Voices That Should Be Heard

 

Good People

“For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.”

Krista Tippett (Speaking of Faith)

          When I am running low on respect for humanity, I often turn to people who seem to float above the fray. Krista Tippett is one of those. She hosts a weekly radio show called On Being, in which she interviews progressive theologians, writers and teachers on questions of their faith and beliefs and what they hope and pray for. Speaking with them, she gives an open mic to the very voices she believes should be heard to balance out the noise of the loud and aggressive ones that dominate in our society today.

          Progressive theologians are not deaf to the divisive voices or the misused passages from the holy books, but they hold tightly to the eternal teachings of those books and do not abandon their moral compass to shine in the spotlight. They are not immune to the world’s darkness, but they do not let it suck them in. Here’s what Tippett says about the people she interviews on her NPR show: “But if I’ve learned anything, it is that goodness prevails, not in the absence of reasons to despair, but in spite of them. If we wait for clean heroes and clear choices and evidence on our side to act, we will wait forever…people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness and contend openly with darkness all of their days.”

          On the news last night, footage was shown of desperate Ukrainians crossing borders to save themselves and their children. They were met on the other side, in Poland, by people with food—soup and sandwiches—and warm places to sleep. The Polish people could not dispel the darkness of Russian aggression, but they could provide the necessities of life and the nurturing warmth to reassure a terrified, cold, and weary population that goodness still exists, that kindness can still be found, and that people you don’t even know care about you.

          It is up to us to tune our eyes and ears to goodness. It’s much easier to get caught up in the dissonance and volume of the nay-sayers and harpies that dominate our political and media culture—because it’s all around us all the time. But it cannot overwhelm the light coming from good-hearted people giving of themselves to “do unto others what they would have others do unto them.” That is still the golden rule despite all the voices that tell us to “fight and win.” It is simply a different battle that good people want to fight and win—the one that saves hearts and souls and tummies and sore feet and freezing hands and broken lives.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane