The standoff

If you’ve ever watched rugby, you might recognise when the teams form a scrum. The forwards from each team bend down in rows and ram forward, locking heads and shoulders with the forwards from the other team. This is a fight. A fight for possession of the ball. There are feet and legs straining to balance and gain possession. Sometimes the scrum collapses, that’s when injuries can happen. But usually, the ball pops out somewhere and another player picks it up and continues the game.

Forwards are strong and burly. They’re built to push and overrun their opposition. But forwards do not come out of the scrum unscathed. You will recognise a forward by their build, but it’s the cauliflower ears that confirm it – ears that have been so crushed and battered that they become deformed.

Some of us are built to fight for what we want. We demand justice. Weakness provides a way through.

I read a line this morning that stuck with me. “Justice without compassion produces a society that is perfectly lawful and quietly cruel.”

We tend to pick a camp or tribe – we’re left brained or right brained, fighting for justice or showing compassion, legalistic or airy-fairy, analytical or creative. What if the better option was ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’?

If you had either a right brain or a left brain, but not both, you would have serious issues (assuming there was a ‘you’ at all)! Our left brain and right brain have different functions, but we need both of them to thrive.

If we had courts of law and prisons, but no support for those in need, we’d be the poorer for it. Some parts of the world have very low regard for the infirm or orphaned or aging or hurt. Those same parts of the world have huge gaps between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. Standards of living can be extremely low.

If we were all data analysts or all artists, we’d miss something special that the other provides.

A challenge with justice is not to favour one over the other. Corruption might look like a bribe and favouring the rich, but it can also look like pitying and favouring the poor. Justice requires us to place people on a level playing field.

Here are the verses that went with the line about being quietly cruel:

Consider if a neighbour came barging into your home making demands. It would be humiliating, invasive, the list goes on. When we overstep boundaries, we create a powerplay that shouldn’t be there.

By allowing a neighbour to bring the pledge out themselves, you show respect and value to them and their household.

When you are in the right, it is easy to overstep the bounds of decency. As a teenager, I was in charge of a group of girls and one of them was taking too long. In hindsight, I didn’t treat her well. I overstepped the mark when dealing with her. At the time I felt justified in what I did. But anyone in her place would have been mortified at my method.

The other part of this verse is, if they need it, to return their cloak, their pledge, so they can stay warm overnight. Again, if you have legitimately taken the coat in exchange for a loan, it makes sense to hold on to it until the loan is repaid.

That works if the person has more than one coat. But, if this pledge that you hold is their only warmth, what is the better thing to do? You can hold it – perfectly justly – and they will shiver all night; or you can show compassion and give them a source of warmth even though you’re not required to. They’ll thank you for it because they know that you could have legitimately kept it.

This is what a balance of justice and compassion looks like. You followed through on the terms of the agreement, justice. Now, as holder of the coat, you may a decision for their benefit, showing kindness. Notice that this neighbour took the pledge in exchange for the loan. They gave the neighbour dignity by allowing them to be treated like anyone else during the transaction – creating a level playing field.

It is really easy to lose our balance when we’re dealing with people. It is easy to be biased, especially for our own perspective. We can be self-righteous like I was with the girl years ago. I justified that I was in the right and human decency fell by the wayside.

When we see ourselves as right, and we’re mentally putting labels on someone else – lazy, slow, rude, out of touch with reality, sensitive, etc. this is a really good time to step back before we take action. By labelling the other person, we’re creating excuses to devalue them. We’re dangerously close to railroading over them if given the opportunity.

On the flip side, others of us are wired to help, to show compassion, to excuse wrongdoing. The danger here is overstepping so this person isn’t accountable for their actions. We can carry their weight to the point that they don’t have to. This devalues them and takes away their dignity. To distance them from the consequences of their actions isn’t justice. Sweeping things under the rug isn’t cleaning house, it’s creating an environment where dust stirs in the atmosphere and no one knows why.

What’s the standoff then?

The standoff is between you being right and doing what is right.

There are times that you’re evenly matched in a dispute, and the outcome could go either way. Sometimes one side is pushing, all the strong guys are there, straining for their own cause. When we get entrenched in our position, we can get carried away and forget to treat our neighbour well.

Some of us are built for the fight, built to push. But don’t assume that you will remain unscathed because you’re built that way. It’s the ears of the forwards that are affected in scrums. Wisdom is often imparted with the phrase, “those who have ears to hear, let them hear.” Pushing for your own cause can affect whether you have ‘ears to hear’. Can you hear the real need?

The crux of the mediation process is to ask questions of the two in dispute, so they hear each other’s true needs. When they stop thinking about the problem and see the person behind it, they’re often released to think broader and together they come up with surprising solutions that neither of them had thought of alone.

The standoff is between the need to gain possession and the need to remain balanced. If the scrum collapses because everyone is trying to gain possession and no one has any balance because their feet aren’t on the ground; the players have to back off, reform, and approach the situation again.

There’s no point in allowing yourself to go both feet for the ball when the scrum will collapse because of it. The collapse is when you’re likely to get hurt.

When you’re in the midst of a scrum metaphorically, consider both the need for balance and the need to get the outcome you’re after. Justice and kindness are two sides of a coin, but without each other, the coin wouldn’t be a coin at all. Justice and cruelty together, create injustice – they don’t make a coin, they don’t make something of value.

Which leg are you standing on? You may be in the right, but how are you treating those around you? How is your balance?