by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
Our daily news often immerses us in divisions that can slice through families, friendships, and neighborhood bonds. We live in polarizing times. Folks hint their political leanings in whispers to new acquaintances, testing whether to say more or less.
Young people disclose their pronouns on their name badges at meetings in support of non-binary and transsexual friends. I cringe at how frequently out of enthusiastic friendliness young people address me and rooms full of women as “you guys.” Does using inclusive language belong only to my generation? So easily we differ and in what agony we struggle to understand.
To reckon means to count, calculate, consider the cost, to settle accounts. Reckoning is a key word that civil rights lawyer and advocate Michelle Alexander explores in a New York Times column, “Reckoning with Violence.” The USA has 2.2 million persons in prison, the New Jim Crow Alexander names it in her book by that title about mass incarceration.
Her column calls for survivors of crime and perpetrators to meet and work out repair for the wrong, face to face. Ninety percent of the perpetrators of nonviolent crime choose to have survivors shape the repair.
In her book Until We Reckon, Danielle Sered finds imprisonment counterproductive. Reckoning is a pathway to accountability. In restorative justice circles, a perpetrator not only answers to a survivor but can put a life together and stay out of prison. She urges us as a nation to break our addiction to caging human beings.
In Sunday’s gospel Jesus is reckoning the cost of discipleship to himself and to those who believe in him. He asks, “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the Earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.”
- How do you work to reconcile divisions in our communities of faith today?