God's Work

In the halls of justice, two defense attorneys tell me that they love their jobs, “it’s God’s work,” they say with perfunctory pride – like a mantra they learned in law school. I spend a good deal of time ruminating over their blaspheme. The laws of God have nothing to do with the laws of man. God’s work is about the soul. Do they really believe that what they’re doing has anything whatsoever to do with the soul? I let the notion fumble through my head, how perhaps they have come to view the justice system as the soul of America. And I think, the conscience, perhaps, at best, but not the soul. In fact, at its simplest level it’s merely a set of rules – like them or not. It is what it is, a “system.”

We do need rules in order to coexist and we need to agree on those rules. Any peace loving person can be incited to violence when those rules are rejected. We may or may not agree with those rules, but they have their place. They are not to remain unquestioned, but they have their place. They are not to remain unchallenged, but they must be challenged within the context of the communities and societies that created them.

I sit here this morning as a witness for the prosecution in a criminal trial, waiting for the jury to return their verdicts. Twelve people sit in a room somewhere across town discussing the details, struggling with a morass of testimony and other evidence to sort out the truth from the lies. Their verdicts will neither be a victory or a defeat. After all, what is right and what is not right, need we ask anyone to answer those questions for us?