Amazing Grace is a wonderful movie about William Wilberforce and his fight against slavery. In it, the character John Newton (who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace), and William Wilberforce, come to see clearly, what they had been blind to—the evil of the slave trade. There was no going back—”was blind, but now I see.”
Many/most/all of us are blind to certain things. If I’m paddling my canoe with a wind at my back, it’s easy for me to think, “Wow, this is easy. What a great paddler I am!”—a fine metaphor for privilege—our blindness to how being white (or male or American or heterosexual) means we have privileges we are not even aware of. If we become aware of the ways we benefit, there’s no going back.
Must we see? John Newton and William Wilberforce would have lived easier, happier lives had they remained blind to the evil of slavery. At the pearly gates, “I really wasn’t aware of what was going on…”
In a The New Yorker article, “Embarrassment Of Riches,” writer Sheelah Kolhatkar profiles a movement called Patriotic Millionaires— ultra- wealthy folk who realize that increasing income inequality is bad for America, who promote higher taxes for the wealthy.
Abigail Disney, granddaughter and heiress to the Disney fortune, talks about her epiphany, when she realized that her family’s lifestyle helped ‘wall themselves off from the world,’ which made it easier to ignore the poor. “Coming face to face with it feels awful. That’s why the wealthy have the private planes and the bottle service in the back and the limousines with the tinted windows.”
It’s easier to not know, but we can choose to know. It’s hard. There are articles about girls sold into sex slavery in Asia that I would rather not read. When I get my updates from Doctors Without Borders, I hesitate to open them.
What responsibility do we have—simply as human beings, but especially as those who claim to follow Jesus–to allow our eyes to be opened? Presumably it would have been easier for Jesus not to be born, get dirty, see hurting people, and die….
I believe we are called to see and feel the discomfort of great injustice, vast equality gaps, racism, and huge ranges in the quality of medical care. We must see and be aware of the evil that we in the West are inevitably complicit in. And seeing, we may see a few places where we can make a difference.
Old Testament prophets— whose call was ‘to comfort the uncomfortable’ and ‘make the comfortable uncomfortable’–wanted to run away. That was not an option for them, nor is it for us. I say, read the article that makes you feel bad about your part in a ‘throw away economy.’ Read the book that opens your eyes to life in a slum. Watch the movie that will make you see how complicit you’ve been in racism. In the end there is amazing grace.
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.
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