Transformation

As I completed my journey to the Catholic Church, my journey home, I did a lot of thinking about the teachings of the Church, the idea of natural law, and the relationship between secular and religious laws.  These are not easy questions.  They are questions very much at the forefront of our national debate.  This type of thinking prompted me to ponder the reasoning behind various laws.  In law school we often talk about the public policy behind this or that law as a way to argue the merit, or demerit, as the case may be, of a given law.  Why was the law enacted?  What was Congress’s intent in passing such a law?  Who is supposed to be protected by the law, and what if any, unintended consequences, were created by the law?

Our legal system is very complex.  It wasn’t always so.  In the good old days, there weren’t law schools.  People didn’t spend years studying the abstract idea of how to be a lawyer.  They went to undergraduate, and then apprenticed themselves to a practicing attorney, got out their Blackstone’s and a volume set of the state legal code, and went to work.  Today, the life and law library of a lawyer is much different.  There are state codes, federal codes, tax codes, administrative codes, rules of civil and criminal procedure, and even rules of superintendence our state supreme courts promulgate.  There are local rules for each court in which you practice, and local procedures and policies that are often unspoken.  There are rules for mediators, rules for guardians, rules for guardian ad litem, and ethical codes for attorneys. 

Despite, or perhaps because of all these rules, nothing much can function without lawyers these days.  It now takes a team of lawyers from a myriad of fields to advise even a mid-sized business.  Lawyers are afraid of being sued by clients and other lawyers. Lay people sometimes break the law without even knowing it.  Some use the fact that enforcing all these laws is increasingly difficult.  They take advantage of the lax enforcement to work the system.  We have so many laws, ethical codes, bullying codes, codes of conducts, trainings and the like that it literally blows the mind.  Every time we think we solve one problem by passing this or that law, another problem shows up. Yet somehow people seem to think that more and more laws, making this or that illegal or unethical, is the secret to changing behavior.

As a lawyer, I’m going to challenge that notion.  Yes, law can be a help to change the way people live, but ultimately, things can only truly change when people’s hearts are transformed.  We can make abortion illegal, or drug possession criminalized, we can make this or that group a protected class; yet ultimately, real change cannot occur unless people’s heart are transformed, because with each new law, there is a new way to skirt the law, bypass it, find the grey area, or just downright ignore it.

I’ve often heard older attorneys talk about the good ole days, when deals were done with simple contracts and a shake of the hand.  While some of that does seem the stuff of legend, it now seems that only an airtight, throw everything in but the kitchen sink, type of legal document is sufficient for even the simplest of real estate home sales.  No longer does a person’s word mean you can count on them.  For the most part, you better have something in writing, documented via email or text, or somehow provable, or you can forget about the person ever admitting to this or that exchange. 

My point is: we don’t actually need more laws.  We need people to be transformed.  When people let go of greed, personal ambition, jealousy, the acquisition of wealth, and behave in the true manner of Christ, laws aren’t needed.  When people don’t lie, you can count on their word, and an iron clad contract isn’t needed.  When people respect life, you don’t need strict laws about when you can and can’t have abortion.  When people value marriage, you don’t need complex case law on divorce and child custody.  The problem isn’t a lack of law.  It is a lack of humanity, and a lack of thinking about something other than your own wants.  It seems to be the fate of human beings to always want more, to never be satisfied.  As long as we look for love in all the wrong places, satisfaction will be fleeting, effervescent, and will leave us with an unquenchable thirst, or maybe as Shel Silverstein said “the itch we just can’t scratch”. 

In this mixed up crazy world full of hedonism, instant gratification, and mass media, we are called to a higher transformation in which we eschew those earthly things for the call to love one another as He has loved us.  No law can truly prevent a behavior.  Only a true transformation of the person can prevent certain behaviors.  Not even a religious or ecclesiastical law can force certain behaviors.  That kind of transformation can only occur internally, and only through free will.  In this political season, it’s important to remember what politicians can and can’t do.  They can’t transform people’s hearts; they can’t remake a person through divine mercy; and they can’t legislate morality.  Don’t put your trust in another human being to fix these things.  There is only one thing that can truly transform someone’s heart, and that is the grace and the love of God.