From Despair to Hope. From Hate to Peace.

From hearing about three fathers with children, who also were police officers risking their lives for the public good, being gunned down due to the political hate engulfing a young man; to hearing about five children being killed in Washington State by a cowardly father who then took his own life; to hearing about 14 people hoping for a better future being gunned down by yet another crazed criminal…. well, you begin to despair for the future.

And then you read this.

Elwin Hope Wilson sits in his Tillman Street home, a sad, sickly man haunted by time.
…
Wilson doesn’t have answers for much of how he has lived his life — not for all the black people he beat up, not for all the venom he spewed, not for all the time wasted in hate. Now 72 and ailing, his body swollen by diabetes, Wilson is spending as many hours pondering his past as he is his mortality.

The former Ku Klux Klan supporter says he wants to apologize for hanging a black doll in a noose at the end of his drive, for flinging cantaloupes at black men walking down Main Street, for once hurling a jack handle at a black kid, for brutally beating a 21-year-old seminary student at the bus station in 1961.

In the final chapter of his life, Wilson is seeking forgiveness. The burly clock collector wants to be saved before he hears his last chime. And so Wilson has spent recent months apologizing to “the people I had trouble with.” He has embraced black men his own age, at the same lunch counter where once they were denied service and hauled off to jail. Wilson has carried his apology into black churches where he has unburdened it in prayer. And he has taken it to Washington, to the office of U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Atlanta, the civil rights leader whose face Wilson smashed at the Greyhound bus station during the famed Freedom Rides 48 years ago.

The article is long and is worth the read. We all joke that “Hope” is President Obama’s middle name. Well Hope is Mr. Wilson’s middle name, and he just gave me tons of it. For the evil and hate in this world, there is also forgiveness, love, and hope. It is one of my firm beliefs, as both a liberal and a Catholic, that anyone can be redeemed. Yes, even Mr. Wilson, who in the article doubts where he should or will be forgiven. I hope Mr. Wilson has found peace in the final chapter of his life. I hope others can find it at the beginning of theirs.