By Rev. Dr. Kharma R. Amos, Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brunswick, Maine
Writer and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor once told a story about reading the newspaper. She described a map of the world marked with symbols for war, earthquake, famine — black lines separating this country from that, this people from that. She noticed, with some relief, that the place where she lived carried no symbols at all. She looked once and thought, “Thank God I’m an American.” She looked twice and thought, “God, help me, I’m an earthling.” In that small shift, she said, her relationship to the world she lived in changed.
I have been sitting with that image recently, not because it’s new but because the first look is so much easier to fall into than the second. The first look asks: Am I safe? Is my family provided for? Did the bad thing happen to someone else? It is not a wrong question. It is a human one. But it is a small room, and if we stay in it, we start to mistake the walls for the whole world.
We have built a culture that trains us to stay in the first look. We are taught to optimize our own outcomes, protect our own interests, secure our own borders — literal and otherwise — and call that success. We ask what will serve me, what will keep my corner of the map clear of symbols. There’s a way to describe organizing a life around that question. We could call it “Just Us.” Just my family. Just my neighborhood. Just my country. Just people who look like me, vote like me, worship like me, versus those who don’t.
Say that phrase out loud and listen to how it sounds: “Just Us.” It very nearly sounds like justice. That’s not an accident of language I want to lean on too hard, because the words aren’t the same no matter how they sound. The near-rhyme is useful, however, because it marks exactly where the two part ways. “Just us” asks what will keep my circle safe. “Justice” asks what will make every circle thrive. It is the second look Taylor describes, made structural. It is the discipline of staring at the map until we notice that every line on it is one we ourselves drew. We could draw them otherwise.
This shift doesn’t happen all at once, and it doesn’t happen by accident. It happens the way most spiritual disciplines do: imperfectly, repeatedly, on purpose. It happens when we catch ourselves mid-sentence, saying “they” about people we’ve never met, and make ourselves say “we” instead. It happens when we ask, before a vote or the drafting of a policy, not “does this protect me” but “does this let us everyone live and thrive.”
We are, all of us, earthlings first. Nation, party, neighborhood, self — these are the first look. Necessary, maybe, but small. Justice asks us to take the second look, and keep taking it until it becomes the only way we know how to see each other: not as symbols on someone else’s map, not as “them” on the other side of a line, but as us.
Not just us. All of us.
Only from that frame of reference can we truly seek justice.