The Heart of Restoration

Laura and I said, “Goodbye,” to the seminary community at John Wesley College on Monday, July 30, two weeks ago today. Then we watched the lights of Johannesburg from the sky as the South African Airways Airbus lifted from the earth; and after a middle-of-the-night refueling in Dakar, we rose again over the ocean and Africa was behind us. It felt to me as though I were leaving home.

That doesn’t mean that Africa had become my new home, or that I had decided to take up residence in South Africa. It rather means that my experience of home has expanded.

During the brief transition time between our return from South Africa and our pilgrimage to the West Coast I ran into two of our church members. I was afraid that my response to their question, “How was it?” would either be the trite “Incredible,” or an exercise of endless babble. There is so much to process. Yet, my more powerful awareness was of my inner joy of encountering members of my church family. I was home. It’s not that my world shrank back; but that here, too, is vital connection.

At the end of that week our daughter, Carrie arrived from Philadelphia with all her quick wit that can bring joy and challenge at the same time. I smiled inwardly as I watched the sister-brother banter resume and continue over the following week. Family time has been holy time. I posted a few pictures on the new “West Coast” public photo folder with a little concern that it might appear that the character of my sabbatical photo-journal might begin to appear as pictures of the family vacation. Never-the-less, family time has been sacred time; and brief as it was, it played on me for a reconstruction of the soul. Laura, Carrie, and James – the ones God placed in my life for dearest connection – came to make my heart recall itself. With them, I am home.

So we explored San Francisco, drove the winding roads up the Western Slope of the Sierra Nevada’s to Sequoia National Park, saw the big trees, and most importantly spent time together. Therein lay the adventure. And it was Sabbath, the heart of sabbatical, which is all about restoring wholeness and vitality. James and I climbed the heights to the High Sierra’s, to the pretty little Pear Lake tucked high in a cirque of towering summits. There we camped for two days in the wilderness and drank in God’s creation like the cool waters we filtered out of the lake. Sabbatical again – restoring the whole self again, as we connected with each other and together found connection with God.

I have now begun the last segment of this pilgrimage. This morning James flew east to Detroit; I flew north to Portland. Now comes a personal moment to take up a short hermitage and drink in the Spirit in the way I have found to be the most effective for me. I’ll pray and think long over the questions, of all the places we’ve seen and that which we’ve seen and heard, what is God saying? What does this mean for me? How does it refashion my soul? What implications might it have for the people I serve and the ministry of the Gospel we do? What do I now understand to be God’s vision for the world? How is this coming about and how do I – and we – either get with it or get in its way?

This is a day of solitude (a pair of airports and another new city to drive through in yet another rental to drive through it with, not-withstanding). Already, a realization has come to me. Perhaps I had it before and perhaps I could have come to it without thousands of miles in air travel and a good dose of a culture that was new to me. Yet, now I have it this way, and I’m certain that the realization means something more and deeper than it would have before.

The quest has been to take a pilgrimage to understand restorative justice. That’s something that is different from retributive justice, the kind with which most of us are most familiar. We think about justice and we automatically think only about proper punishment meted out for proper crimes. We think about injury and penalty. That’s retributive; an eye-for-an-eye, and all that. Retributive justice has its place; its necessary; but it isn't the only kind of justice and it isn't always the most appropriate or helpfull.

With the help of saints like Nelson Mandela and Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa realized that retribution for hundreds of years of oppression and violence would only lead to years more of violence and oppression, only with opposing groups of people exchanging places. If the nation were to be healed, there had to be forgiveness. There had to be truth told, so that perpetrators could say, I’m sorry” and in that find their humanity restored and victims could find healing. There had to be a restoration of God’s love between peoples to the point that the riches of political power and the riches of the land would be shared and the liberty and sacred worth of all the tribes – African, European, and Asian – would be embraced and protected. Tutu says, “There is no future without forgiveness;” without forgiveness there is only continued strife. Restorative justice is this kind of justice.

South Africa is not done with the work. There is a long way to go in addressing the poverty and sharing the wealth and healing the brokenness of the nation. Yet, what they have accomplished so far has astounded the world. Having been among them for a while, it has astounded Laura and me.

In that astonishment is the insight: the heart of restoration is in relationship – when people who didn’t know each other before, only identified each other by categories before, make a connection with each other. It is when we are at home with each other – when we listen to each other and when we see each other as blessed ones, then our own souls are mended, and this world moves closer to the restoration of God’s undisputed realm.