Grace A. Bickers

One of the first things M said to me in person was, “my dad was an alcoholic, but my vice was always chasing skirts.” And if you know him, you’ll know it was said with a charming smile and a warm laugh and just enough seriousness to be disarming. I’ve seen on self-help Instagram about how people always tell you who they are right away. It’s not that I doubted what he was saying, but I had no idea how important or true it was. It was probably the most honest thing he ever told me. That, and his repeated predictions that he’d die young.

We call it self-destruction, but there’s always collateral damage. We can’t help it, getting attached to each other, wanting to share our lives, this inescapable human desire to care for and receive care from others. We’ll share our darkness, too, hurting those we love if it means not being so alone in our pain. We’re such beautiful things, to have so much hope even though we see the hurt coming, so much it can turn into fantasy. Maybe it’s not so bad, and everything will be alright, and he doesn’t really mean it — he’s trying his best.

There’s a lot of wolves in sheep’s clothing out there, those who for whatever reason can sense the weakness of your wanting and are eager to offer their services. There are a lot of fake friends, too, enablers who profit off your smallness. For the most part, though, I don’t think most folks are malicious, just motivated to act for their own ends. It’s not that they’re trying to hurt anybody, they just don’t really care that much about what harm might occur along the way. Most people don’t want to keep you down, either, they’re just too cowardly to call out behavior they don’t want to be held accountable for themselves. They know about the cheating, and they notice the drug use has gotten out of control, and they pick up on the holes in the stories you’ve been telling. But it’s just a little fun, right? He’s just going through a rough patch. Hey, we all gotta blow off steam somehow.

Intentions matter. I’ll take help wherever I can get it, but I’ll never trust anyone who’s in it for themselves. It’s rare to find those who truly witness you, who care about shared values rather than outcomes and do the right thing simply because that’s what it is. Sometimes our immediate interests happen to align, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is when there are higher interests at stake. I believe those usually do align, too, though it might take some work to figure out exactly how. Those who are willing to do the work, who can admit that work needs to be done, those are the ones in whose arms you can let yourself be held.

I had a conversation with a friend recently who, to paraphrase Baldwin, mirrored and magnified my light in a moment when sorrow had occluded it. She met me exactly where I was without asking me to justify or explain, and in doing so reminded me that justice is worth fighting for, even when it’s not the likely outcome. It is easy to forget, when survival mode has become the norm, that the goal is not just to get through another day, but to have a life that feels worth living.

Justice is so often confused with judgment, but pointing out the ways in which things are wrong is not about shaming anyone for it being so. I only care how it got this way so I can understand how to try and set about fixing it. You’re welcome to join me or not, but I don’t really see how punishing anyone moves us forward. That’s God’s work, not mine. Now, if you’ve been the problem, acknowledgement and acceptance of that fact is part of the solution, and there’s simply no getting around it. Honesty is required to accurately assess the state of things and discern what repair could look like. Knowledge is necessary for correct action.

I think this is a big part of the reason I’ve always considered myself such a poor scholar. In order to do the thing well, you have to be really invested in each part of it, the search for every possible source, the wording of every footnote, the hyper-specific ways your arguments fit into the discourse. But all I’ve ever really wanted is the opportunity to think along with others, be it through reading or writing or teaching or conversation. The knowing is only useful to help with the living, and the living makes us constantly revisit and refine what we think we know. It’s always incomplete and in progress. That’s not to say this search for understanding doesn’t require diligence — the footnotes are important, and our interlocutors, past or present, deserve our most sincere engagement — but it’s always been difficult for me to consider any one project a self-contained stopping point.

Even more so given we can almost never guarantee that we actually know anything. Philosophers have been telling us we can’t trust our senses for centuries, the weather is a perpetual mystery, and people constantly surprise us; someone you trust with your whole heart might defy all expectation and betray it. At best we operate in the realm of probability, and doubt is inescapable. All we have to hold onto in this constantly shifting terrain is each other. If we can’t be honest, how could we possibly feel safe navigating such uncertainty, much less attempting to pursue any sort of higher good? Honesty is the only light we have to save us from getting lost in the dark.

Some people make you small so they can feel big. Some are so scared of their own light they want you to dim yours, too.

Both darkness and light are infectious — we either build each other up or pull each other down, and I’m not sure there’s an in between. We do, unfortunately, bear the burden of the sins of our fathers, even if we’re not accountable for them directly. I’m influenced by the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, who says that we come into the world in medias res, part of the stories of others that are already being told. We are the product of generations of histories, prayed for and dreamed about and sometimes cursed, long before we enter the narrative. Where we come from, how we look, how we talk, all shape the paths available to us, through no choice of our own. Of course we have our own stories, too, and that’s why it’s so important we let each other tell them on our own terms. When there are so many obstacles we’ve inherited and may not be able to completely tear down, the very least we can do is let each other figure out how to climb them for ourselves.

But I think that’s actually much harder than it sounds, to get out of each other’s way. We’re wrapped up in one another by design. When we live in the dark, intentionally or not, the consequences of our actions ripple out towards those around us resulting in broken hearts and promises and bones and business contracts. The most difficult thing to come to terms with after my divorce was having had betrayed myself so thoroughly, and in doing so, betraying those who actually did love me, too. Of course my husband treated me badly, and in some ways, I may be dealing with the after-effects of those years forever. But he’s not a part of my life anymore, though I do still have to live with myself. I can’t expect honesty from others if I am not honest with them in turn, and I can’t be honest with them if I’m not honest with myself. It’s inseparable, the way we treat ourselves and the way we treat those close to us — the work of justice is always personal as much as it is communal and relational.

So, justice is a necessarily collaborative project, and that means it requires the leap of faith that is trust. Yet not everybody can be trusted, though I don’t think that means they never should be. I want to believe that everyone has light in them, even if it’s not always shining. There’s a lot of nasty stuff in this world, and we don’t all share it equally. It matters where someone has been and how those experiences might shape the way they are able to show up in a particular moment. But no one chapter in the story defines any of us entirely. I’ve had to learn the hard way about the heartache that comes with asking things from people who can’t give them, and I don’t think it’s fair to either party. I don’t think it’s fair to write someone off either, and I’m not willing to give up my faith in their ability to grow even if it’s not in relation to me. Surely there is always a way to help one another feel safe enough to face whatever pain or shame is holding us back, as long as we can trust that we do truly want what’s best for each other. We probably won’t always know what exactly that looks like, but we can be earnest in our commitment to the process of discernment and the active attempt to actualize those higher interests. True justice is not at odds with anyone’s flourishing.

Trust, patience, humility — each challenges us to balance limitation and greatness, the very heart of the human condition. We are both capable and crippled, knowledgeable and confused, profound and insignificant all at once. Truly, there have been single comments that saved my life, a well-timed hug, a dinner invitation or text. And there have been passing looks and silences that ruined me. It doesn’t take much. It all matters.

It is so easy to obsess over that which we can’t control that we don’t always realize the power we do hold over one another. Whether in relation to God or each other, we are constantly trying to make sense of ourselves and the world, to make it all mean something. We’re like toddlers incessantly asking, “why?”, although we are often left to fill in the blanks ourselves, and we don’t always do so with clarity. Whether or not we all believe there is some kind of divine plan or that things happen for cosmic reasons, we all engage in the activity of meaning-making. There are many stories we can tell about causality, and left to tell them alone, we tend to center our feelings about ourselves, driven by insecurity, guilt, and shame. In our search for answers, we can get stuck in the language of who deserves what, but our perspective is too finite to know the full consequences of any particular outcome with certainty. We simply cannot see the full picture of what and how and why things happen, past, present, and future. I don’t and can’t actually know the worth of anyone’s suffering or the monetary value of their lost time and energy for recompense. But what I do know is that suffering is bad, and nobody should be forced to live a life of mere survival, or live in fear, or feel betrayed. I know that we all ought to be treated with dignity and honesty and respect, and that it’s essential to listen when someone says they don’t feel as if they have been. I know that when we inevitably fall short of these ideals, we deserve accountability and repair. Justice is not about retribution, nor is it defined by any individual decision or act. It is a state of affairs, the ways we want to live with each other, the story we want to tell about the kind of thing we are, what we value and believe, and whether our behavior is aligned with those values or not.

Like faith, justice is an active project, the continuous attempt to make meaning together, to try and understand each other and the world, to create a space where everyone fits and is at home. We help each other find coherence in contradiction and to make sense of the parts of ourselves that feel out of place or out of control. We remind each other who we are. And like faith, justice is a process, not an endpoint. That incompleteness is essential — it is the doing and the striving itself that transforms us, that is worth doing as its own end. As such, justice is always an activity in progress. We do not need to wait until we have collected enough evidence to make a compelling case to address the harm that we see and feel happening to us and around us. It doesn’t have to get undeniably bad before we do something about it. Every day, every choice, every action is an opportunity to work towards creating communities and relationships that aren’t afraid to acknowledge, embrace, and resolve the dissonance between who we are and want to be and how we behave.

There can be no justice without truth. What we deserve, what we owe each other, is honesty. We deserve to have a place in the world where we are seen and accepted in all our messiness and our beauty, our reality and our potential; a place where we belong. The language of “witnessing” and “testifying” is used in relation to both law and religion because it has to do with conviction, about what we believe to be unshakably true. Radical honesty is one of the greatest acts of love because it a testament of faith that we always already are capable of becoming the best versions of ourselves. We are afraid to tell the truth because we fear our darkness defines us, and that’s exactly why we must — so that those who love us can bear witness to our light and dissolve the shadows that keep us chained to falsehood.

Why is it so hard to treat each other as if our lives do actually mean something, as if our actions are important, as if the way we move around the world does make it a little better or worse every single day? What sort of dignity can be found in pretending otherwise, and what shallow mercy is in the condescension that we do not deserve and are not capable of the best of each other? What justice is in excuses and low expectations, for anyone, but especially those we claim to love and who claim to love us? I refuse to degrade myself or another by clinging to their worst when I have seen the spark of the divine in them. I will honor our worth with a faith that is steadfast and without want.

How miraculous it is to matter, and to be told so, and to be given each new day as a fresh opportunity to love despite whatever we did the day before.