Motherhood & Social Justice

Mother’s Day naturally sparks contemplation of motherhood. Your mother, your parents’ mothers, perhaps yourself as a mother. (To which I find Jane Churchill’s point helpful that “there’s no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.”)  In contemplating Mother’s Day yesterday, I ended up reflecting on social justice. 

Wait, what?

Let me back up a bit. Traditionally, the ideas of life and philanthropy have been distinct spheres; I have my job/family, and then I separately (hopefully) do other good things, like give money to charity.  The ultimate goal of philanthropy is social justice (in other words, improving the human condition), but this is not accomplished solely by cutting checks. It is accomplished through a mindset of the heart that meets the needs of the socially marginalized – the widows and orphans, to borrow biblical terms – through sacrifice, be it service in time or money.  This idea of service is broad; one example Tim Keller gives in his teaching “An Everlasting Name” centers around a friend of his who owns a string of car dealerships in the south. Like most car dealerships, the salesmen had an amount of leniency on price to allow for customer negotiation. The owner began to realize through a study of his sales data that distinct patterns appeared regarding what buyers received the best deals: men were better negotiators than women, white people were better negotiators than non-white, the wealthy were better negotiators than non-wealthy. The result was that elderly African-American women were receiving terrible deals on cars as compared to their male, white peers. The owner saw this as an injustice, that one people group was getting better service over another, less-resourced, group and decided to institute fixed pricing across his dealerships so that all customers received the same, fair price. This ties into Keller's explanation of the Hebrew word for justice (mishpat):

“Mishpat means acquitting or punishing every person on the merits of the case, regardless of race or social

status. Anyone who does the same wrong should be given the same penalty. But mishpat means more than

just the punishment of wrongdoing. It also means to give people their rights…. Mishpat, then, is giving people what they are due, whether punishment or protection or care. This is why, if you look at every place the word is used in the Old Testament, several classes of persons continually come up. Over and over again, mishpat describes taking up the care and cause of widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor—those who have been called ‘the quartet of the vulnerable.’”

(Keller, Generous Justice, pg 3-4)

Parenthood is perhaps the ultimate reflection of the kind of service that creates justice. Not only are your constituents dependent upon you for (literally) everything, they are constantly around you. There is no mental or physical distinction of “now I am headed off to the soup kitchen, where for the next 4 hours I will serve in a specific time and place;” rather, parenthood service runs around the clock: whatever kiddos need, wherever they are, with the ultimate aim of turning dependents into independent, productive members of society. In fact, service is so ingrained in parenthood that you often meet a need even before the child knows s/he needs it. This doesn’t happen immediately – parents bringing home a new infant hear the screaming and try everything before figuring out what the problem is. Meeting unarticulated needs comes from being so familiar with your child that you know their every expression, their every necessity.

The familiarity and integration of service into daily life that begins with our families must be expanded to those around us if we ever hope to achieve social justice as a society. It means really getting to know those around us, being on the lookout for unspoken needs, and finding ways of dealing fairly with everyone we meet – be it family, colleague, car-buying customer, or stranger on the street. In our society of looking down at our gadgets, it means looking up and looking out. 

When I was pregnant in NYC, I rode the subway regularly, and in 9 months exactly two people got up and offered me their seat. It wasn’t that subway riders were malicious and didn’t want to get up, it’s that they simply didn’t notice me. On long rows of seats, everyone was looking down – at their kindles, newspapers, iphones, ipads, whatever. They just didn’t see me. Having been for a long time the person with her nose buried in a kindle, this was a startling revelation to me to have the feeling of invisibility, a need un-noticed and un-met.While I had the resources and social standing to simply ask someone to get up, those most vulnerable in society typically cannot so easily resolve their injustices.

And so it is that in a society of injustice, I want to both challenge us to seek justice more voraciously and to toast those working to make it more just: those serving their children through 3 am feedings and scrubbing vomit off the bathroom floor, those dealing fairly in their businesses with employees and customers, those looking up from their gadgets to listen in the silence for unspoken cries for help.