Actually, even at this very moment. I am at my office. Its 7:29pm on a Wednesday. I should be working on my trial brief for my trial in Thunder Bay next week, but I'm not. I'm blogging. Why? Because otherwise I feel like my head might turn into mush... or lemon meringue pie maybe.
I have been reading a lot of material online lately about lawyers leaving "Biglaw" to pursue other career and personal aspirations. Now, I don't work in Biglaw by any stretch of the imagination. My firm has 8 people. That's 8 people total including staff. I have a perfectly reasonable billable hour target compared to the vast majority of Bay Street firms. And our office is totally contained within one floor of our building. The third floor, not the forty-sixth.
Yet I still feel like the following analogy rings just as true of my job as it does of the Biglaw associates: "being a litigation associate at a big law firm is like competing in a pie-eating contest where the prize is... more pie."
YEEESSSS!!!
Its so true.
And I just don't want any more pie. ([whine!]) I never wanted to be in the pie-eating contest in the first place! Well, maybe that's not entirely true. I like pie. I just have absolutely ZERO desire to eat it in competition with others, ZERO desire to eat it once my pie appetite has been satiated and ZERO desire to be rewarded with yet MORE pie after I've finished my pie eating obligations! Is that so odd?
I guess I might as well come right out and admit that I'm ready to move on now from the pie-eating contest. I am moving on. My pie-eating days are coming to at least a temporary close.
I need to be doing something that adds SOMETHING to the general fight to address the gross and awful things that are going on in this world right now while I'm munching away on my pie. There is nothing wrong with eating pie in and of itself, but until everyone is free to eat pie if they choose to, I can't sit around eating it as if nothing is wrong with the world...
Ok. Enough about pie.
I've been thinking a lot about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s words about the Jericho road in relation to my duty as a believer and follower of Jesus Christ to pursue justice for His people:
"On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
King in his April 4, 1967, address at Manhattan’s Riverside Church
I definitely appreciate what Dr. King is saying here. It is right along the lines of much of what God has to say about pursuing justice for the oppressed in general:
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Mi 6:8
Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy. Pr 31:8-9
You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. Le 19:15 Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the Lord your God is giving you. De 16:20
And that is why I am so behind the work that Christian organisations like International Justice Mission (as well as secular organisations like Crossroads International and Women in Law and Development Africa) are doing to make sure that there is structural transformation and lasting change being accomplished to systematically right the wrongs against the weak in our global society.
But I disagree that systematic change and transformation is supposed to be our end goal as Christ's remnant in the world. The huge majority of Bible verses on the subject of justice (and there's LOTS) tell me that God is not as concerned with the bigger picture as He is with each individual instance of injustice. The actual person who right now is being raped by her father, robbed by his neighbour, beaten by her husband, starved by her parents, abused by his caregivers. Not Norweigans, or Haitians, or Middle Easterners, or Africans, but rather, John, or Lee or Svea or Siphe. That person is suffering right now and God is suffering with him; with her. Witnessing it and whispering in reflection to Himself:
"[I] looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress" Is. 5:7
"I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one." Ez 22:30
"Whom shall I send? And who will go for Us?" Is 6:8
The more I ponder these things the more I am convinced that Gary Haugen is right. In his book, Good News About Injustice, he argues that Christians tend to readily agree that we are called to preach the Gospel and called to minister to the poor and needy as God's hands and feet, but a troubling number of Christians believe that the role of seeking justice for the violently oppressed in the world is something God will take on Himself instead of seeking out His people to be His willing hands and feet in this way. The Bible is so full of God's marching orders to me to go out and grapple with the singular instances of evil I encounter -- hands on -- in order to wrestle it to the ground for just one person, just one instance of injustice at a time. To show one person at a time that God cares about his situation, her struggle, his desperation. Not just a promise to pray for her (which I am also called to do) but also a promise to do all that is within my power to deliver that person from his distress and be willing to be God's answer to that prayer.
That is why I absolutely loved Katie Davis' book, Kisses From Katie, because she took God's marching orders quite literally and set out to do what she could, ALL she could, for the individual people that God placed deliberately at her feet in need. She does it in complete abandoned faith and relies completely on God to equip her to meet the need. Her faith is amazing to me.
Don't get me wrong. Like Dr. King said, it is important to restructure the Jericho road for the good of the travellers. It is important to address world hunger; global poverty; rampant systematic oppression. But there will ALWAYS be another Jericho road once the current one we're working on is fixed up. Evil is persistent, he's working overtime, eating pie non-stop and loving every single nasty bite of it -- looking forward to the big pie prize at the end because his appetite is never satiated.
Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. 1 Pe 5:8
I'll never forget this scene about Satan (also known as "Weston") from C.S. Lewis' Perelandra:
As he was looking down at this he suddenly noticed something else. At first he thought it was a creature of more fantastic shape than he had yet seen on Perelandra. Its shape was not only fantastic but hideous. Then he dropped on one knee to examine it. Finally he touched it, with reluctance. A moment later he drew back his hands like a man who had touched a snake.
It was a damaged animal. It was, or had been, one of the brightly coloured frogs. But some accident had happened to it. The whole back had been ripped open in a sort of V-shaped gash, the point of the V being a little behind the head. Something had torn a widening wound backward - as we do in opening an envelope - along the trunk and pulled it out so far behind the animal that the hoppers or hind legs had been almost torn off with it. [....]
At last he got up and resumed his walk. Next moment he started and looked at the ground again. He quickened his pace, and then once more stopped and looked. He stood stock-still and covered his face. He called aloud upon heaven to break the nightmare or to let him understand what was happening. A trail of mutilated frogs lay along the edge of the island. Picking his footsteps with care, he followed it. He counted ten, fifteen, twenty: and the twenty-first brought him to a place where the wood came down to the water's edge. He went into the wood and came out on the other side. There he stopped dead and. stared .. Weston, still clothed but without his pith helmet, was standing about thirty feet away: and as Ransom watched. he was tearing a frog - quietly and almost surgically inserting his forefinger, with its long sharp nail, under the skin behind the creature's head and ripping it open. Ransom had not noticed before that Weston had such remarkable nails. Then he finished the operation, threw the bleeding ruin away, and looked up. Their eyes met.
If Ransom said nothing, it was because he could not speak He saw a man who was certainly not ill, to judge from his easy stance and the powerful use he had just been making of his fingers. He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and colouring and features. In that sense he was quite recognisable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognisable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. [....]
It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken - Ransom himself had often spoken of a devilish smile. Now he realised that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naivete of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.
from Chapter 9 of Perelandra, C.S. Lewis
That's gotta be the most vivid picture of the nature of pure evil that I've ever read outside of the Bible. Its incomprehensible, but its ruthless and tireless. Its gonna keep going. Embarking on a campaign to add more security to the frogs' home to keep them safe from Weston would have been admirable, but it would not have made a difference to the frogs who had already been tortured or the ones currently being tortured. They needed rescue. And once the frogs' home was made safe from Weston, Weston would have found some puppies to destroy instead no doubt, and so on.
Its important to me that I don't get caught up in believing that being a part of restructuring means I have satisfied my role in coming to the aid of individuals who are suffering. It would be like saying I don't need to be worry about donating to charities or giving money to a homeless man or destitute woman because I pay my taxes and my taxes go to support programs to help those people. It just doesn't work that way. Kinda like these most memorable lines from A Christmas Carol:
'At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge,' said the gentleman, taking up a pen, 'it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.'
'Are there no prisons?"
'Plenty of prisons,' said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
'And the Union workhouses.' demanded Scrooge. 'Are they still in operation?'
'Both very busy, sir.'
'Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,' said Scrooge. 'I'm very glad to hear it.'
[....] I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned-they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.'
'Many can't go there; and many would rather die.'
'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
I feel like I'm getting beyond the realm of reasonable in the length of this blog post so I shall leave off. But suffice it to say, my pie-eating days are coming to an end. I feel compelled to take seriously God's instruction to "redeem" the time He has given me on this earth more effectively. I will give more details on my plans in a later post. For now I leave off with an oft-quoted little story which illustrates beautifully the things on my mind:
Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.
One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.
As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.
He came closer still and called out "Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?"
The young man paused, looked up, and replied "Throwing starfish into the ocean."
"I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" asked the somewhat startled wise man.
To this, the young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die."
Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!"
At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, "It made a difference for that one."
Star Thrower by Loren C. Eiseley
