lessons from justice

“Justice work is spiritual work” -Tricia Hersey: The Nap Bishop

Love Supreme-Eryn Allen Kane and Aja Monet

I’ve tried to define and understand the meaning of justice for a few years now. What it means to me and how society defines justice. The definition that resonates with me the most is by Dr. Bernice King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. She says: “Social justice is LOVE applied to systems, policies and culture.” We must then define love, if it can even be defined accurately. Love is beautiful, scary, courageous, and necessary. On the podcast, The Butterfly Effect, host Julie Burns Walker defines love as “the only nutrient that can be expressed.” I come back to this quote often and try to relate it to my understanding of love and grief and justice and freedom. It seems that only through love can we find freedom, but the price of love is sometimes its companion, grief. Grief will always remind us of the love we experienced in this lifetime, and the pain in knowing that the familiar will no longer be the same.

I don’t know how this relates to justice, but with all the losses we face, all the injustice, all the abuse of power, and all the pain we face in this life I try so hard to make sense of it all. What does justice mean if I’m not here to experience it? If “justice work is spiritual work,” how can I rest in that truth. If justice is love applied to all systems, I must acknowledge the spiritual, creative practice it will take to achieve liberation.

Justice is loving myself enough to know that this current society cannot and will not protect me. It is taking time to practice radically loving myself enough that systems of injustice can no longer dictate my worth or stifle my imagination. I am getting free. I am getting justice. And because I think music is such a spiritual expression of life and love please listen to Love Supreme. If nothing in this excerpt made sense, this song and poem captures what I feel.