I’m reading today from a Bible that Ruby gave me on my 40th birthday. She wrote in it, “For you to read by the waters that come and go for another forty years.” When I saw that this morning, I was relieved to know I’ve got another 18.

Hear now the prophet Micah: “The Lord has told you, Oh man and woman, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Good morning. It’s good to be with you today. I have been asked to talk about my journey, to be somewhat autobiographical, and I’ve chosen to do that under the theme of “My Vocation as Mission.” I have a kind of private subtitle to it, though, and that is “Reflections of a Half-Hearted Fanatic.” I call this “reflections” because I grew up a preacher’s kid and I have something of an aversion to sermons - I probably heard too many. You’ll see what I mean by “half-hearted fanatic” a bit later.

I have to start by trying to define what my vocation is, and that’s often been a little unclear to me. But I think of myself as having two vocations:

One vocation, the one that I’m best known for, is as a kind of pursuer of justice. I began that route in a rather conventional way, I suppose. I was doing volunteer work as an offender advocate in Alabama for a number of years, and then moved to Indiana. There I very reluctantly got involved in what was then called “victim-offender reconciliation.” The experience of bringing crime victims and offenders together was my Damascus road experience. I had a kind of conversion.

Some stories stand out in my mind. I remember the first adult case that was attempted by our program, which was the first such program in the U.S. I and a friend facilitated that case. A Vietnam vet had committed many burglaries in the community and had become quite notorious. The first person we had him meet was the deputy sheriff. He met with the deputy and his wife in their home, which he had burglarized. The meeting had a significant impact on the “burglar” as well as his victims. To my surprise, they eventually became friends. The deputy sheriff joined the board of our program and later became sheriff, running in part on a platform that supported our program.

Or I remember the street commissioner and his wife who were burglarized. When they met with the two burglars, they decided that they wanted these two to buy, as their restitution, a piece of furniture to fit in their house. They did this for two reasons: they wanted the “burglars” to know them well enough to figure out what kind of furniture fit the decor of their house and secondly, they wanted to be able to say to their friends, “My burglar bought this for me.” The style of their furniture was hard to find so they ended up going shopping together around the county.

Experiences like this made me rethink my assumptions about justice in general. I began to realize, for example, how central victims must be in anything called “justice.” They led me to what later became known as restorative justice.

I’ve always seen myself as a kind of journalist of justice. I never set out to be an expert and authority, and I don’t think of myself that way now. Rather, I set out to try to interpret justice. When I approach a field of work that is new to me, I usually look to a good journalist who can interpret it for me rather than someone who is an expert in the actual field. I've tried to be that kind of journalist for the field of justice. My book Changing Lenses, which helped shape the field of restorative justice, was really an effort to communicate to people what we and others were trying to do. I wasn’t trying to develop some grand theory.

Today I am a teacher, but I think of myself as a learning facilitator rather than an expert imparting knowledge. I consider my responsibility to set the stage where, as someone has said, “wisdom can come forth.” And I’m an excellent position to do this because I teach in a graduate program that brings peace and justice practitioners from many faiths and many countries to live and study together.

I also think of myself more as a synthesizer than an inventor. People often say to me about restorative justice, “I’ve had these ideas, I just never put them together.” I think what I’ve done is to organize common sense, what most of us already know on some level.

I think of myself as a Volkswagen Bug thinker. For those of you who are old enough to remember the original Volkswagen Bug, each year they would make minor changes around a basic design. They would change a headlight or make the tail lights a little bigger and maybe the rear window bigger. That’s basically what I’ve done in my intellectual life.

Now, my second vocation is as a photographer. Starting at the very end of my graduate studies, I became very serious about photography. I think this was partly an effort to overcome my graduate experience. The heavy focus on the linear and the rational made me shut down my artistic, creative side, and I think photography has been a way to get in touch with that dimension. But have I struggled to make that dimension, and specifically my photography, part of my vocation, part of my mission – to bring together my passion for justice and my passion for photography. I’ve manged to do that in several ways; I'll name two here.

I have come to believe in the power of photography, often combined with interviews, as a way to bridge gaps between people. The photographs you saw projected at the front of this sanctuary this morning are from my books that combine photography and interviews. One of them, entitled Doing Life, is made up of stories and photographs from men and women who are serving life sentences. The other one is called Transcending; here I interviewed and photographed people who were victims of very severe crime. My goal in photography and in justice is to get us to think outside the boxes of stereotypes and assumptions and instead confront each other as people. That's a basic value or principle of restorative justice.

Another way I’ve found photography connecting with my work and my faith is to see it as a form of meditation. I used to struggle with meditation; I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do it like everybody else. Eventually I realized that I had to enter meditation through visual means. In our program I teach photography as a kind of meditation or contemplation and I recently did a book called The Little Book of Contemplative Photography that encourages people to use the camera as a way to reflect on their world and their lives.

All this is one way to think of my vocation. Another way I think of my vocation is as a way of living and relating to the structures of the world as a Christian. I want to explore that a bit.

Two thought patterns are characteristic of me. First, I tend to think in continua rather than either/or. As I’ve gotten older, this pattern has become more pronounced – few things are purely one or the other. This is important in restorative justice. If we purse justice that is restorative, we can't be for victims and against offenders or vice versa. We have to balance concerns for both. In Changing Lenses I contrasted the “retributive” legal system with restorative justice, as opposites; today I no longer see them as so mutually exclusive. So many things exist on a continuum rather than as absolute opposites.

Secondly, I’ve come to embrace paradox and mystery and ambiguity. Restorative justice has taught me that you have to be able to dwell in paradox and ambiguity, because everything is just not going to fit together nicely. The same is true of our faith. In his book, The Vocation of a Christian Scholar, Richard Hughes says that the vocation of a Christian scholar must be built on paradox because the notion of paradox stands at the very center of the Christian message. Think about it. We’re sinners, and yet we are saved. We have to lose our self to find it. We die in order to live. We become first by being last. The whole idea of salvation through a death is very paradoxical. We have to embrace paradox, ambiguity and mystery.

So here are some of the implications of these ways of thinking for my vocation:

I believe it’s important to make a difference in the world, and yet I constantly remind myself that the world wouldn’t be much different if I weren’t here. I’m committed to changing the system - I’ve spent most of my career trying to do so - but I’m realistic and maybe even cynical about the chances of actually doing that. I believe we have to work at the governmental level, and I’ve done a lot of work over the years with it - but I actually believe that real change comes closer to the grassroots, that it comes from the bottom-up. So I’m pretty skeptical of top-down approaches. (And this fits with my Anabaptist tradition).

I’m highly skeptical of institutions. I think they inherently tend to be greedy, even when they are church institutions. And yet I’ve spent most of my life working within institutions and I realize we need them – indeed, I'm now co-director of one. I think it’s important that we be guided by a vision, by an ideal. And yet we have to live with the awareness that we in most cases, we are not going to reach that ideal. We need to have a certain confidence in our knowledge and in our faith. Yet I think we need to be aware of the limits of what we know, aware of how what we “know” is shaped by who we are, and we need therefore to be genuinely open to other realities and to the unexpected.

Many of you know, or at least have heard about, the work of theologian John Howard Yoder. I saw his book at this conference and I’ve heard people here mention him. He’s a well-known Mennonite theologian who has made an significant impact well beyond Mennonite circles. Yoder's thought has been very important to me in my life and vocation, particularly at two critical points.

When I was a student at Goshen College in Indiana (it’s a Mennonite school – I went there for my first year, 1962-63) he did a series of lectures that were entitled, “Beyond conformity.” One of those lectures was titled “To thine own self be true.” In this lecture he questioned the western assumptions that we make about the importance of the self, and the reality of the self. Another lecture was called “As if not.” Here he explored the paradox of being in the world but not of the world and suggested some unusual ways in which to do that.

I dug out those lectures several years ago and was impressed by the number of themes in those lectures that connected with my life. In fact, they were underlined. For instance, he helped convince me that we need to live the gospel where it really matters, where it’s obviously different, where we stand out because of our differences: our “differentness” is in itself a kind of witness. That helped lead me, in my sophomore year, to leave my safe Mennonite community, to go to Morehouse College in Atlanta where I eventually became the first white graduate. Morehouse is the college where Dr. Martin Luther King taught and had gone to school. And, by the way, if you ever get discouraged about your grades, just remember that Martin Luther King, one of the greatest orators in American history, is said to have received a C in speech.

Another thing Yoder said is that it is important to be geographically, or at least psychologically, mobile. That is, he talked about what he called the “footlooseness” of the gospel, arguing we need to be willing to give up the security of our (in my case) Mennonite communities. And he said we needed to be psychologically mobile as well, adaptable and able to identify with other people. He pointed to St. Paul as a person who seemed to adapt himself to the group that he was with. That led me to also leave my community, and it also led me to the importance of empathy as a way of knowing. One of the most important ways of knowing another culture or person, for me, has been to try to empathize with them, whether they are easy to empathize with or not. I argue, for example, that if we can’t understand what makes a torturer tick, we are likely to become like that ourselves. I have come to believe that empathy – trying to stand in the place of the other - is a very important way of knowing.

Here is a quote from Yoder: “Let us reserve our limited creativity for functions which will not be taken care of if we don’t do it.” I've called that the “gap theory” and that’s been one of the criteria I’ve used in deciding what I do. I try to do things that other people aren’t doing.

And then, on the continuum theme, here’s a quote: “Let us get over the lazy habit of assuming that every decision in the Christian life is a matter of whether a deed is absolutely wrong or absolutely obligatory, and realize that there are realms in which our responsibility is the best possible management of the liberty we have.” That has led me to get involved in the real world of moral ambiguities and risks, of criminal justice, where Mennonites just don’t often tread.

Yoder later wrote a small book that had another big impact on me. In the 1970s Ruby and I were living in Alabama where I was teaching and doing some justice work. We had a struggle to find a Christian community where we fit. I read his book called Original Revolution and something clicked for me.

Yoder talked about the importance of community for the gospel. He noted that the context of Jesus’ ministry was an empire with widespread injustice. In that context, what Jesus was doing was finding a third way: not the way of the Zealots who advocated violent uprising and not the way of the Pharisees and the Sadducees who supported accommodation. Rather, Jesus sought to form a community in the middle everything where people live justly with each other. I began to realize how central community is to what the gospel is about. The gospel is an invitation to join a community where people live by different values, in what has been called “the upside down kingdom.”

I recently found this affirmed, by the way, in paper written by a friend of mine who teaches in the Bible Department at EMU. The book of Revelations, Ted Grimsrud argues, is a call to suffering love within communities of support and resistance in the face of empire and dehumanizing powers. The basic focus of Revelations is consistent with the rest of the gospel: it points to the importance of community. This emphasis on community eventually helped lead us back to the Mennonite community in Elkhart, Indiana, where I had lived as a young man.

And that led to an “act of God,” as the insurance companies say, a fire, that led me to get involved in this work. I was the director of a half-way house for ex-prisoners and it burnt down. That’s when I started to get involved (reluctantly, I should admit) in victim-offender reconciliation. Without the fire I might never have gotten involved in what later came to be called restorative justice.

I need to acknowledge something here. My faith has been absolutely central to everything I do, but I’m often uncomfortable with the traditional language of piety and faith. You may have noticed that I haven’t used a lot of that language here. It many be partly due, again, to growing up as a preacher’s kid. (I guess I blame lots of things on that). But more importantly, my life and my vocation has brought me in touch with the ways the traditional language of Christian faith and piety has often been hurtful to other people. And so I keep trying to find other, fresher, ways to express the same ideas. What I do in restorative justice I see as my mission and my witness, but I often do it in untraditional terms. I try to make it very clear who I am, what the basis of my actions is, where my faith fits in. But I try to use inclusive language and inclusive frameworks and to do it in a way that’s invitational rather than impositional.

For example, when I wrote the book Changing Lenses, I wrote it first of all to the church. At the very end it says that and a whole chapter of the book is on biblical justice. But I tried to write in such a way that other people could read it and not be put off by that. It's been deeply rewarding that the book has been so widely accepted: When the state of Michigan, for example, buys it for all their parole, probation officers. Or when I get requests from Iran to translate it into Persian and from the Arab world to translate it into Arabic – these kinds of experiences make me think that maybe the approach works.

I’ve tried to think of justice in a way that’s deeply biblical, but also can connect to people in an existential way and connect with their own traditions. As we've discussed at this conference, so many different people around the world have found that restorative justice connects with their traditions in some way.

If you look at restorative justice the way I articulate it, there is little doubt that it is rooted in an ethical system that comes out of an Anabaptist tradition. It is probably no accident that the two men who did the first case of victim-offender reconciliation in Canada, the case that led to this whole movement, were Mennonites. They had been part of a faith group that was trying to figure out how to apply their faith in the real world, and someone came up with this crazy idea of having victims go back and meet offenders. It led to this whole thing. It is probably no accident that the first such program in the United States, the one that I eventually directed after it got started, was begun, at least in part, by a Mennonite seminary student and Mennonite probation officers.

My tradition puts strong emphasis on practicing love, on ethics and how we behave. It has a strong historic emphasis on peace, and I see restorative justice as basically a peacemaking approach to justice. My tradition also emphasizes community and the practice of servanthood. So it is probably no accident then that all this seems to connect with many of the values that I articulate in restorative justice.

However, I might also admit that one of my biggest disappointments, in restorative justice is that it has been embraced by the rest of the world more than by Mennonites. The only really negative review I can remember on Changing Lenses was from a Mennonite who said it was idealistic and it wouldn’t work in the real world.

I had the funny experience one time with an administrator of a Mennonite college and Sir Charles Pollard, who was until recently the head of one of the biggest police forces in England and a restorative justice advocate. We were sitting at a restaurant and I was listening to this “top cop” from England trying to convince a Mennonite university leader that yes, you could use restorative justice at the university just as they were doing in some of the biggest cities in England. Talk about paradox!

Now I see myself approaching the end of my formal career. I view my main responsibility at this time in my life as passing the baton to other people. In fact, some of my former students are now taking this work into places that I never imagined. And I’m in a wonderful place to do that, because I have amazing students from all over the world. Our founding director, John Paul Lederach (who received your award some years ago), used to call them “colleagues masquerading as students” because they all come with practice background, they bring so much experience and wisdom to the classroom, and then they take the work to amazing places.

The money that came with the award that I was honored to receive this weekend is going for what I call the “Koru project.” We plan to initiate a process of learning from our graduates who are doing restorative justice. We want to know what they’re learning about the real world of restorative justice, how they are applying it and what we can learn from their experiences and reflections. We want their wisdom not just for our program but for the world of restorative justice.

In all of this I’ve been struggling to find some balance and personal space, to avoid burn-out, and to help my students avoid it as well. This gets me to the subtitle of this “reflection.” Edward Abbey, the famous environmentalist, wrote one time: “Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am. A reluctant enthusiast and a part-time crusader. A half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the west. It is even more important to enjoy it, while you can, while it’s still there.” So I try to be a half-hearted fanatic.

There is another theme that I mentioned at the end of my address the other night, and I’m going to end on it here. When I took one of my first philosophy classes, my teacher Delbert Wiens started the course by saying something like this: “Now you’ve been educated in the western mode of thinking. You come from a western culture. So you have been shaped by the philosopher Descartes. Descartes said, 'I’m going to doubt everything. I’m only going to believe what I can't doubt.' He finally concluded that the only thing he could believe is, 'I think therefore I am.'” My teacher continued, “That critical or skeptical approach has been useful - it’s certainly scientifically useful - but it has some real down sides, and that’s not where we’re going to start. We’re going to start in wonder, or awe.” I’ve found that stance has served me well.

A couple of years ago someone gave me a book by David James Duncan called My Story as Told by Water. He defines wonder like this: “Wonder is unknowing, experienced as pleasure.” Wonder involves an openness to mystery. So here’s a quote I once heard from a spiritual director: “We are called to openness, and sin is closing ourselves to mystery. Closing ourselves to mystery is closing ourselves to God.” That’s the stance from which I try to face the world, my creator, my vocation: an awareness and appreciation of mystery. An attitude of wonder and of awe.

Through it all, I’m both comforted and guided by the mysterious and paradoxical words of Psalm 103. Psalm 103, I think is the paradigm, the dominant theme, of justice in the Bible.

Shalom.