Today while turning over the soil in my front vegetable garden I was listening to a podcast from the public radio show On Being. An Armenian Orthodox theologian, Vigen Guroian, was talking about Restoring the Senses, Gardening and Orthodox Easter. Finding God in the garden by use of our senses was something that brought together my training in Ignatiian spirituality of using the senses with the healing powers of the garden. By use of metaphors and symbols the author is a theologian who contemplates the grand ideas of incarnation, death, and eternity as they are revealed in life and in his garden. His theology is grounded in the soil rather than some abstract concepts.
I ran across another use, or abuse, of metaphor or symbols today in the news. For many years I thought of justice as being something good and full of mercy, like justice for those seeking civil rights or justice for the poor. We often heard that “if you want peace work for justice”. However, these days the word justice has gotten to mean having someone arrested or being convicted of a crime or suffering death or a long prison sentence sentence.
The national news is full of protests calling for justice for the person who shot the 17 year young man in Florida. He has not been charged and the calls are out for the family of the victim to get justice by having him arrested. For all victims of crime ‘getting justice’ means have someone convicted of the crime. When a terrorist is killed politic leaders say ‘Justice has been done”. Justice is widely used to means arresting someone for a crime, convicting the person and inflicting punishment. Justice and getting justice has been reduced to a limited legal version of the word.
Getting Justice for the poor, oppressed, marginalized and outcast never meant punishing them but helping for all to get freedom, quality and fairness. Now we need to get justice for justice
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