Sunday, January 02, 2022
Sunday Reflection: 2022
For me, New Year's has always been an almost involuntary religious holiday. After all, we think about what is to come, our hopes and goals, and for me that takes me right to those deepest places.
I'm lucky. My work is a true vocation, a place where my faith and my work are very much aligned. I get to teach, and do it with open faith while talking about injustice, reconciliation and our system's inattention to human dignity (since I work at a Catholic school rather than a secular or Baptist one). I can have a slide in my powerpoint with this Van Gogh painting and talk about how the Good Samaritan story is about how to treat crime victims:
And, of course, in my clemency work with my students, I can visit those in prison and try to make mercy more relevant.
That's been frustrating lately, of course. The Biden administration has lived up to my fears rather than my hopes, and I spend a lot of time trying to explain to people who have waited for years why no decisions are being made. They aren't just failing to grant petitions for clemency-- they aren't denying any, either. They are just ignoring it as the petitions pile up. The number of pending petitions is now an all-time record of 18.367, with many having been sitting for four years or more.
But we need to keep pushing to make it work-- we always knew it would be a long fight, and there can be no doubt that it is the right thing to do.
