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.
