The Community Law Center was sort of like my child. I spent eighteen years nurturing it, and it was as taxing as it was rewarding—but rewarding above all. Over the years the staff grew to include six attorneys and four or five paralegals and other support personnel. Sister Marion and I were the only sisters there for that whole time. Most of our staff were laywomen and laymen. A few times we had other religious on staff, and it became something of a training ground for seminarians who were studying at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. But my full-time law partners were laywomen who shared my commitment to service for those who are left out too often.
Our caseload also evolved so that we wound up taking most of the high-conflict, low-income family law cases in the county. My background in both social work and law helped us in trying to work with family systems to improve the situation for every one. When I started practicing law, I chose not to use my title of “Sister.” I thought that it would create confusion for clients or opposing parties (to say nothing of opposing attorneys and judges). So on my business card was printed simply: “S. Simone Campbell.” Not surprisingly, word got out around the Alameda County Bar that in fact I was a Catholic sister. I remember meeting in the chambers of a judge who was new to the family law bench. He asked me what the “S” stood for. I told him it stood for Sister. He was floored. He said that he thought it might stand for Susan. The important thing is that we served the working poor of our county, and we were highly respected for our legal expertise—whatever the initials on our business cards or the title in front of our names.
Our clients were not typical. One man had suffered a brain trauma that left him a bit at sea and unbalanced. He would lash out verbally and physically. And he was always misplacing my card with my phone number. So his approach to solving this problem was that whenever he felt his anger rising and likely to end with him striking his partner, he would drive around the city really fast until he was stopped by the police. He couldn’t remember what else to do. After he’d get picked up, he’d beg the cops to get my phone number. Then we would work out a solution to whatever was his latest crisis. I had to develop certain skills for this sort of work. For example, I represented abuse victims, but I found that I was also good at representing abusers because I would set limits for them. When another big, hulking client of ours was physically intimidating everyone in the room, I just flat-out told him, “Sit down! That’s not who you are. Behave yourself!” And he did.
But I mainly represented people caught in all sorts of challenging circumstances, and it was heartbreaking at times.
One of the most challenging family situations arose when I was appointed by the court to represent Kirsten. She was seven years old and had been placed with a family for possible adoption when her biological father showed up and demanded custody. The court placed Kirsten with him and his wife and their two boys and named me as Kirsten’s attorney to guard her interests. Her placement was not a good situation. The dad was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict who was not coping well, and the stepmother was an alcoholic too. They were also both so trapped in their self-centered syndromes they had little psychic space to pay attention to Kirsten or the other children. When I went to visit the home, the household just disintegrated in front of me. The step-mom blamed Kirsten for their family problems and the dad just walked out, passive in the face of their dysfunction. I encouraged them to consider family counseling, but the father opted for a different solution: a couple of days later he showed up at our office building. He took the elevator to the fifth floor, where our office was located. The elevator door opened, and he pushed Kirsten out into the hallway. She had a little bag in her hand with what few belongings she had in this world. He made her walk down the long hallway to our office alone while he stepped back into the elevator and left without a word to me or anyone in my office.
He had pinned a note to Kirsten’s dress that read: “Here, take her. Quit destroying my family.”
She stayed with me for twelve days while we worked out her legal situation. I refused to put Kirsten back in the foster care roulette wheel. She eventually ended up back with her original adoptive family, in Missouri. But if I ever need a reminder that good can come from suffering, I think of Kirsten.
In April 2012, when the Vatican announced it had begun an investigation of the leadership group of American sisters and had accused NETWORK in particular of focusing too much on social justice, I was all over the news to discuss the developments. Marjorie, Kirsten’s adoptive mother, heard me on a Canadian Broadcasting Company program, looked up my e-mail at the NETWORK site, and wrote to me:
I don’t know if you will remember me. We were attempting to stay in Kirsten’s life . . . We were poor, in Missouri, and without much hope until you became Kirsten’s guardian ad litem. We credit you with saving Kirsten’s sanity, if not her life. She is now happily married, living in London, England and expecting a baby this summer. She is almost 33 yrs old. I just wanted to say Thank you again, and it is wonderful to hear what you are doing now. Love, Marjorie
Thanks to the Vatican, I was able to receive such wonderful news. And thanks to Kirsten’s adoptive parents, her life has turned out better than even I could have hoped for way back then in Oakland.
Another powerful example of good emerging from suffering was a divorce case I worked that was in fact unlike most of the cases we took. In this instance, I represented the woman, and she and her husband largely worked together with an eye to caring for their two daughters. Yet a few months after the divorce became final, my client and her younger daughter were killed in an automobile accident caused by a drunk truck driver. Her former husband came to me for help in dealing with the myriad issues that he was facing in caring for his older surviving daughter, who had been rescued from the car before it exploded into flames. We worked together to care for her and to find a way to memorialize her mother and sister. She received a decent settlement out of the lawsuit brought on her behalf, enough to support her through what would inevitably be a rough road ahead. We at the Community Law Center received attorney’s fees for our work in the case and in a tribute to our client, we decided to use the money to create a two-year internship program that trained new attorneys to do family law from a systems perspective. We named the program after our client, and the Lillian Hansen internship became a stellar program that helped shape the practice of family law in Alameda County. It was the best of who we were at the center, and a fitting tribute to my client, her former husband, and their children.
These experiences are nourishing for me because being with real people and dealing with real issues is sacred. They shared their pain with me and by doing so gave me an invaluable gift of hope. I was reading Walter Brueggemann back then—he is one of the greatest Old Testament scholars of the past few decades and above all a wonderful theologian and spiritual writer. My work was about what Brueggemann would call touching the pain of the world. It is living the Gospel, and it is the realization that downtown Oakland is much like Beverly Hills; everyone has their pain, only in different guises. “Jeremiah, faithful to Moses, understood what numb people will never know, that only grievers can experience their experiences and move on,” Brueggemann writes. He continues:10
I used to think it curious that, when having to quote scripture on demand, someone would inevitably say, “Jesus wept.” It is usually done as a gimmick to avoid having to quote a longer passage. But I now understand the depth of that verse. Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again: (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping permits newness. His weeping permits the kingdom to come. Such weeping is a radical criticism, a fearful dismantling because it means the end of all machismo; weeping is something kings rarely do without losing their thrones. Yet the loss of thrones is precisely what is called for in radical criticism.
Working at the Community Law Center was wonderful because we were so connected with people at such profound moments in their lives. Like Jesus in the Gospels, we were with the people who are suffering—churched or unchurched, didn’t matter. People want to turn away from pain and poverty and difficulty. Yet that’s where life is, and that’s how we become aware that we are one body. We attempted to do family law in a way that benefited the whole family—including the opposing side. It was challenging, but it was about working to make the entire family system better.
In some ways the most traumatic experience of my time in Oakland came at 5:04 P.M. on October 17, 1989. Everybody in the Bay Area remembers that time and where they were, because that is when the San Andreas Fault shook and shuddered and then settled, and in doing so unleashed an earthquake that lasted less than twenty seconds but seemed like twenty hours.
When it was over, sixty-three people were dead, forty-two of them in West Oakland (three blocks from where I lived), killed when more than a mile-long stretch of the upper level of the Cypress Street Viaduct of Interstate 880 collapsed onto the lower level and crushed the cars below. Nearly four thousand people were injured, and the third game of the World Series between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants was postponed.
Earthquakes have always made me nervous, and it was only later that I realized how much the 1989 experience traumatized me. But at the time, in the moment, I was surprisingly cool in dealing with a client whom I was meeting with in my office. Our office was on the fifth floor of an old building that was not quake-proof, needless to say.
Because we were far enough from the epicenter, the temblor came in two waves, first a big rolling wave and then a big shake. I shoved my client under the desk as the ceiling fell in and bookcases started tumbling. Computer monitors crashed onto the floor, and chunks of marble fell off the exterior walls. If it had gone on much longer, we wouldn’t have gotten out. When everything finally stopped moving, I grabbed my client, got one of our paralegals, Angie, out from under the desk, and together with a lawyer, Katie, we headed down the staircase even as it was pulling away from the wall like some crazy postmodern painting.
It was then I discerned the difference between neurotics and psychotics. My client was psychotic. When we got outside, I looked her in the eye and said, “Get your son from school and go home!” She turned to me and said, “But we haven’t finished talking about my custody case!” I yelled back that we would deal with her case another time, and then I realized that I was still clutching my pen in my hand, just as I was when I was taking notes moments earlier.
With psychotics, the outside world doesn’t enter in. It’s us ordinary neurotics who get terrified. The outside world looked plenty grim as we took stock of the destruction. For our law center, the upshot of the earthquake was that we had to find new office space. The place we moved into looked like a brothel at first, though we eventually fixed it up. Our most valuable possession was a copier, which we had to lower down the outside of our old offices with climbing ropes, knocking bits off the eight-story building as it bounced down the side.
Any natural disaster, and especially one of that size and scope, reconfigures the community, and many individual lives. So it was for Oakland, and for the law center, and for me.
The first evidence of what was to come was that domestic violence increased dramatically, as often happens in the wake of such cataclysmic events. I was the court-appointed lawyer in a number of extremely challenging cases, and at the same time I had to deal with FEMA—the Federal Emergency Management Administration—to try to recover some of our losses and costs. Yet the adversity so many of us faced brought me so much closer to friends in the bar as we handled the adversity together. My women’s group, which we called the Sewing Circle, became exceptionally close, a critical emotional support network through the struggles.
My law partners at the law center, who were all lay folks and not necessarily Catholic, and my colleagues in the family law and probate bar, were wonderful. There was a lot of salutary laughter as we built a practice that was respected across the state. The chief justice of the California Supreme Court named me to a couple of important committees, and I was able to present my case on behalf of the state’s low-income families in a number of venues. I testified in Sacramento about the family law needs of the working poor—the people we served—and we convinced the legislature to change the law so that we could separately incorporate the law center in California as a nonprofit. That allowed us to charge all of our clients fees and provided a vital income stream. We supported ourselves solely on client fees. We took some high-end cases to balance out the low end. The top rate was $175 per hour when I left, and the bottom was $35 per hour. Charging fees was more than viability; it was a lifeline.
My own time at the center, however, seemed to be approaching an end. While the months and years after the 1989 earthquake were fruitful in the end, they were tough, as well, and they took a toll. During one exceptionally challenging stretch, the opposing party in a case was stalking me and I had to be given police protection. It was unsettling, and exhausting, and afterward I took a few months off to decompress.
That’s when I came to realize that I needed a change. If the law center was my child, it had grown up in those eighteen years, but it wasn’t going off to college. Some of my lay partners had taken maternity leaves in recent years, and I realized I too needed a break of my own to give birth to a new idea, and to get away from the hard cases and the kind of personal threats that were part of the job but that still took a toll. Besides, the center now had six attorneys plus paralegals and staff. The place would be fine, and it was.
Still, leaving the law center, and the spiritual nourishment I had known by working with clients—by touching their pain, and trying to ease it—was hard. It was also necessary. What direction would the Holy Spirit send me in this time? Religious life made the decision for me. I was toying with a few ideas, such as creating a “life tank” that would develop ideas based on lived experiences rather than the standard wonkery of “think tanks” that develop ideas based on what went on inside someone’s head or in a research paper.
But several of my sisters asked me to keep my name in the ring for the election of the “general director” of our community, a post that comes open every five years. The Sisters of Social Service is a relatively small order and everyone has to contribute to running the show. To my surprise, I was elected general director at our chapter meeting in June 1995, just after I left the law center. That seemed to answer the question of what God was calling me to next, though it wasn’t an easy passage.
In a sense I was walking into the trauma of another earthquake, both physical and spiritual. Five years after the Oakland earthquake, the Northridge earthquake had rocked Los Angeles and seriously damaged our motherhouse there. It was also a metaphorical earthquake for the community because as we looked at rebuilding our motherhouse, we also stepped back to assess ourselves: Who are we? Are we going to survive? Where are we going? Do we deserve a new place? There were a lot of questions, profound questions, that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. But I soon came face-to-face with it all.
At our chapter meeting in 1995 we had this insight that “we are the church, and that we will know it, own it, and act on it.” Putting that into practice is tougher than saying it, however, and of course there are all the internal dynamics of a small community to deal with, and I wasn’t equipped for it at first. About six months after I had been elected, when I was doing my daily morning meditation, the sound that you make with a straw at the bottom of a soda popped into my mind. That was the sound of my spiritual life. I was running on empty and I had to become connected to other sources of spiritual nourishment. For months I hadn’t had a client to represent or a court case to prepare and I needed to find other places to meet God.
Election to leadership of a religious community is always challenging. For me it was tough because for the previous eighteen years I had run the law center, litigated cases, managed clients, written argumentative briefs, and competed to win the best result for my clients and their families. Although these are wonderful legal skills, they don’t always translate to religious life culture where we focus on collaboration, discernment, and a much slower, less competitive pace. It was a challenging adjustment for me. It was this adjustment that became the grist of my spiritual life.
Criticism naturally gets directed toward the leader, and in a time of insecurity following the Northridge earthquake and our having to leave our motherhouse of sixty-five years, criticism was intense at times from some members. I also knew that the criticisms that hurt me had some truth in them. So my spiritual meditation practice became sitting with the criticism that hurt me until I knew the truth of it. Once I knew the truth, it released the barb of it and I could grow and not be angry about it. One of the aspects of growth for me was that I learned from the criticism of my writing that I was “too corporate” and not enough of a spiritual leader. From sitting with the pain of this true criticism, I learned to speak to my sisters of my spiritual life. This sort of communication has become an essential component of our work “on the bus” and in our advocacy in Washington. I owe this growth to my sisters and to the challenging time of leadership.
Afterward I came to think of my role in leadership during that time as a crucible: holding the reality of a community in crisis, a container for a purifying fire so the challenging time gets refined into gold. For me that’s all the Holy Spirit.
Did things improve on my watch? I think I helped the community. I think my stumblings weren’t totally detrimental, and we were in a better place at the end. Within a small community everybody knows each other, which is good and bad. Also, I am direct, and even when I was right, the truth is not always popular. From my perspective, until you can follow, you can’t lead because you don’t know the value of the gifts of others. I do encourage people to take responsibility and do their piece. And I expect them to. On the plus side, I’m not a micromanager, mostly because I can’t deal with explaining a lot of details.
After two and a half years in leadership living in Los Angeles, I found that I was still pining for Oakland and my friends. I made a retreat that year at the Sisters of St. Joseph Spirituality Center in Orange, California. One of the key parts of the retreat was becoming aware of the fact that God was nudging me to give up my pining for Oakland. In fact, what I heard was very direct: “Get over it, Simone.” Then I heard that I needed to “get over” not only the loss of all my friends in Oakland, but all the other losses in my life. It was time for change, and it left me breathless. I railed at God: Give me one good reason! You said losses were the doorways to life! Why should I give up my doorways? When I finally calmed down enough to listen to an answer, what bubbled up was this: If you don’t have walls, you don’t need doorways. The more you hold on to your doorways, the more you hold on to your walls! That answer caused me to hyperventilate. It left me speechless. It was about a complete change of spiritual life and images. Quite candidly, such a big change made me want to run and hide. I filed it away to nibble on in little pieces when I could. But in the crucible of leadership, I was not prepared for such a big transition.
For me, the takeaway for those five years was the gift of servant leadership. Servant leadership is not about doing things for others necessarily. It’s about stripping away the exterior trappings, quite like eating an artichoke. Each leaf removed has a little bit of the heart attached until you get to the core. By having my resistances stripped away, I learned to talk about my heart. One of the sutras, the Buddhist prayers, speaks about how fortunate it is when someone becomes your sworn enemy because it’s the mechanism for revealing the Buddha’s loving-kindness. It’s true. It’s about dying and rising. Because of the criticism during my term as general director, and because I deepened my meditation practice, I came to know God in a totally different way.
At the end of my term as general director, in September 2000, I had a year’s sabbatical. In October of that year, I headed out to a seven-week retreat in Tucson at the Redemptorist Picture Rock Retreat center.
Our community follows the spirit of the Rule of St. Benedict, the sixth-century monk who is often called the founder of Western monasticism. In the years when I was in the novitiate, we observed even more closely the Benedictine rule of daily prayer and the Liturgy of the Hours. We had Mass in the morning, followed by meditation, adoration, and then spiritual reading. My favorite part was always the quiet time, the silent meditation, and I would get so annoyed when Sister Elizabeth, our novice director, would read homilies to us during that time. Sister Elizabeth took copious shorthand notes of the sermons at the masses she attended and would get up and announce: “The homily of Father Vincent Martin. . . .” Or whoever it happened to be. Then she would read aloud.
I much preferred the approach of the South African Dominican Albert Nolan, who wrote: “Waking up, becoming more fully conscious and facing the realities of life, requires a certain measure of silence and solitude as it did for Jesus.”
I was into meditation, just being quiet. But I didn’t have any rules for it; I didn’t have any framework. Early on, I was always reading new books and trying new things. By the time I finished law school, Thomas Keating and the centering prayer was becoming popular, and I tried that. But then in October of 1983, when our community was preparing a retreat in Encino, the sisters sent out an announcement that Dom Willigis Jäger would be leading it. Something just leaped inside me on hearing this news. Jäger is a German Benedictine monk who is also a Zen roshi, or master, and he is famous (some say scandalous) for using Eastern spiritual practices and Western wisdom to find a truly integrated spirituality.11
All I knew is that I was nervous about the meditation even as I was looking forward to it. But I did it, five days of Zen, in a room. It was like snorkeling, diving off the deep end and suddenly finding myself immersed in another world, using different senses from the ones I had relied on all my life. It was one of the biggest gifts of my life, to finally have a way to do what my heart desired, after fifteen years of trying to puzzle it out on my own. Over the years I would continue to practice and develop my meditation, and through it I was able to achieve some real breakthroughs, to find insights that kept me moving and kept me sane. It provided—as it still does—a framework of everyday mysticism that anchors me in my daily life.
But the Tucson retreat in 2000 was going to be a marathon even by my standards, seven weeks led by Rev. Pat Hawk, a Redemptorist priest who had learned Zen from Willigis Jäger and later with the Diamond Sangha, a famous lay Zen Buddhist group based in Hawaii. I had sat with Pat on many annual retreats.12 This expansive time of meditation was like a magnet drawing me in. Again, nervous, vulnerable, and eager, I headed off into the desert. In the end, it was all gift. In the process I came to see my time in leadership as golden and that the Spirit was “well pleased.” I had been faithful as best I could be in challenging times.
At the end of my time in Tucson, I was walking outside and lamenting that soon I would not be able to look daily at the ring of mountains that surround the city. I said that I would miss meet ing God in the mountains. I said in my mind: I’ll miss you, God . . . but you are EVERYWHERE. I was thinking of God as being in all locations. But what came back to me, inside of me like a thunderclap, was NO! Simone! I AM everywhere. In that moment I knew that God is the “hum” that holds all creation together at every moment of existence. God is intimately connected and never separate. God IS us (but we are not God). It is this insight into God’s living reality that keeps me engaged in this journey. We are not separate, we are not orphaned. My entire spiritual landscape was utterly altered and that was gift. All my familiar landmarks were gone and it was all new.
Initially, as I started doing Zen in the 1980s, I had been inspired by John Henry Newman’s famous lines in “Lead, Kindly Light”:
Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’ encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me . . .
But after my walls disappeared, I found that there was no place to go. It was more a question of being in the midst of the light, in the midst of the fire—being inspired without being consumed. So my mantra shifted to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English convert (like Newman) and Jesuit priest, and his poem “God’s Grandeur” with its image of shimmering light amid the earthiness and oppression of human existence:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Ah! Bright wings! Just as Zen meditation became a path for me to explore spirituality, so too did poetry become a path for higher creativity, as Julia Cameron puts it in The Artist’s Way. I was reading that book during my sabbatical. I wanted to do photography, but that’s an expensive hobby. One day, back while I was general director, I had said to one of my colleagues, in a moment of exasperation, “Oh, how do you work with me?” It was an honest question. I do know myself. She gave a very generous answer: “Oh, it’s always interesting working with a poet.”
A poet? I’d never thought of myself as a poet. But after Tucson I thought I’d try it as another way to live on the edge of awareness and insight, about myself and about the world. As I wrote in one of my early efforts:
Impetuous me favors the passionate tumult of Spring
River flooding. Sensuous me favors the indolent
Caress of Summer river flowing. Reflective me
Favors the penetrating seep of Autumn river trickling.
Even aloof shy me favors the chilled reserve of Winter
River freezing. But, all of me resists evaporation.
I resist the sucking pulling warn air wresting
me from unknown boundaries. I resist drifting unseen
to unknown parts. I resist the uncertainty of unformed
floating yearning rather to surround rocks, carve
new paths. I resist the ambiguous foggy drift.
But luckily, at times, I am yanked into the air. There
beholding earth’s
anguish: Weep!
weeping, raining,
puddling . . . perhaps
the beginning of an
exuberant Spring.
It was the sabbatical that gave me the expansive time to digest the experience of leadership and my life as an attorney. Knowing that God is creating us at every minute allowed me to see the gifts of each moment. Gratitude became the core of my being. So often I saw things that were less than what I would have planned, but they turned into a joyous gift. One example of this was that I took Sister Rochelle (who was like “vice president” when I was the leader of our community) to Europe during the spring of my sabbatical year. The first country we visited was Greece. We went to Delphi (which was a dream of mine), and the museum and upper site were closed because it was a national holiday so we couldn’t enter. On the other hand, there were no tourists because of that, and we got to wander the temple of Athena with no one else there—an almost unheard-of treat in this tourist destination. Because one part was closed, the other was open and opened up other gifts!
Perceiving these gifts given was the fruit of sabbatical and contemplation. Sometimes I want to give gifts back. But for the most part, on reflection, all these gifts have been surprising, life-giving moments for which I am deeply grateful. Still, in that moment, it took me a while to figure out what the next step was going to be for me. I was listening to the Spirit and trying to discern the path of my ministry. One of our sisters approached me about taking over a program, called Jericho, that we had started in Sacramento to do legislative advocacy for those living at the margins in California. After speaking with the program’s board and community leadership, the Jericho job seemed like a good step. It was an extension of the work that I had done previously and the sort of work that actually got me to go to law school in the first place. I had some new experiences and skills to share, and I was willing to give this ministry a try.
As often happens, it was a step that would lead me on to a destination I could never have foreseen.