Pilgrim Finally at Rest: The Journey of Robert E. Rodes, Jr.

When one first met Robert Rodes, it was easy to match him with his fascination for the legal workings of the Anglican Church. He looked the part of an English gentleman, tall, genial, dignified, even vaguely regal. But then he would begin to speak, or write, and the Robert Rodes who studied Marx and Djilas, who was as prophetic in his engagement with lawyers and the law as any scholar in a mainstream American legal institution, would surprise and sometimes sting. The many and varied roads Robert walked in the discipline of law and religion became a gift to the Journal of Law and Religion, where he served as an author, article reviewer, and trusted adviser. In 2007, we published a symposium in honor of his work in law and religion, a deep, critical engagement with the variety of themes in his law and religion work, (1) and, to understand how he came to these arguments, a jurisprudential and theological autobiography and bibliography. (2) Although there is much more to discover in that symposium, I want to reflect briefly on three interrelated testimonies Robert made that are reflected in that symposium, and what they might mean for lawyers and judges today as we struggle through an uncertain time in the American legal profession. These are the themes of pilgrim law, of sin and class struggle, and of the calling of Christian lawyers and legal academics. Robert was "famous" in law and religion circles, if one can be famous in such a smallish community, for his book Pilgrim Law. (3) He argued that the first principle of liberation jurisprudence, as he labeled the legal philosophy that flowed from liberation theology, (4) is that "individuals, communities, and humanity as a whole are called to a journey, a pilgrimage, to a destiny that fulfills human nature but transcends it in ways we do not understand," (5) one in which "we are called to pursue an unknown end by inefficacious means." (6) Robert had no time for a theologically romantic vision that we moderns might associate with pilgrimage. Rather, he meant to describe the reality of a human life course, the hard, gritty task of a traveler wearily climbing over boulders and pushing beyond exhaustion to reach the next barren shelter on the path at night's end. That journey is at once solitary and communal: only the pilgrim herself can push on to the next shrine, but she walks with others silently trudging the same steep incline she must pass over and still others who extend simple hospitality to her at the day's end. The pilgrim way is full of the conflict that always comes with genuine pluralism, accompanied by the aspiration toward fraternity. (7) For Robert, a Catholic, what lay in sight for each person, indeed each lawyer and judge, through the power of moral imagination was the fulfillment of not only his purpose but his very essence, a fulfillment that transcended any list of accomplishments or earthly qualities of one's life. Speaking to the calling of a lawyer in Pilgrim Law, Robert contextualized the preferential option for the poor in the institutional structures of modernity that resembled, but did not mimic, Marx's theories of class structure. In terms of factual analysis, he came to see that Marx had it wrong about who were oppressors and who were oppressed: he realized that any class, now the managerial class and potentially those who once occupied the status of victims, if given enough power, would turn oppressive. (8) Describing his version of "false consciousness" as "adherence to a purported value that in fact supports the ruling class in its freedom from accountability to the wider society," (9) Robert detailed this self-delusion: It is easy to believe that we live (and prosper) under a basically beneficent system, that the misfortunes of those who (unlike ourselves) fail to prosper under it are either the result of their own improvidence or the inevitable consequences of an imperfect world, and that if we tinker more than incrementally with the system, unimaginable disasters will ensue. …