I. Saturday Morning: Opening Presentation on Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics

The substantive discussions began Saturday morning with Peter Gabel presenting avision linking the various efforts each of us is making in our respective legal settings with a larger vision of social change. According to Nanette Schorr’s wonderful notes from the retreat, Peter emphasized three themes. The first was simply to point out that although the words “ spiritual” and “political” are today conceived to be disconnected from one another and referring to aspects of reality that seem to have nothing to do with each other, actually these aspects of our social existence are always connected. To successfully transform law and the larger society, we must understand and illuminate this connection.

We tend to think of the spiritual as referring to inner life and politics as referring to something more external, like struggles over the distribution of wealth and power. But this distinction is actually not accurate if we remember that we are all inherently social beings, all in relation to each other and not existing apart from our interrelatedness that continually shapes us and our sense of what constitutes “reality.” From this viewpoint, our spiritual longings for a sacred and meaningful life, for love and mutual recognition, for forgiveness and acceptance, need to be manifested in the world around us that we create—that is in politics (understood not as “what politicians do,” or elections, or through any such narrow lens, but rather the collective activity that we engage in to communally and democratically create the whole of our social life.) The fact that both law and politics are not today considered to be “spiritual” activities or arenas reflects only the tragedy that these central ways of being together in public life have become de-spiritualized.

The second theme was to try to show how this de-spiritualization of the public sphere takes place, emphasizing, by contrast, our inherently social desire for mutual recognition and affirmation and that this spiritual desire is as essential to our very existence as our material needs for food and shelter (infants who are not held will fail to thrive and die). In spite of this social/spiritual longing for community—a community in which we recognize one another as “I and Thou” in the words of Jewish Theologian Martin Buber—our dilemma today is that we are all ensnared in a circle of collective denial of this very desire under-girded by a terror of humiliation that is a legacy of our culture’s individualism and materialism. To even limit the explanation in this way is probably too narrow—it is probably closer to the truth to say that the evolution of consciousness in this society is at a point where we are now only just approaching a realization of our capacity to see the other as a Thou, as a sacred embodiment of existence and the Divine.

This portion of the presentation emphasized that the post-60s and post- Marxist task of our generation is to help elevate the spiritual longings of our common humanity out of their current “private” location and into our public life so that we can see what we long for reflected back to us by “ the world,” rather than remaining pooled up in our isolated individual selves and families. The public culture, including legal culture, that denies our desire for mutual recognition and authentic social connection, a connection that would allow us to see each other as the source of each other’s completion, must somehow be cracked open, and in a safe way, sensitive to our fear of revealing these deepest needs and longings to the very people (each other) who have thus far failed to recognize them. It is only by thus linking the spiritual and the political that we can transform the world and allow the whole of our common humanity and inherent goodness to become visible to each of us who is today toiling in isolation.

The last part of the opening talk was designed to reiterate the immense potential and importance of law in this process of creating a new political sphere, if law can become a highly visible public arena of social healing, and to connect law and justice in a way that might realize Martin Luther King’s vision of justice as “Love correcting that which revolts against love.” Here the aim was to emphasize that while many of us are already involved in some form of spiritual/legal activity in communities, like the Restorative Justice community that holds conferences and retreats working to bring the Restorative Justice perspective into Criminal Law and other legal settings, the distinctive aspect of our project is to try to tie together in an overarching vision what the link is among Restorative Justice, Understanding-based mediation, the introduction of spiritual elements into private practice, and efforts to transform the education of the next generation of lawyers in a spiritual and moral direction.

In a larger sense, all of these efforts are attempts to overcome the enormously painful consequences of a socially alienated world. This alienation, separating self and other and suffusing life with paranoia toward the other, existential isolation, and cynicism or despair about our own highest longings, is today reinforced by an adversarial, individualistic, and materialist legal culture that in effect equates alienation and justice. By tying together all of our distinctive efforts in our respective localities and types of work within a disalienating vision of a new spiritual politics, we have a real contribution to make in changing the world as a whole and law as a whole beyond our particular and important work in different contexts with particular clients or in particular fields of law or law teaching.

At the end of the presentation everyone booed. Just kidding: this just shows how hard it is to write this stuff down without showing some kind of fear or shame. In reality, people broke up into four small groups, met for a period of time discussing the ideas presented, and then came back to the larger group to share their respective group’s thoughts. Among the many points raised were feelings about the enormity of the dilemma of social alienation and the difficulty of affecting it, the need for translating these ideas into languages appropriate to the varied contexts within which we live and work (recognizing, for example, that Texas is not California), the tremendous importance of the deep message underlying these ideas insofar as they reflect every aspect of our cultural existence, and the importance of transforming self-blaming and other-blaming, which function to deny the climate of spiritual distortion that pervades our spiritual/interpersonal environment.