Misery and Justice

Sometimes when I’m alone, I open my well-loved The Book of American Negro Spirituals (edited and harmonized by James Weldon Johnson, a poet I grew up loving, and J. Rosamond Johnson, his brother); and I sing. The composers of these songs could not count on any right to their own bodies, having a spouse, or seeing their children grow up. They had no due process and no protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Though their enslavers attempted to justify enslaving other people using the Bible, these musicians heard their own story in the Bible, and sang the stories that spoke to their condition.

I understand wishing for the strict justice of these songs. The song “Didn’t Old Pharaoh Get Lost?” begins with Isaac on the altar, Moses cast into the Nile, Joseph sold by his brothers, Samuel hearing from God that Eli’s children would fall, and then dives into the story of Israel in Egypt. One verse describes “raging Pharaoh” and his host drowning in the Red Sea.  And the chorus rejoices after every verse, “Didn’t old Pharaoh get lost in the Red Sea?” “Go Down, Moses” recounts the misery of Israel: “oppressed so hard they could not stand.” In it, God tells Moses to tell Pharaoh to let the people go, and, “if not, I’ll smite your first-born dead.”  

In his Second Inaugural Address delivered during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln spoke about justice: 

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-men’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

Lincoln may well have had in mind the words of God to Cain, “Your brother’s blood calls to me from the ground.” What if, indeed, in the long view, we (or our children) do repay the earth drop for drop for the blood of our human family we have been responsible for spilling on it? 

When those who are terrorized or abused or tortured for being different from their oppressors cry out for justice and express anger and desperation, I want my response to be mercy rather than judgment, even if I am implicated in causing their suffering, even if their expression makes me uncomfortable or perhaps even a little miserable. 

I think it would help if we really tried to inhabit another’s misery, even to the point of calling on our own painful memories to elicit our empathy. While I have endured abuse, loneliness, and misery, and I have called on God for justice, I haven’t experienced what a civilian in Yemen feels, what a child in Syria dreads, how an Black person in the U.S. thinks about traffic stops, how dangerous it is to be transgender. But I can believe them when they tell me of their terror. People of privilege don’t really understand the profound misery of abuse, slavery, or war, or starvation, or terror (until, in some disastrous event, they do).

Theodore Parker, writing before the Civil War, said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” Martin Luther King, Jr., picked this up and made it a hopeful and oft-quoted refrain: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I trust that God will in fact be just, even when it seems to take forever, and I know that God calls me—calls us—to be just, to do justice, to make things as right and righteous as we can. It is hard and uncomfortable work, and that’s all the more reason to try.