The state attempted to kill Christa Pike, she survived, and then they had to save her life. I find that deeply disturbing, and it raises many questions for me. She received two doses of the execution drug pentobarbital. Incidentally, animals are mostly given sedation before euthanasia, sometimes with pain relief too. One properly administered execution dose is all that’s usually required to end a life. But her continued breathing meant two execution attempts failed—it is suspected the drugs entered the arm tissue rather than being delivered properly into the veins. She is now in hospital reportedly unconscious, on a ventilator, and receiving treatment for serious injuries to both arms. Her prognosis is unclear and Tennessee has paused executions for now.

We also need to remember Colleen Slemmer, the young woman Pike killed, and particularly her mother. Her mother’s grief, rage and need for closure are understandable, especially given her long wait for the return of a part of Colleen’s skull, taken by Pike at the time of the killing and held by the state as evidence. We have to remember that loss when we speak about compassion for Pike. It’s impossible to understand what it’s like to lose a child from the outside of that experience.

But what can another death resolve and what are we hoping will end when the person responsible is dead? If our focus is on justice as opposed to forgiveness, then we risk recycling trauma. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or letting someone off the hook. It’s about disentangling ourselves, and becoming free of resentment, bitterness, grief and rage.

And let’s not forget what it must be like being on that execution team, who are prison guards—not necessarily members of a specially trained execution team, as we might imagine. There are documented accounts of prison staff involved in executions experiencing psychological trauma, including reports of guards seeing death row executees standing at the foot of their beds. And imagine going in with the initial mindset of having to kill someone and then having to make the decision to switch to life-saving emergency treatment. Just imagine being Christa herself, who reportedly had made peace with her own death, even helping her executors find the right veins, and then potentially having to go through all this again should she survive and be judged competent for execution.

Sure we can look at the physical reasons why this execution and others fail. But I keep coming back to this: what does it say about us that we can authorise someone’s killing and then arrange to save their life in the same evening? There is something ludicrous about trying to kill someone and then trying to save their life.

Well, America is a Western civilisation that speaks of human rights and the value of human life. Yet it also decides whose life it is entitled to end. It goes without saying that this extends beyond the issue of the death penalty. But in Pike’s case, the state authorised her death on the understanding that it would be carried out humanely. So at what point exactly did the attempt to execute her become inhumane?

I think what this situation exposes is how much reassurance we get from the idea of a “humane execution”. We would rather not look too closely at an execution gone wrong. Or the execution of an innocent person. So rather than looking at whether executions should happen at all, we look at whether the procedure is carried out correctly, humanely.

But in reality, no execution is humane. And when an execution goes wrong, we find ourselves disturbed by the suffering of someone whose killing we had already accepted. But I find it strange that we only begin to object when that suffering becomes prolonged or more visible. Would a quick and apparently painless death settle the matter for us? And nearly 30 years on death row in solitary, let out 1 hour a day, was also suffering of an emotional and spiritual nature.

For me, there is something deeper to look at here. I understand the divine as present within all of life, including the experiences that bring us face to face with horrendous acts that we would rather push aside. I don’t know why it happened this way. But it has forced us to look at something we have become far too willing to accept.

With Venus now retrograde in Scorpio, these questions about life, death and what values we hold sacred feel particularly relevant. With Venus here, we are encouraged to ask how we can hold life sacred but at the same time also take it. It is easy to speak of the sanctity of life in the abstract. People throw this around all the time. But what of that when we encounter someone whose actions horrify us? How do we reconcile that within us. Sovereign Being is about this.

Sovereign Being is also about examining the enormous power entrusted to courts and governments over human life, and our own responsibility to question what they do with it. My position is that all human life has inherent value, including the life of someone who has taken life. We can hold someone responsible for what they have done and keep others safe without taking life.

Within Sovereign Being, a life’s inherent value comes from the divine within each of us. That value cannot change, period. It exists before and after a judgement is passed on someone. If we understand life to be sacred, we have to ask what that means or what changes if someone has acted so profoundly against it.

While the state can legally authorise an execution, we still have to grapple with whether the state taking life is right. Sovereignty means we still have to answer to our own conscience and our own relationship with the divine. That can’t be sidestepped. And what we each decide is important, because it will impact the death penalty’s continuation.

The state gives expression to a society’s collective consciousness, reflecting the Zeitgeist—the spirit of the age. And spiritually, collective support for the death penalty sustains an egregore—a collective thought-form fed by the belief that some people deserve to be killed. The danger is that this becomes so accepted and ingrained in society that we stop asking whether it is right for people to be killed with our so-called collective approval.

If we speak of the divine within every person, we need to be clear what we actually mean by that and what must change to reflect that. It must apply to how we treat the living person before us, and that includes someone whose actions horrify us. And it has to guide what we, together, allow to be done to them.