Voices in the Wilderness
The oppressed urge us to cry out for justice.
BY WALTER EARL FLUKER (GRS’88), Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Ethical Leadership
There are many voices calling us from the wilderness. They talk, walk, and stalk us in our gardens of innocence— our learned ignorance and forgetfulness1 —demanding how we will identify and locate ourselves in the human struggle for justice.2
These voices—belonging to the muted, missed, and dismissed, the wretchedly fated of society—transgress borders, categories, and the order of things. They intrude, disrupt, and interrupt our quiet complacency—making us anxious and afraid. They often cry out in extremes, without respect to per- sons, places, or heritages because they are unheard, unacknowledged. Unlike many of us who benefit from the privileges of academic and ecclesiastical authority, they do not seek to make straight that which is crooked nor right that which is not in alignment with
the order of things. These are subaltern voices that have no recourse but to
cry out. As Father David Tracy writes, “The final indignity for anyone is to
be forbidden one’s own voice or to be robbed of one’s own experience.”3
Tragically, the comfortable and secure seldom, if ever, really hear these voices until they scream. The terrible reality is that we have missed or dismissed these voices in places like Sanford, Florida; Ferguson, Missouri; and Staten Island, New York—and we are shocked when they speak up and act out in tragic, tormented violence in places like Brooklyn, New York; Baltimore, Maryland; Boston, Massachusetts; or Paris, France.
In one sense, the wilderness is a dangerous, complicated space where people compete to be heard. The wilderness
is not merely a geographical and political location—it is also embodied history. To quote Howard Thurman, we come into the world and even before God with “the smell of life upon us.”4 Much of the violence in our world is a result of long, complicated, embodied histories that collide at the intersections of our everyday worlds. These histories remind us of our vulnerability, detachment, and complicity because the wilderness is a mirror of our own wildness, desertion, loneliness, and alienation.
Should we be surprised, then, that there are so many voices crying in the wildernesses of 21st-century America and the world who appear as wild men and women, who haunt our sacred stories of religion and nation, and call us to accountability where injustice reigns among the poorest of the poor; among black, brown, red, white, female, male, crip,5 and queer broken bodies that are crucified daily by the relentless pursuit of capital and
power?
JUSTICE
THAT SEEKS
COMPASSION
The wilderness is
indeed dangerous,
but it can also be
a space of grace,
freedom, liminality, transition,
transformation, and
hope—it can be a
site where a liberating word comes our
way.6 The liberating word, writes
the apostle7, is near and calling us, intimately connected and configured into our very existences; it is in our faces, in our minds and hearts like a champion fighting for the silenced, daring us to hear, see, believe, speak, and act. We
are all haunted by a word that comes our way in the wildernesses of our small, incomplete, and lonely lives and that “liberate[s] [us], both from the frightening restrictions that bind [us] to what
is present and from the anxiety of [our hearts].” In fact, “[we need] language more for hearing than for speaking, for believing than for acting.”8
How shall we hear this liberating word until we have given attention to our own voices? How shall we learn
to listen for the liberating word in the voices of others with whom we strongly disagree? And how shall we insure that our voices are voices of justice and not self-aggrandizing babblings of which
we hear so much? It begins with hearing, seeing, and believing in justice that seeks compassion. According to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in the Tibetan language, compassion is called shen dug ngal wa la mi sö pa, which means literally, “the inability to bear the sight of another’s suffering.”9
Compassion calls us “alongside the other to share in her sorrow and tragedy, but also in her hopes and aspirations”10— alongside the mothers and fathers of murdered children; alongside the spouses and children of slain police officers; alongside the suffering people of Boston and Bosnia, Paris and Palestine, Nigeria and Nicaragua; alongside the frightened and hungry and broken bodies of immigrants crossing borders in Europe and the United States; alongside those who have no one to speak on their behalf; and alongside those with whom we disagree as we enter into difficult conversations about the future of our existence in this nation and on this Earth.
REVOLUTIONARY PATIENCE
How might such conflicts find resolution in a complex, multicultural environment where all public actors can have their say?
The resolution begins not with speaking, but with listening. Listening involves a type of social patience— cultivating the practice of allowing the other to have her say, especially the voice of the marginalized and muted. Listening involves waiting, a type of “revolutionary patience,”11 which is intimately connected with social change. To be alongside, therefore, means to actively listen to the other, even in our most challenging disputations; and it is also an opportunity to hear, maybe for the very first time, the sound of the genuine in the other and to hear one’s own voice.12 This is the sphere of discourse where we are given grace to receive the other in all her difference and to relive our stories in justice-seeking-compassion.13 Being a justice-seeking, compassionate voice in the wilderness for those who cannot speak for themselves and for those who will not speak to us is perhaps the greatest service that we can offer to God.
If only we could hear the sound of the genuine—a liberating word that comes our way—we might believe that it is possible to work for justice in the wildernesses of the world and to join John Wesley and Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Ella Josephine Baker and Dorothy Day, and so many others who spoke from their wildernesses. Until we learn to hear and speak in our own justice- seeking-compassion voices, sing our own justice-seeking-compassion songs, dance our own justice-seeking- compassion movements, and practice justice-seeking-compassion communication, we are but inauthentic actors in a grand narrative that we had no part in authoring—a script that was written for us, but not with us.
There is a particular service that you and only you can do, in a voice which only you can speak. When we cry out for justice in this world, we are the voice—and that voice is the voice of the divine.
Adapted from Fluker’s sermon delivered at Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 18, 2015.
Footnotes
1. Learned ignorance is the “immediate but unselfconscious understanding which defines
the practical relationship to the world.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 19.
2. “Might we think of identities as narratives or roles which sub- jects decide to perform as a mat- ter of identification, not as fixed identities?” Stuart Hall, “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities,” in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 299.
3. David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 106.
4. Ed. Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber, A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 307; see also Howard Thurman, The Inward Journey (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1961), 106.
5. The word “crip” is used to reference disabled and queer bod- ies. See Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: NYU Press, 2006); Sharon V. Betcher, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh: A Secular Theology for the Global City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); and Sharon V. Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).
6. Walter Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 15–17.
7. “But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart’ (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim)” (Romans 10:8).
8. Gerhard Ebeling, God and Word, trans. James Leitch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1967), 30.
9. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 64.
10. Walter E. Fluker, Ethical Leadership: The Quest for Character, Civility, and Community (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 146.
11. Dorothee Soelle, Revolutionary Patience, trans. Rita and Robert Kimber (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1974; England: 1977).
12. “There is in every person something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine within herself. . . . There is some- thing in everybody that waits and listens for the sound of the genu- ine in other people.” Howard Thurman, “The Sound of the Genuine,” Baccalaureate Address, Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, May 4, 1980.
13. Ray L. Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 28.