Justice and Mercy, Part 1

I finished the book The Holy Longing and thought I was done blogging about it until today. The chapter about the Spirituality of Justice and Peacemaking has been rolling around in my brain and the stuff we did today got me thinking more about it. (For the record Jon and Dan, Rolheiser is a Catholic Priest, so you are pretty much obligated to read everything I read and then read the book itself. Dad has read the book and has it on his bookshelf.)

The book starts from the point of God's big requirement that we act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with our God. It looks at this idea of social justice and how justice is different from charity and what I am called to do as a follower of Jesus.

Rolheiser tells a story to illustrate the difference around Charity and Social Justice:

Rolheiser tells the story of a town on a river and periodically bodies would float down the river. The townsfolk would rescue the boies when they could, nurse them back to health, place the kids with families and bury those who were dead. It went on for years, and the townsfolk felt a certain pride in their generosity to the victims. Despite all the generosity and effort, during all those years, nobody thought to go up the river beyond the bend and understand why these bodies were floating downt he river.

Basically, Charity is about giving a hungry person some bread, while justice is about trying to change the system so that nobody has excess bread while some have none. He looks at it around the issue of abortion:

...nobody, ultimately, wants abortion and everyone on both sides recognizes that whenever an abortion happens, something is far from ideal. Too often, though, neither side acknowledges the deeper, systemic issues that underlie the problem. Ultimately abortion takes place because something is wrong within the culture, within the system and not simply because this or that particular woman is seeking to end an unwanted pregenancy.... Behind her, helping push her into that clinic and that decision, stands an entire system (economic, political, cultural, mythical and sexual).

I was reading this the same time I re-watched the movie Juno and listened to Obama's view on Abortion at a recent interview on faith between the two democratic candidates. I dug the fact that he acknowledged the moral side (which I've never heard from the Democrats - it always seems to be about the "My Body, My Choice" mantra") and pointed to the morality of it and the larger issue that needs to be dealt with. Here's what Obama said:

Number one, it requires us to acknowledge that there is a moral dimension to abortion, which I think that all too often those of us who are pro-choice have not talked about or tried to tamp down. I think that's a mistake because I think all of us understand that it is a wrenching choice for anybody to think about. The second thing, once we acknowledge that, is to recognize that people of good will can exist on both sides. That nobody wishes to be placed in a circumstance where they are even confronted with the choice of abortion....and if we can acknowledge that much, then we can certainly agree on the fact that we should be doing everything we can to avoid unwanted pregnancies that might even lead somebody to consider having an abortion.

My Mom was someone who exemplified the idea of Justice in a way that I want to someday. My Mom was someone who loved babies. If you knew her, you know this is a ridiculous understatement. It's like saying that Noel likes Apple. My Mom would stop pregnant Moms in the streets to tell them how beautiful they were and how excited she was for them. She would see the new baby of someone she didn't know and would gush over it in a way that was fun to watch. She had this box of creepy plastic babies that she would give out to pregnant women to show them what their baby looked like at only a few weeks (kind of like the girl standing outside the abortion clinic in Juno telling Juno about her babies fingernails).

My Mom loved babies so much that she couldn't stand the idea that any baby would be unwanted and be aborted. My Mom didn't run around condemning women for abortions like many people do. She understood that it was not just an issue of legality, but that we needed to change the reasons around why a woman would get an abortion to begin with. My Mom would lobby politicians, work at pregnancy services clinics folding and organizing baby clothes and helping new Moms to make their pregnancy as positive a thing as possible. She worked to deal with the issue at hand, but went upstream to deal with the issue of why they would happen in the first place. My Mom exemplified this idea of Justice for me but I don't know what it looks like in my world.

So that's the background... As I read the chapter, I had this feeling of helplessness and saddness in trying to wrestle through what it looks like for me. More on this in my next post.