The Love That Does Justice." Truth Be Told, Most of Us Experience Being Both of These Kinds of People at Vari Ous Times
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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION SECTION ONE PERSPECTIVES !=ROM SPIRITUAL ACTIVISTS I Pastor Otis Moss, Jr. 2 Rev. Samuel E. Mann 3 Thomas F. Beech 4 Judy S. Rodgers 5 Esmeralda Simmons, Esq. 6 Sue Hutchinson 7 Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams 8 Claudia Horwitz 9 Jay Early IO Simon Greer 11 Jess Maceo Vega-Frey 12 Sharon Salzberg 13 Lisa Russ 14 Andre Carothers 15 Betty Rogers 16 Mirabai Bush 17 Kenneth Bailey 18 Diane Biray Gregoria 19 Mark C. Johnson, Ph.D. 20 Will Keepin, PH.D. SECTION Two PERSPECTIVES !=ROM RESEARCMERS 21 James Youniss, Ph.D. 22 Paul Wink, Ph.D. 23 Lynn G. Underwood, Ph.D. 24 Don S. Browning, Ph.D. 25 Ralph Hood, Ph.D. 26 Giacomo Bono, Ph.D. 27 Thomas Jay Oord Ph.D. 28 Valentino Lassiter, Ph.D. 29 30 31 Donald Miller, Ph.D. David L. Cooperrider, Ph.D. 32 Michael A. Edwards Ph.D. 33 Atwood Gaines, Ph.D. 34 35 Julie Juola Exline, Ph.D. 36 Byron R. Johnson, Ph.D. 37 Solomon Katz, Ph.D. 38 Samuel P. Oliner, Ph.D. Margaret M. Poloma, Ph.D. 39 Adam B. Seligman, Ph.D. 40 41 Judith Smetana, Ph.D. Paul Lauritzen, Ph.D. Ramez lslambouli INTRODUCTION For thinkers and activists across a wide range of contexts and historical experi ences, Lmconditional love, spiritual experience, and the rigorous pursuit of justice in the world constitute a powerfulpath to social transformation, but only when they are strongly linked together. "Spiritual activists" draw on spiritual worldviews and practices to sus tain an inner equilibrium of compassion and well-being while continually-engaged at the hard edges of social change (Horwitz, 2002). They practice what has come to be termed "engaged spirituality," in contrast to the spiritual practitioner who casts the world aside in favor of a socially-disengaged serenity. They take on the difficultwork of organizing the downtrodden into groups capable of exerting social and political pressure through persua sion and protest, and do so with reliance on a background picture of a universe in which love and justice go with, rather than against, the grain of Ultimate Reality. These activists have a defining voice in this book, and thereby offer a counter point to the widely-held view that forms of meditation, as practiced in the United States, lie mainly in the repertoire of those who are seeking personal happiness, self-realization, and alternative healing - but not social justice. It may be true that some contemplatives and mystics shy away from engagement in social and political issues, or advocacy with and for those who are the most marginalized and least powerfulin society; but this cannot be said of the voices presented herein. Our collection of essays-some of them in the genre of personal spiritual journey and some more analytic-presents the voices of American spiritual activists and social scientists who reflect together on how to deepen and advance our understanding of the role that spirituality plays in achieving social justice. Encounters between scholars and activists are never easy, but are often necessary to challenge each-other's assump tions, clarify the key issues at stake, and explore the transmission mechanisms that link love and justice in ways that are both conceptually rigorous and deeply-informed by concrete experience. In addition, we have deliberately included contributions from both the new and often younger American spiritual activists who draw so richly on Eastern 3 traditions, and from their monotheistic forbears. 6 6 TME FORGOTTEN FACTOR We suspect that the relationships linking love with justice are unlikely to be linear or universal, and certain to be complex. How do we define love and justice? ls religion the intermediary between the two, or spirituality, or can love and justice grow together in a humanistic framework that omits any reference to spiritual experience? We start fromthe position that love for a common humanity lies at the heart of the matter. "The essence of love," says the Institute for the Study of Unlimited Love at Case West ernUniversity, "is to affectively affirn1 as well as unselfishly delight in the well being of others, and to engage in acts of care and service on their behalf, without exception, in an enduring and constant way." Such love is universal, and therefore must consider the equal and general welfareof the whole. This means that love must consider and confront any factorthat stands in the way of realizing the rights and dignity of every human being - whether rooted in personal prejudice and selfishness, or locked into the systems and structures of power that characterize all contemporary societies. This is our conception of justice, and it implies that the struggle for justice must encompass action at both the personal and the structural levels to create mutually-reinforcing cycles of change. For some, personal change and social ethics have to be grounded in religious affiliation and/or spiritual experience. For others, these things are perceived as barriers to change, especially when religious communities are home to attacks on women's rights, homophobia, narrow-mindedness, a reluctance to enter into community-wide activi- ties and concernsrather than intra-congregational commitments, and the substitution of individual acts of charity or service for a full and complete understanding of the structural factors that lead to oppression. Discrimination is rarely more dangerous than when it is cloaked in religious garb and cannot adequately be challenged by rationalist arguments for social justice because it assumes an other-worldly legitimacy. For the contributors to this book, love and justice are inseparable, for reasons we return to in a moment though do not fullyunderstand, and spiritual experience is necessary for sustaining their capacity fora love that does justice. But membership in formal religious institutions is not seen as a necessary condition for either love or spirituality. Spirituality in activism is not new, but it is too often ignored by those who do not see it as a driving dynamic. Yet many of the great social activists from early anti slavery Quakers to the Civil Rights Movement were spiritual activists within a monothe istic framework.There is no need to remind readers of the prophetic tradition of Judaism, which exhorts, "and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kind ness, and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:5). Perhaps we think of the classical Christian saint, in the style of a St. Francis, as far too ethereal to be interested in organiz ing the victims of ensconced group selfishness in order to establish a fairer balance of power through social and political suasion and coercion (Niebuhr, 1944). A pure love ethic has been deemed by saints-of-a-sort as above the acrimonious fray of the competing claims of classes, races, and nations, where rough solutions have to be achieved, usu- ally with the help of form of some ultimate coercive threat. Yet what is the hard work of 4 justice if not the firstand most essential step on the ladder of unconditional love? The spiritual background of so much social activism is often ignored by stan dard histories or the media. It is worth providing a few examples of this problem. Martin Luther King, shaped to his core by the notion of agape love and the prophetic call for justice, often invoked the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. After being described on the news as "the son of a minister," rather than as the minister he himself was, he once re sponded with the following: "They aren't interested in the why of what we're doing, only in the what of what we're doing, and because they don't understand the why they cannot understand the what." Dr. King's poignant collection of sermons, entitled The Strength to love, ( 1963) describes how he made strenuous efforts to maintain the grounding of his activism in nonviolent love, even when he felt most weary, disappointed, and angered. In this book, Pastor Otis Moss, Jr., one of King's closest associates during the civil rights movement, articulates his own vision of the place of love in pursuit of justice in terms that are clearly influencedby King's writings and experience. Another example of how spirituality can be easily ignored is the case of the late Dame Cicely Saunders. She was trained as a nurse, a medical social worker, and finally a physician. Since 1948, she was involved with the care of patients with terminal illnesses, and is best known as the founder of St. Christopher's Hospice in 196 7, the very first research and teaching hospice linked with clinical care. She was a pioneer in the field of palliative medicine and has inspired the modernhospice movement worldwide. She fought hard to bring justice to the dying through the public health systems in the United Kingdom. One has to look a little more deeply into her personal memoirs to discover the spiritual experiences and divine calling she claims inspired her life work. At a conference in October of 1999 at MIT, she stated she would never have been inspired to invent the hospice movement without her sense of being called by God. She added that the spiritual aspect of her activism never quite makes it into the textbooks. A third example of spirituality as a forgotten factor is the French Catholic social thinker and international activist Jacques Maritain. Maritain coined the modernnotion of "human dignity," and was active in the drafting of both the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and in UNESCO's statements on rights. He believed that dignity was conferred on human beings by virtue of the incarnation, and that, therefore, all human lives are worthy of those basic rights and entitlements that allow for a good and decent flourishing.