Context and Purpose
Apparition above a Massachusetts suburb September, 2019
Martin Luther King is famous for saying that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. He was drawing on the words of Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister opposed to slavery, who in a sermon published in 1853,[1] wrote:
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble. (Emphasis added).
Today Charles Blow writes in the New York Times that the “impending impeachment of Donald Trump will be a rebuke, but it will not be a restraint.” Elizabeth Drew writes that “we could be on the brink of having no check on the president, no matter how radically he defies the Constitution”.
Lovers of the environment are lovers of justice, as surely it is unjust to degrade the foundation on which all life depends. Such lovers may, at this moment, be aided in maintaining their energy to resist degradation and restore the hope of justice by remembering the words of the Preamble to the American Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
This is the declaration of purpose – the mission statement – the plan - of the founders of our system of democracy. Lovers of life and the justice required to sustain it must remember these words and resist all attempts to narrow their meaning. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, envisioning a new birth of freedom, a new founding of the country after destruction, took an expansive view of its purposes. He also drew upon Parker, who in a speech in 1850 stated:
There is what I call the American idea. I so name it, because it seems to me to lie at the basis of all our truly original, distinctive, and American institutions. It is itself a complex idea, composed of three subordinate and more simple ideas, namely: The idea that all men have unalienable rights; that in respect thereof, all men are created equal; and that government is to be established and sustained for the purpose of giving every man an opportunity for the enjoyment and development of all these unalienable rights. This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy, that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom.[2]
This is the time to remind ourselves of our ideals, and the fact that freedom is found not in release from responsibility, but in the universality of ideas of justice. The King James Bible version of Psalm 121 says, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” Many who draw their sense of truth from scriptures think of that help coming from “the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth”. Those who draw their sense of truth from love of the Earth and perhaps also the idealism that the concept of heaven suggests may also lift up their eyes at this time, and try to picture the arc of justice governing the affairs of people.
The psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Anna Ornstein, in a recent review in the publication of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, notes communal disasters and the importance of memorials that provide the opportunity to grieve, observing their
power to elicit the dreaded but also deeply desired pain of grief. Much as it is dreaded, experiencing grief is also desired because it is only then that the numbness that isolates the bereaved from his/her surroundings can be overcome.[3]
It is time to grieve the communal disaster of the destruction of our beloved democracy - a creation of the desire for justice - and to lift up our eyes to the hope that it can be restored. It is time to ensure we do not become numb, to grieve in order to regain our ability to feel, and then to remember our ideals, and participate in the creation of a better world. Parker, in the sermon noted above, observed:
We do not see that justice is always done on earth; many a knave is rich, sleek, and honoured, while the just man is poor, hated, and in torment… the actual function of government, so far as it has been controlled by the will of the rulers, has commonly been this: To foster the strong at the expense of the weak, to protect the capitalist and tax the labourer. The powerful have sought a monopoly of development and enjoyment, loving to eat their morsel alone…Justice is forgotten in looking at interest, and political morality neglected for political economy…
He bemoaned
a foolish neglect of moral culture…The leading classes have not valued it…These men seek the uses of truth, not truth itself; they scorn duty and its higher law ; to be ignorant and weak-minded is thought worse than to be voluntarily unjust and wicked...
Yet he did not conclude that it was impractical to fix one’s eyes on justice. He asserted that
We need a great and conscious development of the moral element in man, and a corresponding expansion of justice in human affairs.
He said this because he believed that
What is false to justice cannot stand; what is true to that cannot perish. Nothing can save wrong…Tell me not of successful wrong. The gain of injustice is a loss, its pleasure suffering. Iniquity seems to prosper, but its success is its defeat and shame. The knave deceives himself. The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul…Let a man try to love the wrong, and do the wrong, it is eating stones, and not bread…Sometimes men fear that justice will fail, wickedness appears so strong. On its side are the armies, the thrones of power, the riches, and the glory of the world. Poor men crouch down in despair. Shall justice fail and perish out from the world of men? Shall anything that is wrong continually endure?...Will you fear lest a wrong should prove immortal? So far as anything is false, or wrong, it is weak; so far as true and right, is omnipotently strong.
Parker believed in God, and that belief may not be available to those who today lift up their eyes and see no sign of help coming. So it is important to know that he stirred great controversy by preaching against faith in miracles, and insisted that:
…in human affairs the justice of God must work by human means...Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind. The ideal must become actual, God's thought a human thing, made real in a reign of righteousness, and a kingdom—no, a Commonwealth—of justice on the earth. You and I can help forward that work…you and I in our daily life, in house, or field, or shop, obscurely faithful, may prepare the way for the republic of righteousness, the democracy of justice that is to come. Our own morality shall bless us here; not in our outward life alone, but in the inward and majestic life of conscience…at our death we leave it added to the common store of humankind. You and I may help deepen the channel of human morality…and the wrecks of evil, which now check the stream, be borne off the sooner by the strong, all-conquering tide of right…
May we who love Creation – howsoever caused, by accident or design – soon be able to view the wrecks of evil, borne off by the flowing waters of justice, loosed by a return of faith in the ideals of democracy, in the ability of humanity to recognize its true self-interest: not in the fragmentation of individual and national competition, but in the upholding of universal values. Not by the miraculous intervention by a supernatural God, but the self-salvation of mature civilization, that recognizes freedom in rights-based governance, liberation in the balancing instead of clashing of interests, the power of progress in the unleashing of cooperative talents, and the purposes of willing contribution, borne of belonging. This gift we can give to ourselves, if we can lift up our eyes and see it, and pledge ourselves to it. This is a time for grieving what has been lost, but not a time for despair, for what we love can still be protected. Though this writer is agnostic, he prays: Let numbness depart and our souls be infused with desire for justice, for all humanity and the living world around.
[1] “Of Justice and the Conscience”, third of ten sermons.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Sermons_of_Religion/Of_Justice_and_the_Conscience
[2] The American Idea, a speech at New England Anti-Slavery Convention, Boston (29 May 1850)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourses_of_Slavery/Speech_in_Boston,_May_29,_1850,_on_Slave_Power_in_America
[3] https://bpsi.org/mourning/
The psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Anna Ornstein, in a recent review in the publication of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, notes communal disasters and the importance of memorials that provide the opportunity to grieve, observing their
power to elicit the dreaded but also deeply desired pain of grief. Much as it is dreaded, experiencing grief is also desired because it is only then that the numbness that isolates the bereaved from his/her surroundings can be overcome.[3]
It is time to grieve the communal disaster of the destruction of our beloved democracy - a creation of the desire for justice - and to lift up our eyes to the hope that it can be restored. It is time to ensure we do not become numb, to grieve in order to regain our ability to feel, and then to remember our ideals, and participate in the creation of a better world. Parker, in the sermon noted above, observed:
We do not see that justice is always done on earth; many a knave is rich, sleek, and honoured, while the just man is poor, hated, and in torment… the actual function of government, so far as it has been controlled by the will of the rulers, has commonly been this: To foster the strong at the expense of the weak, to protect the capitalist and tax the labourer. The powerful have sought a monopoly of development and enjoyment, loving to eat their morsel alone…Justice is forgotten in looking at interest, and political morality neglected for political economy…
He bemoaned
a foolish neglect of moral culture…The leading classes have not valued it…These men seek the uses of truth, not truth itself; they scorn duty and its higher law ; to be ignorant and weak-minded is thought worse than to be voluntarily unjust and wicked...
Yet he did not conclude that it was impractical to fix one’s eyes on justice. He asserted that
We need a great and conscious development of the moral element in man, and a corresponding expansion of justice in human affairs.
He said this because he believed that
What is false to justice cannot stand; what is true to that cannot perish. Nothing can save wrong…Tell me not of successful wrong. The gain of injustice is a loss, its pleasure suffering. Iniquity seems to prosper, but its success is its defeat and shame. The knave deceives himself. The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul…Let a man try to love the wrong, and do the wrong, it is eating stones, and not bread…Sometimes men fear that justice will fail, wickedness appears so strong. On its side are the armies, the thrones of power, the riches, and the glory of the world. Poor men crouch down in despair. Shall justice fail and perish out from the world of men? Shall anything that is wrong continually endure?...Will you fear lest a wrong should prove immortal? So far as anything is false, or wrong, it is weak; so far as true and right, is omnipotently strong.
Parker believed in God, and that belief may not be available to those who today lift up their eyes and see no sign of help coming. So it is important to know that he stirred great controversy by preaching against faith in miracles, and insisted that:
…in human affairs the justice of God must work by human means...Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind. The ideal must become actual, God's thought a human thing, made real in a reign of righteousness, and a kingdom—no, a Commonwealth—of justice on the earth. You and I can help forward that work…you and I in our daily life, in house, or field, or shop, obscurely faithful, may prepare the way for the republic of righteousness, the democracy of justice that is to come. Our own morality shall bless us here; not in our outward life alone, but in the inward and majestic life of conscience…at our death we leave it added to the common store of humankind. You and I may help deepen the channel of human morality…and the wrecks of evil, which now check the stream, be borne off the sooner by the strong, all-conquering tide of right…
May we who love Creation – howsoever caused, by accident or design – soon be able to view the wrecks of evil, borne off by the flowing waters of justice, loosed by a return of faith in the ideals of democracy, in the ability of humanity to recognize its true self-interest: not in the fragmentation of individual and national competition, but in the upholding of universal values. Not by the miraculous intervention by a supernatural God, but the self-salvation of mature civilization, that recognizes freedom in rights-based governance, liberation in the balancing instead of clashing of interests, the power of progress in the unleashing of cooperative talents, and the purposes of willing contribution, borne of belonging. This gift we can give to ourselves, if we can lift up our eyes and see it, and pledge ourselves to it. This is a time for grieving what has been lost, but not a time for despair, for what we love can still be protected. Though this writer is agnostic, he prays: Let numbness depart and our souls be infused with desire for justice, for all humanity and the living world around.
[1] “Of Justice and the Conscience”, third of ten sermons.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Sermons_of_Religion/Of_Justice_and_the_Conscience
[2] The American Idea, a speech at New England Anti-Slavery Convention, Boston (29 May 1850)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourses_of_Slavery/Speech_in_Boston,_May_29,_1850,_on_Slave_Power_in_America
[3] https://bpsi.org/mourning/
Exercise for the New Year: Take stock of the world and what you see being lost as we head into 2020. Consider your feelings of loss and sit with them, do not deny them. Air pollution kills millions, plastic chokes the seas. The ice caps are melting. The governments of the world are not yet effectively responding. The inventor of environmental protection law, the US, has abandoned leadership: the EPA is led by members of the chemical industry who are dismantling protections and the scientific processes that justify them, and our envoys are blocking progress of the world’s effort to address climate change. Invaders of the Amazon are encouraged by a Brazilian president and other fascist leaders are rising. National debts are piling up and the international trade system is devolving instead of moving in the direction it could – towards stronger local economies. Consider how this makes you feel, and then resolve not to despair or become unfeeling, and not to deny or disavow what is happening, or resign yourself. Do not allow this to become normal. Resolve to do what you can, to envision a better world and work for it, to find purpose and meaning in your life. Recognize the difference – as Anna Ornstein articulates it – between “pathological mourning” and “adaptive mourning”. Mourn the tragedy of current events and then creatively respond. Begin by making up your own prayer concerning this. Do not worry that praying is considered the act of someone who believes that a supernatural being will hear the prayer and miraculously respond. This need not be the case for prayer to be useful. Earnestly articulate – to yourself and to others – the noble desires of your heart. Do not be ashamed of them, do not consider yourself naïve. Pray for what you know is right because this will give you strength to work for it. It will encourage others to look into their hearts instead of following the herds. Lift up your eyes and resolve to see what can be there, if we so will it to be.
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