Towards a Deeper Reconciliation
[i]
By Charles Rush
October 20, 2013
Genesis 33: 1-11, 2 Corinthians 5: 17-20
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.0Mb) ]
en I
was in college, one of my distant relatives had dropped out of school and was traveling around the country on a walkabout, as the Australians say, probably reading books by Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. At one point, he returns home town, a town like Middlebury, Vermont. In fact, his dad taught at a college just like Middlebury College. He was always a very gregarious and inclusive young man, and he meets a guy his own age that is troubled and moody, like quite a few boys that age. They do a few things together. One day, this guy is supposed to do something with my cousin and my cousin has a conflict, tells the guy that he can't make it. This guy gets upset, comes over to my cousins apartment. My cousin opens the door, repeats that he has a conflict. This guy gets agitated, pulls out a handgun that he had in his jacket, shoots my cousin in the head and kills him.
He's 21 years
old. The police call his Mother and tell her that her son is dead, killed by
someone that she's never met, for any apparent reason. The murderer was quickly
apprehended but the facts of the case were never really presented to the
parents of the deceased. Over a series of months, a plea deal was eventually
worked out. At the sentencing, it became obvious that the murderer's attorneys
had made the case that the accused was mentally unstable because of drug use,
etc., and that his story was that this was a drug deal gone bad, with poor
judgment used and the prosecutor eventually agreed to his plea on a
manslaughter charge of some kind with the judge giving him 7 years in jail.
My cousin was
not a drug dealer. The truth is they probably smoked pot together, but all of
his brothers and sisters and his other cousins knew that he wasn't using any of
the drugs like crank or crystal meth that might make plausible the notion that
this was a drug deal that led to some explosion of anger that could lead to a
shooting. At any rate, they were never really consulted because that wasn't
part of the system.
In fact, I
believe, that some of the family members went to the sentencing hearing where
the only thing they heard was the judge asking the accused if he understood the
seriousness of what he had done. And the defendant said one word, “yes”.
I cannot
describe for you the frustration that this family felt. They never really
learned what happened. They didn't participate in the system of justice. Their
child is taken from them, their brother is taken from them. The frustration,
the rage, with no outlet. What I watched over a number of years is the way that
this rage gets transmuted into bitterness and how bitterness cuts short
people's lives. What I watched over a number of years is the way that rage gets
pushed down into your subconscious and then erupts indirectly in all these
different places in your life kind of like a subterranean demonic force. What I
watched over a number of years is the way that rage, if it is not transformed
gets transmitted to those around you that you love. You just can't help it. It
was like a curse in a William Faulkner novel that reappears in different guises
in different generations.
The effect of
anarchic tragedy is like the radial anarchy of a hand grenade that arbitrarily
explodes convulsive projectiles through the psyche of our soul maiming
permanently. It sets loose within us the barely controllable subterranean
forces of fear, rage and vengeance that override and trump joy, peace and
gratitude. It makes us edgy and tentative from then on with an amazing number
of triggers that are able to re-awaken the negative emotions in us with force
and immediacy. It feels like a curse.
Spiritually, we
have to do something about this. For all of the obvious developments in our
legal system that make it rational and effective, in this one area we could
learn a couple things from our earlier ancestors. I was reminded of that
reading Jared Diamond's new book “Until Yesterday”. Professor Diamond has been
studying the hunter-gatherer tribes in New Guinea for the past 40 years and now
that they are coming to an end- in our lifetime it is likely that there will no
longer be tribes of humans that have been cut off from all civilization- he
wanted to share what he has learned from them that might help us understand
something deeper in the human psyche. And the way that they do reconciliation
would be one of those things.
Their societies
are quite different from ours. They don't have a legal system, a police force,
an independent and impartial judiciary, a code of written law. What they have
instead is groups of clans, extended families, that stand up for each other and
enforce revenge. So, their wider world, the world outside the dominion of the
clan's territory, is filled with fear and foreboding, because the feud and the
cycle of vengeance and revenge can be never ending. He suggests that this
reason alone probably explains why almost all of us who were given the choice
between living as hunter-gatherers or surrendering some of our freedom to the
monopoly of power held by the state, represented in the police and the courts,
have chosen civilization. It is a much more peaceful and predictable world.
The bible was
born in the world before civilization. The bible may not have been written
until we lived in cities but they remember stories from centuries earlier, like
our story about Jacob and Esau, a story of two brothers who had a falling out.
Then as now, it
was about the family inheritance and Papa's blessing. Esau and Jacob were
twins, but Esau was just a couple minutes older than Jacob. His father also
loved him more, so the scriptures tell it. He was the outdoorsman, the hunter.
When their father is dying, he calls Esau to his side to bless him and name him
as the heir to the family, as was the custom then, to give almost everything to
the oldest son.
Jacob, whose
name literally means ‘the conniver'. We would call him
‘Seamus' in my family, always working a deal. Jacob overhears what is
happening, fakes his blind and ill father into thinking that he is Esau. So the
father blesses Jacob instead of Esau and gives him all of the livestock. Of
course, Jacob runs away shortly afterward, with all the loot.
Esau is livid.
It isn't just that he stole the money. It is that he faked out the old man.
It's all of the rivalry stuff that two brothers can develop over their youth
and adolescence. Nobody can piss you off to the core quite like worthless
family members. Esau was ready to kick his butt and he was more than capable of
providing a serious thumping.
So Jacob flees
and he stays on the run, always worried that he might run into his brother.
This goes on for years that turn into a couple decades. Jacob's herds grow and
he becomes rich. His older brother Esau becomes even richer, with even bigger
herds.
Then one day,
the dreaded day actually comes to pass when Jacob least expects it. Turns out
his brother are in the area. Turns out, he can't really flee. Turns out his
brother is sending a contingent of his men ahead of him, some 400 guys that
work for him. This is not good.
The Bible is short
on details of what comes next, but Professor Diamond can fill in the gaps since
he's watched this process for reconciliation take place for many years. And the
process is important because you don't want bloodshed between brothers. That is
too big a price to pay. But how do you spiritually make amends so that some new
basis can be developed, so that you can move towards a return to stasis, not
forgetting the past, but not taking up arms in retribution either?
In New Guinea,
there are special people appointed in each tribe that negotiate right at this
moment. They are recognized by other tribes and have authority to make amends.
They are especially sent if something really bad has happened like a murder or
a rape, something that enflames all of the uncles and cousins to generally take
up arms and raid the next village and burn the place down in anger.
When that
happens, the special reconciliators show up right
away, with an immediate display of gifts, say food to cover feeding all of the
people that would come to the funeral, and they request a cooling off period.
Of course, this amount of food, no single person has the money to pay, so the
whole tribe must raise the money. So the whole tribe gets involved in the
situation. Everyone donates what they agree to and the reconciliator brings the
food to the family of the victim and they agree to meet in a couple weeks.
After people
have had some time to let their anger subside, a second meeting is called. At
this meeting, the family of the victim are invited to
a table or a circle. And the perpetrator is brought with the reconcilator and he sits there. Then a longer session
begins. It begins with the family of the murder victim speaking. They describe
the shock that they felt upon hearing the tragic news that their child was
killed. They describe how he was such a loving boy, a good provider for his own
children. They talk about the void that is left with his absence.
Again, because
the whole village is distantly related, all of them have a chance to speak as
well about how they will be affected by the loss of their neighbor, their
friend, their colleague at work. This part can go on for quite a long time and
all the time, the accused and the reconciliator sit and listen. They absorb the
pain that has been inflicted.
At some point,
the accused is allowed to make a formal apology. These apologies are quite
standardized and seem to vary little from one culture to another. He also has
the chance to express remorse for his actions. That is a very vulnerable space
spiritually speaking. But guilty people need to do it and people who have been
wronged need to hear it. We share a common bond in human frailty that humanizes
us and sparks compassion that nothing else will quite do. Think of how many
times your significant arguments would have been
better resolved if the other person had simply said, “You know I'm really sorry
about that day. If I could rewind the tape, I would have done this very
differently. I inflicted harm on you and I deeply regret that. I know I can't
take it back but I want you to know that I wish I could.” How much would we be
helped with that alone.
Then he sits
down and is silent. And the reconciliatory speaks up. He makes a speech about
the suffering that the family has experienced, reflecting back to them that he
understands and has heard the sorrows of their heart and the loss they grieve.
He lifts up the qualities in the victim that were noble and cannot be replaced.
And depending on what he has heard, the severity of the crime, the extenuating
circumstances, he suggests a payment, usually pretty big, not as a price for
the life of the victim, for there is no price one can put on a life, but as a
gesture that we want to return from conflict to stasis. It is gesture of
respect and a gesture of responsibility and it is big enough and important
enough that some disgruntled uncle won't kill the accused later or kill a
family member of the accused.
The family
accepts the offer.
Some time goes
by and the reconciliator returns to the village again with the payment and
makes restitution as they agreed and as they promised. And then, and only then,
some healing can start. Spiritually we are beginning to transform the dynamic.
I imagine that
these events are almost always profound. More difficult, to be sure… But they
contain within them the possibility of redemption, the seeds of redemption.
As you may know,
in select circumstances, our judicial system has begun to incorporate aspects
of this process of reconciliation into our sentencing, and similar things are
being done in Europe. It doesn't produce predictable, cheery results, but the
process of reconciliation is more spiritually holistic.
I read of one
case in California that probably got the defendant involved because he had gone
through AA. Of the twelve steps, step four says. “I've made a searching and
fearless moral inventory of myself” and the 5th step says “I've admitted
to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the
exact nature of our wrongs.” So Mike Albertson, a 49 year old prisoner serving
a 14 year prison term for killing Danny O'Reilly when Danny was riding his
bike.
Some time after Mike had started serving
his sentence, he made himself available to an experimental program that brought
him together with Danny's widow, 41 year old Patty O'Reilly. Their session was
mediated and over 4 hours, Mike listened while Patty “told Mike her initial
feelings of hatred towards him, the details of her husband's last words to her,
how she and her two young daughters were brought the news of Danny's death by a
sheriff's deputy, and how she was still reminded of his death by such seeming
trivia as hearing a song on the radio or seeing a bicyclist.”[ii]
But this one had another feature to it.
When Mike took responsibility for his actions, he also filled in some of the
complications that attend most every situation of tragedy. Mike told Patty part
“of his life story of sexual abuse by his father, drug addiction, a broken
back, running out of painkiller pills on the night of the killing, phoning and
being rejected by his girlfriend, setting off drunk in his truck to check himself
into a hospital, seeing a bicyclist- and confessing that he may have hit Danny
on purpose, in rage against his father who had repeatedly raped him and his
mother who didn't stop it.”[iii]
And then, he took responsibility for his
actions, and he apologized for what he had done.
In the course of the next week, Patty
“felt unburdened, empowered and strong having her husband's killer hear all the
pain he had caused… Mike felt alternately drained, depressed, and uplifted by
Patty's willingness to meet with him”… and ultimately to work through to
forgiveness.
Patty had a spiritually insightful line
when it was all over. She said, “Forgiving is hard, but not forgiving is
harder.”
St. Paul called us all to become
“Ambassadors of reconciliation”. He called us to the more profound way of
living that seeks to build reconciliation into the very fabric of our lives. He
called us to work towards consensus and harmony whenever we can but Christians
have always been more realistic than most people, recognizing that there is
something flawed in us that simply has to deal with containing and healing the
very real damage that we do to one another.
Not forgiving is not only harder, it is
very costly. When I look back now on how my generation turned out and I reflect
on how you can become consumed with the negative emotions, not having recourse
to reconciliation not only cuts short your life, it taxes you with a loss of
joy, peace, and gratitude.
My brothers and sisters, I hope for you
the courage and the strength to develop the path of reconciliation, beginning
in your own home, with people around you that are retreating from one another
or avoiding one another because this impasse has been allowed to develop. I
hope you take the hard path and may you, like Alice in Wonderland, stumble into
a profounder way of being in the world. We are not asked to be perfect but we
are asked to heal where we can. Amen.
