Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
September 16, 2018
Audio:
Two weeks ago we had a service on the practice of forgiveness.
I left that service feeling like there was still much more we could talk about. For example, on her way out that day, one of you brought up: “What about forgiveness in the context of the thousands of Catholic priests guilty of sexual abuse?” That had been on my mind, too. … As well as a recent article by one of my seminary professors asking: In the midst of the #metoo movement, why does our culture often rush so quickly to forgive male perpetrators of sexual assault?
Who are we more likely to easily forgive, and why? What hurts in our world need to be listened to longer before the call to forgive and reconcile? What is the role of justice in the forgiveness process?
So I changed my sermon topic for today so we can consider Forgiveness and Justice.
During the ongoing #metoo movement, prominent men (and occasionally a woman) have been accused of wrongdoing – Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Morgan Freeman…the list goes on. And there has sometimes been worry over whether some of the consequences these men have faced have swung the pendulum too far.
Morgan Freeman himself, said “I am devastated that 80 years of my life is at risk of being undermined, in the blink of an eye, by Thursday’s media reports.”
Some find themselves wondering, is the end of a career too high a price to pay? What if it was “just” offensive comments and not technical assault? Emily Click, from Harvard Divinity School says:
This argument runs the risk of perpetuating an old harm done, not just by victimizers, but also by the “rest of us.” What we as a society have failed to do, and need now to repent, is to count the price victims have paid. … I understand the call to right and proper forgiveness. I would ask, however, that we wait to make such a call. Instead, it is a time for listening. ((https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/articles/springsummer2018/listen-first))
So, too, in the most recent Catholic clergy abuse scandal, it’s clear that many high-ranking officials privileged their colleagues’ careers and privacy over ever truly listening to the victims.
LISTENING LONGER
I bet that we have not stopped to really listen because it is too uncomfortable. If we really listened to victims’ pain, and the ways their lives have been affected, what hard truths would we have to confront in our culture, in the human condition, in ourselves?
So, in some ways what I’m talking about today is about communal forgiveness. About times when our culture must wrestle with dis-ease within it, and when – instead of really facing the pain – we rush too quickly to a quick and cheap forgiveness – which is not true forgiveness at all. Or we rush to retributive justice – which is usually not justice at all.
In Desmond and Mpho Tutu’s fourfold path of forgiveness, the first two steps are “telling the story,” and “naming the hurt.” ((The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, Desmond and Mpho Tutu))
How often do we – as individuals and as a culture – skip these steps?
How often do we look away from the gritty details of the story?
How practiced are we at naming hurts?
These are Tutu’s requirements for acknowledging the pain:
• Listen
• Do not try to fix the pain
• Do not minimize the loss.
• Do not offer advice.
• Do not respond with your own loss or grief.
• Keep confidentiality.
• Empathize and offer comfort.
These can be hard to do whether we are listening to a dear friend or to someone we don’t know.
Again, how practiced are we at naming hurts, at facing the truth of pain?
TRUTH and RECONCILIATION
In our country, we have never had a Truth & Reconciliation process – related either to the decimation of native peoples, or to our hideous history of slavery.
We expect the ancestors of these native and African-American people to just move on, let it go. …Even though it has been proven that trauma lives on psychologically, passed down to ancestors, and that the economic and social costs of colonialism and slavery have never been recouped. I think the call to reparations – to somehow practically repay native and African-American people for all that was taken from them – is not even as scary as the truth process that would be required to determine the scale of those reparations.
True forgiveness is achieved in community… and it can be accomplished only in truth. That truth, however, is not mere knowledge. It is acknowledgment. It is a coming to terms with and it is a labor. – Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt should know.
She was a Jewish philosopher living during the Holocaust. Afterward, she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, whom the New York Times had labeled “the most evil monster of humanity.” Based on her observations – on her facing of the truth – she determined that he was -not- the most evil monster. She said that any evil that lived in him also lived in us.
She coined the phrase, “the banality of evil” (banality meaning normal… everyday…). She said we are all capable of contributing to evil conditions by going with the flow, not evaluating the consequences of our seemingly trivial actions.
This is a photo of staff at Auschwitz in 1944. We all know what was happening then and there. ((https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/laughing-at-auschwitz-1942/))
We all like to think that we would not be these people – that we would be able to clearly face the truth of the evil going on around us and do whatever it took to not participate in it.
But would we? Do we?
HOW?
What kind of spiritual and community practices do we need in order to develop our ability to face the truth, to listen to pain, to understand our own complicity in the suffering around us, to create true justice and forgiveness?
I think that this is one of the hard truths we face when we truly listen to the voices of victims.
The truth is that pain in this world is not isolated and discrete – it’s not over there… separate from me.
Pain travels along the interdependent web that connects all of us, and healing that pain, preventing more pain – requires all of us to turn and face it among us and within us.
This truth about pain is the rationale behind a different sort of justice process called restorative justice.
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
Our criminal system uses retributive justice, which looks at what laws were broken and what punishment the perpetrator must receive. But here’s how Desmond Tutu – who was part of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation commission – describes Restorative Justice:
Restorative justice ..begins from the premise that a crime is an act not against the State but against another person and against the community. In this model of justice, accountability is based on the offender taking responsibility both for the harm they have caused and for taking action to repair the hurt. Victims are not peripheral to this process of justice…but play an integral role in deciding what is needed to repair the harm… and the fabric of the community. Restorative justice seeks to recognize the humanity in each of us, whether we are victims or perpetrators. … {And} …forgiveness is central to restorative justice. ((The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, Desmond and Mpho Tutu))
Breaking the cycles of pain and violence in our world requires both TRUE justice and REAL forgiveness.
So I’ll close with a story from our own UU universe about restorative justice.
Last year, Barbara Handley and I went to New Orleans for General Assembly, the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists. On the final morning of worship, our newly elected President interrupted worship to say that the night before, two UUA staff people: Tim Byrne and James Curran were violently robbed and severely injured in the French Quarter. Tim was in critical condition. ((https://www.uuworld.org/articles/two-uua-employees-robbed-new-orleans))
The four suspects were black youth age 18-21. Two turned themselves in. Three had been residents at a shelter for young adults at risk.
The shocking and bloody incident was caught on surveillance camera and quickly became such a viral video that New Orleans city officials worried that the story would deter potential tourists to the French Quarter. ((https://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2017/06/french_quarter_beating_arrests.html))
When President Susan Frederick-Gray made her announcement that morning she said:
I want to acknowledge the sorrow, fear, anger, and heartbreak of seeing a loved one, a member of our community, violently attacked. . . . Throughout the General Assembly, we reflected on the narratives and wider systems of oppression that perpetuate both systemic and personal violence. This week, those reflections became personal and proximate.
Just the night before, our Ware lecturer, defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, had talked about the injustices and inequities in our prison system and the hard paths that lead there. He said there are four essential things that we must do to create a more just and equal world:
- Get proximate to the poor, the excluded, neglected, and abused
- Change the narratives that underlie racism and other inequalities
- Stay hopeful about creating justice
- Be willing to do uncomfortable things.
So here was one of those uncomfortable things.
That next morning President Susan Frederick-Gray invited us to hold the attackers “with the universal love” we also hold for James and Tim.
I don’t think this is an example of cheap forgiveness – of rushing too quickly to forgive, like we sometimes have with some of the prominent men accused of sexual abuse. It’s also not like the cover-ups in the Catholic sexual abuse scandal.
We have to ask: whose pain are we listening to, whose freedoms or livelihoods are we defending? Is it only the people who have already experienced lives of privilege and power? Are we privileging their stories before first listening to the pain of the victims?
The victims in this case were certainly in pain. Tim Byrne was unconscious for 24 hours after the attack and doctors were afraid he might die. His fellow staff at the UUA, and the local UU congregation reached out to provide comfort and practical aid over the many months that Tim underwent physical, occupational, and speech therapy. He’s finally now back to work full-time.
A few months after the attack, he says that one of his co-workers, Elizabeth Nguyen, senior strategist for our UU Side with Love campaign, brought up the idea of restorative justice.
Tim said that both he and his husband “both quickly felt like this sounds better than anything the criminal justice system could do.” Tim said he learned the four men “were of the age where they were deeply affected by [Hurricane] Katrina and were displaced,” and that they had aged out of foster care and had been living in a shelter. He also learned that the UU group in New Orleans was collecting money each month so the defendants could purchase soap and shampoo in the jail.
He said, “wait a minute, they have to pay for soap? That’s not a luxury. So that crystallized for me that [prison is] just not humane.” James and Tim both wrote letters to the court advocating for restorative justice. He hoped that he and James and their families could meet with the defendants. He hoped there would be some kind of “monitored transition” where the young men were put on a disciplined and overseen path to make improvements, whether that be education, training, job skills…
He said, “I’d rather that they not go to jail. My sense is that that is not a system that’s going to improve people.” ((https://www.uuworld.org/articles/nola-restorative-justice))
Unfortunately, the prosecutors were dismissive, saying, Yeah, that’s not going to happen. They’re probably going to get 20 years.
Tim wrote a second letter, saying, “Recidivism statistics show that incarceration doesn’t stop criminal activity, but creates more of it. We all want to prevent Dejuan, Joshua, Nicholas, and Rashaad from reoffending. In this case, I believe a different approach, one that starts with a real acknowledgement/confrontation on the part of the young men of harms done (and demonstrated commitment to change), and that incorporates services for substance abuse, anger management, and counseling, has the most chance of leading to the desired outcome.”
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, a group of about thirty UUs had been working to encourage the restorative justice process on the case, meeting with the defense attorneys and DA, writing letters to the judge. They provided the young men with books as well as money to buy soap in jail. With Tim and James’ permission, ten or so UUs attended each court hearing over the past year, often wearing our iconic yellow Side with Love t-shirts or Black Lives Matter t-shirts.
Unfortunately, the story didn’t end the way they hoped. The young men were each sentenced to 5-8 years in prison for each charge. Tim and James felt these sentences were less than if they hadn’t gotten involved, but they were still disappointed. ((https://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2018/05/4_plead_guilty_in_french_quart.html))
Susan Frederick-Gray acknowledged this disappointment, as well as our commitment to keep up the work. She said:
ONE THING WE CAN DO
So I’ll end with one take-away about how we can translate this communal restorative justice process to our own everyday lives.
Here are the elements of an effective apology. What would it mean if we all got really good at giving good apologies?
• Common understanding of what happened
• Recognition of responsibility
• Acknowledgment of pain
• A judgment about the offense
• Statement of regret
• Offer of repair
For example:
Yesterday on the phone, I said…
I spoke without thinking.
It’s understandable that hurt you.
I was insensitive.
I’m sorry I said that.
How can I make it right? Or: In the future, I’ll be more mindful.
(notice there are no excuses, explanations, or justifications)
You can see here some of the things we’ve been talking about:
Acknowledgment of pain (and our part in it)…Offering repair.
An Ohio State University study found these are the two most important parts of an effective apology.
The good news is that we have opportunities every day to practice this.
We have opportunities every day to get better at facing the hurts in the world, at understanding our own responsibility, at working for true justice, at finding real forgiveness – for ourselves and for others.
What a blessing it is to do this important work together.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon