Modesty and the Pope

Un-SexyModest: Or, What A Pope Can Teach Us About Modesty

Posted by Deborah on August 28, 2013 in women | 39 comments

Pope Francis’ obvious decency appeals to me as a human.  His discourse and homilies appeal to me as a Christian.
But his humble actions appeal to me as a Mormon woman who is weary of witnessing, over and over, how we culturally misuse the term “modesty” and reduce it to base rules governing the attire of (primarily) teenage girls.
Pope Francis gives me hope for the future of our modesty discourse because in five months, he has somehow managed to make humility and  modesty cool again.
First, let’s look at modesty as discussed in the Catholic Catechism:

• Modesty protects the intimate center of the person. It guides how one looks at others (author note: not how others look at you) and behaves toward them in conformity with the dignity of persons and their solidarity. Modesty inspires a way of life which makes it possible to resist the allurements of fashion and the pressures of prevailing ideologies. Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human person.

The “allurement of fashion” extends beyond necklines. And while “respect for the human person” clearly has implications for not viewing another as simply an object for one’s sexual gratification, it moves beyond that into “looking not on outward appearance, but looking on the heart.”  Or, as Jesus asked a group of men who wondered why he was allowing a sinful woman to anoint him: “Do you see this woman?” Really see her?
Pope Francis’ news-making decisions to shun certain “allurements of fashion” is what first endeared him to his new flock. He carries his own bags, swapped the apostolic palace for a room at the Inn of Saint Martha, celebrates mass each morning with rank-and-file Vatican employees, and is driven around in a Ford Focus.
He recently exhorted his clergy and women religious to likewise pursue modesty in possessions, including this pointed advice:

“It hurts me when I see a priest or nun with the latest-model car. You can’t do this. A car is necessary to do a lot of work, but, please, choose a more humble one. If you like the fancy one, just think about how many children are dying of hunger in the world.”

Or, beware the “allurement of fashion.”
The second dimension of modesty — an attitude of respect for the dignity of the human person — doesn’t make quite as flashy of headlines, but it is also key to the Pope’s ministry. Within a week of his ordination, he partook in the  Holy Week tradition of foot-washing. Instead of washing the feet of 12 specially-selected priests, he went to a juvenile detention center and ministered to locked-up youth, including young women. 
Do you see this woman? Jesus asked.
Last week, the pope unexpectedly called an Italian teenager who had written him a letter and gently corrected the young man when he began to use a formal form of address:

“He said to me, do you think the Apostles would have used the polite form with Christ? “Would they have called him your excellency? They were friends, just as you and I are now, and with friends I’m accustomed to using ‘tu’.”

But the most compelling story I have read about Pope Francis’s a modesty — his respect for the person – is this piece regarding his work in the Argentinian slums. 
Buenos Aires has roughly 20 villas miserias, where the poorest of the poor reside, where as one grandmother put it, “For our kids, it’s either the parish or it’s paco [a devastating street-drug]… that’s it.”
Francis made this his personal ministry, handpicking clergy and women religious to live and minister to those  the world has forgotten.  The list of ministries is impressive, including:

• A recovery center for drug addicts
• Two farms where recovering addicts work and live
• A high school and trade school
• A home for the elderly;
• Soup kitchens
• A community radio station, which broadcasts 24/7 and which teaches young people the media business
• A community newspaper
• Drug prevention programs
• A  center for kids living in the streets

But what struck me most about this article — the image I can’t get out of my head — is this:

“I’d say that over the 15 years he’s been walking down the streets here, at least half of the people have met him at some time and have a picture with him, meaning at least 25,000 people in this villa alone,” he said.
“He came for all the big festivals and he did all the confirmations,” he said. “One time, we had almost 400 people to be confirmed, and he did them all personally on one day. It took three and a half hours, maybe four, and he did it all.”
“When he would visit here, he’d take the bus and then he’d just come walking around the corner like a normal guy,” Isasmendi said.
“For us, it was the most natural thing in the world. He’d sit around and drink mate (an Argentinian tea), talking with people about whatever was going on. He’d start talking to the doorman or somebody about a book he was reading, and I could leave him there and go do something else, because Bergoglio was totally comfortable.”
I asked if Bergoglio had been so concerned with the slums because of the drugs, the gangs, or some other specific problem.
“The biggest problem we face is marginalization of the people,” he said. “Drugs are a symptom, violence is a symptom, but marginalization is the disease. Our people feel marginalized by a social system that’s forgotten about them and isn’t interested in them.”

Do you see this woman? Jesus asks.
I’m not sure I’ve ever left a discussion about tank-tops and hemlines feeling edified —  though modesty is supposed to be one of the gifts of the spirit. But the world has caught its breath at the modesty of Francis.  In  his shunning the “allures of fashion” and “awakening in [us] respect for the human person,” we are reminded that modesty is primarily about recognizing the dignity of the human spirit and acting accordingly.

Bill Watterson on the Real World

Here's the text of a speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED
Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990 I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I'm walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized, and I'm not sure which classes I'm taking, or where exactly I'm supposed to be going.
As I walk up the steps to the postoffice, I realize I don't have my box key, and in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, "How many more years until I graduate? ...Wait, didn't I graduate already?? How old AM I?" Then I wake up.
Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing.
I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn't give me a great deal of experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I can't remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you won't remember of yours either.
In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.
Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.
The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.
The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.
My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did.
Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.
It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.
If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.
We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.
You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of "just getting by: absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.
At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you'll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you'll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.
For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been amazed at how one ideas leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite a few deadlines.
A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.
I don't look back on my first few years out of school with much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I'd have encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as possible. But now it's too late.
Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job waiting for me. I'd drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years, and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real application outside of academia.
Boy, was I smug.
As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision to hire me. By the end of the summer, I'd been given notice; by the beginning of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again. You can imagine how upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn't give refunds.
Watching my career explode on the lauchpad caused some soul searching. I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my firs love, comic strips.
For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job.
A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it.
It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in the garage too.
It's funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess that's what it means to be in an ivory tower.
Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those poli sci books that I'd somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don't care about what you're doing, and the only reason you're there is to pay the bills.
Thoreau said,

"the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

That's one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of loud desperation. When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.

I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.
I still haven't drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.
Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.
Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.
To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.
As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.
What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.
On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.

You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.
Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime.
But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.
I think you'll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you. These have been formative years. Chances are, at least of your roommates has taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know.
With luck, you've also had a class that transmitted a spark of insight or interest you'd never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.
Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you'll find yourselves quite well prepared indeed.

I wish you all fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations on your achievement.

Bill Watterson

To Them of the Last Wagon

To Them of the Last Wagon

President J. Reuben Clark Jr.

October 5, 1947

My brethren and sisters, I should like in the beginning to add my testimony to the many that we have heard during this conference — my testimony that God lives; that Jesus is the Christ, the Redeemer of the World, the First Fruits of the Resurrection; that Joseph Smith was a prophet; that through him the gospel was restored and likewise the priesthood, the authority delegated to man on earth to represent Deity here among us; and that the Prophet has been followed down to and including our present president, George Albert Smith, by men who possessed the keys of the last dispensation as conferred upon Joseph Smith.

The matter that I shall give you today is very dear to my soul. Since I should like to say what I have to say in the best way I can say it, I have written it down and shall read it.

At the near close of this one hundredth year of the entering into these valleys of your fathers and your mothers, some of yours and mine, I wish to speak a few further words of humble tribute and thanksgiving to them, and especially to the meekest and lowliest of them, those great souls, majestic in the simplicity of their faith and in their living testimony of the truth of the restored gospel, to those souls in name unknown, unremembered, unhonored in the pages of history, but lovingly revered round the hearthstones of their children and their children's children who pass down from generation to generation the story of their faith and their mighty works, and the righteousness of their lives and living, those souls who worked and worked, and prayed and followed, and wrought so gloriously.

I would not take away one word of praise or gratitude, honor or reverence from the great men who led these humble ones of ours. They were mighty men in brain and brawn, in courage and valor, in honesty and in love of truth, living near the Lord — Brothers Brigham and Heber and Wilford and Willard and Charles, the two Orsons and Parley and John and George and Erastus and Lorenzo and Daniel and Joseph and Jedediah, and a host of other giants, each and all richly blessed with the Lord's divine love and with that gift of the Holy Ghost that made them leaders truly like unto Moses of old. I yield, we yield, to no one in our gratitude for them and for their work of directing the conquest of the wilderness and of saving men's souls. Their names shine lustrously on those pages of history which record only the doings of the makers of epochs — those choice spirits, chosen before the foundation of the world, to be the leaders and builders of dispensations of God's dealings with men; and these leaders of ours to be the builders of that dispensation which of old was named the "dispensation of the fulness of time(s)." (Eph. 1:10, D&C 112:30) Unnumbered eternities will remember and honor them.

But I should like now and here to say a few words about those who trod after where those giants led, some in the same companies that the Brethren piloted, some in later companies following that year and the years after, some in the fateful handcarts, with their unexcelled devotion, heroism, and faith, all trickling forward in a never-failing, tiny stream, till they filled the valley they entered and then flowed out at the sides and ends, peopling this whole wilderness-waste which they fructified, making it to fulfill the ancient prophecy that the desert should blossom as the rose.

I would like to say something about the last wagon in each of the long wagon trains that toiled slowly over the plains, up mountain defiles, down steep, narrow canyons, and out into the valley floor that was to be home — this last wagon: last, because the ox team that pulled it was the smallest and leanest and weakest, and had the tenderest feet of any in the train; it was slow starting, and slow moving; last, because, worn and creaking, it took more time to fix and to grease, for young Jimmy generally had trouble in getting the wagon jack under the "ex"; last, because its wind-rent cover was old and patched and took hours to mend and tie up to keep out the storm; last, because the wife, heavy with child, must rest till the very moment of starting; last, because sickly little Bill, the last born, poorly nourished, must be washed and coaxed to eat the rough food, all they had; last, because with all his tasks — helping little Bill, cooking and cleaning up the breakfast (Mother was not able to help much) — Father took a little longer to yoke his cattle and to gird himself for the day's labor; last, because his morning prayers took a few more minutes than the others spent — he had so many blessings to thank the Lord for and some special blessings to ask the Lord to grant, blessings of health and strength, especially for his wife, and for little Bill, and for the rest, and then the blessings for himself that his own courage would not fail, but most of all for the blessing of faith, faith in God and in the Brethren who sometimes seemed so far away. For they were out in front where the air was clear and clean and where they had unbroken vision of the blue vault of heaven. The Brethren had really visioned the glory of the Lord, who walked near them, put his thoughts into their minds; his Spirit guided and directed them, petitioned thereto by the thousands of Saints who were back in Winter Quarters, back in Iowa, back in the States, and beyond, even across the waters, for the faithful poured out their souls in fervent prayer to Almighty God that the Brethren should be inspired. The Saints buoyed up the Brethren out in front with encouragement, with praise, and sometimes even with adulation. Knowing the Brethren were prophets of God, the Saints gave them full confidence, daily, almost hourly, expressed. The Brethren lived in a world of commendation from friends and the tried and true Saints. Rarely was their word or their act questioned by the faithful Saints. This was as it should be and had to be to carry out the Lord's purposes.

But back in the last wagon, not always could they see the Brethren way out in front, and the blue heaven was often shut out from their sight by heavy, dense clouds of the dust of the earth. Yet day after day, they of the last wagon pressed forward, worn and tired, footsore, sometimes almost disheartened, borne up by their faith that God loved them, that the restored gospel was true, and that the Lord led and directed the Brethren out in front. Sometimes, they in the last wagon glimpsed, for an instant, when faith surged strongest, the glories of a celestial world, but it seemed so far away and the vision so quickly vanished because want and weariness and heartache and sometimes discouragement were always pressing so near.

When the vision faded, their hearts sank. But they prayed again and pushed on, with little praise, with not too much encouragement, and never with adulation. For there was nearly always something wrong with the last wagon or with its team — the off ox was a little lame in the right front shoulder; the hub of the left front wheel was often hot; the tire of the hind wheel on the same side was loose. So corrective counsel, sometimes strong reproof, was the rule, because the wagon must not delay the whole train. But yet in that last wagon there was devotion and loyalty and integrity, and above and beyond everything else, faith in the Brethren and in God's power and goodness. For had not the Lord said that not even a sparrow fall(s) unnoticed by the Father, and were they not of more value than sparrows? And then they had their testimony, burning always like an eternal fire on a holy altar, that the restored gospel was true, that Joseph was a prophet of God, and that Brigham was Joseph's chosen successor.

When the train moved forward in the early morning sun and the oxen with a swinging pull that almost broke the tongue got the last wagon on the move, the dust in the still morning air hung heavy over the road. Each wagon from the first stirred up its own cloud, till when the last wagon swung into line, the dust was dense and suffocating. It covered that last wagon and all that was in it; it clung to clothes; it blackened faces; it filled eyes already sore, and ears. The wife, soon to be a mother, could hardly catch her breath in the heavy, choking dust, for even in the pure air she breathed hard from her burden. Each jolt of the wagon, for those ahead had made wagon ruts almost "ex" deep, wrung from her clenched lips a half-groan she did her best to keep from the ears of the anxious, solicitous husband plodding slowly along, guiding and goading the poor, dumb cattle, themselves weary from the long trek. So through the long day of jolting and discomfort and sometimes pain, and sometimes panting for breath, the mother, anxious only that the unborn babe should not be injured, rode, for she could not walk; and the children walked, for the load was too heavy and big for them to ride; and the father walked sturdily alongside and prayed.

When in the evening the last wagon creaked slowly into its place in the circle corral and the Brethren came to inquire how the day had gone with the mother, then joy leaped in their hearts, for had not the Brethren remembered them? New hope was born, weariness fled, fresh will to do was enkindled; gratitude to God was poured out for their knowledge of the truth, for their testimony that God lived, that Jesus was the Christ, that Joseph was a prophet, that Brigham was his ordained successor, and that for the righteous a crown of glory awaited that should be theirs during the eternities of the life to come. Then they would join in the songs and dancing in the camp, making the camp's gaiety their own — as much as Mother's condition would permit.

Then the morning came when from out that last wagon floated the la-la of the newborn babe, and Mother love made a shrine and Father bowed in reverence before it. But the train must move on. So out into the dust and dirt the last wagon moved again, swaying and jolting, while Mother eased as best she could each pain-giving jolt so no harm might be done her, that she might be strong to feed the little one, bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. Who will dare to say that angels did not cluster round and guard her and ease her rude bed, for she had given another choice spirit its mortal body that it might work out its God-given destiny?

My mother was one of those babes so born in 1848, ninety-nine years ago.

Another morning came, when courageous little Bill, who, with a hero's heart, had trudged through long days of hot sun and through miles of soggy mud in the rain, his little body drenched, little Bill, weak and wan, must be crowded in to ride with Mother, for he was sick from a heavy cold. Months before, on that cold winter's night when they fled Nauvoo for their lives to escape the fiendish wrath of a wild mob, Bill became dangerously ill with pneumonia, which left him with weak lungs. This old illness now returned. He grew worse and worse. The elders came and prayed he might get well. But the Lord wanted little Bill with Him. So a few mornings later a weeping mother and a grief-stricken father and that last wagon swung into place in the line, leaving beside the road, under some scrub brush, a little mound, unmarked save for heaped up rocks to keep out the wolves, a mound that covered another martyr to the cause of truth.

So through dust and dirt, dirt and dust, during the long hours, the longer days — that grew into weeks and then into months, they crept along till, passing down through its portals, the valley welcomed them to rest and home. The cattle dropped to their sides, wearied almost to death; nor moved they without goading, for they too sensed they had come to the journey's end.

That evening was the last of the great trek, the mightiest trek that history records since Israel's flight from Egypt, and as the sun sank below the mountain peaks of the west and the eastern crags were bathed in an amethyst glow that was a living light, while the western mountainsides were clothed in shadows of the rich blue of the deep sea, they of the last wagon, and of the wagon before them, and of the one before that, and so to the very front wagon of the train, these all sank to their knees in the joy of their souls, thanking God that at last they were in Zion — "Zion, Zion, lovely Zion; Beautiful Zion; Zion, city of our God!". They knew there was a God, for only he could have brought them, triumphant, militant, through all the scorn, the ridicule, the slander, the tarrings and featherings, the whippings, the burnings, the plunderings, the murderings, the ravishings of wives and daughters, that had been their lot, the lot of their people since Joseph visioned the Father and the Son.

But hundreds of these stalwart souls of undoubting faith and great prowess were not yet at their journey's end.

Brother Brigham again called them to the colors of the kingdom of God, and sent them to settle the valleys, near and remote, in these vast mountains of refuge. So again they yoked their oxen and hitched up their teams, and putting their all in the covered wagon, this time willingly, unwhipped by the threat of mob cruelty and outrage, they wended their slow way to new valleys again trusting with implicit faith in the wisdom and divine guidance of their Moses. The very elements obeyed their faith, faith close kin to that which made the world.

These tens of thousands who so moved and so built were the warp and the woof of Brother Brigham's great commonwealth. Without them Brother Brigham had failed his mission. These were the instruments — the shovelers, the plowers, the sowers and reapers, the machinists, the architects, the masons, the woodworkers, the organ builders, the artisans, the mathematicians, the men of letters, all gathered from the four corners of the earth, furnished by the Lord to Brother Brigham and the prophet leaders who came after, that he and they might direct the working out of His purposes. These wrought as God inspired Brother Brigham and the other prophets to plan, all to the glory of God and the upbuilding of His kingdom.

Upright men they were, and fearless, unmindful of what men thought or said of them, if they were in their line of duty. Calumny, slander, derision, scorn left them unmoved, if they were treading the straight and narrow way. Uncaring they were of men's blame and censure, if the Lord approved them. Unswayed they were by the praise of men, to wander from the path of truth. Endowed by the spirit of discernment, they knew when kind words were mere courtesy, and when they betokened honest interest. They moved neither to the right nor to the left from the path of truth to court the good favor of men.

So for a full hundred years, urged by the spirit of gathering and led by a burning testimony of the truth of the restored gospel, thousands upon tens of thousands of these humble souls, one from a city, two from a family, have bade farewell to friends and homes and loved ones, and with sundered heart strings, companioned with privation and with sacrifice even to life itself, these multitudes have made their way to Zion, to join those who were privileged to come earlier, that all might build up the kingdom of God on earth — all welded together by common hardship and suffering, never-ending work and deep privation, tragic woes and heart-eating griefs, abiding faith and exalting joy, firm testimony and living spiritual knowledge — a mighty people, missioned with the salvation not only of the living but of the dead also, saviors, not worshippers of their ancestors, their hearts aglow with the divine fire of the spirit of Elijah, who turns the hearts of the fathers to the children and of the children to the fathers.

And thousands upon thousands of these tens of thousands, from the first till now, all the elect of God, measured to their humble calling and to their destiny as fully as Brother Brigham and the others measured to theirs, and God will so reward them. They were pioneers in word and thought and act and faith, even as were they of more exalted station. The building of this intermountain empire was not done in a corner by a select few but by this vast multitude flowing in from many nations, who came and labored and wrought, faithfully following their divinely called leaders.

In living our lives let us never forget that the deeds of our fathers and mothers are theirs, not ours; that their works cannot be counted to our glory; that we can claim no excellence and no place because of what they did, that we must rise by our own labor, and that labor failing, we shall fall. We may claim no honor, no reward, no respect, nor special position or recognition, no credit because of what our fathers were or what they wrought. We stand upon our own feet in our own shoes. There is no aristocracy of birth in this Church; it belongs equally to the highest and the lowliest; for as Peter said to Cornelius, the Roman centurion, seeking him: "Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons:

"But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him." (Acts 10:34-35)

So to these humble but great souls, our fathers and mothers, the tools of the Lord, who have, for this great people, hewed the stones and laid the foundations of God's kingdom, solid as the granite mountains from which they carved the rocks for their temple, to these humble souls, great in faith, great in work, great in righteous living, great in fashioning our priceless heritage, I humbly render my love, my respect, my reverent homage. God keep their memories ever fresh among us, their children, to help us meet our duties even as they met theirs, that God's work may grow and prosper till the restored gospel of Jesus Christ rules all nations and all peoples, till peace, Christ's peace, shall fill the whole earth, till righteousness shall cover the earth even as the waters cover the mighty deep. Let us here and now dedicate all that we have and all that we are to this divine work. May God help us so to do.

Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?

Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Conor McBride, who was convicted of shooting his girlfriend of three years when they were both 19.

By PAUL TULLIS

Published: January 4, 2013

At 2:15 in the afternoon on March 28, 2010, Conor McBride, a tall, sandy-haired 19-year-old wearing jeans, a T-shirt and New Balance sneakers, walked into the Tallahassee Police Department and approached the desk in the main lobby. Gina Maddox, the officer on duty, noticed that he looked upset and asked him how she could help. “You need to arrest me,” McBride answered. “I just shot my fiancée in the head.” When Maddox, taken aback, didn’t respond right away, McBride added, “This is not a joke.”

Enlarge This Image

Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

From left, Conor’s parents, Julie and Michael McBride, and Ann’s parents, Kate and Andy Grosmaire, at the Grosmaires’ home in Tallahassee, Fla.

Enlarge This Image

The Grosmaire Family

Conor McBride and Ann Grosmaire in 2010.

Enlarge This Image

Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Jack Campbell, the prosecutor, was initially hesitant to take part in a restorative-justice conference.

Maddox called Lt. Jim Montgomery, the watch commander, to her desk and told him what she had just heard. He asked McBride to sit in his office, where the young man began to weep.

About an hour earlier, at his parents’ house, McBride shot Ann Margaret Grosmaire, his girlfriend of three years. Ann was a tall 19-year-old with long blond hair and, like McBride, a student at Tallahassee Community College. The couple had been fighting for 38 hours in person, by text message and over the phone. They fought about the mundane things that many couples might fight about, but instead of resolving their differences or shaking them off, they kept it up for two nights and two mornings, culminating in the moment that McBride shot Grosmaire, who was on her knees, in the face. Her last words were, “No, don’t!”

Friends couldn’t believe the news. Grosmaire was known as the empathetic listener of her group, the one in whom others would confide their problems, though she didn’t often reveal her own. McBride had been selected for a youth-leadership program through the Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce and was a top student at Leon High School, where he and Grosmaire met. He had never been in any serious trouble. Rod Durham, who taught Conor and Ann in theater classes and was close to both, told me that when he saw “Conor shot Ann” in a text message, “I was like: ‘What? Is there another Conor and Ann?’ ”

At the police station, Conor gave Montgomery the key to his parents’ house. He had left Ann, certain he had killed her, but she was still alive, though unresponsive, when the county sheriff’s deputies and police arrived.

That night, Andy Grosmaire, Ann’s father, stood beside his daughter’s bed in the intensive-care unit of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. The room was silent except for the rhythmic whoosh of the ventilator keeping her alive. Ann had some brainstem function, the doctors said, and although her parents, who are practicing Catholics, held out hope, it was clear to Andy that unless God did “wondrous things,” Ann would not survive her injuries. Ann’s mother, Kate, had gone home to try to get some sleep, so Andy was alone in the room, praying fervently over his daughter, “just listening,” he says, “for that first word that may come out.”

Ann’s face was covered in bandages, and she was intubated and unconscious, but Andy felt her say, “Forgive him.” His response was immediate. “No,” he said out loud. “No way. It’s impossible.” But Andy kept hearing his daughter’s voice: “Forgive him. Forgive him.”

Ann, the last of the Grosmaires’ three children, was still living at home, and Conor had become almost a part of their family. He lived at their house for several months when he wasn’t getting along with his own parents, and Andy, a financial regulator for the State of Florida, called in a favor from a friend to get Conor a job. When the police told Kate her daughter had been shot and taken to the hospital, her immediate reaction was to ask if Conor was with her, hoping he could comfort her daughter. The Grosmaires fully expected him to be the father of their grandchildren. Still, when Andy heard his daughter’s instruction, he told her, “You’re asking too much.”

Conor’s parents were in Panama City, a hundred miles away, on a vacation with their 16-year-old daughter, when they got the call from the Tallahassee Police. Michael McBride, a database administrator for the Florida Department of Transportation, and Julie, his wife, who teaches art in elementary school, knew one of them would need to stay with Conor’s sister, Katy, who is developmentally disabled. It was decided that Michael would drive to Tallahassee alone.

“I put the car in reverse” to pull out of the driveway, Michael told me, “and the last thing Julie said to me was: ‘Go to the hospital. Go to the hospital.’ ” At the freeway on-ramp, he says he thought he should stop to throw up first. He had to pull over and vomit five more times before arriving at Tallahassee Memorial.

The hallway outside Ann’s room was “absolutely packed with people,” and Michael became overwhelmed, feeling “like a cartoon character, shrinking.” During the drive, he hadn’t thought about what he would actually do when he got to the hospital, and he had to take deep breaths to stave off nausea and lean against the wall for support. Andy approached Michael and, to the surprise of both men, hugged him. “I can’t tell you what I was thinking,” Andy says. “But what I told him was how I felt at that moment.”

“Thank you for being here,” Andy told Michael, “but I might hate you by the end of the week.”

“I knew that we were somehow together on this journey,” Andy says now. “Something had happened to our families, and I knew being together rather than being apart was going to be more of what I needed.”

Four days later, Ann’s condition had not improved, and her parents decided to remove her from life support. Andy says he was in the hospital room praying when he felt a connection between his daughter and Christ; like Jesus on the cross, she had wounds on her head and hand. (Ann had instinctually reached to block the gunshot, and lost fingers.) Ann’s parents strive to model their lives on those of Jesus and St. Augustine, and forgiveness is deep in their creed. “I realized it was not just Ann asking me to forgive Conor, it was Jesus Christ,” Andy recalls. “And I hadn’t said no to him before, and I wasn’t going to start then. It was just a wave of joy, and I told Ann: ‘I will. I will.’ ” Jesus or no Jesus, he says, “what father can say no to his daughter?”

When Conor was booked, he was told to give the names of five people who would be permitted to visit him in jail, and he put Ann’s mother Kate on the list. Conor says he doesn’t know why he did so — “I was in a state of shock” — but knowing she could visit put a burden on Kate. At first she didn’t want to see him at all, but that feeling turned to willingness and then to a need. “Before this happened, I loved Conor,” she says. “I knew that if I defined Conor by that one moment — as a murderer — I was defining my daughter as a murder victim. And I could not allow that to happen.”

She asked her husband if he had a message for Conor. “Tell him I love him, and I forgive him,” he answered. Kate told me: “I wanted to be able to give him the same message. Conor owed us a debt he could never repay. And releasing him from that debt would release us from expecting that anything in this world could satisfy us.”

Visitors to Leon County Jail sit in a row of chairs before a reinforced-glass partition, facing the inmates on the other side — like the familiar setup seen in movies. Kate took the seat opposite Conor, and he immediately told her how sorry he was. They both sobbed, and Kate told him what she had come to say. All during that emotional quarter of an hour, another woman in the visiting area had been loudly berating an inmate, her significant other, through the glass. After Conor and Kate “had had our moment,” as Kate puts it, they both found the woman’s screaming impossible to ignore. Maybe it was catharsis after the tears or the need to release an unbearable tension, but the endless stream of invective somehow struck the two of them as funny. Kate and Conor both started to laugh. Then Kate went back to the hospital to remove her daughter from life support.

“Unfortunately I have a lot of experience talking to the parents of dead people,” says Jack Campbell, the Leon County assistant state attorney who handles many of North Florida’s high-profile murder cases. Sheriff’s deputies who were investigating the case told Campbell that the Grosmaires’ feelings toward the accused were unusual, but Campbell was not prepared for how their first meeting, two months after Ann’s death, would change the course of Conor’s prosecution.

Campbell had charged Conor with first-degree murder, which, as most people in Florida understand it, carries a mandatory life sentence or, potentially, the death penalty. He told the Grosmaires that he wouldn’t seek capital punishment, because, as he told me later, “I didn’t have aggravating circumstances like prior conviction, the victim being a child or the crime being particularly heinous and the like.”

As he always does with victims’ families, he explained to the Grosmaires the details of the criminal-justice process, including the little-advertised fact that the state attorney has broad discretion to depart from the state’s mandatory sentences. As the representative of the state and the person tasked with finding justice for Ann, he could reduce charges and seek alternative sentences. Technically, he told the Grosmaires, “if I wanted to do five years for manslaughter, I can do that.”

Kate sat up straight and looked at Campbell. “What?” she asked. Campbell, believing she had misunderstood and thought he was suggesting that Conor serve a prison term of just five years, tried to reassure her. “No, no,” he said. “I would never do that.” It was just an example of how much latitude Florida prosecutors have in a murder case.

What Campbell didn’t realize was that the Grosmaires didn’t want Conor to spend his life in prison. The exchange in Campbell’s office turned their understanding of Conor’s situation upside down and gave them an unexpected challenge to grapple with. “It was easy to think, Poor Conor, I wouldn’t want him to spend his life in prison, but he’s going to have to,” Kate says. “Now Jack Campbell’s telling me he doesn’t have to. So what are you going to do?”

“He’s so sorry he said that,” Kate says now, of Campbell. “I mean, it opened the door for us.”

Most modern justice systems focus on a crime, a lawbreaker and a punishment. But a concept called “restorative justice” considers harm done and strives for agreement from all concerned — the victims, the offender and the community — on making amends. And it allows victims, who often feel shut out of the prosecutorial process, a way to be heard and participate. In this country, restorative justice takes a number of forms, but perhaps the most prominent is restorative-justice diversion. There are not many of these programs — a few exist on the margins of the justice system in communities like Baltimore, Minneapolis and Oakland, Calif. — but, according to a University of Pennsylvania study in 2007, they have been effective at reducing recidivism. Typically, a facilitator meets separately with the accused and the victim, and if both are willing to meet face to face without animosity and the offender is deemed willing and able to complete restitution, then the case shifts out of the adversarial legal system and into a parallel restorative-justice process. All parties — the offender, victim, facilitator and law enforcement — come together in a forum sometimes called a restorative-community conference. Each person speaks, one at a time and without interruption, about the crime and its effects, and the participants come to a consensus about how to repair the harm done.

The methods are mostly applied in less serious crimes, like property offenses in which the wrong can be clearly righted — stolen property returned, vandalized material replaced. The processes are designed to be flexible enough to handle violent crime like assault, but they are rarely used in those situations. And no one I spoke to had ever heard of restorative justice applied for anything as serious as murder.

The Grosmaires had learned about restorative justice from Allison DeFoor, an Episcopal priest who works as a chaplain in the Florida prison system (and before that worked as a sheriff, public defender, prosecutor and judge). Andy, who is studying to become a deacon, heard about DeFoor from a church friend and turned to him for guidance. When Andy told DeFoor that he wanted to help the accused, DeFoor suggested he look into restorative justice. “The problem,” DeFoor says, “was the whole system was not designed to do any of what the Grosmaires were wanting.” He considered restorative justice — of any kind, much less for murder — impossible in a law-and-order state. “We are nowhere near ready for this in Florida right now,” DeFoor told me. “Most people would go, ‘Huh?’ And most conservatives would go, ‘Ew.’ ” But as a man of the cloth, he said he believed there was always hope. He suggested the families “find the national expert on restorative justice and hire him.”

By midsummer, Andy Grosmaire was meeting Michael McBride regularly for lunch. He knew that, in a way, the McBrides had lost a child, too. At one of these lunches, he told Michael about restorative justice. Maybe this could be a way to help Conor. Julie McBride, who wasn’t sleeping much anyway, started spending late nights online looking for the person who might be able to help them change their son’s fate. Her research led her to Sujatha Baliga, a former public defender who is now the director of the restorative-justice project at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland.

Baliga was born and raised in Shippensburg, Pa., the youngest child of Indian immigrants. From as far back as Baliga can remember, she was sexually abused by her father. In her early teens, Baliga started dying her hair blue and cutting herself. She thought she hated herself because of her outcast status in her community, in which she was one of the few nonwhite children in her school. But then, at age 14, two years before her father died of a heart attack, she fully realized the cause of her misery: what her father had been doing was terribly wrong.

Despite the torments of her childhood, Baliga excelled in school. As an undergraduate at Harvard-Radcliffe, she was fairly certain she wanted to become a prosecutor and lock up child molesters. After college, she moved to New York and worked with battered women. When her boyfriend won a fellowship to start a school in Mumbai, she decided to follow him while waiting to hear if she had been accepted at law school.

Baliga had been in therapy in New York, but while in India she had what she calls “a total breakdown.” She remembers thinking, Oh, my God, I’ve got to fix myself before I start law school. She decided to take a train to Dharamsala, the Himalayan city that is home to a large Tibetan exile community. There she heard Tibetans recount “horrific stories of losing their loved ones as they were trying to escape the invading Chinese Army,” she told me. “Women getting raped, children made to kill their parents — unbelievably awful stuff. And I would ask them, ‘How are you even standing, let alone smiling?’ And everybody would say, ‘Forgiveness.’ And they’re like, ‘What are you so angry about?’ And I told them, and they’d say, ‘That’s actually pretty crazy.’ ” The family that operated the guesthouse where Baliga was staying told her that people often wrote to the Dalai Lama for advice and suggested she try it. Baliga wrote something like: “Anger is killing me, but it motivates my work. How do you work on behalf of oppressed and abused people without anger as the motivating force?”

She dropped the letter off at a booth by the front gate to the Dalai Lama’s compound and was told to come back in a week or so. When she did, instead of getting a letter, Baliga was invited to meet with the Dalai Lama, the winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, privately, for an hour.

He gave her two pieces of advice. The first was to meditate. She said she could do that. The second, she says, was “to align myself with my enemy; to consider opening my heart to them. I laughed out loud. I’m like: ‘I’m going to law school to lock those guys up! I’m not aligning myself with anybody.’ He pats me on the knee and says, ‘O.K., just meditate.’ ”

Baliga returned to the United States and signed up for an intensive 10-day meditation course. On the final day, she had a spontaneous experience, not unlike Andy Grosmaire’s at his daughter’s deathbed, of total forgiveness of her father. Sitting cross-legged on an easy chair in her home in Berkeley, Calif., last winter, she described the experience as a “complete relinquishment of anger, hatred and the desire for retribution and revenge.”

After law school at the University of Pennsylvania, Baliga clerked for a federal judge in Vermont. “That’s when I first saw restorative justice in action,” she says. The second part of the Dalai Lama’s prescription would be fulfilled after all.

Early in 2011, Julie McBride called Baliga, who patiently explained why restorative justice wasn’t going to happen for her son. “This is a homicide case,” Baliga told Julie, “it’s in the Florida panhandle, we don’t know anybody who does this level of victim-offender dialogue, and I don’t think there even is victim-offender dialogue in Florida, period. Just forget it. This is never going to happen.”

“We want to hire you,” Julie insisted.

“We do burglaries, robberies,” Baliga protested. “No gun charges, no homicides. No rape. There’s no way. There’s never been a murder case that’s gone through restorative justice.”

But Julie wouldn’t let it go. “I think you’ll just fall in love with the Grosmaires,” she told Baliga. “You just need to talk to them.”

“I’m not going to cold-call them,” Baliga responded.

“Oh, no, no,” Julie said. “They told me about restorative justice. They want all this to happen. I’m just doing the legwork because they lost their daughter.”

“O.K. So wait, what? You’re talking to them?”

Baliga says she thought that Julie McBride was maybe a little deluded, traumatized, as she must have been, by what her son had done. She agreed to speak with the Grosmaires only if they called her, and within minutes of hanging up with Julie, her phone rang. Kate was on the other end.

Kate told her how Conor almost immediately turned himself in, and about Michael’s coming to the hospital before going to see his son in jail. At first, Baliga says, “I had mistrust of the potential for people to be this amazing.” After a few minutes of talking with them, though, she says, “I just couldn’t keep saying no.”

A conference call was quickly arranged that included the McBrides, the Grosmaires, Baliga, DeFoor and Conor’s lawyer, a capital-crime specialist named Greg Cummings. Baliga was asking questions, trying to figure out how her diversion process might work in Florida, where nothing like it existed.

Then DeFoor had an idea: “What about the pre-plea conference?” Right away the lawyers knew this could work. A pre-plea conference is a meeting between the prosecutor and the defendant’s lawyer at which a plea deal is worked out to bring to a judge. Anyone can attend, it’s off the record and nothing said can be used in court. All of those conditions would also fulfill the requirements of a restorative-justice community conference.

The only obstacle that remained — and everyone knew it was a big one — was the prosecutor, Jack Campbell.

The Grosmaires’ request was not without risk to Campbell. He is ambitious and approving an alternative-justice process brought by a woman from California that might result in a murderer receiving a lighter sentence would most likely make him appear soft on crime. On the other hand, “opposing a church deacon asking for mercy for his daughter’s murderer has its own problems,” DeFoor says. “But the safe course was for Jack Campbell to say ‘no.’ The circumstances did not lend themselves to him being bold.”

Campbell did his own research, and once satisfied that the conference wouldn’t violate his oath or, he says, “the duty I owed to every other parent and every other child in this town,” he called Cummings, Conor’s lawyer, whom he knew and respected, to work out the details. Campbell told Cummings that he would not necessarily abide by whatever wishes the other parties had regarding sentencing. “Just because I’m participating,” he told Cummings, “doesn’t mean I’m going to sign off on the product of this meeting.”

The day of the conference, June 22, 2011, was hot and humid. Baliga and the Grosmaires arrived first at the small room inside Leon County Jail where the meeting would take place. Baliga felt it important that Ann be represented at the conference, so while she arranged the molded plastic chairs in a circle, the Grosmaires placed a number of Ann’s belongings in the center of the room: a blanket Ann’s best friend had crocheted for her; the Thespian of the Year trophy she won during senior year; a plaster cast of Ann’s uninjured hand. After the McBrides, the lawyers, a victims’ advocate and the Grosmaires’ priest, the Rev. Mike Foley, from the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, arrived, Baliga asked the jailers to bring in Conor.

Kate and Julie rose from their chairs. Conor stood awkwardly, not sure where to go or what to do. “Conor,” Baliga said, “go hug your mother.” Jail policy is that there be no physical contact between inmates and visitors, but Baliga had persuaded the sheriff to make an exception. He had not touched his parents in 15 months. He hugged them and then turned to the Grosmaires. Kate and Andy had continued to visit Conor periodically — Kate particularly wanted to be with him on Ann’s birthday. Now, he hugged them, too.

Baliga laid out the ground rules: Campbell would read the charges and summarize the police and sheriff’s reports; next the Grosmaires would speak; then Conor; then the McBrides; and finally Foley, representing the community. No one was to interrupt. Baliga showed a picture of Ann, sticking out her tongue as she looks at the camera. If her parents heard anything Ann wouldn’t like, they would hold up the picture to silence the offending party. Everyone seemed to feel the weight of what was happening. “You could feel her there,” Conor told me.

The Grosmaires spoke of Ann, her life and how her death affected them. “We went from when she was being born all the way up,” Andy says. He spoke of what Ann loved to do, “like acting, and the things that were important in her life. She loved kids; she was our only daughter who wanted to give us grandchildren.” She had talked of opening a wildlife refuge after college. “To me she had really grown up, and she was a woman,” Andy says. “She was ready to go out and find her place in the world. That’s the part that makes me most sad.”

Kate described nursing Ann. She told of how Ann had a “lazy eye” and wore a patch as a little girl. “We worked for her to have good vision so she could drive and do all these things when she grew up. It’s another thing that’s lost with her death: You worked so hard to send her off into the world — what was the purpose of that now?”

“She did not spare [Conor] in any way the cost of what he did,” Baliga remembers. “There were no kid gloves, none. It was really, really tough. Way tougher than anything a judge could say.”

“It was excruciating to listen to them talk,” Campbell says. “To look at the photo there. I still see her. It was as traumatic as anything I’ve ever listened to in my life.”

Conor was no less affected. “Hearing the pain in their voices and what my actions had done really opened my eyes to what I’ve caused,” Conor told me later. “Then they were like, ‘All right, Conor, it’s on you.’ And I had to give an account of what I did.” He leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees and looked directly at the Grosmaires, who were seated opposite him. It was difficult to get started, but once he did the story came out of him in one long flow.

Ann and Conor fought on Friday night. Conor was tired and had homework and things to do the next day, so he wanted to drive home and turn in early. This was a frequent point of contention: Ann being “more of a night person,” he told me later, “was sort of an ongoing issue.” He promised to return to Ann’s house to make breakfast, but when he overslept the next day, the fight continued. They fought by phone and text and tried to make up with a picnic that evening. Ann was excited about a good grade she got in a class and brought Champagne glasses and San Pellegrino Limonata to celebrate. But Conor forgot about the grade, and he recalled at the conference how disappointed Ann was. “It just all fell apart from there,” he told me.

After sunset, they went back to his parents’ house, but Conor fell asleep in the middle of a conversation. “Sunday morning rolls around, and I wake up, and she’s already awake and just pissed at me,” he recalled. “The fight picked up from where it left off. At some point” — this must have been hours later — “it escalated to the point to where she got all of her stuff, walked out the door, and she was just like: ‘Look, I’m done. I’m leaving.’ ”

Conor and Ann met in chemistry class during their sophomore year in high school, and in some ways, their relationship was still adolescent. They were in love and devoted to each other, but there was also a dependence that bordered on the obsessive. They were spending so much time together senior year that Conor was fired from his job for frequently not showing up, and his father told me of “wild swings” in their relationship. There was also constant fighting. “They were both good kids,” Julie McBride says, “but they were not good together.” Kate Grosmaire put it another way: “It’s like the argument became the relationship.”

Conor was prone to bursts of irrational rage. Ann never told her parents that he had struck her several times. Michael now feels, with searing regret, that he presented a bad example of bad-tempered behavior. “Conor learned how to be angry” is how he put it to me.

“We never talked about it, you know?” Conor told me. “We never tried to be like, ‘Why do you do this and why do you do that?’ Or, ‘This is how I’m really feeling.’ That kind of communication just wasn’t there.”

When Ann got up to leave that Sunday morning, Conor says it wasn’t clear to him if she was leaving him or just leaving, but in any case he noticed Ann had left her water bottle, and he followed her to the driveway to give it to her. He found Ann in her car, crying. As Conor related it to me, and to Ann’s parents that day, Ann said to him: “You don’t love me. You don’t care.”

Conor leaned his head through the car window, exasperated. “What do you want from all of this?” he asked. “What do you want to happen?”

“I just want you to die,” she said.

Conor went back in the house, locked the door, went to his father’s closet, pulled his shotgun down from a shelf, unlocked it, went to another room where the ammunition was kept and loaded the gun. He sat down in the living room, put the gun under his chin and his finger on the trigger.

“I just felt so frustrated, helpless and angry,” Conor says. “I was just so sick and tired of fighting. I wanted us to work out just because, I mean, I loved the girl. I still do. I was so torn — this was the girl that just said she wants me to die. I’m sick of the fighting. I just want to die, and yet I love her, and if I kill myself she might do something to herself.”

All these thoughts were running through his head when Ann started banging on the door. Conor stood up, placed the weapon on a table and let her in. They went into his bedroom, and a few minutes later Conor went to get her something to drink. When he returned, he found her lying on the couch, breathing in a way that seemed to indicate distress. Her mysterious behavior made him so angry that he started screaming: “Let me help you! Tell me what’s wrong!” Conor says that he would frequently fall into this “wrathful anger,” and on this day “there was so much anger, and I kept snapping.” Ann started sobbing, saying that Conor didn’t care and that she wanted to die. “At this point, I just lost it,” Conor says. He left the room and got the gun. Ann started to follow him, but she may have stumbled or tripped, because when Conor returned with the gun, she was on her knees halfway between the couch and the door. Conor was frustrated, exhausted and angry and “not thinking straight at all.”

He pointed the gun at her, thinking, he says, that he could “scare her” so that “maybe she would snap out of it.”

“Is this what you want?” he yelled. “Do you want to die?”

“No, don’t!” Ann held out her hand. Conor fired.

As Conor told the story, Andy’s whole body began to shake. “Let me get this right,” he said, and asked Conor about Ann being on her knees. Baliga remembers Andy’s demeanor at this moment: “Andy is a very gentle person, but there was a way at that moment that he was extremely strong. There was just this incredible force of the strong, protective, powerful father coursing through him.” Conor answered, clarifying precisely how helpless Ann was at the moment he took her life.

The Grosmaires remember that at this point, Campbell suggested a break. Campbell told me that he understood “the process was going to be horrific” and that he was the only one present with the power to halt it. During the break, he approached the Grosmaires in the hallway.

“You all had enough?” he asked. “I’m here for you all, and I don’t mind being the heavy.” Kate thanked him but declined his offer to end the conference early. As Campbell backed away, Baliga approached the Grosmaires. “I thought it was going to make sense,” Andy told her. Later, Andy told me that he had fantasized or hoped that maybe it had been an accident, maybe Conor’s finger had slipped — that he would hear something unexpected to help him make sense of his daughter’s death. But Conor’s recitation didn’t bring that kind of solace.

When the group returned to the circle, Conor continued. He didn’t try to shirk responsibility at the conference or in long conversations with me about the murder. “What I did was inexcusable,” he told me. “There is no why, there are no excuses, there is no reason.” He told Ann’s parents that he had no plans to shoot their daughter. Still, he said, “on some subconscious level, I guess, I wanted it all to end. I don’t know what happened. I just — emotions were overwhelming.” He said he didn’t remember deciding to pull the trigger, but he recognizes that it wasn’t an accident, either.

Conor said he stood there, ears ringing, with the smell of gunpowder in the air. The thought came into his head that he ought to kill himself, but he couldn’t muster the will. Instead, he left the house and drove around in a daze until he decided to turn himself in.

Julie McBride was devastated. “I was sitting right next to him. It was awful to hear and to know: This is my son telling this. This is my son who did this.”

When it was Michael McBride’s turn to speak, sorrow overtook him and he told the group that if he had ever thought his shotgun would have harmed another person, he never would have kept it. Kate Grosmaire didn’t bring it up at the conference, but she says she has thought a lot about that gun. “If that gun had not been in the house, our daughter would be alive,” she told me.

When everyone had spoken, Baliga turned to the Grosmaires, and acknowledging their immediate loss, she asked what they would like to see happen to attempt restitution. Kate looked at Conor and with great emotion told him that he would need “to do the good works of two people because Ann is not here to do hers.”

The punitive element came last. Before the conference, Kate, who doesn’t put much stock in the rehabilitative possibilities of prison, told Baliga that she would suggest a five-year sentence. Listening to Conor, however, she began to feel different, and when she was called on to speak, she said he should receive no less than 5 years, no more than 15.

Andy Grosmaire, sitting beside his wife, went next. He was so deeply affected by what he had heard, it was all he could do to say, “10 to 15 years.” The McBrides concurred. Conor said he didn’t think he should have a say.

All eyes turned to Campbell. A restorative-justice circle is supposed to conclude with a consensus decision, but Campbell refused to suggest a punishment. He only said he heard what was discussed and would take it under consideration. “I think the ultimate decision on punishment should be made based on cool reflection of the facts and the evidence in the case,” Campbell told me later. “I don’t think those conferences are the best prism for that.”

The Grosmaires were deeply disappointed. Andy in particular imagined that the end of the conference circle would be the beginning of the young man’s redemption. They expected a plea bargain would be struck, and they could go on. Instead they had no idea where Campbell stood. “Had the circle really worked?” Kate asked.

Campbell would consult with community leaders, the head of a local domestic-violence shelter and others before arriving at the sentence he would offer McBride. He told me that his boss, Willie Meggs, the state attorney, who Campbell once believed would never sign off on a sentence of less than 40 years for Conor, was “extremely supportive” once he understood the Grosmaires’ perspective. “He wanted to be sure I had gone through the proper analysis,” Campbell says, “and that it was for the right motivations. Because he knew there would be a backlash.”

Three weeks after the conference, citing Conor’s “senseless act of domestic violence,” Campbell wrote the Grosmaires to inform them he would offer Conor a choice: a 20-year sentence plus 10 years of probation, or 25 years in prison. Conor took the 20 years, plus probation.

Campbell told me that in arriving at those numbers, he needed to feel certain that “a year or 20 years down the road, I could tell somebody why I did it. Because if Conor gets out in 20 years and goes and kills his next girlfriend, I’ve screwed up terrible. So I hope I’m right.”

In March the Grosmaires invited me to their home, on Tallahassee’s northern fringe. We sat down in their living room, near a modest shrine to Ann: items that represented her at the conference are there, along with her cellphone and a small statue of an angel that Kate splurged for not long after Ann’s death that reminds her of Ann.

The Grosmaires said they didn’t forgive Conor for his sake but for their own. “Everything I feel, I can feel because we forgave Conor,” Kate said. “Because we could forgive, people can say her name. People can think about my daughter, and they don’t have to think, Oh, the murdered girl. I think that when people can’t forgive, they’re stuck. All they can feel is the emotion surrounding that moment. I can be sad, but I don’t have to stay stuck in that moment where this awful thing happened. Because if I do, I may never come out of it. Forgiveness for me was self-preservation.”

Still, their forgiveness affected Conor, too, and not only in the obvious way of reducing his sentence. “With the Grosmaires’ forgiveness,” he told me, “I could accept the responsibility and not be condemned.” Forgiveness doesn’t make him any less guilty, and it doesn’t absolve him of what he did, but in refusing to become Conor’s enemy, the Grosmaires deprived him of a certain kind of refuge — of feeling abandoned and hated — and placed the reckoning for the crime squarely in his hands. I spoke to Conor for six hours over three days, in a prison administrator’s office at the Liberty Correctional Institution near Tallahassee. At one point he sat with his hands and fingers open in front of him, as if he were holding something. Eyes cast downward, he said, “There are moments when you realize: I am in prison. I am in prison because I killed someone. I am in prison because I killed the girl I loved.”

Conor got a job at the prison’s law library. He spends a lot of his time reading novels by George R. R. Martin, the author of the “Game of Thrones” series. He enrolled voluntarily in the anger-management class offered at the prison and continues to meet with his classmates since completing it. He told me that when he gets out he plans to volunteer in animal shelters, because Ann loved animals. As a condition of his probation, Conor will be required to speak to local groups about teen-dating violence. His parents visit him regularly, and they talk on the phone almost every day. They talk about his sister, Katy, baseball and food, Michael says, as well as the issues he needs to focus on to come out a better person than he was when he went in. “As long as I’m self-motivated enough,” Conor says, “I can really improve myself.” The Grosmaires come, too, about once a month.

“I’m not worried about him getting out in 20 years at all,” Baliga told me. “We got to look more deeply at the root of where this behavior came from than we would have had it gone a trial route — the anger issues in the family, exploring the drama in their relationship, the whole conglomeration of factors that led to that moment. There’s no explaining what happened, but there was just a much more nuanced conversation about it, which can give everyone more confidence that Conor will never do this again. And the Grosmaires got answers to questions that would have been difficult to impossible to get in a trial.”

Not everyone felt comfortable with the restorative-justice circle or how it resolved: there were angry letters on local news sites denouncing the sentence as too light. Ann’s sisters supported their parents’ decision to forgive Conor and seek restorative justice but declined to participate in the process (they also declined to speak to me). In hindsight, Kate sees the restorative-justice process as a sort of end in itself. “Just being able to have the circle made it a success,” Kate said.

Andy felt a little differently. “Hearing Conor,” he said, “I made sounds I’ve never heard myself make. To hear that your daughter was on the floor saying ‘no’ and holding her hands up and still be shot is just — it’s just not. . . .” He tried to explain the horror of such knowledge, but it’s not easy. Even experiencing the deaths of other family members, he said, has given him “no context” to understand what happened to Ann. Andy doesn’t attribute Ann’s death to “God’s plan” and rolls his eyes at “God just wanted another angel” sentimentality. But not being “stuck” in anger seems to give the Grosmaires the emotional distance necessary to grapple with such questions without the gravity of their grief pulling them into a black hole. I talked a lot to Kate and Andy over several months. They don’t intellectualize what happened or repress emotions — I saw them cry and I heard them laugh — but they were always able to speak thoughtfully about Ann’s death and its aftermath.

As much as the Grosmaires say that forgiveness helped them, so, too, has the story of their forgiveness. They’ve spoken about it to church groups and prayer breakfasts around Tallahassee and plan to do more talks. The story is a signpost in the wilderness, something solid and decent they can return to while wandering in this parallel universe without their youngest daughter.

Kate Grosmaire keeps asking herself if she has really forgiven Conor. “I think about it all the time,” she said. “Is that forgiveness still there? Have I released that debt?” Even as the answer comes back yes, she says, it can’t erase her awareness of what she no longer has. “Forgiving Conor doesn’t change the fact that Ann is not with us. My daughter was shot, and she died. I walk by her empty bedroom at least twice a day.”

Paul Tullis is a freelance writer. His last article for the magazine was about a controversial treatment for multiple sclerosis.
Editor: Vera Titunik