There are no words when faced with horrors like those perpetrated by Lucy Letby in England. I somewhat wish that, like the mosque killer in Christchurch, her name were now being wiped from history. Such names are searchable, but why bother? No words can bring those infants back, nor erase the grief from those who loved them.
How do we speak of God in such a context? Extremely cautiously. Evil and holiness continue to coexist, and not one of us is immunized from the former. As with natural disasters or accidents we can improve our odds, but the parents of those infants in the Countess of Chester Hospital took no risks beyond the risk of love.
God did not stop the evil machinations of Letby’s twisted mind. God will be present, named or not, as tears are wiped away, nightmares recede, as those who are grieving are held physically and emotionally by those who stand with them in their sorrow. God will be present eventually even in the aching void of those who have loved and lost (including Letby’s parents). But the word “God” might not. Ever.
Yet we who are Christ-bearers must speak that word, still.
How? How after any brutal tragedy? Natural or human-made.
How?
I am a “Christian universalist.” I believe that no one ultimately stands outside the realms of the salvation won in the Christ-event. But Letby? Or Hitler? Sexual abusers and mass murderers (and any murder is one too many)? Where is God when Lucy Letby …? Where is God for the babies who cannot legally be named, where is God for their loved ones?
God?
Ultimately if there is a God (I happen to think there is) then that God must provide answers. In moments of sorrow I hope Letby will spend the rest of her life (a far better punishment than death) listening to the victim impact statements of those whose children she has killed, the statements she refused to hear in court. Then, post-life, post death, my theology tells me, she must spend whatever “eternity” is, facing the horrors she has perpetrated, until at last she sees, acknowledges, cries “mercy” for those horrors, and looks into the infants’ and their loved ones’ eyes. Looks, and knows, and seeks at last the mercy only her victims can permit and God-in-Christ bestow.
