We talked long into the humid summer evening about what was so different about Unitarianism. He reminded me that we have led the way on immigrant rights in opposing the new law in Arizona, which we now seem to be the leading denomination. “But” he reminded me “you have sterilized your faith of one the greatest difference makers of all time: Jesus” And then that minute he emailed me a poem by the Christian poet, Studdart Kennedy:
“When Jesus came they hung him on a tree
They drove nails through his hands and feet and made Calvary
They crowned him with a crown of thorns red his wounds and deep
For those who were crude and cruel days and human flesh was cheap
When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed him by
They never hurt a hair of him they only let him die
For men have grown more tender and they would not give him pain
They only passed down the street and left him in the rain
Still Jesus cried “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” and still it rained the winter rain and drenched him through and through
The crowds went home and left the streets without a fight to be
And Jesus crouched against the wall and cried for Calvary.”
When he continued he was quieter now, clearly feeling his way to the right words as a former Southern Baptist, “Jesus” he said “can still be a hero for all of us. He represents our collective struggles; sometimes tortured, but more often ignored. That’s what so many don’t get about Christianity. We focus so much on the exclusion, but all of us feel wounded, as Jesus reminds us, all of us suffer. And sometimes the worst suffering is to be ignored.”
The worst kind of indifference comes from ignoring the very existence of another. How many of us good meaning folks, he asked me, just go sleepwalking by the ones who are most vulnerable, perhaps even in our own communities?
I thought about my own dark moments of the soul. When my business and marriage were failing, I would have given anything to have someone notice the beast perched on my shoulders, but no one wanted to interfere. His point was well made: the first step to undo the indifference in our lives may be to recognize that the person next to you may be angry or surly for a reason. And then to ask “what is happening with you?”
Normalcy can be a mask of indifference. So often evil is done not by the people who are bad, but by people who do nothing. When the Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed in the early days of the civil rights movement, the good white folks kept their distance, only the Unitarian minister, his president and another lay person walked down the dusty lane to pay their condolences. All they said was that they were sorry and then everyone, black and white cried. It didn’t change the bombing but it changed the world after the bombing. “All it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good people to do nothing” wrote Edmund Burke. Poor election results are only a symptom of what we need to see. That we have to care; we have to feel the Jesus in all of us. And we have to care with seeing that pain in those closest to us.
We can make a difference with our money and our time but most of all with how we notice the differences with those we know and love. The difference we make is so much more than you think; even the smallest moments of kindness can reverberate through the universe.
With grace and grit, John
