At the end of 2021, Desmond Tutu died at the age of 90. Archbishop Tutu had been a moral figurehead in my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up as an Episcopalian, and Desmond Tutu was ordained within that global communion. In 1984, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in nonviolent resistance to apartheid. He became Bishop of Johannesburg in 1985 and then served as Archbishop of Cape Town until 1996. I’d only spent time with him once, and only had a few chances to hear him speak publicly, but they were all life-changing moments.
After the dissolution of apartheid in 1991, South Africa was a country torn apart by violence, severe segregation and poverty, and systemic and personal dehumanization. In 1994, newly elected President and former activist dissident Nelson Mandela formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address these crimes, and to identify and support those harmed.
The Commission met for several years and much of its work was televised. This massive restorative justice project had three phases. Essentially these moved from truth telling, into reparations and repair for those harmed, and finally to programs of amnesty for those who qualified.
It was intensely difficult, Tutu writes in “No Future Without Forgiveness,” to be the witnesses as a country processed its collective trauma and pain. Tutu especially points out the impact the work had on the translators, those people hired to actually speak the words into record. Much of his book is an exploration into the spiritual alchemy of truth and pain and ultimately the forgiveness of letting go of retribution and revenge.
This work has of course spun around my mind throughout all of 2021 as we have allowed The Insurrection on January 6, 2021, to basically go unaddressed. We have had slight legal action, and virtually no cultural conversations about it outside of our silos. We are afraid, because we cannot see a way forward that would do anything other than further anger the trigger-happy or widen the gaps between us.
Violence has also come home very close to me, as it often does in this country. A recent mass shooting in Denver took the lives of several beloved community members. Someone fired multiple shots near a friend’s car this week. Several prominent friends have received viable death threats. It feels chaotic and out of control. It feels random, and as if there can never be real safety, or freedom.
But all of it is predictable given our circumstances, our policy and enforcement choices, our inability to talk about hard or uncomfortable things. Random violence almost never is -random, that is. I believe increased ‘random’ violence is a reflection of a rising acceptance of death and violence as an inevitable conclusion to conflict -that and an obscene level of access to weaponry but that really is a separate issue from this that I’m wrestling with now.
What was learned in South Africa is that there cannot be a way forward without truth telling, without letting go of our thirst to avenge, without, as poet Jan Richardson puts it in Blessing in a Time of Violence “the hated and the hateful, the victim and the victimizer.”
Restorative justice is hard, intimidating. We are used to a retributive model, wherein crimes are punished, criminals become marked as separate, and punishment is harsh. We have dallied in this country with some rehabilitative justice models, and those are of course more effective than the retributive, but less politically popular, rarely fully funded, and still missing the mark.
Restorative justice seeks to rebuild the relationship broken by the infraction. It makes space for truth to be told, not without consequence, but without revenge. It provides those harmed a place to tell their stories and be heard, confront the person who caused the damage, and build communities free of shame.
Restorative and regenerative work does not erase the negative or dismiss damage. They do not gloss over injustice or nurture what festers. But neither do they reject those things. Instead, restorative justice lays bare the broken and seeks to face both the damage done and the reasons for the damage. Regenerative work transforms the pain and the trauma, the shit and the compost, into what we need to build, to grow.
Without that alchemy, the fuels of fear and anger will destroy us from within. Processing the effects of violence can easily morph into rage. Rage can be an important tool but it cannot be a place to live, and expect to rebuild or grow anything that isn’t also of anger itself. We fear what we do not understand or know, and we easily pour all the ills of the world onto ‘the other’ as a way to distance ourselves but also as a way to rationalize true hard-heartedness. We require this alchemy that tempers with love and compassion, faithfulness and boundaries.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was restorative justice on a mass scale, an international endeavor in the end. But the day to day opportunities for restoration are more personal.
On Saturday, the Sol Tribe community gathered to celebrate the life of Alicia Cardenas and all those who’d been killed the week before. I am a pastor. I have attended, officiated, assisted in more memorial services, celebrations of life, and funerals than I could count. But from the outset, this was a different ritual, a different ceremony.
Tribal dancers, billows of sage, drums and shakers all filled the space with something other than pain, something other than grief. Certainly, pain and grief were present in abundance. There can be no denial of the gaping hole left by sudden death, and the spiritual and psychic remnants of violence can be persistent.
This was a call for reclamation, for reparation of what was taken, what was broken.
An older voice was rising, through the tears and laughter, the hugs between grievers, and lone figures standing strong.
Hatred will not win here.
White supremacy will not win here.
Misogyny will not win here.
We Will NOT feed the fear.
We will NOT feed the despair.
We will NOT feed the hatred.
Song and drum filled the air. Incense and prayer wove us into gracious moments of transcendence. Dance spun spirit and energy A hawk flew overhead.
The community gathered processed in a sacred march around the block that was led by children and Elders, by the Ofrenda held high. We followed behind, traffic paused along the way as we do with funeral processions and pallbearers. This procession felt not unlike a New Orleans Second Line, with song and drum and chant. This was a joyous reclamation of the land, a reconnection with place for all present
We returned to the beginning, to a dance and drum circle full of defiance and victory, joy and celebration, transformation and renewal.
I have been sitting with this experience for several days now. This intentional alchemy of pain and trauma into the fertile ground from which the new can grow, steeped in ancient traditions contrasts with how ‘White America’ tends to manage such events. We build statues and memory gardens or worse, do nothing and pretend it didn't affect us at all.
It feels very similar to how we seem bound from facing and managing The Insurrection. Some friends and I were joking on social media about the “Never forget 01/06” lapel pins the DNC would surely offer eventually. As a nation, we both haven’t forgotten and STILL haven’t learned from 9/11 so I’m not terribly hopeful our national conversation and processing will just miraculously occur, like a 1970s Happening.
We need Truth and Reconciliation. And for that to happen, we have to be willing to let go of being right, and making others pay. This is essential not only in these things, but in all things. In our corporate policies. In our Houses of Worship. In our own lives.