One of the things we talked about at the Social Justice residential in February was some of the theology of justice. In fact, we didn’t just discuss theology, we did it – thrashed it out together, beginning with our experience, aiming for a change in unjust situations, and using the pastoral cycle as our map (ably guided by Marie). The pastoral cycle is a tool for thinking about justice in the light of our faith, and for trying to achieve a balance of reflection and action which is relevant to the situation because it is grounded in experience.
We began by sharing situations from our placements, learning about some of each others’ experiences and the thoughts they had provoked. The aim of this first stage of the cycle is to ensure that everything which follows has its foundations in reality and its feet firmly on the ground. We talked about homeless people, disabled people, church people, displaced people. We told real, concrete stories about the things we had seen and compared notes about how we felt about them.
The next stage is analysis. We asked who loses out in the situations which bothered us, who gains from them and why they continue. Unless we understand how it comes about, it will be difficult to challenge oppression. The questions we asked were a way to start to understand how our lives affect the lives of others, and how the structures of our society affect the people at the edges of it. One of the things which came up was the level of misinformation and ignorance about some marginalised groups of people. The media creates and fosters unhelpful public attitudes towards, for example, asylum seekers and refugees, and this is combined with prejudice to result in a lack of awareness and a fear of the unknown and not-understood. Then there is laziness and indifference – it is often easier to let an unjust situation continue than to think about how it should and could be changed, and so disabled people continue to be treated as children because society is unwilling to wrestle with its own preconceptions. Or perhaps it is easier to meet someone’s short-term needs than to think about what would help them in the long run, so people who find it difficult to remain in conventional accommodation are given handouts instead of the support and acceptance of their abilities which they need. Sometimes an issue may not even be seen as a problem, or not one interesting to those who could make the greatest changes. Elections are not won on issues which affect minority groups. And finally, there may be vested interests in keeping people marginalised.
Having made an attempt to understand the problems we had seen, we asked what our faith has to say about them. Of course we should not try to restrict God’s place, which is in everything we try to do, to this point, but this is the place for listening, prayer and reflection on scripture, particularly from the point of view of the marginalised, to see what insights we gain. Two strands came out of this stage of the process. One theme was anger: the causes we had identified in our analysis were the things which made Jesus angry; the things he spoke out against. And just as Jesus was often angry with the religious authorities of his day, we talked about anger at a church which allows itself to be comfortable with the situation, failing to challenge injustice and refusing to preach on poverty. The other theme we identified was compassion. That morning we had been led in some thoughts on Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman by the well, and we noted that he asks her to do something for him. We felt it was fundamental to recognise people’s worth and to let them know that they are loved and accepted. It is also important to see that really helping people is not the same as helping them to conform, and look outwardly “normal”.
The final stage of the cycle is action: what needs to happen in the situations which we have identified, and what can we personally do? What sticks in my mind from this phase is the thought that “the powerful don’t know what it’s like to be poor and the poor don’t speak the language of power”. One of the things we can do, then, is to bridge that gap: to tell stories of our experiences to others, especially to those in power, and to challenge people’s attitudes with love and respect. Even to suggest that social justice should form part of the school curriculum. In our own lives we thought it was important to be aware of which are our wants and which our needs and of what money means, and important to keep integrity, even when it is difficult or goes against the grain – to “jump over our own shadows”. As always to pray, and to become more aware of unjust situations in the world now and in the past by studying history and current affairs.
Because we’ve chosen a cyclical tool for thinking about injustice, action isn’t, in fact, the final stage. There is no final stage to the process. We will, if we carry them out, be able to evaluate our actions – the good points, the bad points and the lessons learned – and celebrate the results. We will finish the action stage with a whole new set of experiences to feed into the next round of the cycle, so that it is not just “going round in circles”, but moving outwards in a spiral as each revolution builds on and adds to the last.
