Sunday
We think fear, anger, divine intimidation, threat, and punishment are going to lead people to love. We cannot lead people to the highest level of motivation by teaching them the lowest. God always and forever models the highest, and our task is merely to “imitate God.”
—Richard Rohr
Monday
When the common good is the focus, preaching is not about imposing guilt and shame on individuals, but about giving vision and encouragement to society.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Restorative justice—the divine freedom to do good at all costs—is quite simply God being consistently true to Godself.
—Richard Rohr
Wednesday
Grace offers us a vision for justice that is restorative and dedicated to healing the wounds of injustice. But the grace thing is hard work.
—Shane Claiborne
Thursday
As I looked at the life of Jesus in scripture I did not see someone who came to hurt, punish, or put us to death. Jesus came to heal and help us, to rehabilitate and reconcile us, to restore to us the life that was lost by “original sin.” God’s idea of justice is restoration, not punishment.
—Marietta Jaeger Lane
Friday
We have to begin with dualistic thinking, just as we must first develop a healthy ego and frame before we can move beyond it. We must first be capable of some basic distinctions between good and evil before we can hold paradox.
—Richard Rohr
Week Nine Practice
Personal Practices of Restoration
Writer and activist adrienne maree brown connects our ability to practice restorative justice to our individual capacity for resilience in the face of harm. We cannot practice collectively what we have not practiced in our own lives and personal relationships:
Resilience is a way of understanding how we recover from harm, our capacity to bounce back. Trauma and oppression are part of the current reality of our species, but there is wholeness and beauty that comes before, during and after the pain. There is a place in each of us, what Maya Angelou called our “inviolate place,” a place we can return to.
We are always more than our trauma—individually, collectively, intergenerationally, ancestrally.
We are socialized, trained, encouraged and given permission to punish each other. Punishment starts very early in most of our lives. Time-outs, spankings, detention, suspension, expulsion, juvenile detention, jail, prison, solitary confinement, death… even when it isn’t our politic or intention, we pass on these punitive behaviors to others who cause harm or challenge us. In this way, a cycle of punishment perpetuates.
Your work is to break the cycle of punishment in any room you hold….
Restoration can be a transformative, healing act in a community…. Transformative justice is a way of moving into accountability, deepening relationship, clarifying boundaries, and opening the way for more collective possibilities….
Practice transformative justice in your closest relationships. Choose patience, communication, mediation, curiosity, boundaries, and uprooting harm over cancellation, public humiliation, ghosting people, or other methods of disposing of people. The more you practice it personally, the more you will be able to support others through it politically and collectively.
Reference:
adrienne maree brown, Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation (AK Press, 2021), 166–167, 171–172.
Image Credit: Jordan Heath, untitled (detail), 2018, photo, New Zealand, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. At the meeting of river and lake, we see the great watershed of God’s mercy— justice rolling wide and without vengeance, drawing us into a love larger than our own grievances and inviting us toward the common good.
