I did something new not long ago. In my prayers at a memorial service, I remembered not just the deceased, his children, and friends but also the two people he murdered.
Here was a man who bore in his own body the sins of his country, what had been done and left undone. Here was a ser­vice that constituted a prayer that the country of his birth find a future bigger than its past. Here were leaders of that country, past and present, gathered to respect a man who had the courage, dignity, and humility to change his mind.
Seán O’Callaghan was born in Ireland and grew up understanding nationalism as a religion and terrorism as an act of devotion. He joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army as a teenager and soon had two conquests to his name, a police officer and a reservist soldier. After learning of a policewoman’s death, Seán heard a top IRA officer say, “I hope she’s pregnant and we get two for the price of one.” That was the decisive moment—the telling judgment. Seán recognized this was no noble contest, but a squalid sectarian war.
He changed his tune. He became the most senior informer in the organization, working with the Irish government to undermine the IRA’s efforts from within. His efforts started to have notable effects—information he shared even helped thwart an attempt to assassinate the heir to the British throne. But after six years Seán could stand the secrecy and subterfuge no longer. He gave himself up to the police and was sentenced to prison for 539 years. Another six years passed before he made the next step, publicly renouncing the paramilitary cause and all it stood for. He told his family he could never have any contact with them again.
Three years later, having received a pardon, Seán walked free—although freedom meant a life in hiding. “I keep looking in front of me as well as behind me,” he said. “That’s just how it is.” Freedom also meant it was time to enter recovery from the drinking that had long drowned his abiding guilt.
Seán had lived his life among lies: initially the deceit and secrecy of terror brigades, then the mystery and concealment of being a spy, and finally the danger and disguise of living in hiding from the ruthless revenge of the organization he once adored. He wanted somehow to glean dignity, integrity, and wisdom from the ashes of false ideals and the poison of broken trust. He knew how the mind of a terrorist works, and to the end of his days he labored to communicate insight and dismantle fanaticism.
Right now I'm reading In the Garden of Beasts, by master storyteller Erik Larson. It is the captivating story of William E. Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany during Hitler's rise to power. Dodd's young adult daughter Martha, a socialite who had affairs with the head of the Gestapo and a Russian spy, steals the show. Next I plan to read Stephen Ozment's sweeping survey A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People.
When you read children’s literature you expect to smile at the quirky characters fumbling to figure out their growing independence. You might expect to cry as you watch characters face the pain of growing up. You don’t expect to be confronted by current events like a refugee crisis—and inspired to imagine the kind of society we could be even in the face of terror and fear.
The show Homeland puts viewers in a moral vice and squeezes.