I read an excellent post this morning from Rich Havard, who was in our congregation as a student and now works in community building and social change in his adult life. It is an excellent piece about the struggles of being a person who is intentional in his spiritual journey working in a real world where sometimes there is puzzlement or antipathy toward the notion. He asked, “What place do spirituality and love have in the quest for a just world?” He spurred me to think about it. It’s an excellent piece I commend for your thinking.

In his book, The Irony of American History, the great 20th century ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr famously said,

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

Social change itself without a broader vision to which it aspires ultimately withers. Spirituality, to use the broad term, is attending to the largest possible framework in which human beings live. Activists are inevitably frustrated by it, sometimes rightly so, but its place is to keep us honest inwardly about the why of our actions and outwardly about the metaphorical visions that lie beyond the ethical realm but which are the implicit vision which is their motivation and focus. We will attend to it either intentionally or be driven by it unconsciously. This is why I do not exclude atheist and agnostic friends from my spiritual conversations.

Love can be, and is, reduced to “feeling,” but in the deepest instinct we might consider it to be the completion to which justice works. A fair world (to think of justice with a less lofty word) makes love possible. Love keeps us alive–mother and child, father who cares and protects, community that nurtures and teaches–but it also assumes and requires justice to avoid skewing into sentimentality, hiding real motives of power over, and control, or crushing the very ones we claim to love. Justice is the unfinished form and foundation of love.

To put this more simply in our lives, consider the damages wrought through time through sibling rivalries (here we may start with Cain and Abel and move right through the sorry parade of families in the Bible with few exceptions). Being treated unfairly, with cruelty, with arbitrary harshness or selfish neglect, sets up a young child for a lifetime of suffering experienced and visited on the world.

Love and justice are, in the end, inseparable. In the South, we are syrupy about family love and politeness, but being polite can sometimes distract us from the depth of love we need. Ask an addict, whose family participation in their disease facilitates their self-destructive path. Love itself cannot be realized without truth, and truth inevitably asks us the ethical questions: What is fait? What is right? What is my duty? Am I responsible? What about the other person?

In a society awash in “how I feel about this or that,” we might do well to have a better grasp not only about what makes for a just world, but what is our largest destiny, and what love, in its deepest and most profound form, actually is. In a moment in which force, violence, and authoritarianism claim, against the entire experience of the human race, to contain the solutions to our deepest problems, it is our most pressing need.