Individuals can say or do something wrong, such as discriminate, and we will look upon it as misguided or a mistake. Who among us hasn’t at some time looked at someone who is unshaven, dirty, and smelling bad and chosen not to stay in the same room? You get my meaning. There are degrees of wrong — murder versus running a stop sign, for instance.
But what happens when individual minor acts of wrong become collective? What happens when clueless acts multiply into a collective failure to be the kind of a community that God calls us to be? Growing up in the South in the 50’s and 60’s I know how that was like — an act of discrimination here, an unkind word said here, a blind eye to evil turned away, and all of a sudden, you have a collective community where the accepted norm of behavior was offensive to the eyes of God.
This particular Lent, we are each charged not only with individual self-examination, but also an examination of the unjust practices of our institutions and communities. It is not acceptable to merely say these practices have nothing to do with us. If we turn our backs, we are more than lost, we are part of the communities’ problem.
During Holy Week spend a little time meditating and praying about our collective failures, and ask how you can be part of the solution.
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