Reparations is a big word, 11 letters. But the shorter word it comes from – repair – strikes me as even bigger.

As a noun, reparations suggests that a decision has been reached about concrete actions to redress past wrongs. As a verb, repair is a process. That’s where the hard work happens to restore, renew, make whole. But history is history. We can’t go back and undo the horrors of the middle passage or the sundering of families at slave auctions.

What restoration is possible centuries later?

A first step can be looking back and taking an honest accounting of the past. That’s what researchers working with Saint Louis University are doing to learn about those enslaved by Jesuits at the school.

Yet no amount of looking back can recompense historical harms. We have to move forward, somehow. To try to understand what might promote that, I turned to the world’s most-read book, the Bible. This phrase in Isaiah 58 piqued my interest: “repairer of the breach.”

Here, the repairer isn’t a carpenter or mason but a caring community. That’s the ideal anyway. People feed the hungry, free the oppressed, undo heavy burdens. And behind those good actions, Isaiah indicates, are good attitudes – compassion and humility. Treating people well comes with thinking of them that way.

Having achieved this, the entire community experiences abundance, “like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” It earns the name “repairer of the breach” and can “build the old waste places.”

If today’s debate over reparations builds community, that sounds like progress to me, whatever decision is reached.

Today’s issue, dedicated to reparations, looks at slavery, forced assimilation, and territorial dispossession – in the United States, Barbados, and Canada. Over the summer we’ll consider other reparations issues and locales.

Building community is hard work, but it might be the fulcrum that lets us balance looking back and moving forward.