Desmond Tutu sat in a room that smelled of old wood and exhaled grief. Across from him, a man spoke about a life he had taken. He detailed the time, the place, and the silence that followed. The man waited for the weight of the law to crush him. He waited to be called a monster. He waited to be cast out from the human family.

Tutu looked at him. But he didn’t look with a judge's squint. He looked with the steady gaze of a brother. He noted that even this man, this perpetrator of the unthinkable, was a child of God. He saw the humanity of the victim and the perpetrator as a single, tangled cord. One could not be free while the other was discarded.