Pop 89: “Just” Listening

By Madonna Hamel

Calls for justice are everywhere these days. At least once a week, I hear abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker’s quote, made popular by and often attributed to Martin Luther King Jr: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Neither King nor Parker spoke these words as a kind of relax-it’s-all-gonna-come-out-fine-for-our-side” bromide. They understood that pain and suffering can be the most powerful means of entering into communion with others. Relating to the pain of others allows compassion and mercy to follow.

Parker was a Yankee abolitionist in pre-Civil War America. He became a Unitarian minister after losing six siblings and his mother to tuberculosis. He argued that morality is not merely “obedience to one’s conscience” but that a truly moral person requires a belief in a power greater than themselves to expand the limited capacity of our consciousness. King said often that divine Love was required when it came to loving a neighbour we do not like.

Today, preachers, following in the footsteps of Parker and King, urge us to contemplate our own rage and impatience, and not add to the undignified status of this moment’s public conversation. 

One of those preachers is Reverend Liz Walker. She facilitates actual spaces where people of all stripes and party affiliations come together to tell their personal stories. She then encourages contemplation and reflection on those stories. 

Rev. Walker grew up in a Black family at a time when church was the only place where her “ancestors could testify, weep, pray and also dance and sing” their way to transcendence in the midst of chaos and pain. In church, they trusted “that whatever needs to be healed will be healed by the Spirit of a creative God who works in and through us.”

The civil rights movement was born through the contemplative spirit of the Black church. The social justice movement was a social gospel movement. Marchers and movement organizers were emboldened by a faith in a power greater than themselves. That faith enabled them to focus on a larger Love which kept the marches nonviolent. At least, on their end.

Rev. Walker understood that “the exterior work of social justice is only as strong as the interior work that births and fuels it. We can’t heal as a community if we do not concern ourselves with healing our own lives. Storytelling, listening, all represent the interior healing necessary to empower the hard work of social change.”

I write this on my birthday and the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King’s, fifty-seven years ago. He died on my tenth birthday, and that event sticks forever with me as pivotal turning point in my own moral education. It also marks a moment in the direction we, as North Americans, went as citizens concerned about justice. 

As a Baptist preacher, King understood, like Parker before him, that without the strength of his faith founded in the gospel stories, he could not carry on in the struggle for justice. In a sermon King spoke of a kitchen table moment when he realized that without a real connection with a personal God, he was ready to cave beneath the crushing pressures of the movement, among them, daily death threats against him and his family.

Political struggles are about both justice and trauma, writes Roger Gottlieb, in his book “Joining Hands.” He quotes Thomas Merton, saying “without compassion the protestor becomes more and more centred in anger and may easily become an obstacle rather than a solution.”

Gottlieb writes that great religious social activists ( including Dorothy Day, Thich Nhat Hanh, Mahatma Ghandi) tend to speak to the traumatic aspects of social conflict more than secular activists do. Trauma is a physical reality, affecting individuals in their daily lives. Having understood the transformative power of suffering, religious leaders like King, chose transcendence over despair and revenge. They used their own pain to develop a kind of spiritual muscle and directed their efforts toward a merciful tenderness and a courageous open-hearted empathy for other sufferers. That merciful courage, I believe, is what ultimately bends the arc of the moral universe toward justice. 

It’s easy to practice values and morals when times are smooth. But when things get desperate - that is when we test the strength of our spiritual muscle. Our values are precisely for times like these when we are tempted to break our rules of behaviour and behave in knee-jerk, reactionary, desperate ways that mimic the very acts if injustice we decry.

When times get tough we tend to justify desperate measures. But King, Parker, Day, Hahn, and Ghandi sought divine succour to continue doing what is right, simply because it was the right thing to do. Period. 

The arc is still bending and it behooves us to keep it bending in the right direction. One way of doing that is by listening to stories. Story-telling without story-listening is simply speaking into a vacuum. In a political climate where knee-jerk decisions trigger knee-jerk reactions, contemplation and self-reflection allow for justice at a personal level.

As Canadians, we need look no further than Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas, another Baptist preacher, who after suffering a rare bone disease as a child underwent several treatments from a surgeon offering to treat him for free. Later, he said, “I felt that no boy should have to depend, either for his leg or his life, upon the ability of his parents to raise enough money to bring a first-class surgeon to his bedside.” And thus, through his own suffering, his fight for universal health care began. 

Ideally, in a court of law, justice is not served until all the stories are heard. Perhaps the most radical act of justice we can practice  is “just” listening to the stories of people’s suffering beneath the rage. “Just” listening is something we can all do.