The Value of Punishment

I wrote this post nearly a year ago and never posted it. I started out to say "I don't know why" at the end of that sentence, but I don't think that would be entirely accurate. I think that I never posted it because it was uncomfortable, because it was too personal, because it's something none of us like to think too much about as it applies to our own lives. It's fine in the theoretical, as we talk about raising children or reform in our criminal justice systems--two things that I, as a parent, former criminal defense lawyer, and legal writer think about a lot--but not so much when it comes closer to home. I ran across it again today and decided that I thought what I'd written was true, and important, even if it wasn't entirely comfortable...so here it is.

I had to be punished yesterday. In one sense, I think that self-imposed punishment is the least valuable. It requires discipline, certainly, and a deep level of acceptance, but it is still in some sense chosen, still within our control. Receiving punishment from some just authority—whether we want it or not, whether we agree with it or not—is beautifully humbling. Or it can be, if it is well conceived and well received.

Unfortunately, both of those conditions seem to be sadly lacking in society today. In our criminal justice system, punishment is imposed seemingly at random; some sentences seem outrageous in their lenience and others in their severity. Most sentences have nothing directly to do with the crime in question. It doesn’t seem to be intended to inspire reform, and where it is the inspiration seems to be expected to come from fear of future punishment, from having “learned your lesson” about what happens if you behave like that. True reform, as we well know, requires a change of heart, not simply an aversion to punishment.

And, in fact, the aversion to punishment itself can undermine its effectiveness. When punishment is accepted—and I mean accepted internally, not simply conceded to—it can open the door to wonderful growth in obedience and humility. Unfortunately, the flipside—and the much more common scenario today—is that resistance to punishment (though it might not be escaped) builds a fortress of pride and an illusion of being “in control of our own lives.” The “they can’t do that to me” attitude has become so instinctive that it is nearly impossible for the value of punishment to penetrate the rejection of obedience and humility.

One summer morning several years ago, I was lying on my bed reading with my daughter when the power went out. I got up and checked the breaker box and looked out the window to see whether the neighbors had power, and then, with a bit of a sinking feeling in my stomach, I went to check the front table where we kept the outgoing mail.

You see, I’d just returned from Las Vegas, and before I’d left I’d written out the utility check and put it in an envelope on the table where we put the outgoing mail…but I hadn’t actually mentioned to my husband that it was there and needed to be mailed.

At one time in my life I would have been angry: angry with my husband for not sending out any mail during the whole time I was gone, and angry with the utility company, because the bill couldn’t be more than ten days late and this seemed a bit hasty. I was just back from this long trip, and I was tired. We only had one car, and my husband had taken it to work. That meant a trek uptown—about a mile and a half—on foot, and it was in the nineties.

But I made a conscious decision that morning. I didn’t get angry. I took responsibility for not having either mailed the bill myself or explicitly pointed it out to my husband, and I recognized that three mile round-trip walk in muggy 90+ weather as the price I had to pay for that carelessness. My daughter, then five, wasn’t responsible, so when she began to complain of being hot and tired on the walk, I put her on my back and carried her. She shouldn’t have to suffer for my mistakes, after all, and if carrying her made the whole thing a little harder on me, so be it. Maybe next time I wouldn’t get so caught up in the excitement of my travel plans that I overlooked the obligations of everyday life.

By the time I arrived at the utility office, I was glad that we didn’t have a second car. It was clear to me that if this had been a minor inconvenience cleared up in five minutes in my air conditioned car, I wouldn’t really have taken time to give any thought to the way I’d just assumed someone else would take care of the details while I floated in the lazy river at the MGM Grand.

Although I was already in my thirties that day, it was the first time I’d thought to be grateful for consequences, to really open myself up to fully experiencing them instead of letting resentment interfere or trying to find ways to mitigate them.

There seems to be a “never give in” attitude in our society that makes it a point of pride to stand your ground even when you’re clearly wrong. “They can’t do that to me” extends so far that when it turns out that they can—when one finds himself in jail, for example, or without his driver’s license—“not letting it get to you” seems not only to be the norm, but viewed as somehow heroic.

I say, let it get to you. If you’re in jail for something you did, suffer. Don’t live inside your mind so that you can be “free” even behind bars—live behind bars and acknowledge your restrictions and the reasons for them every minute of every day. If you’ve lost your driver’s license, don’t drive. Accept the inconvenience of having to leave earlier and walk and take buses as part of the punishment you know you deserve, and give up places you don’t really need to go so that you don’t make someone else pay the price for your crime by requiring taxi service. And above all, be grateful. Realize you’ve been given an important opportunity to grow in virtues, to learn your place in the world and in God’s plan.

C.S. Lewis said once that every man we encounter will one day be a creature of such beauty that we should be tempted, if we saw it today, to worship it, or of such horror that we’ve never seen the like even in our nightmares. He pointed out that in every encounter, we help our fellow man along one path or the other. But there is perhaps no man-made circumstance in which that is so true as in punishment. It is never ignored, it is never without affect: it strengthens humility and obedience or it strengthens pride and rebellion.

Advice? Insights? Anyone?

This evening, my daughter told me over dinner that she was worried about one of her friends. She's in middle school, so of course a lot of frightening possibilities sprang to mind at once, both about the kids and their families. She has a friend in foster care. She has a friend who is the victim of a "shared custody" arrangement that has her moving back and forth between her parents' homes every other day. She has a friend whose mother was recently deported. So I was prepared for the worst.

But not for what she said.

Her friend, she told me, wears a cross tucked inside her shirt, because her mother has forbidden her to have anything to do with "church stuff". Her mother found and threw away her Bible, and won't let her go to church with friends because she doesn't want her "learning about that religion crap".

I had no idea what to say.

I told her that we would pray for her friend and her mother, and that she should remind her friend that the most important thing was her relationship with God and that no one but her would know if she talked to God. And I felt two firmly held ethical beliefs crashing into one another hard enough to leave shattered glass on the ground around me. I'd be outraged if I felt like some other adult was feeding my daughter ideas that were contrary to our religion at her age. But the idea of a 12-year-old child trying to be a Christian alone and hide it from her parents is pretty painful, too.

I have no idea what the right thing to do might be, or even if doing anything (other than praying) is right. Any thoughts, experiences, prayers, insights, etc. will be greatly appreciated.

Hijacking Jesus

I was always bothered, when I was working in the city, by the people on the street who held up pictures of Christ while they begged, who wrote Bible verses on their signs. It seemed exploitative to me; I was less likely to give them money than to those who simply claimed a need. Jesus, I said once to a co-worker, is not a marketing device.

What I meant, of course, was that I thought that Jesus SHOULDN'T be a marketing device. That's all I could mean, really, because there is no denying that in today's society, Christ is a marketing device every day, all around us. What began as something sincere in the days when we knew the members of our parishes has become the frequent tool of the unscrupulous. I'm not just talking about the credit repair people advertising on Relevant Radio, giving the impression that they're just there to help. I'm not just talking about people advertising on the back of the church bulletin and offering a 10% discount to parish members simply because it's a cheap way to draw in business. I'm talking about something much more sinister, and much more pervasive--something a single example should clearly put into perspective.

Google "Christian payday loans". No really. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Yes, there are more than 8,000 results.

I must admit that even cynic that I am, even with the experience I've had in researching and writing consumer protection information about payday loans and payday lenders, I held out a moment of hope. I just had to. I thought that maybe, just maybe, Christian payday loans were a moral alternative to the payday lenders who command fees equivalent to 400% interest or more in storefront offices and over the Internet.

So I clicked on a few links. I read some information. I filled out a few forms. And I learned that Christian payday loans are different from regular payday lenders are different from other payday lenders in one way: they write "Christian" on their websites and marketing literature.

What is Christian about charging 400% interest to working people in such dire straits that they can't afford to wait for their next paychecks to arrive? And what, exactly, is Christian about using the word "Christian" to sell something without letting Christian principles alter your business practices in any way? Jesus as a marketing device is bad enough, but Jesus as a marketing device for deceptive and destructive practices is more than we should tolerate.

Recently, in the name of Christianity, we've seen protesters disrupting the funerals of fallen soldiers and slain college students. Now, we see businesses that exist only as a means of taking advantage of the working poor selling their virtually unbreakable cycle of debt with Christ's name. This list could go on, and I'm sure that you don't need me to spell it all out. We see it all around us every day. But what are we going to do about it? How are we going to reclaim Christ's name and insist that it stand only for the principles HE taught and works truly done in his name?

"My Soul Has Adjusted"

A colleague mentioned to me recently that he doesn't sleep much—never more than a few hours at a stretch. "That can't be healthy," I said, and he told me that his body had adjusted.

That happens. The human body is a remarkable thing; it's made to function one way, with a certain amount of sleep, within a certain temperature range, with a certain kind of fuel. And yet, if those things aren't available, it adapts. And we recognize that adaptation—we know that our bodies were meant to have nutritious food and a minimum amount of rest and all that, and that if they aren't getting it and they're still functioning, something fundamental has shifted in order to accommodate that, to keep operating as best it can in the absence of optimal conditions.

For better or worse, the human soul seems to work pretty much the same way. The dangerous difference is that we’re not so quick to recognize it. When the soul doesn’t get what it needs to thrive, when it doesn’t get the fuel it was meant to run on or the environment it was created to thrive in, it adjusts as well. It finds a way to get by in less than optimal circumstances, without the food and water and fresh air that it needs to be all that it was meant to be.

But just like the body, it has to change to do so. Just like the body, it doesn’t work as well without the conditions it was created for, doesn’t grow to its full strength, doesn’t become exactly what it was meant to be…what it could have been if only the sunlight hadn’t been obscured or the water hadn’t been polluted or any of a hundred other possible contaminations or missing pieces. And I think that for the most part, we don’t notice. It’s not so easy to see our souls shriveling as it is our bodies, not as easy to detect that something isn’t working quite right. Our souls adjust.

And unless we recognize that that’s what’s happening and find them the right food, the right sunlight, enough fresh air, they shrink into something very different from what they were designed to be.

But finding the right food and re-adjusting to it isn’t always easy. It seems, perhaps, that if it’s what we were made for, if it’s what was made for us, then it should fit, should feel right, should be as natural as breathing. And without those adjustments, that might well be true. But breathing fresh air is painful if we’ve become accustomed to a different atmosphere, and vegetables are hard to digest after a steady diet of processed foods. It stands to reason that if we’ve been feeding our souls a lot of junk and they’ve adapted, the good stuff isn’t going to go down easily—that’s going to take another round of adjustment.

The Spirit of Martyrdom

Recently, I read Father David Knight's book, His Way. I've probably mentioned before how interesting and insightful I found Father Knight's Confession Can Change Your Life, and I'd been meaning for a long time to read more of his books. One of the things Knight talks about in His Way is the spirit of martyrdom in the modern world. Those of us who have always lived in the west have rather lost our sense of what that means. After all, we're rarely called upon to sacrifice our lives for our faith, and no one ever shows up and confiscates our land because we won't abdicate loyalty to Christ. It creates the impression that martyrdom is a concept of days gone by.

Really, though, Father Knight points out that it simply tends to manifest itself far less dramatically in our culture today. The point, he says, is that those early Christians knew that they risked everything every day simply by being Christian. They didn't remove themselves from everday life or avoid building homes and families and owning property and working at their trades--they simply did it all with the knowledge that the day might come when they had to choose, and that when that day came, they would choose Christ.

In some small way, we all face those decisions every day. We all live out that spirit when we decide to pass up on a profitable venture because it's not consistent with Christian values or to skip a social event because we can't condone the atmosphere or any of a hundred other things that we might not consciously connect to martyrdom--might not even consciously connect to our faith.

The whole idea that martyrdom was a necessary condition of any Christian life, but that it didn't mean quite what we associated it with from history and the idea that it wasn't about giving things up so much as a continual state of willingness to give them up if that's what Christianity required resonated with me. The apparent conflict between the focus on the value of relationships and the admonishment against attachments always created some dissonance for me, and this gave me a new perspective to consider.

But I must admit that even as I read those words and gained those insights, I was thinking that even the kind of choices Father Knight described didn't come up so often in modern life. Specifically, he pointed out that any friendship that wasn't founded in Christ was at risk, could always turn if you chose to stick to your principles and be true to Christ. And I didn't really get it. After all, I have many friends who disagree with me about many things. I think that most of us do.

But God has a way of clarifying these things for us, and just a few short days after I'd read those words and questioned their validity, a group of people I'd been associating with in an online forum took the surprising step of pulling away from the main forums and forming their own discussion group for the express purpose of limiting religious discussion.

The controversy that led up to their decision was, indeed, unpleasant, and on one level it might even have been understandable. But the options proposed frankly shocked me: come join our new group and agree to "leave God out of it" or don't come and talk to us at all. This wasn't, understand, and anti-religious or anti-Christian group. It was a group of people who was sick of listening to people proselytize and debate and squabble and so chose to create a safe haven where all discussion would be free from mention of God, positive or negative.

But is it really possible, if you're attempting to live a Christian life, if you're making decisions and analyzing situations in light of Biblical imperatives, to "leave God out of the discussion"? I determined that it was not, and off they drifted. But the controversy didn't end there. The backlash from the previous discussions continued to grow until there was more backlash than there was discussion. And the knee-jerk negative reaction to anything remotely related to religion became so extreme that I found that there were people I hardly dared respond to, because I was repeatedly faced with the choice of triggering that reaction, answering less than honestly so as not to reveal that God was part of my analysis, or simply not responding at all.

Of course, we all encounter people it's best to simply ignore, people best kept at a distance. But in this case, the people I found myself most reluctant to be honest with were the people I'd found most interesting, the people I'd believed to be most open-minded and capable of rational discussion that considered all viewpoints.

I don't fault the people involved; I can see how every new step along the path developed, and how each decision along the way seemed like a reasonable one in the moment, and how different the issue looks from "the other side". But it came as a startling revelation to me that I'd one day suddenly be asked by rational, thinking people to choose between talking to them and acknowledging the role that God plays in my life--and it gave a concrete context to what I'd been thinking just the week before "couldn't happen here".

Just Wanted to Share a Thought on Peace

I ran across this story on another blog today, and while the idea it illustrates shouldn't be news to us, it's a good reminder, and well told, so I thought I'd share: The King's Prize

Grace is Like Sugar

In my fledgling days of Christianity - and during dark days later and probably some still to come - the idea that God would grant one the grace to weather trials, to do the right thing when it was hard, to make sacrifices wasn't especially comforting. It didn't, frankly, sound like that much of a gift that I'd have the strength to do stuff I hated and give up stuff I liked.

And sometimes it's like that. If you absolutely have to take some awful-tasting medicine, sugar can make it possible to swallow it. Not pleasant, certainly, and probably still something you'd rather avoid, but possible. That's the picture of grace I always had when I read those words words about grace enabling you to do the right thing, as if it would give you the ability to stomach things - lots and lots of things - that you'd rather avoid.

But I'd forgotten about grapefruit. Or at least, I'd forgotten that there's a lot more grapefruit in the world than there is horrible tasting medicine, and that it comes into our lives much more regularly and naturally.

Grapefruit is sour. I actually happen to like grapefruit plain, but many people do not. It's too tart, too bitter, too acidic. Add a little sugar, though, and it's delicious. Not just something you can stomach, but something really good. Sugar doesn't mask the taste of grapefruit or cover it with something different and better or mitigate it so that you can take a deep breath and force yourself to swallow. No, it draws out the best of the natural flavor of the grapefruit, mingles with it, enhances it.

Without a pinch of sugar, it would be very easy to pass on grapefruit altogether, to decide on the first taste that it was a bit too tart and never really experience the texture and the hint of sweetness and the hundred and one health benefits. But with a little sugar, it's suddenly inviting. Not something to be stomached but something you might otherwise never have enjoyed. Something you might develop a taste for even without the sugar, once you've come to know it better.

It seems to me now that it's a little that way with grace, too. Sometimes there's awful medicine to be taken and it only takes the edge off enough that it's possible to swallow. But more often there are potentially delicious fruits, and grace draws out the flavor for us in something we might otherwise never have appreciated, gives us eyes to see the appeal in something masked by our worldly views, or sets up a stepladder to a place we didn't know enough to reach for.