Christianity

Reflections

• Different Types of Hope
• A Bishop's Message
• A justice that restores is a justice with a good chance of enduring
• Chapel Memo
• Towards healing, reconciliation and the new life
• On Joseph: A Victim Exercises Restorative Justice
• Pain, Justice and the Hope of Redemption
• On Crossing Bridges
• The Ten Commandments of Restorative Justice

Different Types of Hope

Adrio König

No one can live without hope. It is not for nothing that we say: If hope were not, heart would break. A life without hope is a life that is meaningless. To lose hope, means to become either totally disheartened to the point of considering suicide, or fearful, or aggressive. This does not only happen to the destitute or terminally ill, but also to the rich and powerful.

So the Gospel, being a message of hope, has something to offer to everyone. The God of the Bible is called the God of hope (Romans 15:5, 13), and of people living without Him, it is said that they are without hope (Ephesians 2:12).

To hope is to look forward to the future, to expect something that is good, at least better than what we have. This is a motivating experience. It adds to the drive in our lives. People who have nothing to look forward to, in the end lose all meaning in life.

There are different forms of 'small' hope, each depending on specific circumstances. Some are built on one's social network or personal abilities. A prisoner's hope may be on such a social network, like a job being available, or family and friends who will assist him/her, or future training. It may also rest on his/her personal circumstances such as age, qualifications, abilities, or positive disposition (being optimistic, honest, having a good prison record). All these circumstances can contribute to the prisoner's total optimism or pessimism, or to that of any other person.

It seems obvious that not every form of hope is just. While it is always true that hope motivates and encourages people, it is as true that people can be motivated and encouraged by unjust hope to do what is wrong. A prisoner can hope that his/her next bank robbery will be more successful than the previous one. A warden may hope that it does not come to the light that he/she took a bribe. To realize these forms of hope, injustice is added to injustice, and it can even lead to great 'success stories'.

Over against the variety of forms of small hope, there is great hope, the hope the Gospel stirs up.

What distinguishes ['great'] hope from small hope is that it does not depend on circumstances. Actually, in really bad circumstances, it often blossoms all the better. (See Acts 16:25 - Even though the word hope is not used here, the thing is obvious.) This form of hope depends solely on God/Christ and is related specifically to salvation.

In general, the great hope is hope and trust in God/Christ. To trust in God, results in a positive attitude towards life. Because of who God is, we can take on life with optimism, have good expectations of the future, and make the best of bad situations.

Great hope can also be more specific. God does specific things in the lives of people. What does that mean for a prisoner who is in a hopeless situation or for a chaplain facing retrenchment? If you follow in the footsteps of this Lord, if you practice this value system, you may put your hope in the Lord to fulfil his promise of salvation to you which consists of forgiveness, healing, liberation, care, and many other aspects.

(Excerpts from a speech delivered at the Conference of the International Prison Chaplains Association (IPCA) in Kroonstad, South Africa, August 2000)

A Bishop's Message

Michael J. Pryse

In the darker days of the 1940's, three prisoners of war escaped from their prison camp. One of them was seriously wounded in the escape. By day, the other two hid him as best they could and carried him on their shoulders through the night. At last they came to a tiny French parish church. The parish priest, seeing their desperate need, led them to a safe retreat; but the wounded man grew weaker and when morning came, he was dead.

It had been a long companionship and the two who remained wanted their friend to be properly buried, so they asked the old priest if they might have a plot in the cemetery at the rear of the church. The kindly man shook his head. "Your friend was a Protestant," he said gently, and then explained that only Roman Catholics could be buried in the consecrated ground. With regret he said that he didn't make the rules, he could only obey them. "But we could put him over here, just outside the little fence," he offered invitingly. The dead man's friends agreed. It was better than nothing. The simple funeral was held, but still the old priest seemed strangely dissatisfied.

The next morning, at first light, the men were ready to be gone, but went for one last look at the place where they had laid their friend. But to their amazement, everything looked different. The grave which had been outside the fence was now within. How could this be? It only took a moment to realize what had happened. Sometime during the night, the old fence had been taken down and rebuilt further out. It was then that the old priest appeared, smiling somewhat sheepishly. "Your friend could not be buried inside the cemetery," he explained. "That's the rule. But I don't know of any rule that says you can't move the fence! And if, in doing so, we are joined with one more child of God, doubtless the good Lord will smile with understanding."

Jesus, too, was a fence mover who continually pushed his followers to define the breadth of God's embrace ever more widely. Much to the consternation of the professionally religious of his day, Jesus portrayed the realm of God in amazingly broad terms, describing a community of rich diversity that included some startling combinations of people: men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Samaritans and Romans, rich and poor, religious and non-religious. It was a hard and deeply challenging message for his listeners to hear.

The same is true for us. Our natural tendency is to envision the kingdom of God with a zero sum mentality where someone's gain necessarily means someone else's loss. Hence, broadening our definition of who is in and who is out means giving up a sense of our own exclusivity - our own specialness. We fear that if God's embrace is defined too widely, it will mean, by necessity, that we are going to end up loosing something.

Jesus challenges us to grow beyond that mentality. The divine economy doesn't allow for zero sums. God's grace knows no limits aside from those of our own making or choosing. And while the church has chosen, at different points in it's life, to emphasize various aspects of what the kingdom of God might look like, within this time and context I believe that we are being called to be particularly mindful of that kingdom's radical expansiveness. I believe that we are being called to go beyond the safety of our comfortable definitions of who is in and who is out and to follow the light of Christ's presence to whomever and wherever that light may take us.

Moving the fences: It's a task that we are all called to play a part in today. And in as much as we try to respond to that call, we become partners with God in bringing the kingdom of heaven to fuller expression.

(A reflection by Michael J. Pryse, Lutheran Bishop, Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada, which appeared in a 2000 newsletter.)

A justice that restores is a justice with a good chance of enduring

Rod Carter

When offenders seek forgiveness and victims struggle to redeem the past, harmony can return to a broken community, even after a great loss or tragedy. There are many definitions [of restorative justice]. I like this one from the rabbi: Restorative justice is addressing the hurts and needs of the victims and the hurts and needs of the offenders in such a way that they and the community are healed.

[Restorative Justice] initiatives grew out of the recognition that since crime comes from the community, the solutions must come from the community. These are creative and extremely valuable: peer counselling models in school, for example, seek to reduce ridicule and bullying. Dispute resolution works with landlords and tenants, business and labour. Victim offender reconciliation models have been extremely effective. Circles of Support allow volunteers to place themselves around sexual offenders who have served their time, holding them strictly accountable and at the same time caring for them. As a prison chaplain, I hung my pardon document on a office wall to inform all who entered that a willingness to provide a second chance and forgiveness is part of the humanity of our society.

When one commits a crime, one has betrayed the community by vandalizing shalom. This necessitates full admission of the wrongdoing. The restorative call to non-adversarial truth telling is essential. It calls for a commitment to right the wrong as far as possible through making amends, extending apology or other forms of reparation. The offender must accept being held accountable. Firm resolve and a support network work toward not re-offending. As Malcolm X said, "To have been a criminal is not a disgrace; but to remain a criminal, that is a disgrace."

(The Rev. Rod Carter is a regular contributor to United Church of Canada publication, The Observer. This reflections appeared in the November 2000 edition.)

Chapel Memo

Bo Gajda

What would happen if we met our frustrations, pains, and heartaches as we would meet a visitor having something to teach us? What if we lingered a bit with our brokenness and asked it to help us grow? What might we learn from those pieces of our lives that are still wanting and incomplete?" Out of lifetimes of neglect, abuse, fear, and pain, people, like those hardy spring tulips sprouting from the ground when the oppressive overburden of snow is lifted, seek a new self, a fresh start in living.

Springtime is the Creator and Redeemer God's gift to our hemisphere, a clear demonstration in nature, that we too can pass from the dullness and 'deadness' of our interior winter to the new stirrings, hopes, anticipation of life reborn in spring. But it is necessary to understand, accept (even welcome) the importance of pain, suffering, including even interior death to one's egotistical self, to bud forth and spring up in new life. Faith gives us the courage to face and overcome our fear of leaving the dead past behind and to rejoice in the openness and new beginnings of life set on a higher plane.

(from this chaplain's Chapel Newsletter - Rockwood Institution,, April 2001)

Different Types of HopeTowards healing, reconciliation and the new life

Michael Peers

A colleague of mine once passed on a story of a Nobel prize-winning geneticist, Barbara McLintock, who spent her whole life studying ears of corn. On one occasion, when asked how her science was done, she told her interviewer, "I guess the only way to say it is that you must learn how to lean into the ear of the corn." If we place ourselves in the way of God - lean into God, so to speak - I believe something of God's kingdom will take root in us.

".Healing, reconciliation." There is a difference between these two words. Imagine you have been badly cut. Ointment helps deal with pain and bandaging stems the flow of the blood. In time, a scab forms, and eventually it disappears. That is healing. But the wound leaves a scar that never disappears. So there is no forgetting. However, there can be accepting and growing. Reconciliation is when we see the scars, and know they have no power over us; when they no longer anger, frighten, or intimidate us.

God knows that there are wounds enough. The tragedies in the world, the injuries done in our own household, the wounds that leave scars in our souls call for both healing and reconciliation. To heal and to be healed, to reconcile and be reconciled need to be the heart of our life. Scripture shows us that to see our risen Lord is to see the wounds he bears. And to reach out and touch them is the beginning of "the new life." We need not, and cannot, ignore what strikes at us for ill - in our church, society, or the whole human community. Rather, in faith we look into the depths of it, lean into it, and discover how it might become the source of new life.

(This reflection by The Most Rev. Michael Peers, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada appeared in Ministry Matters, Volume 8, Number 1 / Winter 2001)

On Joseph: A Victim Exercises Restorative Justice

Rick Prashaw

Remember Joseph? The dreamer, the man with the coat of many colours, favoured son of his father, handsome and smart, and, for all these reasons, detested by his 11 brothers. Maybe Joseph wasn't that smart after all, with his interpreting for his brothers his dreams to be signs that they better bow down and honour him because God had great things in store for him. The brothers hatched a murder plot. Then, thinking better of that, they decided to sell him into slavery in Egypt for 20 pieces of silver. And this is where our reading picks up the story.

Things have not gone well with the brothers and their father, suffering from a famine in the land. And in search of favours from the Pharaoh, the brothers come into the Egyptian court where they are confronted by Joseph. "Is my father alive?" asks Joseph who has been deprived of being with his father and family for many years. What does Genesis say? "His brothers could not understand him. They were so dismayed at the sight of him!" Now, isn't THAT an understatement! You better believe they were dismayed! They probably saw themselves on death row - knowing how powerful in the court was this brother they had sold. And what does Joseph do? He speaks the truth, frankly to them. "You sold me into slavery," he says. He names their crimes. He meets them face to face. But he knows he has choices too. And he somehow sees God's hand in all that has happened. He will not harm them. He will give them back their life. And he weeps with his full brother, Benjamin, for those two shared the special bond of the same mother and father, Jacob and Rachel. The situation is redeemed by this kind of love, this ultimate form of justice. And, incredibly, did you notice that his love of them gives the brothers back their voice so they can now talk with him when, before, they were silent in fear. .

Let us be clear about this. When God shows steadfast mercy to people despite their wrongdoings, it is not that God is suspending or putting aside the demand for justice - sometimes people look at justice and mercy as opposite notions. Actually, God is actually satisfying a higher and fuller understanding of justice. Mercy becomes a way of achieving justice. This is Christ's example form the cross.

Our Christian community needs to respect what forgiveness means and what it does not mean. Forgiveness is an invitation, not something to force on people. We victimize further those already harmed when we condemn them for not being able now or soon to forgive. Can we learn as a faith community to invite them to these waters, and walk or sit with those who are not ready to forgive? Forgiveness is the hardest call of all. We need to realize that forgiveness never minimizes, excuses or forgets what happened.

I recently read another comment from a victim where she compares her ongoing work of forgiveness to the daily shower we need to keep clean. I like that. I sense in my own journey that reconciliation is very hard, takes a very long time and is a lot of work. And we will need to be gentle and forgiving with ourselves. That was the hardest part for this victim, who had a hundred legitimate reasons why she suggested to her daughter to walk home from school on that fateful day, instead of picking her up. We all have our own "stuff" like that to deal with.

(Excerpts from a homily preached at St. John's Anglican Church, Ottawa, Canada on Sunday, Feb. 18th, 2001. Rick Prashaw works with the Church Council on Justice and Corrections.)

Pain, Justice and the Hope of Redemption

Chris Marshall

The story of the Cross is the story of Christ entering fully into human misery and evil in order to reveal the true character of God and to secure universal redemption. But what does that mean in practice?

First, the story of the cross invites us to understand justice and the conquest of pain. [.The] use of imprisonment as our primary mechanism or dealing with criminality rests on the assumption that justice requires an equity of suffering - eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, stripe for stripe, pain for pain. Often the work of the Cross is itself explained in such terms. According to the penal model of atonement, Christ suffered the pain of the punishment required by God's law in order that we might go free. God's justice required a balancing of pain - the pain of punishment for the pain of sin.

But I believe this approach puts an emphasis in the wrong place. Certainly Christ suffered pain in pursuit of God's justice - but it was not the pain of divine punishment but the pain of our estrangement and alienation from God, the pain of our subjection to evil, the pain of our sin-afflicted, death-controlled condition. And he did so in order to set us free from our bondage to evil and bring healing to our lives. God did not punish Christ to satisfy his justice. Rather God's justice was satisfied by Christ doing all that was necessary to conquer evil and make things well.

God's justice, in other words, is a restorative justice more than a punitive or retributive justice. It is satisfied by forgiveness, healing and reconciliation, not by blood, sweat and tears. True justice happens when oppressors are overthrown, the oppressed set free, and things are made right again. This is what happened on the Cross. The oppressive powers of law, sin and death were defeated; sinners were set free and reconciled with God; and "peace was made" with heaven on earth (Rom 5:1; Eph 2:14-18). In short, things were made right again.

The same thing applies in the criminal justice realm as well. Throughout the world, governments employ mechanisms of pain (such as prisons) to achieve justice. But while prisons may be necessary in some evil cases, they do not usually serve to achieve real justice. True justice entails the conquest of pain, not simply the administration of pain. What is needed when criminal offending occurs is a way of facing the pain caused by the crime and working to reverse it - through repentance, restitution, rehabilitation and, where possible, reconciliation.

The story of the Cross, secondly, guarantees that we can find God in the midst of present pain. It is part of the human condition to know pain. Suffering usually comes from an experience of loss or deprivation. It may be loss of a loved one or of a relationship, the loss of possessions or health, the loss of hopes or ambitions, the loss of innocence or childhood, the loss of dignity or self-respect.

Of course the victims of serious crime suffer enormous loss through what has been done to them - the loss of physical and emotional well-being, perhaps the loss of deeply loved friends or family members. The perpetrators of crime also suffer. They suffer inner moral and spiritual degradation, the bondage of guilt and remorse, and, if caught, the pain of punishment.

To be locked into perpetual pain, whether as victim or offender, is to be trapped in hell on earth. To find freedom and wholeness again nearly always requires the broken-hearted to face squarely into their pain and to grieve the losses that have endured. It requires them to "walk through the valley of the shadow of death", trusting that as they do so they will find rest - and may even find God walking with them, sharing their sorrows and bearing their grief.

I believe the greatest challenge a person can ever face is finding God in the midst of pain. But the story of the Cross guarantees that this can happen. Christian faith asserts that God is never more truly God than he is in the dying of Jesus. In the death of Jesus, the gospel writers assert, the veil of the temple is torn in two and God stands revealed. This means that God is most fully known at the centre of human pain and need. God is to be found where human strength gives out; God is to be found amongst the dregs of society; God is present at the extremities of human desolation.

God's presence in our pain does not make it less painful. But it does give it meaning; it does give us strength to go through it; and it does give us hope for healing. This leads to the third lesson the cross: It brings hope for the ultimate end of pain., the wiping away of every tear from every, the defeat of death, and the abolition of mourning and crying and pain forever. (Rev 21:1-4)

(Excerpt from a paper delivered at the International Prison Chaplains Association Conference, Kroonstad, South Africa, August 25-30, 2000)

On Crossing Bridges

Bishop Paul Verryn

To cross the bridges, to cross the sea into foreign culture and another race, I would suggest is one of the critical pieces of hope in this passage. [Mark 5:1-20]

It's very obvious to us, particularly in South Africa, that one of the major issues that we have to keep on our agenda as different races must certainly be our journey into one another's lives with compassion, understanding and respect. If we don't do that within this nation, we won't build a nation.

Jesus presents this to us as a critical centrepiece of the way He is: disrespecting of the prejudices and determined to reach the unreached and unreachable. It is that same determination, that same decision to cross the Rubicon, that is the essence of hope for humanity.

Jesus crosses the lake and encounters a dispossessed, fractured, insane, lonely, broken human being. He crossed over the racial divide into the area of contamination and brought freedom and healing holiness and dignity. That is a sign of hope that is accessible to any human being.

(Excerpt from a sermon delivered at the International Prison Chaplains Association Conference Kroonstad, South Africa, August 25-30, 2000)

The Ten Commandments of Restorative Justice

When you do justice restoratively.

You will focus on the harms of the crime rather than the rules that have been broken.
You will be equally concerned about victims and offenders, involving both in the process of justice.
You will work toward the restoration of victims, empowering them and responding to their needs as they see them.
You will support offenders while encouraging them to understand, accept and carry out their obligations.
You will recognize that while obligations may be difficult for offenders, they should not be intended as pain.
You will provide opportunities for dialogue, direct or indirect, between victim and offender as appropriate.
You will find meaningful ways to involve the community and to respond to the community bases of crime.
You will encourage collaboration and reintegration rather than coercion and isolation.
You will be mindful of the unintended consequences of your actions and programs.
You will show respect to all parties - victims, offenders, justice colleagues.