My warm greeting to you all. Broken relationships are anathema to us all. It is part of the human condition that we want to be liked and when we fall out with someone we are upset, angry and experience a whole host of negative responses. Why? We are upset because we care. If it meant nothing to us, the broken relationship would not evoke such a deep emotional reaction.

We care because we were made for relationships with each other, for interdependence. An eye for an eye does not seem to work when communities are in conflict - a reprisal just leads to a counter reprisal leading to yet another counter reprisal in an inexorable spiral as we are seeing in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. And it does not work with individuals, for it seems to harden attitudes. An Eastern sage declared, "For in truth, in the world hatred is not appeased by hatred. Hatred is appeased by love alone. This is the eternal law".

Restorative justice is, unlike retributive justice, not basically concerned with punishment, it is not fundamentally punitive. It sets high store by healing. The offence has caused a breach in relationships and it is this failure in relationships that needs to be healed. It regards the offender as a person, as a subject, with a sense of responsibility and a sense of shame who needs to be reintegrated into the community and not to be ostracized.

Restorative justice is hugely hopeful. We cannot give up on anybody. If it were true that people cannot change, then the whole Truth and Reconciliation Process would have been impossible. It happened because we believed that even the worst racist has the capacity, the possibility, to change. That an enemy could become a friend and that indeed conflict could be transformed into peace, that reconciliation is was possible. There is no future without forgiveness.

God bless you.


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