The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament link the desire to relate to God with involvement in social justice.

Connections

Those committed to social justice/transformation have related these two experiences in a number of ways. There are those who contend that spirituality, defined as the nurture of one's inner life, initiates and energises compassionate responses to human need and the passion for social justice. Others, notably theologians of liberation, contend that it is our involvement in the world that nurtures our spirituality, doing welfare and striving for justice being the privileged way to God. Some argue that evil is generated by shadow distortion within individuals and communities. Unless these distortions are addressed, no amount of tinkering with externals will permanently redress endemic injustices. Others, again, suggest that, unless we challenge religious provincialism and scientific materialism and embrace the Grace that will help us transcend both and enable us to live our inherent spirituality, attempts at remedying injustice will not only prove futile, but may exacerbate the distress.¹ Another group argue that what is needed is a quantum leap in human transcendence/consciousness, the beginnings of which, they contend, can already be discerned. The most effective way of helping to bring this about, of building the critical mass necessary to tip the balance, is through meditation/contemplation.² In the meantime, these deep, prayerful, meditative practices will help reduce violence and injustice.³

These approaches are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. Their variety reflects a range of sociological contexts and personality styles.

Models

The necessary connection between spirituality and social justice can be illustrated by three paradigms.

Rahner

Karl Rahner, a Catholic theologian, contended that the decisions we make are negotiated at two levels, at the level of our inter-personal engagements and at the level of our deepest subjectivity. He suggested that all people experience an inner grace that inclines them, when they are confronted by decisions in the course of the day's activities, to act in ways that will develop personal strengths and that will benefit those who will be effected by the decisions they make. This influence is intuitively, and, more often than not, retrospectively discerned. This means that when we respond to our children, our partner, those we work with or casually encounter, or when we address broader situational dilemmas, we are faced with the option of flowing with or [188] resisting this grace. Responding to the inner urging, which is, in effect, saying yes or no to God, and responding to an external situation, constitute two elements of a single response. Furthermore, the more attuned we are to the inner voice, the more we have learned to flow with the Spirit of God in the depths of our subjectivity, the more our decisions will benefit both our own maturational interests and the well-being of others.⁴

Bohm

The physicist, David Bohm, has argued that we live in a holographic universe in which every part effects every other part. I can influence inanimate matter and am, in turn, influenced by what is happening in a distant galaxy.

Bohm was concerned with implications arising from quantum mechanics. First, when dealing with quanta, minuscule packets of matter, it became obvious that one cannot separate the observer from what is observed. There is a sense in which we help create what we observe. For example, one cannot measure, at the same time, both the position and the velocity of quanta. The very act of measuring the one alters the other. Second, matter has a corresponding wave function. Directing single electrons through tiny slits creates an intricate but complex design that emerges on the other side of the barrier and that represents its wave function. Furthermore, this wave function is the "matter" corresponding to a more ethereal and complex wave function beneath it. The regression is infinite. We live, therefore, according to Bohm, in two dimensions of reality, the explicate order, which is the world we observe, a world of seemingly separate "things", and the implicate order, the order in which everything is connected to everything else, the order of an infinite regression of interconnecting packets of matter/wave functions. Bohm further argues that the implicate order of unity is enfolded within the explicate order of diversity.⁵

This model has implications for the relationship between spirituality and social justice. It indicates that, in dealing with social justice, as with other issues, we need to take account of two levels of reality, the explicate and the implicate. It points to a connection between materiality and energy, between materiality and consciousness and hints at an explanation of our psychic interconnectedness with each other and with the phenomenological universe. The subtler level, the implicate order, is the locus for this interconnectedness. Some physicists argue that the stuff of the universe is Mind stuff and they talk of a Universal Mind or Consciousness. The Johannine gospel seems to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth uniquely incarnated this cosmic Logos. Bohm also appears to be contending that the foundational order of reality is the implicate order.

If this is so, and if the living of our spirituality is an engagement with the implicate order, and with the Spirit Presence that is the constituent element in that order, then, to address issues of injustice without guiding and sustaining one's effort through an engagement with this Spirit Presence at [189] that level, is to court further dislocation, through consequences relating to a lack of comprehensiveness in our approach.

Wilber

Ken Wilber, the doyen of transpersonal psychologists, marrying the insights of East and West and drawing on Plato, Plotinus and Schelling, has argued for a model of maturation that takes account of levels of transpersonal experience common to the contemplatives of all religious traditions.

Wilber demonstrated the essential connection, in the healthy development of egoic consciousness and in the attainment of contemplative states that have avoided pathological distortions, between the upward path of meditation and the downward path of material engagement. The one is an ascent, via eros, to wisdom, and the other, a descent, via agape, to compassion, a compassion that finds expression in the self, in the community and in institutionalised structures. He further argues that either ascent or descent, taken alone, is destructive. Where ascent is fuelled by phobos, rather than eros, it is escapism. Where descent dismisses ascent, it results in thanatos, or death.⁶

The separation of Ascenders and Descenders, of those who attempt the ascent without the descent and those who attempt the descent without the ascent, of those heading towards the One and of those heading towards the many, of those pursuing intellectual or spiritual highs and hands on activists who disdain intellectual rigour or spirituality, spells disaster for the planet. This separation also sets up two opposed camps, whose need to defend themselves against each other further blinds them to the real issues and to the complexity of the situations they address.

Thus Far

The argument, thus far, is that spirituality and social justice are unavoidably intertwined. Where they are separated, each becomes a parody of itself. Spirituality that is not concerned for or involved in social justice, contemplation divorced from action, can easily degenerate into a fanciful regression to a tepid womb of oceanic feelings. On the other hand, social justice, in the absence of a nurturing of one's inner life, can easily result in a frustrated activism at the mercy of its illusory efficiency. This worshipping at the altar of our activism will cause us to lose direction.

Spirituality and social justice are often seen as isolated initiatives, separate journeys. The reality is, as Wilber has argued, that the two journeys, the journey inward and the journey outward, when healthily pursued, are really different elements of the one journey. [190]

Benefits

It can be argued that our lives will be far more balanced and effective when our concern for social welfare arises out of a life nurtured in God, in solitude and in the context of the worship life of the Christian community.

Commitment to personal, spiritual development is a necessary discipline undergirding our involvement in social justice because it will cleanse our motives.

Few of us, in the absence of an intentional commitment to nurturing our inner development, live for much of the time out of a deep inner self that is self-accepting and that is calm in the midst of emotional and physical stress because it is aware that its true identity is in God. Often we do no more than play our roles and are dominated by unfulfilled needs that surface, like Lock-Ness monsters, from our depths. We are rarely sufficiently free from our own personal concerns to attend to others, and, when we do, it is usually to harness their vulnerabilities to our needs. Driven by a sense of our powerlessness, we seek power over others by helping them. It is also true that many who argue the case for social justice are motivated, not primarily by the injustices they denounce, but by a reservoir of inner anger whose origin is often in an unhappy childhood.

Those who are helped by us, those suffering the injustices we seek to address, can read our motives and it is only a love that is concerned with their welfare that will enable them to forgive us for our charity and for our political action on their behalf. This sort of love has its origin in God, for God alone loves with this degree of selflessness and intensity. It is only as we are in contact with God that we will love others in this way.

We can only love others to the degree we ourselves have been loved, or, more accurately, to the degree to which we have been able to feelingly appropriate the love of others for us, which means that we can only love as God loves if we have emotionally appropriated God's love for us. This love, in enabling us to accept ourselves, to love ourselves, frees us from desperate ego needs that distract us from the concerns of others. It also gathers up the new stirrings of affection and compassion and transposes them into various forms of practical caring.

This same love, in enveloping our inner core, and in helping us feel comfortable with ourselves, enables us to face our inner violence, that frustrated lust for dominance that over the years has fed on our insecurity and tried to compensate for it. This inner violence, and the desperate need to dominate others, is drained away by a divine love whose embrace gives us a new security, a sense of belonging and an awareness of our true identity.

To fully appropriate this loving, we need to work at being continually present to God. It is only when we live out of our still centre, when we are in touch emotionally with God's loving of us to the degree that we are self-accepting and conscious of an identity rooted in God, that our motives will be pure. [191]

Despite this cleansing of our motives we will never be totally free of self interest, a fact that will not fuss us, for, being self accepting, we will know when our needs are being engaged by the persons we are seeking to help and we will make appropriate allowances for this.

Personal spiritual nurture, which is essential for the cleansing of our motives, and which enables us to bear the burden of reality, also has a bearing on the quality of our response.

We can respond prayerfully and actively, sobered and encouraged by the fact that our small response is part of a larger whole and that the total responsibility is ultimately God's. It is not those who refuse to give up the illusion of a private Disneyland, where everything can be controlled, but those who live close to God, who are best able to wrestle with the seemingly insoluble problems of this world.

A further consequence of living a life that is centred in God is that the response we make to human need is appropriate. First, we will know which need to respond to. We are not called upon to die upon every cross. God will indicate to us which situations we are to address. Second, we will know when to make our response. Third, we will be aware of what type of response is appropriate.

We will certainly avoid the sort of sentimentality that characterized the approach of the old liberals, who argued ineffectively and ad nauseam that if only the nations of the world would live out the love ethic of Jesus then all would be well.⁷ The appropriate response, which is not easily discerned, will gradually formulate itself. In situations where there is no one right response but a different right response for different individuals, and overall a complementary pattern of responses, our living from our centre, and with God, will help us understand which is the appropriate response for us.⁸

When our response arises out of our life in Christ, it will be characterized by humility.

If we relax each day into the presence of God, we will have the patience to persist, in spite of lack of progress, and we will even be able to celebrate defeats, knowing that, even in defeat, those factors that will win out in the end have been evident in the midst of our striving. Living close to God, picking out God's presence in the ordinariness of our day, will give us the strength to endure, because we will be convinced that his purpose will ultimately prevail.⁹ Maintaining a consciousness of the presence of God will also help us to see that we will need to constantly rework our solutions.¹⁰

When the Spirit of God is working within us, helping us to know ourselves, we will be aware of the insecurity that leads us into sin, and we will most often recognize it in the guise of a compensatory egotism that causes us to need to dominate, to kingdom build and to shore up our defences against [192] others.¹¹ We will also discern this process in others, and in the structures of society, and this will cause us to be vigilant, to quality control our motives and those opinions and bodies with which we associate in our crusading zeal.

If we are working, not on our own, but with God, and in the consciousness of God's leading and presence, we will be sustained by the community of his people. If we are sustained by such a community we will not fall victim to a fatalistic resignation, nor a pre-occupation with personal survival. We will be able to work on seemingly overwhelming issues and confront them without paralysis or panic.¹²

Issues

At this point I would like to raise a range of issues, that are not only critical to the issue of the inter-relatedness of social justice and spirituality, but which are also foundational to the Church's prophetic function. As they are issues that have knocked on my door, asking for hospitality and a hearing, rather than issues that I have become acquainted with through the writings of others, my explorations and responses are tentative and seminal.

Prophets

The first clutch of issues is concerned directly with the dimension of the prophetic.

Given the fact that the prophet's vision is narrowly focussed, usually issue focussed, even selectively focussed on particular issues, how is the prophet, or the Church in its prophetic role, to retain its prophetic edge without falling victim to reductionist dichotomies, to simplistic analysis or to the seduction of its own rhetoric?

To what degree does the prophet need to recognize that she/he is not the king?

Prophets are warriors and warriors do not generally make good kings, though, in exceptional circumstances, as in the case of King David and Nelson Mandella, the transition is effected by a moderation of the warrior archetype/behaviour.

To what extent should the warrior/prophet take account of the dilemma of the king, who needs to balance sectional interests, a spate of moral discourses and competing claims to justice, and all in the context of a limited treasury?

The role of the prophet is to keep the king honest by reminding him of his sinfulness and that of his subjects, so that the king is encouraged to bring himself, and his subjects, under a degree of self-restraint. However, one has to ask how she can help ensure that the king does not undervalue the role of [193] human sinfulness and, therefore, fall victim to naive utopianism, or overvalue it, and institute a police state. How does the prophet discern and monitor the balance and influence the king to straddle it.

There are also a range of issues concerned with the prophet's spirituality.

If it is necessary for the prophet to see issues in black and white, which is usually also a temperamental pre-disposition, and if issues, like individuals, are far from exclusively black or white, how does the prophet avoid, on the one hand, a one-sided, and, therefore, distorted, mis-reading of situations, or, on the other, a blunting of his ethical challenge.

If prophets, who, epitomised by Elijah, generally manifest, in a conspicuous manner, both strength and fragility, the strength often being a compensation for the fragility, how are they to sustain themselves so that they avoid either collapsing back into themselves or else inappropriately over-reaching themselves, where they damage themselves, abort their mission, and, at times, crush those they are intending to serve.

There have always been, and there will continue to be, among the schools of the prophets, those who, like Nietzsche, are so threatened by internal disorder that they are gripped by a rage to order their external world, or to order themselves in that external world. One has also to ask, to what degree can the solution they propose, which does not account for their inability to take account of or deal with their inner disharmony, be seen to be appropriate for social ills generated by just such disorder in the others who make up the community?

Those who are prophets by temperament, that is, by a combination of genetic predisposition and early neural patterning, rather than prophets by circumstance, like Oscar Romero, are beset by a rather unique temptation, rarely of their own making, which is related to the fact that their passion for justice was focussed and elicited by early abuse. This is a temptation to violence and abuse of power, which ironically, are the social vices against which they are continually tilting their swords.

Can We Do It?

The next issue, which is not so easily focussed, relates, not so much to any single issue, but to the nature of the individual and of society.

I want to challenge an assumption which underlies much prophetic rhetoric. This assumption suggests that, once we are told what we are doing wrong and what we should be doing to correct ourselves, not only that we will want to do it, as Socrates half suggested, but we will also have the capacity to do it.

While it is difficult to get a handle on this issue, I will attempt to sketch the dilemma it poses by using Wilber's argument that, to accurately graph the [194] range of dimensions impinging on human existence, one must take account of four quadrants, the intentional [interior individual], the behavioural [exterior individual], the social or systemic [external communal] and the cultural [internal communal].¹³ My aim is to suggest that we are not nearly as much in control of ourselves as we imagine.

We will deal first with the intentional quadrant.

It can be argued that, while we tacitly assume that we are governed by reason, the reality is that we are frequently at the mercy of unconscious complexes. Overcoming their influence is a life-long process. Furthermore, such complexes, constellated in the unconscious, where they have collected archetypal adhesions, sometimes become discontented with merely exercising power behind the throne and take over overt control of the individual.

This factor also manifests in communities, an was evident in the emergence of National Socialism in Germany, which, it has been argued, was less a phenomenon generated by the rhetoric of Hitler and more an autonomic social phenomenon that selected Hitler as its tool.¹⁴ Nazism gathered about it the archetypal energy of a somnolent Wotan.¹⁵ Jung had argued, in the early 1930's, that if Germany did not deal internally with its shadow, it would project itself upon the world and resolve itself there, which it did.¹⁶

We have already transgressed into the area of the cultural quadrant.

The psychic interconnectedness, revealed as much in the Jim Jones phenomenon, in the Branch Davidian Sect and in those who suicided in expectation of a parousia organised by extra-terrestrials, as in National Socialism, powerfully illustrates the degree to which we are the victims rather than the creators, of our cognitive cartographers. Howard Bloom, in The Lucifer Principle, has described such phenomena as memes, the communal, or cultural equivalent of genes.¹⁷

Jung has argued that the few capable of standing against the pressure of such ideological viruses, are those, who, through the gradual integration of the unconscious into the conscious personality, have a rootedness and centredness in the body/self, a body/self, I would argue, that is the medium of experiencing and expressing divinity.¹⁸

The behavioural quadrant, the quadrant in which the individual can be looked at externally, also evidences a degree of freedom from cognitive or volitional control.

For example, genetics is coming to be regarded as a more significant determinant of behaviour than was previously acknowledged. Research is increasingly focusing on a range of chromosomal particularities. Furthermore, it is becoming evident that brain physiology, which lays the foundation for differences between men and women, plays an enormous role [195] in behaviours, in terms of genetic givens, in the initial neural firing that establishes cognitive and behavioural pathways and in the influence of neuro-transmitters, like serotonin.¹⁹

The external, collective, or systemic quadrant, fills us with no greater hope than the others.

In this quadrant is gathered information of the external behaviour of groups, which evidences patterns and predicability, a macro illustration of which is the rise and fall of civilisations. One illustration of this same phenomenon, at a micro level, is the contention of a range of scholars, who have studied the human race zoologically, that communal behaviours are governed by the size of communities. They have argued, for instance, that the maximum size of naturally compassionate communities is around 200.²⁰ A further illustration is Bloom's persuasive argument that the process of evolution is itself largely responsible for human evil and that its ideological correlate, natural selection, is not an individual, but a communal phenomenon, and an inevitable one at that.²¹

Three Suggestions

Before proceeding I would like to make three suggestions.

Justice and Mercy

The first suggestion is that justice and mercy, which we have a tendency to view as separate entities, are necessary to each other.

While there is little doubt that those demanding justice, and those championing justice, are well advised to take account of shadow energies that are liable to contaminate responses, it is not often recognized that justice itself has a shadow side. Sophisticated theories of justice have arisen from the Lex Talionis, the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and, in the sweaty atmosphere of covert self-righteous revenge, can easily degenerate into the rough recriminatory justice from which they emerged. Justice [mispat] needs mercy [Hesed] to guard against shadow contamination. Mercy is equally in need of Justice as a counter-balance.

Principled and Situational Approaches

A similar relationship exists between deontological and situational approaches to Justice. The first gives priority to principles and the second to situational constraints. To ignore principles is to sell out to relativism. To ignore situational factors is to deny the human factor in the interests of a spurious, self-centred ethical purity.

To argue that deontological and situational approaches are necessary to balance each other, is also to contend that both short and long term perspectives should be taken into account. Short term responses that [196] address the need for compensatory justice, an important and necessary element, may, nevertheless, work against the incarnation of the principle of justice in the long term. This also points up the need for a form of meta- justice that is able to review the long term effect, on society, of efforts we are currently making to establish more comprehensive protocols of justice. One could ask, for example, whether the emerging notion that we need to be financially compensated for any form of injury incurred will foster avarice and litigation and develop a form of society based solely on the notion of rights, rather than a society in which rights and responsibilities are balanced. It would be equally remiss of us not to consider, either the demands of justice in the context of the immediate issue, or the future implications of the ethos we are generating through the ways we are attending to current injustices.

The Top and the Bottom

While it is necessary for us to occasionally make a public stand on issues that cry out for justice, we should be aware of the subtle temptation to imagine that we can create a just society through either grand, defiant gestures or legislation, as critical as these may be.

In one sense, justice needs to be built from the ground up, in ways that are unspectacular. The manner in which we bring up our children, how we treat our neighbours, the extent of our involvement in the local community, our practical ecological sensitivity, the way we conduct ourselves in work situations, the manner in which we drive our vehicles, our graciousness and our fidelity to principles, balanced by a respect for the sensitivities of others, are all important ways of building a just society. Our lifestyle, as well as our protests and our advocacy, are ways of doing justice.

This can be forgotten by those who are called to be prophets. They assume that we all need to don the prophet's mantle. I suspect that a Christian community made up exclusively of Reinhold Niebuhrs, or Daniel Berrigans, would be discordant and dysfunctional. Niebuhr, who probably exercised a greater influence over a more extended period than any other Christian ethicist this century, in continually shifting ground, kept alienating those supporters who were unwilling to follow him in his latest shift of focus. It was important for Niebuhr to be open to fresh insights, but his changes of perspective were not easily accommodated by even his committed intimates. People like Niebuhr can more easily conscript followers than accommodate rivals. Ironically, a church made up wholly of prophets, prophets passionately committed to justice, would have little capacity for embodying the justice that was the core of its rhetoric! The body of the Church has many functions, of which the prophetic is one, albeit an important one.

The Ultimate Dilemma

The urgency of social justice issues will become increasingly apparent in the not-too-distant future, given the twin threats of overpopulation and [197] pollution, together with the inability of individual nations to deal, not only with these peak issues, but also with their own internal dilemmas.

Without wishing to be alarmist, I have to admit to myself, in my more sober moments, that, even if the ecological zeal of ecology's most optimistic advocates were to be realised, we appear to be a doomed species, since we are already overpopulated [and the human population continues to expand exponentially] and since it would appear to be impossible to shut down our engines.

Reflecting on this scenario, following a conversation with a brother of mine, a physicist concerned with pollution, I found myself in a sombre mood, which found expression in a poem:

A Final Response

In the light of this scenario, I am able to see more clearly the importance of the need for a quantum change in human consciousness, and to recognize the important role of contemplation, or, in Merton's words, Contemplation in a World of Action.²² I am also better able to appreciate Gutierrez' later reluctance to talk about liberation theology, except in the context of spirituality. Not only is it impossible to effect significant social and political change, except through a change in consciousness, or way of being, but efforts at engineering such a change, in the absence of new structures of consciousness, is a naive, violent, even fascist exercise. It is analogous to the badgering rhetoric of a teacher attempting to force a recognition of volume conservation and reversibility on a child under the age of 7, who has not acquired the cognitive capacity to experience the phenomenon. [199]

[SFM 188-199]