The True Face of Justice is Compassion

He stands shivering in an open grave. His face is caked in make-up; light fabric flows about his body; one foot throbs uncomfortably in a platform heel. He looks up at a priest standing over the pit. Your crime is heinous, the cleric says. Your punishment is just. Then he passes sentence.

“I forbid you to enter a church,” the priest intones as onlookers throw spadefuls of dirt on the malefactor’s head. “I forbid you to go down an alley to meet anyone. I forbid you ever to touch children or give them anything.” The list goes on: he may not eat or drink with others; he is banned from stores and restaurants; nor may he wash his hands in public restrooms. Finally, as spectators jeer, he is forced to crawl unassisted out of his makeshift grave. The crowd pelts him with rocks as he flees, stumbling on his high heel, gossamer-like cloth trailing behind him.

Who is this man? What is his crime? A rapist? A pedophile? Look at his make-up. Transgender?

He uses cosmetics to cover terrible scars. His gauze robe is made of the only material that does not cause him excruciating pain. That platform heel is strapped around one ankle to compensate for a foot that has been amputated. He trips, pitches over, and quickly picks himself up. Behind him the voices of his one-time neighbors and friends screech in angry condemnation: “Leper! Outcast! Unclean!”

This is a true story from the thirteenth century. It’s not unique. The priest was reading a ritual of separation that had been codified in Rome during the Third Council of the Lateran in March, 1179. Tellingly, each word is patterned after the rite for the dead. At the time, Christians believed that Hansen’s disease was the result of sin, a physical manifestation of moral dissolution that accompanies sexual licentiousness.

In other words, he brought it on himself.

The dread malady was censured as being no different than heresy, a capital offense. Hansen’s disease sufferers were given a metaphorical “death” in a freshly-dug grave before enduring a lifetime of shame and condemnation. I flatter myself that we live in a more enlightened age.

But do we?

I am reminded of one of Korea’s finest twentieth-century poets, Han Haun, struck by Hansen’s disease in his twenties. After his diagnosis, Han is condemned by family and friends as untouchable. There is a sense that he is to blame for his affliction, he writes. So he leaves.

Han’s reaction is not uncommon. One 2014 study by a medical team with the Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Brazil found that many people afflicted by Hansen’s disease leave their current surroundings. Reasons include discrimination and estrangement, a lack of social support, ignorance, and a desire to conceal their disease. Han is no different.

He spends nearly all of the 1940s wandering Manchuria. There he writes poems of yearning and lament. I am still myself, he sighs, yet the stigma attached to his condition comes to dominate his existence:

All of beauty is gone.
 
All that remains is shame, punishment, leprosy.
This sky I know so well
remains still blue.
 
A flowering life turned flowerless.
I stand maimed
 
here for a moment under a stranger’s eaves.
I stand weeping:
shame, punishment, leprosy.

Han’s poetry puts a human face, and human feelings, to a condition that for centuries across Europe was deemed the fault of the sufferer. Twentieth-century Asia was not much better. Another study of a Hansen’s disease village settlement in South Korea discovered that sufferers viewed themselves with disgust and feared they would transmit their affliction to others. “As a result, they had feelings of damnation, fear, shame, and guilt about their physical deformity,” write researchers Ho Gi Jung,Chonnam National University, and Ya Ki Yang, Wonkwang University. This would not have surprised Han.

In 1948 the poet resolves to go back to Korea. He aches for home, childhood, crowds: “I breathe longing through my reed flute; I breathe tears thru my pipe, for valleys and rivers, for hill beyond hill.” His verse is infused with misery, reproach, and desperate hope:

Cherry blossoms blow; cherry blossoms fade.
Like flakes of snow, they drift, adrift.
 
Among the petals, on a road strewn with petals,
I return.
 
In moonlight and starlight the blossoms doze;
stars and blossoms streaking
across the Milky Way.
 
Petals adrift, drifting on the leper
heedless they nestle to his chest
as a woman might.
 
Petals are gone; gone, the petals.
Who has lost love? Who
leaves in secret tonight?

Petals gone in the night, a night of steps retraced.
Among the petals, on a road strewn with petals,
I return.

Han is not welcomed in his homeland. The stigma of Hansen’s disease remains. Despite this, his grief is tempered by compassion for those who condemn him, and more, for others who have the same condition. His words echo the pain of many who face a world that despises them for an affliction over which they have little control.

Han cries that he hopes to be a bluebird when he dies, “free, flying into the deep blue over fields of green; singing blue deeper still, crying the deepest blue.” His effortless lyricism has an insistent repetition that is more tempo than meter. The reality of Hansen’s disease, of being an outcast, lends a furious cadence to his verse:

“Guilty of being a leper.”
An absurd charge indeed
 
unknown in any legal code.
Yet my case has no defense.
 
Tradition declares that
only the guilty are punished.
 
Yet I am outcast,
despised by all,
 
guilty of being a leper.
An absurd charge, indeed.

Through it all, Han does not give up. Over the next twenty-seven years, he publishes poetry collections, is featured in a popular film, and founds the Korean Hansen Association. Today his pioneering work continues to help thousands of sufferers. Han Haun died in 1975, leaving a legacy of hope against hopeless odds. But writing his story, I am not relieved, I am condemned.

I too cast stones.

To my shame, in the 1980s I was guilty of smugly reviling AIDS patients. My friends and I, mostly in the same church, were quick to judge and ostracize anyone with “that gay disease.” The hate we spewed forth was not far from the bile of the Middle Ages. Given the chance, would we have run those with AIDS out of town? In a way, isn’t that exactly what we tried to do through cruelty, ignorance, and blame?

We may have lacked convenient rocks, but when a group gets worked up, it’s pleasing to convince ourselves that we are without sin—or at least that particular sin. The words of Jesus were on the page before us, just as they were in the thirteenth century: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. . . .Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” or “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone,” and most damning of all, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

But we weren’t listening.

Not once did I pause to think of the cankers on my own soul. Who among us has not brought misery on ourselves and others through hubris, weakness, or anger? We need hardly look for examples in faraway lands or in local churches, not with our families so close at hand. All too often, we condemn the people that love us, and who need our love most.

Consider my father, Dennis, an alcoholic. Dad was forty years sober when he died in 2019, but never truly free. Oh-ho, we may think. Drunk! Sinner! And yet . . .

Rather than sit in self-satisfaction at four decades of temperance, Dad reached out to fellow sufferers. He returned to the twelve-step recovery program with church-sponsored addiction groups. It wasn’t easy.

Losing my mother in 2013 left him heartbroken and at times desperately lonely, yet still he did not take a drink. Instead, he went through each difficult step, participating with those who may have slipped a week before, or a day before, demonstrating through example that each journey of a month or forty years can only be traveled one day at a time.

A younger member of the group summed up my father’s influence. “I don’t care much about Sunday school,” he said. “But when the old guy talks, I listen.” Dad, in his usual lively way, replied, “Well, for that I’ll be the old guy.”

Or consider my daughter, Jess, a drug addict. She died of a fentanyl-laced heroin overdose. Ah-ha, we might exclaim. She brought it on herself! But I ask you, where in the words of Jesus does he demand that my little girl stand in an open pit, shivering and alone, before we run her out of town? Today that is precisely where she rests, in a grave not open, but closed. I would give anything, my life included, to hold Jess in my arms once more and assure her she is loved exactly as she is, addictions and all.

Some believers in the Middle Ages had a similar view. They took Jesus at his word: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” For them, people with Hansen’s disease were to be treated with the same love given to their Lord. They founded hospitals and monasteries for the afflicted.

In the mid-twelfth century, for instance, Arnulf of Markene, lord of Ardres near Calais, established a leper house at Lostebarne. Seeing this, his neighbor Arnulf of Guines founded a leprosarium in nearby Spelleke. He was moved, he wrote, by “pity for the poor of Christ, deprived of the use of their limbs and tainted by leprosy.” Others thought that perhaps Jesus himself may have suffered from this dread malady, as Isaiah foretold: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

Today we recognize physical and mental diseases as having material causes. Poet and author Guy Davenport with the University of Kentucky grew up in a Southern Baptist church that boasted Ku Klux Klan members in its congregation. He knows the brutality of violent language and action. Jesus and Paul, he writes, were also surrounded by devils: literal, physical, and emotional. Davenport lists viruses, bacteria, epilepsy, scleroses, lameness, and blindness as maladies Jesus healed, along with less easily recognizable afflictions like depression, obsession, greed, cruelty, and selfishness. “We see Jesus healing both disease and ungenerous heart, scarcely making a distinction between them,” Davenport concludes. “As if the wounded body and the wounded mind were the same kind of hurt crying out to heaven to be healed.”

My father-in-law saw such hurt in others. He too was a bereaved parent and, like me, was steeped in flaws, with one remarkable exception. He took the words of Jesus to heart—he rarely judged others. When he passed this year, he left a memory not of condemnation, but of mercy.

I aspire to his attitude, though as yet unequal to the task. Judging is easy and so satisfying. It distracts me from my own defects. But as I think of my daughter, my dad, Han Haun, and centuries of unfairly maligned sufferers, something else occurs to me. When I judge others I am seldom just. It may be that for followers of Jesus, the true face of justice is compassion.

Translations from the Korean are by David Bannon.

Image credit: Georg Pencz, “Christ Healing the Leper, From the Story of Christ” (1534-1535) via Wikimedia Commons