My family moved overseas when I was 13 years old. It's kind of an awkward time to move to another country. It's the time in our culture where we are trying to figure out who we are going to become and what's important to us. It's the time when we learn how to relate to other people outside of our families. It's the time when we're trying to form an identity that's separate from our parents.
So, at 13, I picked up and moved to the fine country of Singapore. It's very different than the United States. The biggest difference I saw that goes to the core of how we relate to one another is that, in the United States, we are primarily individuals. In Asia, you are primarily part of a bigger community--you are defined based on your relationship to your family, then the greater community, and then your nation. When making decisions, the family and the community are given greater care than the individual's desires. There were other things I noticed--like the fact that all the light switches were upside down, or that communication is much more indirect so that no individual is ever blamed for anything. So "the glass got broken" rather than "Henry broke the glass."
I was a pretty observant kid, so I spent a lot of time watching how people interacted and trying to figure it out. Although I didn't find the language to describe the differences in culture until my college sociology class, I definitely noticed. I remember thinking about their governmental system and realizing that democracy was not the only way to go. I mean, they had a pretty successful country, and they don't have the same form of government as we do.
It was about that time when I realized a couple of things: (1) Culture affects everything we see and understand about what is around us; (2) There are good and bad things about every culture; (3) I could actually choose my own values and way of life based on something other than my culture, namely, what I believed was biblical or that flows out of the character of God.
I began to critically evaluate the teen magazines coming from the US and the messages they sent about what I was supposed to care about (clothes, boys, appearance, etc). I began to think about what I actually wanted my life to look like and the values I wanted to use to measure my choices. And I chose. Because of my life experience, I was able to have a much more proactive role in my own personal development than I probably would have if we'd lived in the US all my life.
Those three principles have a huge effect on where I'm at today and why I'm doing and talking about what I am. There's a whole lot of momentum in the Christian world right now to reject what the modern church sees as the cultural imperfections of the post-modern, post-Christian culture. There even seems to be the expectation that, for people to truly come to faith in God, they have to leave behind their postmodern culture and go back to a rational, modern way of living and believing.
But every culture has positives and negatives. There is a concern for social justice and the environment that exists in today's culture that did not exist when I was growing up. Reading the stories of the Bible, those two things seem to be pretty important to God. There's also an inherent distrust in material possessions that I'm not sure existed before. Where we're at now is not all bad.
And what I learned from living overseas is that cultural changes are difficult. They take a long time. They go to the core of people's beliefs about life and their own identities. I think that all culture should be challenged and evaluated in light of the character of God. But practically speaking, to some extent we have to work within the context that we're in. And that's really what my heart is. My heart is to ask the question "how do we reach and communicate the heart of the gospel within today's culture?" God can change culture - but he's only going to be able to do that as people's hearts who are within that culture are changed and conformed to his image.
Within the month, Second Story, a fictional story about that question will be released by Da[w]bar House Press. It'll be available on Amazon and hopefully through some local bookstores. I really want to spark conversation about how we can effectively communicate the gospel to people today, right now, in this culture. More information about the book is available on my website.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Introducing . . . storying
In a slight change of pace, I really wanted to take a couple of minutes and recommend a great resource to you. About a year and a half ago, I stumbled on the idea of storying from Michael Novelli. His website is here.
The basic idea is that it's a really powerful thing within a community to return to the power of the story of the Bible. The Bible was written in narrative form, but so often we break it up and analyze it into tiny, bite-size pieces. It's really easy to misinterpret. It's also really easy to sort of contain God if we can categorize and analyze things to the point where they all make sense.
Last year a small group of people met in my house about twice a month to story through the Old Testament. I was immediately captured by the stories. I was confronted by the character of God in those stories, who was so much bigger than I'd remembered. We had great conversations about the stories and about what they challenged us to do in our own lives.
As I've learned to recognize emotional barriers to faith in my life and in the lives of those around me, this idea of story has really jumped out at me as a way to engage with those barriers. Through story, we can introduce ourselves and our friends to the person of God rather than just ideas about God. And those stories have the power to transform. They challenge our preconceived notions and ideas, and they force us to engage with God in a different way than if we just talk about him in the abstract. I would highly recommend this resource.
The basic idea is that it's a really powerful thing within a community to return to the power of the story of the Bible. The Bible was written in narrative form, but so often we break it up and analyze it into tiny, bite-size pieces. It's really easy to misinterpret. It's also really easy to sort of contain God if we can categorize and analyze things to the point where they all make sense.
Last year a small group of people met in my house about twice a month to story through the Old Testament. I was immediately captured by the stories. I was confronted by the character of God in those stories, who was so much bigger than I'd remembered. We had great conversations about the stories and about what they challenged us to do in our own lives.
As I've learned to recognize emotional barriers to faith in my life and in the lives of those around me, this idea of story has really jumped out at me as a way to engage with those barriers. Through story, we can introduce ourselves and our friends to the person of God rather than just ideas about God. And those stories have the power to transform. They challenge our preconceived notions and ideas, and they force us to engage with God in a different way than if we just talk about him in the abstract. I would highly recommend this resource.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Love one another
"I don't really care what people think about predestination or baptism or salvation. The church doesn't know how to love. I think we should be focused on that."
Regardless of what you think about the theology of this statement, it's something to consider. One of the biggest issues people have with the church is how it treats people. One of the biggest issues I have with the church is how it treats people.
In John 13:35, Jesus said, "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
Is it really a surprise, then, that people use the question of love to evaluate the truth of the church's or individuals' beliefs?
This seems to be one of the most common barriers to faith. What we do is so much more important than what we say. That doesn't mean that we don't need to put words around what we believe. It simply means that what we do has the power to authenticate or detract from what we say we believe.
I don't think that I'm saying anything new here. But it's amazing how disconnected what we say we believe and what we actually do has the ability to become. In some ways, our faith communities contribute to this by creating the expectation that spirituality happens on Sunday and doesn't affect the rest of the week.
What does it actually mean to love the people around us? What does it mean to love the "least of these" or our most vulnerable populations?
I once saw a news show about Rick Warren's wife. She was explaining her humanitarian work in Africa, and she was able to share the story of how she became interested in this work. It was amazing. After seeing so much skepticism in the media about the things that Christians say and do, this interviewer was basically speechless. She couldn't make fun of what Kay Warren was doing. She couldn't despise it. She had to respect it because it was making a real difference in a real way.
As I participate in this church planting team and as we prepare to become the kind of community that we hope to be, this is something that we have been talking about a lot. How do we create a culture of love and care? How does your community intentionally love one another and the world?
Regardless of what you think about the theology of this statement, it's something to consider. One of the biggest issues people have with the church is how it treats people. One of the biggest issues I have with the church is how it treats people.
In John 13:35, Jesus said, "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
Is it really a surprise, then, that people use the question of love to evaluate the truth of the church's or individuals' beliefs?
This seems to be one of the most common barriers to faith. What we do is so much more important than what we say. That doesn't mean that we don't need to put words around what we believe. It simply means that what we do has the power to authenticate or detract from what we say we believe.
I don't think that I'm saying anything new here. But it's amazing how disconnected what we say we believe and what we actually do has the ability to become. In some ways, our faith communities contribute to this by creating the expectation that spirituality happens on Sunday and doesn't affect the rest of the week.
What does it actually mean to love the people around us? What does it mean to love the "least of these" or our most vulnerable populations?
I once saw a news show about Rick Warren's wife. She was explaining her humanitarian work in Africa, and she was able to share the story of how she became interested in this work. It was amazing. After seeing so much skepticism in the media about the things that Christians say and do, this interviewer was basically speechless. She couldn't make fun of what Kay Warren was doing. She couldn't despise it. She had to respect it because it was making a real difference in a real way.
As I participate in this church planting team and as we prepare to become the kind of community that we hope to be, this is something that we have been talking about a lot. How do we create a culture of love and care? How does your community intentionally love one another and the world?
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Listening for stories
So I watched this clip this morning about "The Danger of a Single Story." It got me thinking about things on several levels, particularly having lived cross-culturally. It resonated with my own experience.
And I got to thinking that being willing to hear all stories about a person or a people is so important about making human connections. Sociologists talk about stereotyping as a sort of short cut for survival and communication. We look at people, we size them up, and then we act according to what we expect will work. But to truly know someone, we have to be willing to listen to their stories - all of them - positive, negative, neutral. We have to take the time to hear people and to know what makes them tick.
We do this with our children, right? We spend a lot of time trying to understand them, to draw them out, to walk with them through joys and pains in life. We do this with our friends. We hear their stories, we tell our own to build relationship and connection or to encourage and challenge.
Learning to seek out and engage peoples' stories has really helped me in relationships. I'm an introvert. I somewhat hate talking to "strangers," meeting new people, and trying to figure out their cultural and personal expectations of me (as a Third-Culture Kid, I think that's normal, actually). But I find myself engrossed in the stories of other peoples' lives. And I find that when I truly listen to a person's stories - all of them - I'm able to find points of connection with almost everyone I meet.
This idea has great relevance to how I talk about faith. The single story that I was taught about sharing faith is that the church has the solution to the human problem of pain, suffering, evil, sin. Armed with a tract, I was to leave the safety of the church, go out into the streets, and impart that solution to the people I met. The stereotype is that the world out there is broken and needs what I have to say. That's really the only story I ever heard.
Over the last years though, I have begun to live out of who I am, and I have begun to listen to the stories of the people around me. Instead of seeing them as the stereotypical people who "need Jesus," I have seen them as people with many, many stories of joys and pains, desires and setbacks, hopes and fears. And I have engaged with those things at a human level, sometimes sharing my own story, sometimes sharing a Bible story, and sometimes just sitting without words. This is what it means to me now to share faith--it's to walk with people making genuine connections to them and their many stories.
Reading this blog, you may get the impression that all I ever talk about is faith. But the reality is that I spend a lot more time in my relationships listening to other people or building natural human connections based on shared interests or discussions about ideas. Though faith is central to my life and is always on my mind, I only talk about it when it's relevant to the current story that we're discussing.
The idea of sharing faith doesn't have to be a horrible, scary thing. It doesn't have to mean the imposition of my beliefs on other people. It doesn't have to mean uncomfortable conversations with people. If I truly believe that I am in the world to love and care for the people around me, and if I am doing that by hearing peoples' stories and engaging with them in a natural way, then talking about my own faith and my own perspective becomes really natural too.
And I got to thinking that being willing to hear all stories about a person or a people is so important about making human connections. Sociologists talk about stereotyping as a sort of short cut for survival and communication. We look at people, we size them up, and then we act according to what we expect will work. But to truly know someone, we have to be willing to listen to their stories - all of them - positive, negative, neutral. We have to take the time to hear people and to know what makes them tick.
We do this with our children, right? We spend a lot of time trying to understand them, to draw them out, to walk with them through joys and pains in life. We do this with our friends. We hear their stories, we tell our own to build relationship and connection or to encourage and challenge.
Learning to seek out and engage peoples' stories has really helped me in relationships. I'm an introvert. I somewhat hate talking to "strangers," meeting new people, and trying to figure out their cultural and personal expectations of me (as a Third-Culture Kid, I think that's normal, actually). But I find myself engrossed in the stories of other peoples' lives. And I find that when I truly listen to a person's stories - all of them - I'm able to find points of connection with almost everyone I meet.
This idea has great relevance to how I talk about faith. The single story that I was taught about sharing faith is that the church has the solution to the human problem of pain, suffering, evil, sin. Armed with a tract, I was to leave the safety of the church, go out into the streets, and impart that solution to the people I met. The stereotype is that the world out there is broken and needs what I have to say. That's really the only story I ever heard.
Over the last years though, I have begun to live out of who I am, and I have begun to listen to the stories of the people around me. Instead of seeing them as the stereotypical people who "need Jesus," I have seen them as people with many, many stories of joys and pains, desires and setbacks, hopes and fears. And I have engaged with those things at a human level, sometimes sharing my own story, sometimes sharing a Bible story, and sometimes just sitting without words. This is what it means to me now to share faith--it's to walk with people making genuine connections to them and their many stories.
Reading this blog, you may get the impression that all I ever talk about is faith. But the reality is that I spend a lot more time in my relationships listening to other people or building natural human connections based on shared interests or discussions about ideas. Though faith is central to my life and is always on my mind, I only talk about it when it's relevant to the current story that we're discussing.
The idea of sharing faith doesn't have to be a horrible, scary thing. It doesn't have to mean the imposition of my beliefs on other people. It doesn't have to mean uncomfortable conversations with people. If I truly believe that I am in the world to love and care for the people around me, and if I am doing that by hearing peoples' stories and engaging with them in a natural way, then talking about my own faith and my own perspective becomes really natural too.
Friday, December 3, 2010
A first step
One of my first opportunities to talk about my faith within a secular environment came while I was at work. I was on break, maybe at lunch in the break room, and the only other person at work who was my age was also there. We'll call her Melissa.
So Melissa and I were chatting. I was thinking then of going to law school, and she was thinking of going back to graduate school to study something like social work. We were talking about the future and where we were heading. Turns out that she almost went to law school, and I was a social work major for a very short time during undergrad. I asked her why she didn't want to go to law school. Then she asked me why I decided not to do social work.
And I remember really clearly that I told Melissa the story of how God had brought some emotional healing into my life. The reason I didn't go into social work is because I think that true life-change and healing comes within true community relationships with people who really know you--at least, that's been my experience. While I think there's a reason for the clinical setting in many cases, I've had the blessing of a rich spiritually-based community where the people around me are challenging me and helping me to grow. And no matter how much a professional listens to you, she doesn't really offer unconditional love. And I told her how my friends had offered that and how much it changed my life. I told her how I believed that God met me through that community in some really difficult times.
It was a really simple conversation. We didn't end by talking about church or God or Jesus, even. But that conversation opened the door to talking about faith and spiritual things - for both her and me. And as time went on, we did talk about a lot of deeply spiritual topics, and she initiated many of them.
Conversations about the spiritual are natural. We're spiritual beings, and if that part of your life is important to you, it's very natural that it will come out during some conversations. The first step toward spiritual conversations for me, though, has consistently been to share something from my own life. I never start with a list of all the beliefs I hold. I don't start by making judgmental comments about how horrible the world is or how someone's actions are "sinful" or even "wrong." I don't even really talk about the fact that I'm a Christian.
Instead, the natural bridge for me has been talking about something God has done in my life or talking about why I've made some of the choices I've made. And because that sharing comes as a natural part of a relationship, I've been able to continue walking beside people as a friend and sometime spiritual mentor over a long time.
So Melissa and I were chatting. I was thinking then of going to law school, and she was thinking of going back to graduate school to study something like social work. We were talking about the future and where we were heading. Turns out that she almost went to law school, and I was a social work major for a very short time during undergrad. I asked her why she didn't want to go to law school. Then she asked me why I decided not to do social work.
And I remember really clearly that I told Melissa the story of how God had brought some emotional healing into my life. The reason I didn't go into social work is because I think that true life-change and healing comes within true community relationships with people who really know you--at least, that's been my experience. While I think there's a reason for the clinical setting in many cases, I've had the blessing of a rich spiritually-based community where the people around me are challenging me and helping me to grow. And no matter how much a professional listens to you, she doesn't really offer unconditional love. And I told her how my friends had offered that and how much it changed my life. I told her how I believed that God met me through that community in some really difficult times.
It was a really simple conversation. We didn't end by talking about church or God or Jesus, even. But that conversation opened the door to talking about faith and spiritual things - for both her and me. And as time went on, we did talk about a lot of deeply spiritual topics, and she initiated many of them.
Conversations about the spiritual are natural. We're spiritual beings, and if that part of your life is important to you, it's very natural that it will come out during some conversations. The first step toward spiritual conversations for me, though, has consistently been to share something from my own life. I never start with a list of all the beliefs I hold. I don't start by making judgmental comments about how horrible the world is or how someone's actions are "sinful" or even "wrong." I don't even really talk about the fact that I'm a Christian.
Instead, the natural bridge for me has been talking about something God has done in my life or talking about why I've made some of the choices I've made. And because that sharing comes as a natural part of a relationship, I've been able to continue walking beside people as a friend and sometime spiritual mentor over a long time.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The power of story
About 2 years ago now, I sensed that I needed to get away from the craziness of life for a week and go to this little place of prayer called The Hermitage in Three Rivers, Michigan. It's a place where they practice the discipline of silence and you have time and space to just meet with God.
I'd been somewhat avoiding having such extended time with my own thoughts. My brother had been diagnosed with cancer that year, and I'd spent a lot of the year just trying to survive. I can't even explain now what the realization of his mortality did to me emotionally. He's the only person who experienced life with me in that way - we grew up in the states, and then left with our family to move overseas when I was 13 and he was 11. The thought of not having someone in the world who understands that life experience was horrifying to me. But I think I only cried about it once, and then I proceeded to take care of everyone - him, my sister-in-law, myself. My parents were still gone, you see, living overseas. So taking care of everything fell on me.
I'd spent a lot of years before that surviving too. The moving back and forth overseas and losing all important relationships made it hard for me to be able to open up and risk needing other people around. Inevitably, they would leave or I would leave. It doesn't help that I have a passion for and an interest in the world, so virtually all of my friends are forever jet-setting around, spending a year in this country or that one. I had finally come to a place of healthy interdependence within a community, and then once again I was headed toward survival. And for me, that means shutting everything off - all emotions, all relationships - and just walking through life. I was well on my way toward doing that again. And what I've noticed about life is that if you hold on to a pattern like that long enough, it becomes very difficult to undo.
So away I went, to the Hermitage. I took a stack of books from the library - spiritual books, devotionals. I took my guitar, my journal, my Bible. And I went and I stayed in a tiny cabin in the woods. And I had space and time to listen. When I got to the cabin, I found some books sitting in the desk. One of them was CS Lewis's "Till we have faces." When I got tired of reading "serious" books, I picked that one up. And I was engrossed. Here was a story about a person whose whole world had fallen apart. I read and I read, and then I got to the part where she is led to the room to read her charges against the god in the story.
And I stopped. And I cried. And I finally made the choice to be real about my own "charges" against God - about my questions about whether he is good and whether he will provide for us. My refusal to admit those questions, even to myself, had created a barrier between myself and God, and probably myself and other people. Once I said those words out loud, I was able to hear the truth from Scripture about who God actually is.
And that's the power of story. I don't know if there's anything else that would have unlocked my barriers to relationship with God, because I'm not sure that I even knew they were there. Reading the story and feeling the character's pain and walking with her through her own experience allowed me to draw parallels with my own life and allowed God to bring me to a place of willingness to be real with where I was at.
So part of the reason I believe so strongly that story is a way to engage with people's barriers to faith and trust is because that's what worked in my own life. That's what spoke to my own barriers and allowed me to move forward and take a risk to speak and to trust. I don't think it would have been half as powerful for someone to just look at me and say "Anna, you're obviously not trusting God right now." And how many people were there who I would have trusted to speak into my life anyway? I was basically emotionally removed from everyone and everything.
Story is nonthreatening. Story is compelling. Story gives people a chance to absorb truth in a way that it never will be absorbed when it's communicated through declarative statements.
For example, which was more compelling to you? The last paragraph of this post? Or the story I just told about myself?
I'd been somewhat avoiding having such extended time with my own thoughts. My brother had been diagnosed with cancer that year, and I'd spent a lot of the year just trying to survive. I can't even explain now what the realization of his mortality did to me emotionally. He's the only person who experienced life with me in that way - we grew up in the states, and then left with our family to move overseas when I was 13 and he was 11. The thought of not having someone in the world who understands that life experience was horrifying to me. But I think I only cried about it once, and then I proceeded to take care of everyone - him, my sister-in-law, myself. My parents were still gone, you see, living overseas. So taking care of everything fell on me.
I'd spent a lot of years before that surviving too. The moving back and forth overseas and losing all important relationships made it hard for me to be able to open up and risk needing other people around. Inevitably, they would leave or I would leave. It doesn't help that I have a passion for and an interest in the world, so virtually all of my friends are forever jet-setting around, spending a year in this country or that one. I had finally come to a place of healthy interdependence within a community, and then once again I was headed toward survival. And for me, that means shutting everything off - all emotions, all relationships - and just walking through life. I was well on my way toward doing that again. And what I've noticed about life is that if you hold on to a pattern like that long enough, it becomes very difficult to undo.
So away I went, to the Hermitage. I took a stack of books from the library - spiritual books, devotionals. I took my guitar, my journal, my Bible. And I went and I stayed in a tiny cabin in the woods. And I had space and time to listen. When I got to the cabin, I found some books sitting in the desk. One of them was CS Lewis's "Till we have faces." When I got tired of reading "serious" books, I picked that one up. And I was engrossed. Here was a story about a person whose whole world had fallen apart. I read and I read, and then I got to the part where she is led to the room to read her charges against the god in the story.
And I stopped. And I cried. And I finally made the choice to be real about my own "charges" against God - about my questions about whether he is good and whether he will provide for us. My refusal to admit those questions, even to myself, had created a barrier between myself and God, and probably myself and other people. Once I said those words out loud, I was able to hear the truth from Scripture about who God actually is.
And that's the power of story. I don't know if there's anything else that would have unlocked my barriers to relationship with God, because I'm not sure that I even knew they were there. Reading the story and feeling the character's pain and walking with her through her own experience allowed me to draw parallels with my own life and allowed God to bring me to a place of willingness to be real with where I was at.
So part of the reason I believe so strongly that story is a way to engage with people's barriers to faith and trust is because that's what worked in my own life. That's what spoke to my own barriers and allowed me to move forward and take a risk to speak and to trust. I don't think it would have been half as powerful for someone to just look at me and say "Anna, you're obviously not trusting God right now." And how many people were there who I would have trusted to speak into my life anyway? I was basically emotionally removed from everyone and everything.
Story is nonthreatening. Story is compelling. Story gives people a chance to absorb truth in a way that it never will be absorbed when it's communicated through declarative statements.
For example, which was more compelling to you? The last paragraph of this post? Or the story I just told about myself?
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
The culture of crime
I sat in court this morning and watched a judge berate a father for spanking his 8-year-old kid with a belt. The judge said, "I would never, ever consider hitting my child with a belt." The father said back to the judge, "I'm trying to make my child into a good man, so he's not pulling up to a drive-through restaurant with a gun in his hand, asking for all the cash."
One of the most difficult things for me to deal with as a criminal defense attorney is the lack of cultural understanding within the system. There are lots of reasons that our system is unjust, but this is one that is really hard for me.
The law is written by the representatives of the majority. These are people who have to weigh was is good, what is bad, and how to govern society as a whole. This is necessary and important work. But the world that I'm from is a minority world. The urban culture is a whole different culture, where survival is dependent on presenting an invincible image, where my safety depends on whether you're more afraid of me than I am of you. The urban culture does not mesh well with the majority culture. On so many levels, what is required of an urban person for survival is against the law.
Setting aside questions of morality (like whose culture is morally correct), this creates a situation where my clients can never win. They will not survive their home life or their neighborhood walks without acting in one way. But acting in that way sets them at odds with the law. As a result, they face the attendant financial and social penalties that further separate them from the majority culture.
Going back to the father in my story, I wouldn't be surprised if the father is right, that the only way he can prevent his son from going criminal is to physically discipline his child. In his culture, this is the only way to communicate discipline. Is it ideal? No. Is it causing the child damage? Maybe--I don't know because I wasn't there. But the father's reaction may be the lesser of many evils that are possible. I don't advocate for situational ethics. But I do wish that there was some way that the father's perspective could be legitimized. He has very real fears and concerns that society is not helping him to solve in a socially acceptable way. So he's left with a domestic violence charge on his record, hundreds of dollars of court costs that he's unable to pay, and a criminal record for violence.
Is this really justice? I understand the need for rules and laws that govern societal behavior. I understand the desire to protect children from abuse. In fact, I'm a huge advocate for that in many arenas of my life. But I do want to cry out against the perception that just because this is what the majority has deemed correct, the people who choose to do otherwise for their own good reasons are somehow different than "us". He's just the same as everyone else. Many times criminal behavior does not indicate that someone is a reprehensible or morally stunted person.
One of the most difficult things for me to deal with as a criminal defense attorney is the lack of cultural understanding within the system. There are lots of reasons that our system is unjust, but this is one that is really hard for me.
The law is written by the representatives of the majority. These are people who have to weigh was is good, what is bad, and how to govern society as a whole. This is necessary and important work. But the world that I'm from is a minority world. The urban culture is a whole different culture, where survival is dependent on presenting an invincible image, where my safety depends on whether you're more afraid of me than I am of you. The urban culture does not mesh well with the majority culture. On so many levels, what is required of an urban person for survival is against the law.
Setting aside questions of morality (like whose culture is morally correct), this creates a situation where my clients can never win. They will not survive their home life or their neighborhood walks without acting in one way. But acting in that way sets them at odds with the law. As a result, they face the attendant financial and social penalties that further separate them from the majority culture.
Going back to the father in my story, I wouldn't be surprised if the father is right, that the only way he can prevent his son from going criminal is to physically discipline his child. In his culture, this is the only way to communicate discipline. Is it ideal? No. Is it causing the child damage? Maybe--I don't know because I wasn't there. But the father's reaction may be the lesser of many evils that are possible. I don't advocate for situational ethics. But I do wish that there was some way that the father's perspective could be legitimized. He has very real fears and concerns that society is not helping him to solve in a socially acceptable way. So he's left with a domestic violence charge on his record, hundreds of dollars of court costs that he's unable to pay, and a criminal record for violence.
Is this really justice? I understand the need for rules and laws that govern societal behavior. I understand the desire to protect children from abuse. In fact, I'm a huge advocate for that in many arenas of my life. But I do want to cry out against the perception that just because this is what the majority has deemed correct, the people who choose to do otherwise for their own good reasons are somehow different than "us". He's just the same as everyone else. Many times criminal behavior does not indicate that someone is a reprehensible or morally stunted person.
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