“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is not a huge leap to move from welcoming the stranger to caring for the stranger—being concerned for their well-being and being willing to get involved in ensuring that they, as God’s children, have equal opportunity to flourish. And yet, I was surprised when this started happening to me. 

For a while, it seemed like I couldn’t get enough solitude, silence, and just being in God’s presence.  In fact, I started to become a little worried about myself, wondering if I would ever fully re-engage with the world of people again or would I always be wanting to wander off by myself? I feared I was becoming a narcissistic navel-gazer, disconnected from the needs of the world. Would I ever be good for anything practical again? I wondered.  Where had my activism and drivenness gone?      

But as I stayed with my desire and the practices that were fostering the deeper intimacy for which my soul had been longing, I noticed that there was an organic rhythm unfolding in my life—a rhythm of receiving from God the loving connection I needed and then allowing God’s love to flow from that fullness back out into the world.  There was less forcing, just flowing.  Without having words for it yet, I was experiencing a natural phenomenon—our spiritual transformation for the glory of God, for the abundance of our own lives AND for the sake of others—my intimate others (and believe me, they were grateful for my much-needed transformation!) but also others in the world who were not enjoying the safety and security, the justice and the equity, and other tools for flourishing that I have taken for granted all my life.  

Where the Justice Journey Begins 

As we experience ourselves to be unconditionally welcomed by God, our own hearts become more welcoming, and our capacity to care about what and who God cares about expands. As we welcome one another into our conversations and communities, our hearts and our lives, we find ourselves changing–sometimes in surprising ways. It becomes harder to sit on the sidelines when those whom we are coming to understand and care about are being treated unfairly and unjustly.  Suddenly, issues that didn’t used to matter to us much at all, matter quite a bit because they relate to real people whom we have now welcomed and whose cares and concerns have become our own.  

How, I began to wonder, had I been a Christian for so long and somehow avoided really grappling with the reality of injustice in the world, not to mention God’s passion for justice? “For I, the Lord love justice,” God declares (Isaiah 61:8) and Isaiah 30:18 proclaims, “For the Lord is a God of justice.” Clearly justice is a part of God’s essential nature. And Micah’s statement What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” is as concise a biblical definition of Christian spirituality as we might find anywhere.  How has Christianity so often been reduced to a privatized, me-and-my-best-friend-Jesus kind of thing with so little regard for the welfare of others? 

The Sin of Injustice 

Gary Haugen, founder of International Justice Mission, shares a similar experience of growing up in a good Christian family, attending church every Sunday and never once hearing a sermon on justice.  In his book, Just Courage, he shares that it wasn’t until he got to college that he first began to be challenged towards thinking about justice, which changed the trajectory of his life to one oriented around fighting for justice on behalf of those who cannot fight for themselves.  In his book he boldly states, “The sin of injustice in the Bible is defined as the abuse of power—abusing power by taking from others the good things God intended for them, namely, their life, liberty, dignity, or the fruits of their love or their labor…When more powerful persons abuse their power by stealing those good things, they commit the sin of injustice.” 

Our Black brothers and sisters are quick to point out that only in the White church would it even be possible for justice to remain unaddressed and ignored; in Black churches, justice is talked about every week.  In fact, in the Black church it is impossible to talk about love without talking about justice because they are seen as two sides of the same coin. As James Cone puts it, “Love in society is called justice.”

Not needing to talk about justice is nothing more than White privilege, plain and simple.  

Beyond a Domesticated Faith

Speaking of James Cone…recently I have been rereading his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, engaging it again with new eyes and a deeper soul as we navigate a much-needed racial reckoning in our country. What stands out to me this time around is that Cone is writing about justice in the context of grappling with his spirituality as a Black man.  He writes, “I was black before I was a Christian. My initial challenge was to develop a liberation theology that was both black and Christian—at the same time and in one voice. That was not easy because even in the black community the meaning of Christianity was white.”  He goes on to acknowledge how his questions—”Who am I?  Why am I here? And what must we do to achieve our full humanity in a world that denies it?”—have shaped his spirituality differently than the spirituality of those who have been shaped by assumed safety, agency, and privilege.  

The reality of injustice and how it shapes and misshapes those who are on the receiving end of it is something the Holy Spirit is seeking to rectify even now, and that brings me to my next observation: The Christian spirituality of the future will be (and indeed must be) more sensitized and committed to the fight for justice or it is not Christian spirituality at all.  Rather, it will be some pale, watered down, self-serving domestication of the God who is the father and mother of us all and therefore desires for all to flourish.  Applying Paul’s profound statement about equality and justice in Galatians 3:28 is an ongoing work of the Spirit that has yet to be fully realized:  As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  [In Christ] there is no longer Jew or Greek…there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ. 

What Does the Lord Require of Us?

As painful as the racial reckoning we are experiencing in our country is right now, as hard as it is to face the abuse of sex and power not only in the world but in the church, as painful as the controversies are around gender equity and human sexuality, as confounding as issues of immigration and socio economic inequities can be…there is contained within it all an unprecedented opportunity for us to grapple in new ways with what it means to love justice and do justice rather than merely pontificating about it.  God is already at work in these difficult places, inviting into fresh applications of basic Christian ideals.  So, let’s lean into the future rather than resist where the Spirit is taking us. 

The future of Christian spirituality is already incorporating, and will continue to incorporate, listening to the experiences and wrestlings of those whose collective experience includes oppression, violence and abuse, discrimination and inequity—both past and present. Those who have not experienced any of these things will need to stand down and stop feeling so threatened by realities that we simply must face. We’re going to have to stop the flow of our own words and rationalizations, listen better and longer, and give others’ understanding of God within their experiences as much credence as we give our own.  We are not the measure of all things, after all!  And God is big enough to hold us all in our differing experiences and how these shapes our spirituality. 

And maybe, if we do, we will be given the grace to respond with the soul force Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. identified as “the force of God-directed action motivated by love and emerging from the soul of a person in touch with the Spirit of God.”  

Quick to Listen and Slow to Speak

One of the most fundamental aspects of partnering with God in the work for justice is being slow to speak and quick to listen. We need to ask questions characterized by deep curiosity and true care, including questions like, “Tell me more” and “What was that like for you?” We need to let those who have experienced injustice tell us what would constitute justice going forward vs. thinking we know how to fix everything. Then we need to do the next right thing based on what we’ve heard.  We need to ask, “What can I do to help make this right?”  

Listening does not mean we agree on everything…in fact, I think that’s why many of us don’t want to listen—because we’re afraid we’re going to have to agree and we’re not sure we’re ready for that! But there can be no movement towards justice without first listening and allowing ourselves to be impacted by those whose experiences are so different than our own. Bishop Michael Curry writes, “To love, my brothers and sisters, does not mean we have to agree. And maybe agreeing to love is the greatest agreement.  And the only one that ultimately matters, because it makes a future possible.”

While the fight for justice starts with listening, it cannot end there.  Then we must gather up whatever resources we have at our disposal—money, platform, position, power, influence—and use them to take steps toward liberty and justice for all, walking gratefully in the footsteps of all the justice partners who have gone before. For where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom…and the wind of the Spirit propelling us toward justice.  

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2024. Parts of this article were first presented at The Future of Christian Spirituality Conference in honor of Fr. Ron Rolheiser in 2019.

• Introduction: A Protestant’s Journey Toward a More Unified Faith
• Part 1: The Role of Desire in the Spiritual Life
• Part 2: The Charism and Practice of Spiritual Direction
• Part 3: A Spirituality that is Practice-Oriented and Practice-Based
• Part 4: A More Welcoming Stance from a Rooted Depth