Friday, September 11, 2020
Meg Moran
Seek
We pray for lofty goals. We seek justice and peace in the world. Sometimes we doubt the significance of our individual prayers in the face of all the wrongs we witness every day, and we despair.
I am an attorney who represents people who have survived genocide, torture, human trafficking, and other forms of violence and persecution. My work requires me to spend a lot of time talking, reading, and writing about humanity at its worst. I find myself dwelling in some truly dark places: the childhood memories of clients who witnessed their government massacre unarmed civilians, including other children; the forensic evaluations detailing the evidence of torture in the scars on clients’ bodies; the written and oral accounts of testimony in war crimes tribunals; ICE detention facilities with inhumane conditions; immigration enforcement and court proceedings where due process is routinely denied and basic rules of human decency and respect for others are ignored as a matter of course; and more.
And yet, I love my work. Paradoxically, it is my daily, hopeful response to what’s wrong with the world, my daily antidote to despair. My work is also my spiritual life’s journey. I know, so cliché. But my day-to-day work life is a kind-of pilgrimage. Though I don’t really have a destination, I feel like I’m moving. My clients let me visit them in their lives for a while. We talk about their past experiences, good and bad, their fundamental beliefs, their identities, and their fears and hopes for the future. In order to prepare their cases, my clients sometimes have to share things they’ve never revealed to anyone else. During the time I spend with my clients, I sense what I think is what people mean when they talk about the presence of God. I’m really not sure what the presence of God is, or if it’s presumptuous of me to think I know it when I see or feel it. But I don’t know how else to describe what happens. Even though one client’s persecution experience can be similar to another’s, the encounters I have with each client is unique and unpredictable. I think it has something to do with the ways in which the mutual work each client and I do together alters both of us. As a lawyer, I’m really only a resource or tool for my clients to use for what they seek. But our work together is a union, a joining together that involves intense, sacred moments of vulnerability, trust, emotional intimacy, and even love. In helping clients reach their goal for protection – sanctuary – in the U.S., my work is as much about fortifying them for battle as it is about gathering evidence and preparing legal arguments.