Posts Tagged ‘injustice’

Shhh… do you hear something?

{ March 14, 2009 @ 11:44 am } · { personal reflection, social justice }
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I don’t know if you share this experience, but sometimes it seems like everything I’m reading, every conversation I have, points in the same direction, toward the same topic.  As though the universe is saying, “Think about this, now.  This is the thing to figure out this week.”  Lately, that thing has been the topic of motivation.  Namely, why in the world do you what you do?  Where does your drive toward a thing, a topic, a social cause, a perspective, come from?  How far back can you trace it?  I’m taking a class about human trafficking as a contemporary moral issue right now, and over and over again we’re circling back to why it is that people feel the need to participate in social justice issues.  The answer, “Because it’s just the right thing to do,” while perhaps easy, is less than helpful.  Because, really, not all of us are interested in abolition of slavery.  It’s just not on the radar.  So why is it central for some, or why is another issue like abortion, or environmental degradation, or the death penalty?  Why?  I’m still thinking about the particular causes I’m concerned about, where my motivation comes from, my attraction to them, but I think I’ve figured out why it is that I’m generally worried and involved with issues when people are excluded, marginalized, silenced.  Whether it’s poverty or lesbian and gay rights, I am overcome with some real anger and sadness that people aren’t cared for, that they aren’t heard.  

Last month, I received a Facebook friend request from someone who was one of the popular girls in my elementary school, and it reminded me of where some of this comes from, for me.  I was one of those awkward kids… I never really knew how to dress, didn’t have that natural social aptitude other kids seemed to just exude.  A loner, a reader, the one who liked people but had no clue how to start a conversation with the cool kids.  But, our elementary school was small, so we really had to hang out with everyone.  Somehow, I got hooked into wanting to hang out with the pretty girls.  Not a big surprise.  They weren’t even very interesting or smart, but that’s the stupidity of being human, wanting to fit in.  One day in the third grade, on the athletic field where we had daily recess after lunch, I wandered over to the spot where these five particularly popular girls hung out.  They wouldn’t have invited me, hadn’t, but I had no reason to think I wasn’t welcome.  But I walked up to the little clutch of them and said, “Hi, can I sit down?” hoping for someone to hang out with at recess.  And one of them, the coolest (’cause she could do that thing with her bangs that was so popular in the mid-’80′s, where they fluff up 5 inches… you know the style.  I couldn’t ever manage it without looking ridiculous), she looked right at me and said, “I’m sorry, do you all hear something?  I could swear I heard something.”  And turned to the others and smiled meanly.  They sort of turned to me, then her, and one of them (the short, thin one, gymnast-type) said, “Nah.  I think it was the wind. I didn’t hear anything.”  And, as one, they all turned and ignored me, pointedly.  I remember really clearly their nasty little exclusive smiles, the closing of the ranks.  I’m sure this interaction took about 30 seconds.  In my memory, it was an eternity.  This isn’t a special experience – I’m nearly certain we’ve all felt this, in school at some point… at work, in our communities.  Feeling erased, totally cast out, unwanted for no reason other than the fact that the other could do it, their social cache allowing them a moment of true power.  We were eight… but it’s a microcosm, and representative of so many things I see in the world today.  I’m a pretty privileged person, with most of the social and cultural advantages valued in our world today… I’m white, straight, middle-class, healthy, well-educated.  And yet, even I could be silenced, devalued.  I remember thinking, walking away in tears, that I never wanted to make anyone feel so small.  

Then, at age 12, at my YMCA summer camp,  I was those girls, for a summer, for the sake of feeling included, of being powerful.  Mary was the only black girl at camp, and we made her life a living hell for one week, starting with the day one of her extensions fell out and we screamed in mock fear then shunned her for the rest of camp.  I remember intentionally excluding her, the visceral sense of belonging because someone else didn’t.  The rush, and the sort of satisfying guilt, of being capable of creating a space in which I was safe because for once I could draw boundaries around myself that didn’t include another person.  

Thinking about these two very early experiences with exclusion, one as the target and another as the perpetrator, I realize I don’t do social justice work because “it’s the right thing to do.”  I do it as penance.  I do it because, out of that sense of personal responsibility, I can see the walls between people, ones I’ve built and ones that are being constructed by others, some of them tall and wide enough to blot out the sun, some small enough just to make sure people stumble.  It’s not easy to admit that it’s not that I’m a “good person,” or kind, or particularly enlightened, that I feel the need to include people in the larger family of humanity.  I’m not especially altruistic.  Really, it’s all about me.  Well, a lot about me.  I need to do it, for myself, in order to be a part of that family, too, again.  It’s selfish.  And I think that’s probably not a terrible place to start.  But it would be good to hear other people honestly own up to that motivation, too.  Sure, I understand the how and the why of being concerned for others based on the words  of the holy scripture I treasure and the person of Jesus who I attempt, falteringly, to follow, but my motivations, not my justifications for the actions themselves, come from long before I was a person of faith or a mature adult.  

I wonder what motivations other people are willing to admit.

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Cursed and blessed with ears to hear.

{ January 23, 2009 @ 12:00 pm } · { political, poverty, Sermon, social justice }
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***A disclaimer, briefly.  I wrote this sermon last summer, but it’s been on my mind all week as I’ve listened to the news and watched my new President be sworn into office.  It’s my prayer for the next four years.  Or one of them, anyhow.  That we will have ears to hear. ***

Shenita had done the math.  She’d counted and recalculated every meager addition and every major debit in her tiny account book, once, twice, three times.  After paying for her son’s medicine at the local shaman’s, buying groceries at the market, paying the increasing debt on her small plot of rented land where she grew rice to sustain her family, giving away a portion to the head of her village, her priest, her father-in-law, deducting her eldest son’s school fees, she’d have left only 30 rupees to make it through the month.  Just thirty.  Not enough, never enough.  She felt like she was swimming in pond full of grinning flesh-eating fish, everyone wanting just their little bite, not realizing that they were slowly eating her to death.  How would she survive?  

First century Palestine had its own share of people living on the edge of total deprivation, simply subsisting day to day, hoping for a windfall or a sudden opportunity to lift themselves out of the struggle of daily existence.  None would pass up a golden opportunity to make tomorrow less painful and challenging.  Who wouldn’t want to have to worry about tomorrow’s supper, next week’s debt?  Absentee landowners rented out land to tenants, people such as these, who could not sustain themselves because their land had been bought up and combined into enormous farms owned by the wealthy.  Owned by the wealthy, worked doggedly by the poor.  

Jesus told a story to the leaders of his society, those who challenged his radical reminders of compassion and the true meaning of the Torah.  Told them to think of a landowner, one he called a good man, who had rented out his vineyard to such tenants.  At the time of the harvest, the vineyard owner called in his debts.  He’d take, thank you very much, what was owed to him, his share of the harvest.  But the tenants beat up his servants who came for the harvest, nearly killing them.  When they saw the master’s son coming down the road, cart empty and ready for his father’s share, they realized that he was the last thing standing between them and their opportunity for survival.  So they seized him and killed him, as well.  There, the evangelist Thomas relates, Jesus leaves his audience with the simply command, “Let him with ears, hear.”  

Hear this: these tenant farmers had counted and recalculated their meager accounts.   After paying what usually amounted to nearly fifty percent of the vineyard’s yield to imperial and local taxes, after tending the fields and feeding their working animals, after repairing their tools, after paying their usual dues, their mandated fees for cultic and religious festivals, they would only have around ten percent of the harvest to live on, to trade out and to feed themselves with for the rest of the year.  Not enough, never enough.  And here was the landlord’s son, coming to take it, his share!  So they did what they felt they were forced to do to survive.  The vineyard owner didn’t need this yield, these grapes, as desperately as they did.  A good man, Jesus called him.  Perhaps he was; he was simply taking what he felt he was entitled to, what his business had earned.  And yet, his entitlement dangerously threatened the lives of those who sweated and slaved over his land.  Let those with ears, hear.  

We might believe in our current lives that what we are doing is simply “taking what is ours.”  After all, we too must earn our livings, feed our families.  We live in the “land of opportunity,” the home of independence, raised on the luscious crop of do-it-yourself and the American dream.  We all struggle, have to strive for our share, feel entitled to that little bite of sustenance beyond the most of our basic needs.  This is the way of the world, our world.  Or is it?  Throughout the Hebrew scriptures and the gospels, we hear the voice of God calling out for us to seek justice, to have mercy, to be compassionate toward those who have less than we do.  God whispers to us, sometimes raising nearly to a shout, “Love one another!  Can’t you see how you hurt one another when you do not see?  When you do not look at your own life and realize your disorientation?  Where am I in your lives?  Do you see me there? Let those with ears, hear!”  

Sometimes, as with the vineyard owner who was a good man, we take things that are ours.  Our cheap t-shirts made in the dark by hungry children in India, our coffee harvested through the use of slave labor in Columbia, our democratic freedom created at the cost of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, our self-regard as a nation of independent, self-willed movers and shakers to the detriment of our relationship with the God who willed us into being. The tenants recognized the heir to the vineyard and felt they had no choice but to seize and kill him.  He and his father’s lack of compassion for the reality of the poor who made their comfortable lives possible, their entitlement, was their destruction.  Jesus’ basic mantra throughout the gospels, in all of the gospels, is for us to love our neighbors and our God as ourselves.  The good news is that when all are cared for, God’s reign will have arrived.  We are good men and women.  Let us have ears to hear.

You shall love the stranger.

{ October 20, 2008 @ 9:46 pm } · { personal reflection, political, poverty, spirituality }
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“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” – Isaiah 58:6

“You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” – Deut. 10:19

 

Throughout history, diverse people of faith have participated in the spiritual discipline of fasting.  The intentional practice of limiting consumption, most often of food and drink, but sometimes also commercial products or personal habits, follows a long tradition: Moses fasted.  David fasted.  So did Jesus.  Indeed, Gandhi, 20th century suffragists, and political prisoners of many nations have fasted to bring attention to injustice.

 

The Bible recounts the practice of fasting throughout the Old and New Testaments, including for the purpose of averting God’s judgment, to focus the mind and heart on the will of God, and to prepare for times of trial or great spiritual challenge.  We know that our own country is in the midst of one of those times of challenge – we are faced with the fact that the American dream of equality, freedom, access to clean water, healthcare, and safe employment with living wages is far out of reach for many.  Like the Israelites, most of us, too, began as sojourners in this land.  Yet our immigrant brothers and sisters find little hospitality.  “You shall also love the stranger,” says the Lord. 

 

I’m a United Methodist, and our denomination has a special tradition of caring for the poor and of connecting such acts of mercy and justice to our spiritual practice.  John Wesley, the founder of our denomination, taught  that there are three simple rules for the life of faith: to do no harm, to do goodness, and to stay in love with God.  As Micah said: loving justice, doing kindness, walking humbly with our God. 

 

Beginning in the middle of October until the 2008 election, a collection of immigrants, movement leaders, day laborers, people of faith both lay and clergy, student leaders, grassroots organizers, musicians and artists, and people of conscience will rise out of fear and begin one of the largest hunger strikes in American history.  For the Christians participating in this intentional fast, we hope that our shared sacrifice and commitment to the Immigrant Rights Movement will bring attention to the ways in which our communities and government have neglected to provide reasonable care for the least, last, and lost of our society.  By joining the Fast for Our Future, whether for a meal, a day, or a week, we will repent of the personal and systemic choices we have made to oppress immigrants, following the rule to “do no harm.”  We will reflect during this time on better, more compassionate ways to love strangers in our midst, practicing acts of goodness.  We will witness to the power of the Living God amongst those without resources and without voices, sharing and experiencing the power of God’s love.  This is the fast that we choose. 

 

In fact, it’s the fast I’ve chosen.  You may have read my earlier post about poverty – as I was wondering what ways I could practically live out this sense of needing to make an intentional choice in my own life to do less harm, to do good, to undertake the eternal and difficult task of staying in love with this God I worship, I ran across (was given?) this opportunity to act out my faith and my convictions by taking part in the Fast for Our Future.  So, I’ll be fasting on Nov. 2 and 3 as a part of this movement.  My hope and plan is to spend the time during those two days praying for our nation’s leaders, elected and unelected, visible or quietly working behind the scenes.  I’ll pray for them to act with conscience and clarity, compassion and courage.  I’ll pray for them to sense their calling to the broken places in our society.  Most of all, I’ll pray that they will speak with and for the poor.  As a part of that prayer, I’ll write letters to my legislators outlining for them why I believe immigrants deserve the same rights to life that I enjoy by the sheer privilege of having been born where and who I was.  I won’t joke – this will be hard work.  I don’t naturally give up food (who does voluntarily?) and I certainly will struggle to keep my mind and heart focused on these goals.  But I truly believe that when people turn their faces to God, no matter what they understand as “divine,” the world changes. 

 

 

I rather hope you’ll join me, whether by fasting from food or by fasting from the distractions of the every day to spend time thinking about, praying for, or working toward reform for immigration.   

http://www.therisemovement.org/home.html

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