The Hope That Injustice Is Unsustainable

(The Hope that Injustice is Unsustainable, Part 3 of The Beginning of Birth Pains)

And this leads us to our application today—hope. Injustice, whether political, economic, social, ecological or whatever, is unsustainable. It cannot endure. Injustice always eventually reaches a breaking point. And when it does, the transition is always destructive, and most destructive to those most vulnerable. Voluntarily abandoning unjust systems ahead of time is always difficult, but much less difficult and less harmful than waiting for change to be forced.

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(Read this series from the beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)

I think of the economic stress so many are under presently. I think, too, of the political divisions that continue to grow here in the U.S. I think of the ecological damage we cannot continue to perpetuate.“Rising inequality and global warming are the most pressing issues of our time,” says Thomas Piketty, author of Capital and Ideology. Add to all of this the recent gut punch of the recent election results and what those results reveal about who we are here in the U.S. and how far we still need to go toward a multicultural democracy.

It’s the last phrase in the reading that gets me. Rather than a pessimistic outlook as if the world is about to end, our reading characterizes all of this pain as the “beginning of birth pains.”

This is not the end. If we choose it, all of our present challenges now could be the beginning of us giving birth to something new. We don’t have to give up hope. We can look at the world around us and still imagine a world that is a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone. The current loss and anxiety, our energy and concerns, can be channeled into a renewed commitment to resistance giving birth to the kind of world we want to live in, a world where there is room enough for all of us thrive. Things will be different this time. But we are different this time, too. We are more organized, and we are ready. We are not alone. Our community of resistance is still here.

To be clear, our present challenges will be significant. I don’t want to gloss over those or only consider them through rose-colored glasses. But we have an opportunity to meet significant challenges with extraordinary resistance. Are we creative enough to envision a world that is just, safe, and compassionate for all? The Jesus of our gospels asked us to. And again, if we choose, the pain many of us are presently experiencing could be a foreboding of life rather than death. These don’t have to be death-pains. It’s still painful. Yet through our continued commitment to resistance and justice, we can transform our pain into the beginning of birth-pains instead: the beginning of something, that in the end, may be beautiful.

We are not alone. We still have each other. And our work, once again, is laid out for us.

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