Offer of Mercy Tested Church, State and Family
https://www.vnews.com/love-thine-enemy-Tamerlan-Tsarnaev-1957093
Three years ago on May 6, I got myself in a big mess by offering a plot next to my mother’s grave in Hamden, Conn., as a burial location for the Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose body a Worcester, Mass., funeral home couldn’t persuade any cemetery to accept. I owned the burial plot and I believed no one could refuse me use of that gravesite for any burial I chose.
I had twice before been involved with taboo news stories, in 1971 getting a federal grand jury formed after the Kent State University killings where I was a graduate counselor, and in 1984 for bringing press attention to a female prostitute who was the first known woman in America to transmit AIDS. She operated on a street corner near Yale, where I had graduated from divinity school.
Both of those times I thought I could be fired from my jobs, but in 2013 with the Boston Marathon bomber burial, I was retired and living in Vermont. Nobody could fire me — not even Social Security.
I knew that as with the Kent State and Yale AIDS controversies, offering the grave to Tsarnaev would create a media sensation, but in addition to feeling safer this time because I couldn’t be fired, I knew (as with Kent State and Yale) it was the right thing to do .
So I did it.
What I didn’t expect was family ostracism. Two family members disowned me, one writing that “you disgraced your mother’s memory” by offering her grave to the Boston Marathon bomber.
My reasoning went this way at the time: Tsarnaev’s undertaker has put out an appeal to help bury this man who perpetrated an evil act. No one will help him and the story lingers in the news day after day. I have two extra gravesites next to my mother and father. My mother was a Sunday School teacher who taught me to “love thine enemy,” and I went to a divinity school at Yale which taught the same thing.
So put your money where your mouth is master of divinity, 1980, Yale University. Love this enemy — by offering a grave to the family of the murderer without charge.
The offer came with only that one Sunday School provision: that it be accepted in memory of the mother who had taught me to “love thine enemy.”
I did not expect the mayor of Hamden’s office to be flooded with threats of protest, or my mother’s own church, Mt. Carmel Congregational Church, to wash its hands of the problem when I requested help in arranging a Muslim liaison to intercede with the Tsarnaev family, who were thousands of miles away in Russia.
Even the dean of my alma mater, Yale Divinity School, refused my request, saying I had committed the sin of “going to the press” and that he didn’t want to get involved.
However, Harry Adams, the emeritus chaplain of Yale, who was then 86 years old and had been associate dean of Yale Divinity School 35 years earlier when I was a student, had a different reaction.
He picked up the New Haven Register with a front-page banner headline something like “Yale graduate offers Hamden burial plot to Tsarnaev” and — unafraid of the repercussions — he sat down and emailed me: “When I saw the headline I thought ‘that sounds like Paul Keane’ — and it was! Good for you. ”
No surprise to him because three decades before, I had brought 60 Minutes to his Yale Divinity campus to film a story on the New Haven prostitute who transmitted AIDS heterosexually. The segment was broadcast Feb. 4, 1984, a pretty scandalous news item at the time.
What have I learned from the Tsarnaev experience? In the case of my family, blood is thinner than politics. In the case of officials in town and gown, scandal scares people in power, even ministers.
In the case of my 86-year-old retired Yale chaplain and divinity dean, right makes might. He was a mighty fortress to me that lonely day three years ago.
Tamerlan Tsarneav was ultimately interred in Virginia at a rural Muslim burial ground, after a female counselor arranged for a secret burial, citing the same bible verse as my mother: “Love thine enemy.”
