Faith & Action
Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian, is a powerful voice in the larger religious community today. He is the author of the best-selling book: God’s Politics. His message is that poverty in this country and in the world is the driving moral issue of our day. He says that “there are two great hungers in the world: spiritual integrity and social justice. What the world is waiting for is the connection between the two. And he concludes with a message to us: “People of faith have to find that connection.”
Spirituality comes out of our lives. For each of us, our sense of the spiritual has emerged from some significant event in our lives. For some, and maybe most of us, the nurture of one’s spiritual side energizes their compassionate response to human needs and their passion for social justice. For others, personal experience and involvement in the injustices of the world is what creates and nurtures a spiritual awareness. Social justice and spirituality are intertwined. They are really two sides of the same coin, and have to be seen as part of a whole.
A personal spirituality without a concern for the needs of others can be self-centered, narcissistic , and only inward-looking: “being”, but not always “doing”. Social justice, on the other hand, without a spiritual foundation can result in frustrated activism, loss of focus and direction, and will last only as long as your energy holds out.
This morning I want to tell the story of how my outward journey into social action led to an inward spirituality. For me the awareness of the “spiritual” in my life came from my connection with other people in the midst of confronting injustice, both personally and in society. These experiences of the injustices of the world is what nurtured a spiritual awakening within me.
Early in life I had a personal experience of being treated unjustly. That sense of injustice in my life seemed to permeate my view of how I viewed the world.
Much later, during the Civil Rights Movement, War on Poverty, and my community organization experiences in the 1960s I had the opportunity to throw myself into fighting the injustices in society, and at the same time, deal with my own feelings of being treated unjustly as a child. I took on these causes because I was working out my own feelings of personal injustice. Martin Luther King’s birthday tomorrow always reminds me of the turmoil related to addressing both in our country and in my life during that time.
After 10 years of intense, long days, and confrontational activities, I recognized that I needed a spiritual focus for social justice. I was getting burned out and I was losing a center and a spiritual heart for my work. I was becoming a little self-righteous, wanting to be a part of solving all society’s problems. That was the moral illness of liberals at that time! Worshipping at the altar of activism can cause you to lose direction and perspective! It was almost a “savior complex.”
What then became clear to me in all this activity was my connection between and among all people. I was able to connect my early experiences of injustice to the experiences of all people, and recognized that we are all connected. I really “got it” that we are all connected in a “web of relationships. Right then, that became the heart of my growth into spirituality!! That deeply personal, existential awareness that we are all connected then became the focus of my social justice work, a larger understanding of spirituality in my life, and really a transforming change in my life.
Because I came at my spiritual awakening through social awareness and activity, I am more sensitive to the importance of translating our inward spiritual practice to an outward concern for others. A true spirituality encompasses both. Out of my experience I have learned that spirituality is personal, but never private. Our spirituality has to be lived and shared, and that mean we have to care for our brothers and sisters where a need exists. For me caring is a spiritual matter; service is a spiritual matter, social justice is spirituality at work.
For our convergence this morning I invite you to think about and then write down in your journal or piece of paper how you will translate the inner strength of your spiritual life to some specific action that you can do that meets the human needs of the world.
