Until one day, the little fellow crosses a big line and commits a serious weapons offense - and he knows the shoe is coming down. He feels guilty, he feels like he's let himself down, and he feels his self-control is under attack. Instead of seeing his prank as a sign of adulthood and giving him the respect such a prank deserves, the powers-that-be have punished him as if he were the weakest of children. They have put him down yet again. He can never win.

And secretly he is afraid of his parents. He is afraid, perhaps most of all, that they will see him as an even bigger child than before - as someone who cannot take care of himself; as a baby needing more discipline and more direct control.

When a world is turned upside-down, and you realize you are to be taken away from your peers for a year, maybe slipped back a grade, perhaps put in another school, perhaps sent into the army, treated as an outcast instead of an adult, then the anger sets in along with the fear - and you lose it. It's just not fair. Nothing is fair.

And in your moment of anger, you grasp for something...

And you find you are holding a gun in that moment of fury and weakness. And you find the trigger has just been pulled, so easily, so gently, so smoothly, so unintentionally. And you find you have done something horribly and irreparably wrong. And the bottom sinks out of your world. Everything goes red. Your face is on fire. You have crossed the point of no return. You have made the last mistake. You have relinquished your life. It's over.

And your mind is no longer thinking in straight lines. Every possible thought is swirling in your head. You see God and Hell and prison and torture and blood and family and fire. Something snaps. Some thin tendon that connects you to reality is broken, and you are flailing in a vat of molten blood.

And the thoughts that follow have no logic anymore. You do not seek to clean up your mess or cover your tracks. Your mind is not working for self-preservation. You are caught somewhere between defending yourself from all attackers and wiping your evil self and all who made it thus, from the face of the earth. It is not penance; it is an acting-out of the evil that this event proves you certainly must be.

Without a live human being here anymore to condemn you or to offer you forgiveness and a way out, you hear only the message of condemnation in your head. You have been given up on. You are bad. You are undisciplined and evil and out of control. You internalize those accusations. You affirm them, not because you want to but because you feel your accident has underlined the accusations as true.

You feel by your one act of fury and rage that you have crossed the border into Hell from which there is no return.

A distant voice talking through your mouth tells your friend it's too late. You are amazed that this Murderer can control himself enough to talk. The voice sounds distant, foreign, like an echo from someone else's voice. You are a million miles outside yourself looking down. Nothing is as it was. There is no respite. The vicious turning of things does not end. You just want it to be over. You know it will spiral downwards until you are finally all gone. But for now, as you are disintegrating, you are tossed to and fro in your madness, acting without thought or reason or purpose or direction.

There's a sound in the driveway. The hands at the end of those distant arms take the gun. The hands fire the gun. Your head is spinning. You cannot take the sight of any more blood. You never meant to cause such pain. You try to mouth the words of regret. But you are not in control of what your body is doing. It is operating somewhere a million miles beneath you, and you can no longer feel your hands clutching the gun.

Hours pass and the whirlpool has not stopped spinning. You see your Self fill his trenchcoast with weapons. You see your Self taping a knife to his leg. The actions are mechanical, robotic. Something or someone is making your Self do what he does. You don't know who. He is like a zombie driving towards the cliff with a foot on the accelerator and no capacity to even form the thought about taking take it off. And your destiny is tied to your Self's actions as surely as if it were a concrete block chained to your legs and sinking to the bottom of the sea.

You know you are losing it, losing your grip on sanity, dissolving like sugar in an ocean. You know you are spiraling down towards death as your Self's hand mechanically clutches the firing weapon. And when it is over and you feel them holding down your body, you hear your Self demand to die. Shoot me. Shoot me. Shoot me. Shoot me. Shoot me now. Shoot me now. But you are not shot and you do not die.

And gradually, the spinning fades and you return to the empty blackness that haunts you. You are crying. You are cold. You are sick to your stomach. You are impassive. You are like hot and cold running water all at the same time.

And you feel as if you are supposed to die for what you have done. You are Judas. You have betrayed those you most loved. You feel unsavable, unforgivable, unlovable.

All hope is gone.

But my son, my son, that was not you in there.

It was all an accident spun madly out of control - like the Romeo who thinks his Juliet is dead and loses all hope and sanity and thought for himself, and ends it all in a moment of sheer desperation.

That, son, is not you. That is not who you are. The person who did those terrible things is inside all of us. Each man has his madness. Older men know their madness better and can control it. But younger men - whether in battle or on the streets or in love or in the home - when the madness comes, they sometimes lose control.

You lost control. I do not blame you. I grieve for you.

Can a man be redeemed for what he has done in madness? I believe it is within the power of all of us to comprehend that madness and to forgive it. No, everything is not okay. But enough horrors have been committed in the name of madness today. Let us restrain ourselves from committing another. Let us mourn the damage by allowing the damaged one to grieve with us, as one of us.

If we cannot forgive you, we embrace with sanity the crime you committed in madness. If we cannot forgive you, how much more difficult will it be for us to be forgiven?