As we think about Liberation this season and contemplate God’s justice I am walking through deep thought pattern shifts about the concept of rightness. One way this is coming up for me is in my school board work. We are contemplating changes to our real estate policy, which will impact our long term leases. One item we added was that rent abatement would only be approved for organizations in financial distress. This seems to my brain logical and fair, but then a colleague raised the idea that we were punishing successful organizations and that maybe rent abatement should be about racial justice more than financial records. Suddenly my ideas of fairness and what was right was being questioned. I was so sure about the path forward. And then I was not. At first I was a bit indignant. This is how it is. But then I began to think what if this wasn’t how it had to be? What if we could think more expansively? What if what I had always assumed about fairness wasn’t really fair?
I’m still working through all of this, it’s challenging and discombobulating. These thoughts about fairness, fiduciary responsibility, and equity are foundational to how I try to operate as a person who is striving to be faithful and good. So now that my mind is being expanded and I’m seeing things from a different angle I start to question past actions and decisions. Sometimes our shame about our past gets in the way when we learn new things. God calls us to forgiveness and reconciliation. I turn to the words of Maya Angelou who said, “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” It is good to take inventory, to repair past actions where I can, yet the most important piece is to strive to be better now, to take my new learnings about rightness and apply them forward.
This is the holy work of God’s liberation here and now. May we be open enough to have our minds and hearts changed, may we be bold enough to examine our pasts with out shame as we work towards reconciliation, and may we always be filled with the hope of the rightness of God’s dream for us all.
-Eilidh
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