We were so excited. Jack Campbell had given Sujatha permission to contact the Leon County jail and do whatever it took to make the circle happen; to be made easier (we hoped) since the man who ran the jail, Sheriff Larry Campbell, was Jack’s father.
The circle would take place at the prison itself. It was much easier to keep Conor where he was and bring the rest of us in than it was to arrange to transport him. A deputy sheriff would be right outside the room where we’d meet. All the details were falling into place.
Now that the “restorative justice circle” had been scheduled, Sujatha had to make her way from Oakland all the way to Tallahassee.
As she began making her travel arrangements, we insisted she stay with us during her visit. Although we had only spoken over the phone, we felt so close to her. She had been a true advocate for our cause. It never occurred to me that it might be seen as inappropriate, or that people would have seen this as a professional relationship with boundaries and rules that needed to be respected. Sujatha was reminded by a colleague that restorative justice is about breaking boundaries, and our case certainly fit that description. Sujatha accepted our invitation.
It was Father’s Day, and I was upstairs rushing to put the finishing touches on the guest room. I often say, “I am no Martha,” referring to the sister in the gospel who always made sure the meals were prepared and dishes cleaned. But I’m no Martha Stewart either. The “guest room” was nothing more than Allyson’s old room, which hadn’t changed much since she left for college. No coverlet and bevy of matching pillows with Anne Geddes baby portraits on the walls. A simple quilt, and one pillow. I did find a small basket that I filled with little niceties. Downstairs, I heard Andy opening the door and having a conversation. I went to the top of the stairs, where I saw Sujatha for the first time. She was short with caramel skin, dark hair streaked with silver, and dark eyes that gleamed even after her cross-country flight. Under the sparkle of her nose stud was a broad smile.
“Is it still okay that I stay here?” she asked, walking up the stairs to greet me.
Seeing her filled me with an immense sense of relief. She seemed to emanate wisdom, knowledge, and compassion. When she reached the top of the stairs, I couldn’t help but embrace her. As I was in her arms, I was almost overcome by her strong, calming, maternal presence that made it seem that everything was going to work out.
As Sujatha settled in her room to take a nap after her flight, I brought up dinner plans. “Are you a vegetarian? Do you eat eggs, milk?” In all our phone conversations, the focus had been on us, our needs, and the case. Sujatha talked about her life in the context of the work that she did, but bits and pieces of her personal life peeked through. We knew she was born in America to Indian parents.
“Well, yes,” she said, “but just make whatever you like. I’ll find something to eat.”
Thankfully, I had anticipated the possibility that she was a vegetarian and had planned dinner accordingly.
At dinner we talked about everything. She asked about Conor and what our relationship had been like in the past.
“We always liked Conor,” Andy said. “In fact, he gave us quite a scare a few weeks before prom.” He proceeded to tell Sujatha about the car accident he’d had about a mile from our house.
“We always said it was a miracle that God saved his life,” I said. “But it’s hard now . . . now that we know that he’d go on to take Ann’s life. Sometimes I wonder why God didn’t just let Conor die that night. Then I’d still have my daughter.”
Sujatha listened compassionately, and Andy talked about how God had a plan for Conor’s life, referring to Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
I concluded that “why?” is not the worst question you can ask, but it very well might be the least productive. Sometimes there’s never a good answer.
We also delved more into Sujatha’s background. “Are you Buddhist?”
“Yes,” she answered, opening up to us. “I grew up Hindu, but with no Hindu temple in our small Pennsylvania town, I actually attended Catholic mass many Sundays with a friend of mine.”
We all smiled at the “coincidence.”
In our increasingly segregated society—where you rarely meet people with whom you disagree—it’s not common to have so many people of different faiths pulling on the same oars.
I’m not one of those people who thinks that beliefs and theology don’t matter, but our efforts in the restorative justice arena remind me of American Congregationalist theologian Lyman Abbott’s words from 1893: “All truth is ours, gather it where you will . . . Yea, whosoever honestly, earnestly studies the book of nature or book of history or the book of the human heart, and endeavors to find God’s truth, is speaking some word that the world needs to hear; and every word of truth is a word of God. And it belongs to us.”
The truth in this situation was forgiveness and justice—notions that transcend the categories that define us. That’s how a couple of Catholics listened to the advice of an Episcopal priest, who led us to a Mennonite, who introduced us to a Buddhist, who worked with Protestant parents to attempt what everyone wanted: restorative justice.
Would we receive it?
It all came down to the restorative justice circle.
“All right,” Sujatha said as she sat down on our couch after dinner. “If we’re going to be ready for this circle Tuesday, we have a lot to talk about.”
That night we discussed the details of the circle, but the conversation turned personal when Andy asked Sujatha how she had gotten into the restorative justice business in the first place.
She told us that when she was in college at Harvard, she planned to go to law school because she wanted to become a prosecutor and put child molesters behind bars. It was personal for her because her own father had sexually abused her when she was young.
Then one summer she traveled to India with her then boyfriend. He was starting a school in Mumbai. There she met women and children who had been abducted and forced to work as sex slaves. It was hard to listen to her talk about such dehumanizing conditions. She had a passion in her voice that I admired. She had even spent time with Mother Teresa, serving the poorest of the poor through her ministry.
“I even considered becoming a Catholic nun,” Sujatha said with a laugh. I wondered if her boyfriend had known how the trip had affected her.
The trauma of spending time with the sex slaves and their children threatened to overcome her. Obviously, she was dealing with unresolved issues related to her own childhood abuse, which couldn’t be undone simply by trying to help other people with theirs. Her fury and rage began to take a toll on her. She talked of suffering from blinding migraines, terrible stomach problems, and complicated relationships. And so, on the advice of some friends, she grabbed a backpack and hiked north to the Himalayas. She landed in the Dharamsala, where she was quite the anomaly, an Indian American traveling alone with a backpack. A number of Tibetan families in exile welcomed and befriended her. They wanted to know her story, and she wanted to know theirs.
Their stories gave her a new, life-shifting perspective. They told her about losing family members as they tried to escape the Chinese Army, about women getting raped, and children being made to kill their own parents, parents being forced to leave the bodies of their children behind, and worse.
Once again I was overwhelmed by the depth of pain some are made to endure in this world.
“I had to ask them,” Sujatha continued. “How can you go through all of that and still have a smile on your face? You’ve been through so much. So why do you seem to be happier than I am? And time and time again, the response was the same: ‘We practice forgiveness.’ ”
“I thought they were insane,” she said. “I thought some things are just unforgivable!”
The woman who managed the guesthouse in which she was staying asked her, “Why are you so angry?”
Sujatha shared her story of abuse.
“She told me, ‘People often write to His Holiness the Dalai Lama for advice. You should try it. Write the letter, then take it to his monastery. You’ll get some sort of response.’ ”
Andy and I were rapt with attention. The Dalai Lama? That would be like writing a letter and putting it in the pope’s mailbox.
“I wrote, ‘Anger is killing me, but it motivates my work. How do you work on behalf of abused and oppressed people without anger as the motivating force?’
“I dropped the letter off at the front gate to the Dalai Lama’s compound, but I didn’t expect anything to come of it. I came back a week later, however, to see if there was a response. I figured I’d get some sort of prayer cord or a preprinted card. To my surprise, I was taken all the way in to his private secretary. ‘His Holiness was moved by your letter, and his schedule has changed so he’s not traveling this week,’ the secretary said, while looking at a calendar. ‘Would you like to have a private audience with him on Thursday?’ ”
Sujatha told us that she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but within days, she sat face-to-face with the Nobel Peace Prize winner. Sujatha began the conversation by talking about sexualized violence against women and children. She told him about her work counseling women and children who had been forced into sexual slavery.
“I told him about my father’s abuse. How that was the motivation for me to do good in the world. But that the anger was having physical effects on me now. His Holiness listened attentively to my story, then he shared a very personal story about how he dealt with his own anger toward the Chinese. I was amazed by his ability to forgive and how peaceful he was.
“Then, when I asked His Holiness for specific advice on how to forgive my father, he asked me a genuine but profound question. ‘Do you feel you have been angry long enough?’ The question struck me. For a few moments I didn’t respond. We sat in silence as I thought about the way anger had affected my life. My anger was killing me. The migraines and the stomach problems. I was a mess! So I finally simply said yes.’
“ ‘Then, I have two pieces of advice for you.’ He smiled at me. ‘First, you should meditate. Second, open your heart to your enemies,’ he said.
“ ‘I’m just about to start law school to become a prosecutor so I can make sure that abusers, batterers, and child molesters all end up behind bars,’ I protested. ‘I’m not opening my heart to anyone!’ ”
The Dalai Lama thought her response was absolutely hilarious. “Okay,” he chuckled and patted her on the knee. “Okay, okay, then you just meditate.”
Inspired by the conversation, she went back to the United States and signed up for a ten-day meditation course conducted completely in silence.
“Then, on the very last day there,” Sujatha told us, “I was able to completely forgive my father. I let go of all the hatred and just felt love for him.”
Honestly, as I listened to this incredible story, I probably thought the same thing that others do when they hear our story. How could she have done this after just ten days of meditation? Could she really feel love for her father after what he’d done to her? But it was true. I could tell by the way she told the story, the sound of her voice. She felt it.
A couple of weeks after she had forgiven her father and returned home, she started law school. Without the rage of her abuse brewing in her soul, she no longer had the desire to become a prosecutor. Instead she decided to become an attorney who defends women who kill their abusers. “I didn’t realize lawyers don’t have the option of specializing in such a way,” she said. “So once I became a defense attorney, I had to defend everyone—including people accused of child abuse. I found myself following His Holiness’s second piece of advice, to open my heart to people I’d previously seen as my ‘enemies.’ And I learned that their life stories were not so different from my own.”
Sujatha had benefited so immensely from forgiveness, but ultimately she was dissatisfied with how the system seemed bent on artificially segregating the victims and the perpetrators. Frequently, her clients simply wanted to apologize for the harm they had caused.
“I’d have to tell my client, ‘Everything you say will be used against you. If you talk to the victims, it could be used against you if we get you a new trial,’ ” she said. “ ‘Tell your therapist, and tell your priest, but you can’t say a word to the victim.’ ”
Of course, this effectively squelched the potential for the restoration and emotional peace that frequently follows an apology. Sujatha couldn’t quite reconcile this with what she’d learned in her spiritual practice. Victims frequently want to hear those words—I’m sorry—and criminals so desperately need to say them. Yet she denied them the opportunity because of legal posturing. Wasn’t there a way to pursue justice outside of the adversarial roles of the criminal justice system? Somewhere in the middle?
This is how Sujatha was led to restorative justice, which led her right to my front door.