Sunday, April 05, 2015
Easter Sunday Reflection: Thankful
Easter is the heart of Christianity: All of the hope and love and joy this faith is capable comes out now, if we are at our best.
It was an amazing week. President Obama granted 22 commutations. I wrote a piece about it for the Huffington Post, which you can read here. Here is how it ends:
It befits the morality of our nation that the pardon power be used. The framers of the Constitution intended it, and it is the rare moral system, religious or not, that shuts out any access to mercy. In a Christian-majority nation, it should matter to many that Jesus granted clemency (to the woman about to be stoned) and was wrongfully denied it (by Pilate).
I am not impartial in all of this, of course. Part of my teaching involves running a clinic for clemency-seekers. Each week I see my mailbox fill up with brown envelopes covered with stamps and carefully-crafted letters spelling out my name and address. They write to me because they think I can help them; sometimes, maybe, I can. Often I pause to survey the outside of the envelope, to look at the stamps. Each stamp costs an hour's wages in prison. If I see twelve stamps, which is not unusual, that is a day and a half of work, just for those thumb-sized squares. When I open the envelope, inside is a life story, poured out. It is often heartbreaking. Sometimes I can't bear to slip my finger beneath the fold to unseal it because I have had enough tragedy for that day.
What happens next is important. My students research the case, find family members, and visit a far-off prison to meet the client. They come back changed people, often, having seen something they had never tried to imagine. Then we work on the petition, to tell the story that goes beyond the worst thing that person ever did, the moment that defined them in a court order concisely called a Judgment.
The last part, and the most moving, is this: I type the cover letter. The first words I write, on the address line, is "The President of the United States, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." It is a letter to the most powerful man on Earth. And sometimes, at Lent, he writes back.
It was an amazing week. President Obama granted 22 commutations. I wrote a piece about it for the Huffington Post, which you can read here. Here is how it ends:
It befits the morality of our nation that the pardon power be used. The framers of the Constitution intended it, and it is the rare moral system, religious or not, that shuts out any access to mercy. In a Christian-majority nation, it should matter to many that Jesus granted clemency (to the woman about to be stoned) and was wrongfully denied it (by Pilate).
I am not impartial in all of this, of course. Part of my teaching involves running a clinic for clemency-seekers. Each week I see my mailbox fill up with brown envelopes covered with stamps and carefully-crafted letters spelling out my name and address. They write to me because they think I can help them; sometimes, maybe, I can. Often I pause to survey the outside of the envelope, to look at the stamps. Each stamp costs an hour's wages in prison. If I see twelve stamps, which is not unusual, that is a day and a half of work, just for those thumb-sized squares. When I open the envelope, inside is a life story, poured out. It is often heartbreaking. Sometimes I can't bear to slip my finger beneath the fold to unseal it because I have had enough tragedy for that day.
What happens next is important. My students research the case, find family members, and visit a far-off prison to meet the client. They come back changed people, often, having seen something they had never tried to imagine. Then we work on the petition, to tell the story that goes beyond the worst thing that person ever did, the moment that defined them in a court order concisely called a Judgment.
The last part, and the most moving, is this: I type the cover letter. The first words I write, on the address line, is "The President of the United States, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." It is a letter to the most powerful man on Earth. And sometimes, at Lent, he writes back.
