and, to speak personally, so mysterious.

Shavod Jones was released from jail in 1995 at age twenty-five after eight years of incarceration. Four days later, he was dead from head injuries sustained when he and a friend lost control of the motorcycle they were riding recklessly down a street in East Harlem. So that was the end of Jones’ story, but Steven McDonald, who was promoted after being shot to the rank of first-grade detective, spent the rest of his life promoting the cause of reconciliation. He spoke often about the way his Catholic faith sustained him, and how he felt proud to be symbol to others of the ability to forgive. He even traveled to Northern Ireland at the height of the unrest there to promote the cause of reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants, making that trip in the company the Reverend Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York City Fire Department who was killed while ministering to others on 9/11.

The Torah forbids the faithful from holding grudges or refusing to reconcile when someone who has wronged us comes to ask for forgiveness. Rambam uses the very harsh term akhzari (“cruel”) to describe someone who refuses to forgive the sincere penitent who comes to seek forgiveness, and that surely is the model we should seek to emulate. But Officer Steven McDonald went far beyond the requirement of the law and offered his assailant forgiveness not as a response to the latter’s wish to atone, but as a spur to encourage him to seek atonement for a terrible crime. In my mind, that was the act of a truly noble man possessed of the ability not merely to allow reconciliation but actively to seek it out. That is beyond the letter of the law, to be sure. But embracing the moral basis for a law even if doing so requires going far beyond what the law actually requires is the mark, I think, of a truly noble spirit. And so I take note of Officer McDonald’s passing with great sadness and invite you all to join in the prayer that he rest in peace, and that his memory, and the fine example he set, be a source of blessing to his family and to his friends, and also to us all.