Most days I read something written by Frederick Buechner: I have for more than 25 years. So, you would think I would remember. I came across a paragraph the other day that, for some reason, stood out to me this time as something that really matters now. Buechner revealed a truth about God’s justice that perhaps runs counter to the emphasis we, or organized religion, usually place on “sin” in our lives.
I’ve thought of many reasons why this particular bit of writing made such an impact on me. I recently read the Honourable Murray Sinclair’s unconventional memoir, Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation. Senator Sinclair was an Indigenous judge in Canada for 28 years and served as Chief Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From these voices, I hear that justice can foreground restoration, community and healing that give back life. In contrast, the justice system most of us are familiar with takes away life, marks one as broken and separates from community.
The first question Murray Sinclair answers for himself and asks us to answer is “Where do I come from?” Along with the stories of our parents and grandparents, ancestors, and our real and mythological villains and heroes, he says that we also need to know about the story of the community of people to which we are attached but he doesn’t stop there. We need to know “our collective story—all the way back to our place in the creation of the world.”
For me that would be a version of the Christian creation story from Genesis. In the beginning God created the earth, all the creatures of the earth and then humans in God’s own image. God placed Adam and Eve in the garden with only one rule: don’t eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Depending on the telling, Eve or Adam and Eve break that rule and are cast out of the garden to fend for themselves it might seem. Here’s where I honestly have to consider the “spin” that each of us has inherited from tellings we remember from Sunday School to popular literature that elevates blame and consequences that shape our understanding of wrong-doing and correction.
Even after all these years of reading Buechner, I was taken by his retelling of God’s response to Adam and Eve’s transgression originally written in Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary. In the entry “Psychotherapy,” Buechner relates the story of God finding Adam and Eve hiding when they realize their is no undoing what they have done. God’s actions give new meaning to ways of justice that restore, heal and offer life giving care.
Buechner writes,
“But then comes the end of the story where God with his own hands makes them garments of skins and clothes them. It is the most moving part of the story. They can’t go back but they can go forward clothed in a new way—clothed, that is, not in the sense of having their old defences again behind which to hide who they are and what they have done but the in the sense of having a new understanding of who they are and a new strength to draw on for what lies before them to do now.”
My sense of justice extends to how I see myself in relationship to what I do and do not do and how I treat others and the whole of creation. I want to be told and to tell this part of our collective story that offers restoration, healing, and belonging even for us when we fall because we all will.
I found this blessing to reclaim God’s own hands to clothe us for whatever lies before us now.
May the shadow of Christ fall on thee.
May the garment of Christ cover thee.
May the breath of Christ breathe in thee.
From Brendan by Frederick Buechner
Attentive to Joy 
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