Mend our brother's broken heart

The other day it was sentencing time in the High Court for a former teacher, a school principal indeed, convicted of sexual abuse of pupils at a Maori school. TV gave us a look in the court, assuming that we are all voyeurs. This chap was cowering in the dock, shattered, beaten, humiliated, frightened and helpless as though at his public execution, as the judge gave him eight years.

I was impressed however with the judge, who denied himself the luxury of high moral indignation on behalf of “all right-thinking people”, and simply stuck to the legal necessities. Also, he allowed the teacher’s whanau not only to be present, but to conduct their own quite dignified karakia. Often this is a problem and an embarrassment, it seems to me, but this time we got a heartfelt prayer spoken by an elder, and the sentence that stuck in my mind was: “Mend our brother’s broken heart.”

Our culture applies a great deal of energy to punishment and retribution. An eye for an eye makes a lot of people feel better, they feel that the world is the right way up for once. If the punishment and humiliation of someone can be used as a warning and a moral deterrent, even better -- although there is precious little evidence to show it has any of those effects. People such as Garth McVicar of "Sensible" Sentencing and all his unpleasant ilk think we have a common stake in making sentences harsh. Their pet hate is judges who are “soft”. You wonder whether they would advocate state-operated tumbrils, if they knew what those were. It is incomprehensible to these people that anyone might be more interested in the reclamation and restoration of the offender.

Of course, society’s eye for an eye attitudes are also the fount of huge hypocrisy. The higher you climb on the moral ground, the more sickeningly hypocritical you get. We seem to be blind to it. Watch the feeding frenzy that results when some MP or other unfortunate, who has himself/herself taken some moral stand, is then shown to be fallible. Much of the media devotedly feeds these ugly aspects of our culture. It is as Gandhi said, An eye for an eye simply makes the whole world blind.

In all my CD collection, one of the best tracks of all has the two American negro sopranos, Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman, singing the negro spiritual:

There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.

And in all graphic art, nothing for me surpasses Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal.

A secular culture, in the end, lets people go to hell -- or remain in hell where they are already. Indeed, it is a mantra you hear people repeat these days, when someone has done something unspeakable: I’d let him rot in hell.

Worst of all, there have been instances in which such attitudes have emerged in what purports to be the christian church in NZ.

I have no knowledge of the teacher at the start of this essay, but I saw him there, and I know what grace and love can achieve. On the other hand, I recall a church colleague from years ago who was apprehended and found guilty of similar offences. The church simply didn’t want to know. He went to prison in an abyss of sorrow and depression, and there he died of a broken heart. The church still doesn’t want to know. I share in the guilt of that.