Like everyone else, I am ready to leave the Boston Marathon bombings behind, return to my world, keep my feet on the ground, but a part of this awful thing isn’t quite ready to leave me. All week I was thinking of those many people killed, injured, frightened and traumatized by this monstrous butchery – I made sure to contribute to the funds raised for their insurance and care.Today, working in the garden, I thought of the face of this 19-year-old boy and the Army of trucks, teams, helicopters, trucks and  soldiers and police officers he summoned out of  his madness to gather and fight him and hunt him down.

I felt for the young officer gunned down in his patrol car, and grateful for the men who rushed into bullets and bombs to protect their communities. I hope I will have such courage if the time ever comes. There was much compassion for them, as there should have been.

But I felt for this man today, this suspect, this seemingly normal boy, but still, it seemed a boy,  not too much more than a child who caused so much horror and provoked such a fearsome response. He is responsible for what he has done, and will, I am certain, be held accountable.

I was uneasy at the images  of the streams of men with their big black guns in their trucks and armor and helmets – there were  thousands of them, it seemed an image out of Orwell or some Dystopian film fantasy, not an American city. There seem to be more and more of them all the time, with newer and more powerful technologies, searches, cards, regulations, tools. I thought of this young and wasted life, whose soul was somehow so emptied of what it means to have a conscience or spirit.

I often fear that the awful damage these damaged humans do only begins with the dead and injured, but spirals and mushrooms into what it turns the rest of us into, a society that is increasingly armed, self-righteous, divided, fearful and angry. How ironic that it takes mass murderers to unite us and our only real heroes are the men in guns and trucks, heroic as they often are.

I watched some of the social media today – it seems a Frankenstein creation, bigger and more out of control all the time – including many of my “friends” on Facebook and saw this man called a monster, a fiend, inhuman, an animal, a devil. Everyone seems to want him dead, and as quickly as possible. In our culture, of course, he cannot ever die, he will be portrayed, visualized, examined and transformed into an iconic kind of hero from hell, a symbol of how in our culture one person can turn all of the rest of us upside down. He will live on in blogs, websites, videos, social media and the digital archive forever. His face will never go away, even as he withers alone in a cell in some super-prison, his only companions other fiends and monsters and mass murderers.

And I wonder what it is about our world that turns young men into creatures capable of unimaginable violence and brutality, more all the time. I don’t see too many stories about that in all of the cries for vengeance and more security.

I am not a Christian, but I am an admirer of Jesus Christ  and I am always struck by how evoked and exploited he is but so little understood. He would have thought of this young man, I am sure, not as subhuman but as all too human, perhaps all the more deserving of mercy and compassion because of that. This young man has sentenced himself to Hell, he will never go free in this world, never have love and connection, he will listen to his own voice for the rest of his days,  he almost surely will wish he had died in that boat. I thought of the farmer who left Simon to die in his awful pen, and wondered why no one felt any mercy and compassion for him, only for the animal he neglected and starved.

Mercy and compassion does not mean forgiveness. There are no excuses for Boston last Monday.  Compassion is for us, it helps us. It means saving ourselves from being less human. It means understanding, and it calls for us to spare ourselves the corrosive nature of anger and vengeance. Is mercy and compassion, I wondered, only reserved for the good, for the innocent, for those we like and understand? For the law abiding? Or is true mercy and compassion for the other, the despised and reviled, those whose brutality is beyond our imagination? We are quick to seek vengeance, but it doesn’t seem to work all on its own.

As I move away from this week, I am getting clearer about my own feelings. I see the way forward for myself. It is okay for me to feel badly about this man and his life. I will permit myself to feel  compassion for his awful choices, his awful fate, for another young life cut so short. It is liberating for me. I cannot suggest that course for anyone else, nor can I imagine how I would feel if my child was killed that day, or my legs blown off on a beautiful Spring day.

But I hope I don’t end up living in one of those countries that becomes less human and more brutal every time something inhuman is done to it, that slowly evolves into the very things it hates without ever quite realizing it. If the dead and maimed are sad and deserving of mercy, and they surely are, so is this sorry man. If I can’t forgive what he did, perhaps I can try and understand him as a fellow human being. He cannot be inhuman, he is a human.