{"id":6778,"date":"2013-01-17T09:09:49","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T14:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=6778"},"modified":"2013-01-17T09:09:49","modified_gmt":"2013-01-17T14:09:49","slug":"what-do-we-owe-all-the-valjeans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2013\/01\/what-do-we-owe-all-the-valjeans.html","title":{"rendered":"What Do We Owe All the Valjeans?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Since Les Mis<\/em> seems to prompt endless reprises on this blog<\/a>, you won\u2019t be surprised to find I\u2019m over at First Things<\/em> today talking about Valjean, Javert, and what we owe to the prisoners in our criminal justice system.<\/p>\n

When Jean Valjean appears for the first time in the stage musical Les Mis\u00e9rables, he is in the process of being paroled, and he is in an argument with his former jailer. When Inspector Javert barks out \u201cYou are a thief,\u201d Valjean replies, \u201cI stole a loaf of bread.\u201d For Valjean, his crime is an action in the past, regretted and repented. From Javert\u2019s point of view, the crime isn\u2019t something Valjean did; it\u2019s something he is, now and forever.<\/p>\n

Our criminal justice system frequently takes the same view. Over five million citizens are denied the right to vote because they have committed a felony. Disenfranchisement is not akin to parole check-ins or other prudent defenses against recidivism. It is a denial of the former prisoner\u2019s membership in the body politic.<\/p>\n

When a prisoner\u2019s sentence is finished, the debt between him and society is settled. The time served made restitution for the crime committed, so now the criminal justice system must reintegrate him into full participation in society. If prison does not prepare prisoners to become full, happy, healthy citizens, we have not held up our end of the bargain. The social contract and the bounds of civil society demand this much of us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go to First Things\u2019s<\/em> On the Square feature to read the rest of the essay<\/a> and to find out which duties and relationships ask even more of us than the social contract.<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u2014 \u2014<\/p>\n

As bonus content for the blog readers: I was struck by different things on my three viewings of the\u00a0Les Miserables<\/em> movie, but I was always particularly drawn in to the big forgiveness scenes (the Bishop with Valjean, Valjean with Fantine (and vice versa), and Valjean with Javert). \u00a0For the week after viewing number three, I kept returning to one line in the encounter between Valjean and Javert outside the barricade.<\/p>\n

Valjean says to Javert: \u201cYou are wrong, and always have been wrong<\/em>.\u201d \u00a0It\u2019s easy, on the page, to read those as words of condemnation, but, when well-staged (as it is in the movie), I think it\u2019s clear that Valjean is offering this line as a gift to Javert. \u00a0Thinking about the lines reminded me of an article I\u2019d read a long time ago in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em> about the use of mirror therapy for phantom limb pain<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm. They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm\u2014to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Valjean isn\u2019t blaming Javert for living in error, but he\u2019s trying to draw his attention to the way he stands athwart the world, refusing mercy. \u00a0He\u2019s inviting him to notice that he could live differently, that he might have the chance to unclench, that his constant feeling of opposition isn\u2019t the natural way to be.<\/p>\n

I kept coming back to this plea in prayer, particularly in my daily examen<\/a>, to ask for the grace and desire to hear \u201cYou are wrong, and always have been wrong\u201d where needed, and to accept this insight as a gift; the only possible way to avert: \u201c\u2026and always\u00a0will<\/em> be wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since Les Mis seems to prompt endless reprises on this blog, you won\u2019t be surprised to find I\u2019m over at First Things today talking about Valjean, Javert, and what we owe to the prisoners in our criminal justice system. When Jean Valjean appears for the first time in the stage musical Les Mis\u00e9rables, he is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":6782,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[162,51,19],"class_list":["post-6778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-morality-in-practice","tag-accepting-gifts","tag-at-the-theatre","tag-radical-forgiveness"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Do We Owe All the Valjeans?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Since Les Mis seems to prompt endless reprises on this blog, you won't be surprised to find I'm over at First Things today talking about Valjean, Javert,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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