Craving Justice and Beauty

I said that I would never get a cell phone.  I have one.  I said I would never write a blog.  Here is one.  The genesis of this was a frustration and a delight.  The frustration is about how our conversation has fallen, both in politics and in the church. The delight is that, as I am six months from completing my sixth decade, I have found more wonder at the beauty of creation and the incredible complexity of human beings than I have for years. Maybe decades.

             “With liberty and justice for all.”  That’s how the Pledge of Allegiance ends. (I also think that’s the part that God cares about, not whether we say “under God” or not.)  But so much of our political discourse in this country focuses only on liberty.  It is present on the right: my right to choose my own insurance plan, my right to keep more of my money.  But it’s also found on the left: my right to marry who I want to, my right to make my own decisions about my body.  I’m not opposed to liberty or human rights (though what rights we do have and what we should have are an open question).  But lacking from the conversation much of the time is the question of justice, especially justice for all.

             For example, in all the talk about health care in the last couple of years, we’ve usually avoided the key issue: why do we have so many uninsured people in our country?   It’s hard to decide on solutions to that question when we aren’t even asking it.  We are an incredibly wealthy nation, and yet we don’t have a national strategy to provide health care for all our citizens.  Almost all our talk has been focused on rights.  My right to not have health insurance.  My right to have contraception coverage.   The “my’s” have it.

Whatever justice means, it always means “expanding the tent”.  Expanding not just rights to a wider group, but also expanding the power to use those rights.  (Slow down libertarian friends—I’m not talking about a government transferring power from one group to another!).  Any movement toward justice means working through two deep human fears: the loss, or perceived loss of our power, and the responsibility that comes with using our power.  That is not done without struggle, thus the call to Spirit wounds.  Wounds that can heal.

Which brings us, in true non sequitur fashion, to beauty.  Our conversation and our life together in community cry out for more beauty in our lives.  I don’t mean a flowery, isn’t-everybody-so-precious kind of coating on our struggles.  I mean a passion to see beauty and to create it in our daily life.  Take the prophet Amos’ well quoted words on justice:

Let justice roll down like waters

            And righteousness like an everflowing stream

             This powerful call to justice is clothed in a beautiful poetic image that is repeated.  Healing, refreshing water—water we all want and crave—is the metaphor for a just life together.  We can’t control water, but we can cherish, protect and share it.

            Most of you know that I am a poet. Sometimes I will leave this with something from a poem.  These are a few lines from my poem “Questions”:

Is freedom a surname for joy,

or the fastest way to annihilate
ourselves?    Is hope an unfolding
flower, or a factory to hide in?

Be beauty.  Be justice.

Patrick