UNITED STATES
Stop Baptist Predators
Christa Brown
“A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.”
— Desmond Tutu
I felt so honored when retired judge Sheila Murphy invited me to contribute a chapter for a book on restorative justice that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was supporting and writing an introduction for. I had never met Sheila before, but after my speech at the 2013 SNAP convention for clergy sex abuse survivors, Sheila introduced herself and pressed into my palm a yellow post-it note with these words: “Yoga as Restorative Justice.” That was the topic she wanted me to write about. I looked at my palm, looked at her, and then said, “Huh?”
Fortunately, Sheila wasn’t deterred by my monosyllabic response. “You may not have used the language of restorative justice,” she said, “but I think it’s what you were really talking about just now in your speech.”
“It was?” Again, any pretense of wit or wisdom eluded me.
But ultimately, the more we talked, the more I decided that Sheila was right. It’s funny how communication is a two-way street like that. Sometimes, what gets communicated depends as much on what’s in the mind of the listener as it does on what comes out the mouth of the speaker. Sheila had heard more in my speech than what even I had realized I was saying.
So, I wrote the chapter, and the book has recently been released. You can read my chapter here: “Yoga as a Practice of Restorative Justice.”
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