Restorative Justice, Inside Out

My first sermon

Dear reader,

It’s not often these days that I have the chance to deliver my writing live to an in-person audience. I used to speak quite a bit when my book first came out, but it was always in the role of author, not minister.

Since receiving my ordination last summer from the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine, I haven’t really known what it means for me to be an interfaith minister. Who is my congregation? Where do I preach, and worship, and offer my spiritual services? What are my services anyway?!

There’s nothing prefabricated or clearcut for an interfaith mutt like me. We’re in the wild out here. No universal guidelines or doctrines. No collectively agreed-upon rituals or commandments. No ancient lineage. You, I, we, the cultural orphans who’ve left behind religion but still feel the spiritual impulse: We have to find our own way. Make it up. Make it real. Make it something more than a mere reaction to what we came from, and something other than an imitation of what we never had.

But I digress.

This past spring, the Unitarian Universalist Church in Newburyport, MA invited me to offer a sermon for one of their summer worship services. It was the first time I’ve ever preached in a church as a pastor. I will say, it was nice, for a moment, to feel what it might feel like to have a church (with a steeple!), an inheritance of guidelines to follow, the generational momentum of tradition, a congregation. To just show up to work, do my job, and get paid for it.

But alas, and thank God, my path isn’t so clear. There is no church for me but the church of this moment. No congregation other than the humans of right here and now. And I am not your minister so much as I am a guy who cares as best he can and shares when he is able—ideally twice monthly here in the Little Courtyard, and sometimes elsewhere out there in the world when the world knocks on my door.

My gratitude to Reverend Julie Amery, Reverend Jane Tuohy, and worship associate Stephen-Wolf Foster for facilitating this particular invitation.

I chose a quote from Mother Teresa to guide my reflections for the service, copied below.

Thanks for dropping in, people. Good to be out here in the wild with ya.

Sincerely,

Andrew

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If we have no peace, it’s because we’ve forgotten that we belong to each other.

—Mother Teresa

In my day job, I facilitate circles in my local public schools. Restorative circles, they’re called. Sometimes these circles are about responding to a crisis or a conflict. More often, they’re just about building community, deepening our understanding of one another. You’d think this would be fairly straightforward. You just get in a circle and share, right?

Well, a circle can be a pretty scary thing to be in, if you think about it for a second. To just sit in a circle together, without any desks or tables to hide behind, with the invitation to share something real, something vulnerable perhaps, something honest from the heart of your own humanity: that’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. How much realness are you going to risk? Can you trust the others not to judge you, if you open up? Will they accept you as you are? 

To be seen, to be heard, to be held by the attention of others: these are things we think we want, but when it comes down to it, to the prospect of actually letting ourselves be seen and heard and held, face to face, real time, things start to get a little more complicated. Would you open up in a circle like that? 

Opening up. Yikes, right? Imagine if I was like, all right people, we’re getting rid of this pulpit, we’re gonna move the pews out of the room, and we’re gonna circle up, and instead of me talking, we’re gonna make space for each of us to open up. Sound good? 

Now imagine doing that in middle school. Or high school.

Sure, maybe in theory it’s no big deal, but in practice it’s a loaded and complicated thing, to step into a circle with other human beings. Because we are loaded, with the great, gorgeous weight of our humanity. We are complicated, with our fears and longings, our wounds and prejudices, the shadows we don’t realize we’re in, the light we can’t bear to see in ourselves. Our ancestries. Our history. To take all of that, all of who we are, and then enter into a space where it, where we, will be invited out to be witnessed: this is a vulnerable proposition.

Sometimes, people are ready to take the leap right away. I remember one circle with a group of after-school care providers who’d never been in a restorative circle before. But they had so much trust built up amongst themselves, that once we got into the process, the tears started to flow, tears of grief, about some of the struggles they’d been carrying alone, tears of relief, to finally share those struggles, tears of love for each other, and the shy, precious tears of feeling loved. This was over the course of about 45 minutes. We got there, somehow.

But that’s not always how it goes. Sometimes people just don’t wanna. Which is understandable. Being vulnerable in our society is a pretty big risk. 

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I’m not sure that being vulnerable is intrinsically terrifying. I think it’s just that we live in a culture that doesn’t respect and revere vulnerability. We learn that it’s dangerous to be vulnerable, to open up, to share who we really are. We learn this by experience, when our vulnerabilities are exploited or mocked, and then we begin to live our lives accordingly, adjusting to the unfortunate reality that our world is not one in which we can share our uncertainties, our fragilities, our tender longings - the realities of our humanity. And so we keep it to ourselves, the truth, and start missing each other like ships in the night. We can’t see whoever it is we’re looking at because we haven’t heard their stories. They can’t see us, because we haven’t told them ours. In these gaps of understanding, it becomes possible to misperceive one another and start believing that we do not belong to each other, and that we ourselves do not belong.  

This is not the way it has to be. It’s not the way it is, in some cultures. 

Restorative practices, or restorative justice, and more recently, transformative justice: these are modern words that are now being used to describe an ancient way of being, a way of living, that many Indigenous communities from around the world have been cultivating for thousands of years. We, in modern mainstream society, are not discovering something new here. We are remembering what Indigenous people, and our own pre-colonial ancestors, have known for ages: that we exist in a network of relationships, and that these relationships have to be tended and honored, understood and protected, in order to maintain balance within and without. 

What would that world look like?

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It might look like that one afternoon this past winter with that alt ed class I’d already visited a few times. These were the kids for whom school just didn’t work. I had tried a few times to do circles with them, but they weren’t having it. They’d talk over each other, make fun of each other. Or they wouldn’t talk at all. One kid would lay facedown on the floor by the wall, just passed out. Once they realized I wasn’t going to force them to do anything they didn’t want to do, things started to change. And then came the day one girl took the risk, told us about how her parents were fighting at home. We met her with reverence, and questions, and gratitude. Following her lead, one boy then told us about how he was living with his uncle, because his mother was having a relapse, because her other son died by suicide and the dad had left the family. We met him with reverence, and questions, and gratitude. That’s all it took for the rest of them to take the dive. 

What would change, if we knew what we were looking at when we looked at each other?

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Restorative justice centers relationships. It asks, what harm was caused, to whom, and what needs to be done to find balance again? It focuses on accountability instead of punishment. It relies upon a whole community to support the healing process. But it’s not just a tool for harm repair. It’s a way of life, a practice, of listening, and of the willingness to be in relationship - or rather, to face the fact that we are in relationship, whether we like it or not, and to then show up to the work of learning whatever it is that that relationship has to teach us. 

But how do we do this work, how do we center relationships, in a society that was built by and upon the premise that we are not related to one another? I am not related to you. This is how we did slavery. This is how we do genocide and war. Our history is a history of believing that we are not related, and this continues to be the grease that lubricates the gears of our civilization. Believing that we are not related is what makes it acceptable for me to cut you off in traffic, or to curse you when you cut me off. Our relationship doesn’t really matter. Believing this is how I walk past you when you’re holding a sign that says you need help and could I spare some change, or a sign that says you support a presidential candidate I don’t care for. The myth of separation is much more convenient in these moments than the reality of our interconnectedness. But is convenience really what we’ve come here for? 

There is a powerful momentum to the myth of separation, built up over the course of generations. How do we interrupt the relational patterns that come from this myth, that hijack us into acting as if we do not belong to one another?

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Restorative circles can help. They might even be essential. But what we are capable of doing together is the result of what we have learned how to do with ourselves, in our own minds and hearts, in the privacy of our own healing. The interpersonal, between me and you, is a reflection of the intrapersonal, my relationship with myself, and you with yours. 

Being in relationship with the fullness of our own humanity is what it means to live restorative justice from the inside out. It means looking for the parts of yourself that you’ve tried to banish, imprison, even execute. It means learning how to heal the divisions inside. Learning how to face the loneliness, and listen to it, but also how to hold it accountable. How to facilitate a conversation between your jealousy and your generosity. In this way, we become restorative justice. It’s not only something that has to happen out there with the convicted felon who caused harm against another. It’s something each of us does within ourselves. How much of ourselves are we prepared to forgive, to accept, to understand? That is the love that then moves us in relationship with one another.

There is a circle inside each of us, and a seat in that circle for each part of us. My fear has a throne of its own in the circle inside myself. My hope has a throne. My desperation. Every thought, every feeling, every aspect of myself that arises into experience belongs in my circle. Or, that’s the prayer at least. The practice. The invitation. Can we invite all of ourselves into conversation? Can we listen, really listen? Can we build a relationship within that denies nothing and meets everything? The disappointment. The shame. The many forms of believing we’re separate, and the stories that go along with that belief: stories of better than and less than, stories of right and wrong, stories of I’m alone and they’re not like us and he is this and she is that and I, and I, and I, and who am I?

Who are we?

I don’t know. 

We find out by being in relationship. With each other, if we’re lucky enough to realize we already are. And with ourselves, always. 

So, what does it mean, to belong to each other? And what does it mean, for all of our own selves to belong to ourselves? We are each, I think, living these questions as bravely and beautifully as we know how. I thank you for that, and I honor the many millions of human beings who have lived these questions before our time so that we now can ask them of ourselves and to each other.

Who are you? What do you love? Where does it hurt? How does it feel? Why are you here? 

We get to ask each other. We get to ask ourselves. In circles, yes, but also in passing, wherever we find ourselves, whenever we remember, whenever we dare. May we dare every day, dare to ask, and dare to share. 

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May we know that our nature is blessing, and that wherever we are is where we need to be to cultivate relationship with the sacred divine beauty of that nature, our nature, which is Gaia, which is Goddess, which is God.

And may we walk gently today with ourselves, in joy, and when it hurts, today or in the days to come, may our gentleness guide us home and our joy receive us there with open arms and a big smile that says I’ve been waiting for you.

Amen.