by Denise Breton and Stephen Lehman

Justice lies at the center of this crisis: What is justice, and what do we mean when we say "justice must be done"? It must be done, but what does it mean to do it?

Among other things, it means not allowing acts of inhumanity, but how can we achieve this end? If there is no peace without justice, how can justice lay a foundation for peace that lasts beyond an immediate urge to settle the score? Even killing everyone in the terrorist network will not achieve peace if the conditions, hurts, and misunderstandings that gave to rise to terrorism remain unchanged.

We need justice to be done, but we need a big justice, one that goes to the roots of conflict and heals them.

When the terrorists said "justice must be done" to themselves for years in the planning, it meant flying planes into buildings. When we hear it now, it mostly means waging war. These responses are understandable: they and we are both human, and such emotions come with such suffering.

When we saw family, friends, and fellow citizens die senseless, cruel deaths on September 11th, we cried out in pain and anger. But the terrorists' cultures have experienced the same destruction over decades. Happy people with lives worth living do not carry out suicidal missions of mass destruction. As trauma research suggests, violence takes over a mind and heart when trauma upon trauma beats upon them, until all normal feeling is lost.

Justice is the remedy, but not the justice of revenge. That will kill us, for where does it end? Today, we suffer from planes used as missiles, tomorrow it could be super-poisons in the water supply. When pain, hatred, and desperation consume people, there is no security. Neither missiles nor oceans protect us, nor should they. America just joined the global community, and that's not all bad. But we join a community that has huge hurt in it, which many of those in the community trace to America's doing. Instead of arguing the legitimacy of positions on either side-each side seeing the other as deserving punishment — we can agree that our world community is breaking with hurts that remain unhealed, hurts that drive us to kill each other.

We need justice to right things, but for that, we need a radically different model of justice, one that "restores our souls" from trauma and heals our broken relations. Indeed, a healing, constructive model of justice exists and has existed for millennia. This model makes different assumptions about who we are, what we're doing here, and most relevantly, how we can best respond to hurts and conflicts.

Rethinking Justice from the Ground Up

A spiritual response to today's terrible crisis calls us as never before to make a paradigm shift we never imagined: to rethink justice from the ground up. Everything we have been raised to think about justice must be questioned, for if we follow the course of punishment now, we invite escalating cycles of violence.

Moreover, what if revenge and punishment are not the essence of justice at all, indeed, what if they're the counterfeit of it? We desperately need justice to help us, but we need the real thing — a justice that creates peace, happiness, security, mutual respect and understanding, freedom, love, cooperation, and joy. Revenge and punishment, good as they may feel when we're in pain, cannot do this. Neither can a justice that eradicates the enemy, for in doing so, we create new enemies.

Before we consider real justice, we must address this age-old pretender: justice as punishment, violence, and revenge. Where do we get this model? What is its nature, and why is it incapable of creating justice among us?

The prevailing model of justice operates on rewards and punishments: the good are rewarded, the bad punished. We get this model from childhood, for it is a method of controlling behavior. Forming our earliest notions of ourselves in relation to others, the model dogs us through life. Schools are deeply committed to using rewards and punishments, as are religions. By the time we go to work, doing what we're rewarded for doing and avoiding punishments has become automatic. A technique of social control stands in for our model of justice.

Philosophically, the problems with this model are legion — problems raised not only 2500 years ago by Socrates in Plato's dialogue, The Republic, but also by many psychologists and educators today. (We cannot go into all the problems here, and for those who want to pursue this, we recommend Alfie Kohn's books, especially Punished by Rewards, as well as our own books.) Briefly, rewards and punishments blast out our intrinsic, soul-connected motivation and replace it with externals. We lose our inner compass, as externals dictate our responses. Worse, the model collapses into "might makes right," for whoever controls the externals controls the options given others: those who wield the greatest "might" rig the game.

Following externals or "might makes right" cannot give us justice. As Socrates observed, such a model does violence to our souls, and how can that be good? How can this model offer a principle of justice workable for humans, since humans are both outer and inner beings? Indeed, without our inner lives, who are we?

All the things we want from justice — peace, happiness, love, mutual respect and understanding, safety, joy — are at their core inner and intangible. Externals cannot secure them. "Might makes right" most certainly cannot. It creates the opposite: resentment, anger, hostility, and a helplessness that drives desperate acts.

Criminals must be stopped.
Before we sketch an alternative model, let us agree that those who commit crimes must be stopped and held accountable. Harming others is not acceptable. But if it is unacceptable for others to do violence to us, then it is also unacceptable for us to do violence to others, since each party deems itself justified in its own eyes. Yes, complexities arise that make our choices of how to achieve no-harm difficult, but we need to be clear about our principles.

Justice as inflicting harm will not create a just world, because it leaves too much pain in its wake. Thanks to addiction and trauma research, we've learned that unhealed hurts cause pain in marriages and families, and that inflicting more hurt does not heal those relationships. Now we're learning that this same principle applies to the world stage.

An Alternative Model of Justice

Fortunately, an alternative model of justice exists and has for millennia. Socrates and Plato hinted at it, while many indigenous communities have practiced it as their original cultural tradition. For example, the Hollow Water First Nation Community on Lake Winnipeg, Canada, expresses their Holistic Circle Healing Program's policy:

"Our tradition, our culture, speaks clearly about the concepts of judgement and punishment. They belong to the Creator. They are not ours. They are, therefore, not to be used in the way that we relate to each other. People who offend against another (victimizers) are to be viewed and related to as people who are out of balance-with themselves, their family, their community, and their Creator.

A return to balance can best be accomplished through a process of accountability that includes support from the community through teaching and healing. The use of judgments and punishment actually works against the healing process. An already unbalanced person is moved further out of balance."

Today, the restorative justice movement, which has grown worldwide over the last thirty years, is forging a model of justice devoted to healing, "restoring our souls," mending broken relationships, and above all, using conflicts as opportunities to strengthen communities by correcting imbalances and building understanding. True justice calls us to go on the healing path together, and it does so on the basis of core spiritual principles:

• Wholeness, connectedness, and the sacredness of life: We are all part of the whole, more, we are each the whole expressed. Each life is sacred, and no one is expendable. Each of us is needed to be who we are and to do what's ours to do not from our pain but from our wholeness, and that takes healing.

• Change and diversity: We are moving together in change-in open-ended, self-organizing systems that move us to greater complexity and awareness on every level. Because of change, we are different. Our common origin in the whole does not make us all the same. We have to work to understand our differences, so that we can appreciate and benefit from them.

• Cycles of change: We change in cycles of development and disintegration, coming together and coming apart. These cycles are natural and unavoidable, but they are also hard, demanding perspectives we often don't have. Realizing this, we need to cultivate tolerance, compassion, forgiveness, and patience with ourselves and each other when we feel overwhelmed by change and don't act at our best, doing harm we wouldn't do if we knew a better way or if we weren't so engulfed in fear, pain, and powerlessness.

• Our seen and unseen reality: What we see of ourselves and others is not the whole story. We are both seen and unseen beings, because reality is both. We must honor both the seen and the unseen, outer and inner, tangible and intangible, for otherwise we act from a dangerous one-sidedness. As this crisis proved, ignoring the unseen is a great danger, and acting only from the seen dangerously limits our options. True justice demands a bigness of mind and heart that stretches us beyond the conventions that led to breakdown.

Methods for Practicing Justice

Based on these principles, restorative justice is developing many methods for practicing justice as a healing activity. For example:

• Honoring the "more" that we are: Because we are all part of the whole, we're each more than our actions. Our acts do not exhaust our worth or the possibilities of our being. Instead of boxing each other inside blame and accusations, we need to invite the "more" that we can be into the justice process, so that we can move beyond positions of hate and pain. We need to grant each other the space to become more, instead of reducing the other to the fixed role of "evil enemy" or ourselves to the role of "righteous one."

• Listening to each other: Because we are all different, justice involves listening to each other as we share feelings and experiences. We all have reasons for acting as we do. True justice seeks these reasons as a basis for balanced action.

When Gandhi first started his work in India, he sent teams of college students into the villages to document what had happened under British rule and to find out what the villagers needed to make things right. We need to tell our stories and to listen to the stories of others. Now we realize that we have to do this both interpersonally and globally. We need to listen to people around the world and not ignore their needs and hurts, or we risk their wrath.

• Allowing ourselves to be transformed by the process: As we hear each other's stories of pain and hurt, justice calls us to let the listening change us — to engage us in soul-searching transformation. True justice calls us to open our minds and hearts to each other, especially when that feels like the last thing we want to do. If we stay locked in polarized positions — us/them, ally/enemy-then escalating conflict follows. Breaking the cycle starts with us. As the Roman Stoic Epictetus observed, what others do is not in our power, but what we do is. We have to use our powers to change ourselves as the catalyst for healing our broken relations.

• Demanding justice that's creative and healing: As we apply these spiritual principles to our practice of justice, we practice justice as a creative, constructive, healing force among us. Revenge and punishment have no such power. They are only destructive. They further break already broken relations.

Instead of reacting to the visible side of events only — the images of devastation or of people celebrating our suffering — true justice invites the unseen dynamics behind such images into the process. By so doing, we address not only the immediate hurt but also the deeper sources of unhappiness, of which crises are manifestations.

Seeking true justice, we have the hope of creating a truly happy world by founding our security on mutual respect, understanding, compassion for our weaknesses when we're deranged by pain, and ultimately open-hearted love. Not the tangibles but the intangibles will save us and make our lives secure.

Granted, we're a long way from experiencing justice as healing or from being able to practice it from our hearts. The old model has been so branded on our psyches that it's hard for us to let it go. Even so, we need a vision of what justice can be, just as those lost at sea need a star to guide them.

A spiritual response to America's tragedy can begin this process. We can turn terrible suffering to meaning by making a profound shift in our consciousness and practice of justice: what it can be, and who we can become together as we practice true justice.
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Denise Breton and Stephen Lehman are co-authors of The Mystic Heart of Justice: Restoring Wholeness in a Broken World (Chrysalis Books, The Swedenborg Foundation, Fall 2001). Denise is also the co-author with Chris Largent of Love, Soul and Freedom: Dancing with Rumi on the Mystic Path and The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential and How We Can Change Them.

An adaptation of this article will be included in a forthcoming book, Out of the Ashes: A Spiritual Response to America’s Tragedy, to be published by Beliefnet.com and Rodale Press in October.

This article can be found online at http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/blank/item_3319.html