One Fear Ends--and Hope Is Reaffirmed

The career of the alleged Unabomber, arrested on Wednesday, has stunned and demoralized many citizens. The fact that the Unabomber could evade authorities for so long and that his actions could lead to many deaths and injuries was one more sign that irrationality seems to rule in a world that most of us would like to see ordered and safe. That he could wreak terror with such randomness on the basis of a bizarre philosophy suggests to the cynical that they do best to let the world go by. Even those who want to be responsible find reason to turn faint when they see what the cunning and the mad can do to undercut human resolve. They are tempted to abandon the world to evil forces and persons.

For the moment, however, there are good reasons to affirm the values of human responsibility. The arrest of Theodore J. Kaczynski, as the alleged bomber whose anonymous acts of terror held a nation in thrall for 17 years, promises a kind of deliverance for people who had become afraid even to receive mailed packages. Amid all the terrors of the time, here was one that now might be ended. The arrest gave citizens a measure of new hope. They could return to a more ordered, rational existence--at least in one sphere of life.

The coincidence of the timing of these events in a week called holy by so many inspires reflection. The story of the arrest in newspapers that arrived on Passover matched something of the mood of that festival. “I will deliver you” (Exodus 6:6) had been the ancient pledge that modern Jews still hear. Celebrating their rescue, they are to act upon the deliverance theme so intrinsic to their history.

The televised images of the suspect also inspired emotions that matched something of the outlook on the world that Christians are celebrating this Easter Day: to appreciate newness. “As Christ was raised,” said Paul in Romans, “we, too, might walk in newness of life.” Christians are to act on the newness theme that marks their basic story.

The identity of the Unabomber, when firmly established, is likely to become prominent in the annals of terrorism, but he will be trivial in the long history of people who trace roots back to biblical times. They have seen too much to remain religiously impressed by such incidents. No one, by any stretch of the imagination, expects the seizure of any murderer to make its way into chapters headed “Deliverance and Judaism,” or “Newness and Christianity.” Yet, people of both faiths recognize that important happenings in their present-day lives are to be interpreted in the light of their originating story line. And its plot is supposed to motivate their current actions.

The capture of Kaczynski just outside Lincoln, Mont., may represent deliverance from only one kind of fear. The Unabomber may not have represented a threat that matches those brought by crime or a drug culture. But, inhabiting the bleak realms where sanity leaves off and madness begins, he posed one more threat to serenity and confidence. Like the assassins Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, who killed the Kennedys and a King, the Unabomber made it seem as if irrationality alone prevailed in a jeopardized world. All the rational reliances seem to go when killers’ acts tear at what is left of the fabric of society. What Kaczynski allegedly did peeled away some of the thin veneer of civilization, or caused tremors on the already shaky ground beneath us.

Looking ahead: Suppose all goes well. Suppose that Kaczynski’s indictment grows to full-fledged charges, conviction and punishment. Suppose the nation can continue to breathe more freely, to rejoice in his capture and take new confidence in efforts to work against others whose mad genius threatens us all. Still, the possibility that such an achiever in mathematics as Kaczynski could so disrupt life has to remain disturbing.

One killer’s imprisonment will not be a guarantee that no others will plot to kill people in the name of their own warped interpretations of life. Deliverance in the world of the divine may be permanent, even eternal. But in the human world, one has to know that down some other block or up some other mountain road, someone else may be hearing voices that tell him or her to destroy innocents in the name of an unreasoned cause. We keep our eye on the freemen, isolated and under suspicion in the same Montana where Kaczynski was arrested. There are always more from where such as these come.

As for newness, there are reasons to use the Easter holiday to celebrate a break with the old, with the power of death--which, for Christians, is the holiday’s main theme. But each time a Unabomber’s fanaticism is turned loose on the world, it seems harder to put trust in the promises of newness. What the Unabomber did was to reveal again the relative impotence of deliverers and those who promise newness. The mad ones, the inducers of chaos, seem too powerful against the forces of light, of right. But the killers, we have to believe, do not have the only or the last word. Deliverance goes on.

Catholic theologian David Tracy teaches that human life is lived, at Passover and Easter, as at any time, under the three marks of “finitude, contingency, and transience.” Finitude: Every living thing dies. Contingency: Randomness, chance and accident are always waiting in the wings. Transience: Everything passes. Yet, Tracy and other religious thinkers add: In the face of these three deadly threats, people affirm--in faith and hope and love.

So all Jews who celebrate Passover and Sabbath do so in full awareness of the precariousness of life. The plot of a people that long suffered exile and experienced Holocaust keeps being rewritten to help them face the dangers. The Christians who celebrate Easter and the Lord’s Day do so in realization that they are affirming in the face of the dying, the changing, the passing of what they hold dear. Yet, the most inspired also speak with hope and, at their best, they try to change a world, to help its forms and events mirror something of the newness that is their gift today.

Prophetic Jews liked to talk about a “remnant” among the people who kept the themes of covenant and redemption alive. Easter-minded Christians like to talk about being part of a “new creation.” To those who grow weary in pursuit of these themes today, the career of the Unabomber is one more evidence that it does not pay to affirm. But among those who truly follow the plot of Passover and Easter, as many do--you see it in the smiles during the recall of also sad events at table for Seder, and you can hear it in the trumpeting that goes with Easter hymn singing--last week offered fresh motives to outlast the evil. If only they take time to watch for the signals and the signs that continue to announce deliverance and newness.