Driving home from the market one afternoon, I turned on the radio for the first time since my arrival in Point Reyes Station.
“Why is this group abusing, selling off girls, kidnapping them? Why is it killing boys? Why is it wiping out villages and showing this capacity for extreme and merciless violence?”
Terry Gross was interviewing journalist Alex Perry about his recently published book, The Hunt for Boko Haram: Investigating the Terror Tearing Nigeria Apart. Horrific words sunk in: “heavily armed Thuggery,” “a perfect nightmare,” “extreme child abuse,” and even worse, more graphic descriptions of the violence. Gross and Perry spoke with an intelligent coolness, dissecting the atrocity like expert surgeons.
As I listened, I felt as though I’d been hit between the eyes. My throat clenched. Tears collected in the corners of my eyes. Nestled in the seaside woods of Northern California, I’d lost the routine of listening to NPR every day. Instead, I read Wordsworth and pruned rose bushes. Every evening, I would sit beside an open window in my temporary home, a 19th-century farmhouse, listening to the nighttime songs of owls and coyotes. After hearing the conversation between Gross and Perry, the world unraveled back into the cruel, uncontrollable place it had always been.
West Marin enchants in the summertime, but I wondered, was my enchantment blinding me? While I had been immersed in beauty, violence raged elsewhere on the same planet. In that light, even the basket of strawberries in my lap seemed deceptive.
I walked around in a haze of existential malaise for weeks afterward, asking unanswerable questions about the irreconcilable polarities of human life, like love and injustice, beauty and violence. Until one morning, on an ordinary foggy day, I opened The Sun Magazine to Bethany Saltman’s interview with Chris Hedges. “Moral Combat” was a searching examination of religion and fundamentalism, trauma and war, and the complexities of moral decision-making. Unlike Gross and Perry, Hedges and Saltman confronted unwieldy subjects in humanizing ways. They stitched seemingly disparate subjects together: instead of dissecting, weaving.
Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, began his career working in a church in Boston, before becoming a lauded war correspondent. Hedges reported on atrocities in Central America, Gaza, Sudan, and Bosnia, to name a few. In the interview, Hedges avoids moralizing statements about conflict. By doing so, he compellingly comments on sweeping subjects like virtue and wisdom, while also approaching the question of a “just war” pragmatically. For example, Hedges states, “There’s a huge divide between those who experience war on the ground and those who imbibe this mythic tale of honor and heroism and glory, which is rendered hollow and obscene after thirty seconds of combat.”
Hedges, however, romanticizes neither war nor pacifism, for as he admits, “The world rarely offers us a choice between the moral and the immoral. It’s usually a choice between the immoral and the more immoral.” Hedges argues against fundamentalism, which he defines in both secular and religious terms, as a divisive, binary worldview. “It’s a belief that you and those who subscribe to your ideology have found the absolute truth, which must be accepted by everyone, and those who won’t accept it must be silenced or eradicated. Fundamentalism is an abdication of our moral responsibility to make difficult decisions.”
Moral decision-making in a world defined by difficult if not impossible decisions, then, looks more like this: “Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, ‘You make a moral choice, you act, and then you ask for forgiveness.’ That’s a wise statement. You make the choice, because you can’t sit around hemming and hawing forever.” Moral choice, therefore, demands choosing complexity over oversimplification, and contemplation over purity.
*
Now years later, I, too, graduated from divinity school and view subjects ranging from human suffering to politics through a virtue-ethics lens. The terrors of Boko Haram are by no means the only atrocity which we must witness and address. Quite the opposite. Police brutality, gun violence, racist violence and aggression, mass incarceration, homelessness, xenophobia, and disenfranchisement are only a few realities of American cultural life today. As poet Brian Bilston reminds us, “America is a gun.”
In recent weeks, more examples of racism and police brutality have come to light with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. It seems as though, at least on the surface, we are at a cultural inflection point, where a more substantive dismantling of institutionalized violence might begin, if Americans are willing to pursue an arduous process of self-examination and re-education.
Evil and dehumanization, as scholars like Foucault and Father Richard Rohr argue, are more often than not systematized and therefore at least partially concealed. This is the precise reason why they are so insidious. If violence is institutionalized and combat looks more like ‘legal’ policing and less like traditional warfare, how do we create a healthier, more equal, more compassionate world for all people?
I am a biracial woman of color from a bicultural family and the daughter of an immigrant. A former Catholic, now Episcopalian. And an American who was raised in the Midwest but now lives in Los Angeles. My identity is defined by liminality, by the mixtures of hegemony and oppression, privilege and otherness, assimilation and difference – the edges of these borders are difficult to discern. Am I a bridge? What part of me is complicit, what part of me is oppressed? What part of me understands, what part of me can be lulled into forgetting? I ask myself questions like these constantly.
Every time I drive through my neighborhood in Los Angeles, I drive through a city which has dedicated nearly 54% of its proposed annual budget to the LAPD. If we are to create a new world, we need to see everything from our neighborhoods and homes to our community maps differently. We need to listen and learn to listen differently. And we need to act differently, now.
In a world tangled by despair, moral decision-making can be overwhelming because we may not fully see how our actions still participate in the oppression we hope to subvert. As Hedges describes, our decisions and actions are rarely, if at all, morally pure even when the validity of moral virtues like “anti-racism” are crystal clear. Thus, I think humane work begins with witnessing. It begins with learning how insidious violence and trauma actually are in our broken world: how demographics are divided by zip codes, and maternal health outcomes, and incarceration rates, and pandemic statistics.
Listening to the radio, so many years ago, I was reminded of the world’s multivalent pain. I am reminded of the same fact every day. I learned then, which I practice now, not to turn away, but rather, to turn toward. We cannot live fully in the world, in any meaningful way, without seeing both beauty and terror. They coexist. We must not let the beauty lull us into forgetting that the terror is often unevenly inflicted.
Compassion – by definition ‘to suffer with’ – clarifies action. Moral action is less like a paved road and more like trekking through the wilderness. It demands discomfort and risk. It requires we take steps daily to sow seeds of justice, to see where people are hurting and tend to those deep wounds.
“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”
Warsan Shire
Sarah James is a graduate of Middlebury College and Yale Divinity School. Her writing appears in Earth & Altar, Darling, and Patheos.
