Justice

Photo Credit Andrea Lingle

By Andrea Lingle

“The Lord is near.” (Philippians 4:5b)

"Nothing beats kindness," said the horse. "It sits quietly beyond all things." (Mackesy)

Do you know what counts? All of it. All the little tiny things you don’t think matter do. Hopefully you have not just dissolved into a gooey mass of paralysis, but I really do mean that. The little stuff matters. Before you get your toothbrush out and start cleaning the stairs, let me pull back into a little story from today. No, really. Go put the toothbrush down. This isn’t that kind of discussion. 

Today, I told a four year old and a six year old that they were made from stardust. I used gestures and talked about supernova explosions and atoms and used an excited voice. And they did not believe me. Even after I used the word SUPERNOVA. In my experience, if an adult trots out an impressive sounding word like that, you believe them. Especially since I actually was telling the closest thing I know to the truth. I will keep working on their atomistic understanding of matter, while we use this launching point. All that there is, from the farthest supernova explosion to the garden dirt under your fingernail once glowed with the very same blinding inspiration. In an instant of a moment, the universe went from unimaginably dense to a frizzillion points of light-energy bounding into spacetime. Acres and moments later, things got cool enough to be more than protons and neutrons and things really got interesting, but right before that, you and me and the chair I am sitting on were all pretty much energy soup.

Justice is about seeing. It is about scrolling back the moment you are living in with all of the pain and frustration and fear, and seeing that just beyond the broken plane of reality we are all forced to inhabit, are stars and wild songs and embers of joy. Yes, the world we live in is broken. Bodies are exploited, people are violent, and the plastic oceans of our own making threaten to engulf us. And yet, justice and kindness insist, the Lord is near. 

Oh, but you just said we were all just protons and neutrons and quarks and leptons and who knows what else. What is the Lord? 

Oh, but there is blood shed in the streets and parents weep for their lost children. How is the Lord near?

Oh, but the voices cry out so loudly with nonsense in their throats that the song of justice is shouted down.

Where is the Lord? 
Who is this Lord?

No one can ever answer that question. Sure many will try, but let them fling their certainty to the wind. If there is something beyond it all, it is much too wild to fill out any shape I could imagine, but let me tell you one more story. 

It has been a day since the stardust incident. My computer and I have marked time in various ways. For my part, I ended up face down on my bed, exhausted and teary by lunch. The six year old curled her little fingers around mine and whispered, “I know this is hard, Mommy, but remember. You are made of stardust.”

Who is the Lord? We do not know, but we can see the whisper of something. Can you be brave enough to wonder if there could be such a one?