Those who have no flame in their hearts for justice, no consciousness of responsibility for the reign of God, no raging commitment to human community may indeed be seeking God. But make no mistake, God is still, at best, only an idea to them, not a reality. Indeed, contemplation is a very dangerous activity. It not only brings us face to face with God. It brings us, as well, face to face with the world, face to face with the self. And then, of course, something must be done. Nothing stays the same once we have found the God within…. We carry the world in our hearts: the oppression of all peoples, the suffering of our friends, the burdens of our enemies, the raping of the Earth, the hunger of the starving, the joy of every laughing child. ~ Joan Chittister

What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love kindly, and to walk humbly with your God. ~ Micah 6:8 

I’m not a big fan of the conjunctive phrase “spirituality and social justice.” Not as odd a pairing as sandals and socks or Bogey and Bacall or the Weight Watchers Clinic next door to Big Bobby’s Bakery, still I suspect to the untrained eye more times than not joining spirituality and social justice conjures up images of things that don’t belong together.

I am sympathetic to persons who use this phrase, who author articles or organize conferences or teach semester courses with it as the title or part of the title. But as it stands alone without any clarification, I think it fails to do the very thing it is trying to do: emphasize that the two belong together. Although not grammatically incorrect, the conjunction and in “spirituality and social justice” is misleading and may do more harm than good. It infers a relationship without making clear the nature of that relationship. Unfortunately, when we join spirituality with social justice using the conjunction “and,” it looks to many people like a mathematical equation — spirituality + social justice — which suggests that justice is separate from spirituality, an addendum or complement to it rather than a constitutive dimension of it. For this reason alone, I would encourage people of faith not to use this phrase. How far we have moved from the tradition of the Hebrew prophets in which Jesus was nurtured whereby justice was virtually a metonym for what today we call faith, religion, or the spiritual life.

As people of faith trying to make sense of living in this world, we would do well to tighten up our understanding of the relationship between spirituality and justice. Not only are they not unrelated, polar opposites, or antagonistic, the two words and the reality to which each points are necessarily and intimately bound together in any authentic spirituality. Even more, they are mutually enhancing. In Judaism and Christianity (the traditions I know best), this is true both theologically as a vision of life from a divine perspective and incarnationally since both spirituality and justice are not ideas but enacted theology.

It is paramount that people of faith naturally and spontaneously come to associate these two terms and connect the realities to which they refer. But it is equally important to clarify their relationship which in one direction we might call derivative and in the other direction validating. That is, spirituality, if it is to be mature, credible, and responsive to the urgent and pressing issues of our day, must give birth to concern and work for justice in the world. Work for justice derives from and is an integral dimension of authentic spirituality. Conversely, working for justice in one of its many manifestations (for example, distributive, racial, gender, social, or ecological) re-informs and validates our spirituality. This mutually impactful relationship is referred to as the theological spiral. Stated most succinctly: theology informs living in the world and living in the world re-informs and reshapes our theology. A theology that is devoid of this ongoing dialogical spiral, in my opinion, is either misguided, anemic, or false and sure to produce a spirituality in kind.

In the Jewish tradition, authentication of the spiritual life especially means authentic to the prophetic consciousness, the prophet being the woman or man most intimately aware of and concerned about what concerns God, namely, the well-being and care of the least protected and most vulnerable in society (in Hebrew the anawim, literally “the bowed down or bent over” by the burdens or injustices of life). In the Christian tradition, authenticity is evidenced by aligning one’s way of living with the vision, teaching, and paschal pattern of Jesus’ life. The vision is focused on the reign of God where justice and peace are the hallmarks. The teaching is perhaps best expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and articulated most succinctly in the Beatitudes, and the paschal pattern most vividly captured in his final days, death, and resurrection. Of particular note is how the vision, message, and lived pattern of Jesus’ life come together in the special attention he gives to those in the gospels who are variously called “the poor, the blind, the lame, the crippled, the lepers, the hungry, the miserable (those who weep), sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, demoniacs (those possessed by unclean spirits), the persecuted, the downtrodden, the captives, all who labor and are overburdened, the rabble who know nothing of the law, the crowds, the little ones, the least, the last and the babes or the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”1

In the biblical tradition, earthly justice is always linked to the kin(g)dom or reign of God, which is not a place but rather the aliveness of God present and active for the well-being and flourishing of life and love, and to the human desire, commitment, and obligation to participate in making God’s dream come true “on earth as it is in heaven.”

I acknowledge, as many others have, that the word spirituality has become so diffuse that it requires either an adjective in front of it — contemplative, feminist, Wesleyan, liberation, African-American, Ignatian, eucharistic– or a clarifying explanation after it. So be it. Let me continue to speak then as a Christian about Christian spirituality and its relationship to justice with one caveat: whereas it is true that people of no overt spiritual persuasion or motivation can and do participate in and promote justice (often putting to shame those of us who call ourselves Christians), for Christians it is unsupportable to suggest that there is an authentic Christian spirituality that is not inclusive of concern for the most vulnerable and disenfranchised and work for justice.

For Christians, it is necessary to emphasize that spirituality does not refer merely to private religious devotions and practices. It is not synonymous with or limited to such things as petitionary, intercessory, or contemplative prayer, lectio divina, reading scripture, or bible study, the Divine Office, the sacraments, or Sunday liturgy, spiritual direction, fasting, retreats, and ritual. This mistaken assumption is what gives rise to misguided statements like the proverbial comment “I wish s/he/they wouldn’t mix politics and religion.” Anyone who reads the Hebrew prophets and the gospels knows that they are from the beginning inextricably entwined. But if the word spirituality lacks the gravitas of the earthy and earthly and suffers from its association with the non-physical or celestial, the word religion suffers from its strictly institutional associations and its separation from what may be its original etymology – re + ligare meaning that which connects us back to the Divine. Politics, on the other hand, at its core refers to the arrangement of human relationships (and more broadly to the relationships between all life forms) for the good of the commonweal. In this sense, the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:2-17) and the two-part Great Commandment (Mt. 22: 34-40) are both theological and political statements presenting principles intended to ensure a right relationship with God and communal well-being, which is the aim of justice.

In the biblical tradition, the concern for justice is traced to the first creation story (Gen. 1:1-2:3) which is not meant to be a scientific document about the origin of the universe but rather a poetic proclamation of faith that traces everything that exists back to the gratuitousness of divine love. This tradition is guided by the conviction that all human and other-than-human forms of life are the subjects of divine affection and care. Therefore, not to care about others, not to be concerned about justice for each and for all human and other-than-human creatures, landscapes, or habitats is to misunderstand or miss altogether our primordial heritage, the call to reciprocity, and suggests we are out of alignment with the heart of God.

The dissociation of spirituality and working for justice in the minds and lives of many who call themselves Christian (or religious or spiritual or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu etc.) is one of the most pernicious ailments of our time. Whereas justice-making does not require an explicit spirituality or faith, spirituality, and certainly Christian spirituality requires working for justice, otherwise it is, at best, incomplete, and, at worst, simply false and unrelated to the person and work of Christ. Work for justice is not an afterthought, not incidental, not optional. It is an integral, necessary, and dynamic dimension of personal and communal spirituality. Without it, no spirituality could honestly call itself complete or authentic, and certainly not biblical or Christian.

The most creative and effective advertising specialists know how difficult it is to say a lot in a few words. But on this issue it would do us well to try. I would suggest there are more informative, emphatic, and unmistakable monikers than spirituality and social justice. For starters: spirituality in action3 or faith that does justice4 or contemplatives in action5 or justfaith6 or sacred activism7 or enacted theology8 or engaged anything – engaged Buddhism9, engaged Judaism, engaged Christianity.

Spirituality is not a designated section of life cordoned off like VIP parking. It is rather ALL OF LIFE lived from a divine perspective. It is how one lives when s/he understands life as a gift not a given. In reality, there is no such thing as the spiritual life. There is only life lived spiritually (or not). For Christ-ones, for apprentices of Jesus, spirituality is life lived through, with, and in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, giving glory and honor to God. Justice is not the partner of spirituality but a necessary and integral part of an authentic spirituality and a sure sign of our enacted partnership with the Divine.

ENDNOTES

1. Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity, 21.
2. All justice is social in some way. From here on, I will simply use the term justice unless referring to the specific pairing I am challenging.
3. James J. Bacik, Spirituality in Action, 1997.
4. John C. Haughey, ed., The Faith that Does Justice: Examining the Christian Sources for Social Change, 1977, 2006.
5. A notion associated with Jesuit spirituality and the vision of the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola.
6. JustFaith Ministries was birthed in the effort to invite and prepare people of faith for the life-changing and world-changing call of the Gospel to help heal the world and, in so doing, experience a deeper faith, a more fulfilling life, and a community of care and vitality.
7. Sacred Activism is a term coined by Andrew Harvey who explains “Sacred activism is the most potent after effect of our inner spiritual practices.”
8. I first came upon this wonderful term in one of the late Protestant theologian Robert McAfee Brown’s book though I cannot remember which one.
9. A term coined in the 1960’s by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh in reference to using meditation practices and dharma teachings to inform and inspire responsiveness to human forces of unjust suffering.