Justice: Let it RAIN!

I confess that I have misunderstood the Bioneers.  I thought that they were dreamers who would not even see a hungry person while rushing to clean up a river.  There’s a lot of land conservancy activity up here, a lot of bird counting and removal of dams to let the fish spawn more naturally.   So I won’t beat myself up for turning my back on the Bioneers in order to give my time to working with homelessness and poverty.  But I’m glad I discovered that they’re into justice, too.  It is Bioneers weekend here, and their promotional information has been everywhere for the past two months.  About a month ago, I bothered to read the elegantly clear and simple motto for the Great Lakes Bioneers 9^th Annual Conference:” Inspiring Action for People and Planet”.  The word “People” jumped out at me

, and I submitted a too-late request to present a program on sustainability from a societal perspective, sustainable communities based on mutually caring relationships. 

My proposal was too late, I was told, but there was need for someone to coordinate an activity for the pre-conference youth day on Friday, when middle school and high school groups would come in.  They needed someone to work with a “Graffiti Wall” that would invite the students to express how they would be Bioneers.  Kathy and I decided we’d put banner paper six feet high along the 15’ wall we were given, and ask the groups to choose one of their members to stand against the wall and take a pose that would suggest caring about people, caring about nature.  The group would outline their silhouette, then choose a body part and draw or write how they’d use that body part to care. 

It started out smoothly.  The first group was a dozen sweet kids who were comfortable with themselves and with each other, who felt free to get right into it, to suggest poses.  It was a guy who posed, holding his hands above his head in the shape of a heart.  The kids decorated his silhouette with hopeful maxims appropriate to the theme.  The second and third groups went likewise.  But the fourth group consisted of big, lumbering, posturing high school kids who had the need to show their strength, to be cool, to act above all this stuff.  When we mentioned taking a pose, one flashed a gang sign; one lifted his tee-shirt sleeve to expose a tattoo.  Tattoo Man took a pose against the wall, not waiting for his group to consider alternatives.  As he raised his arms in a show of strength, they fell into active compliance, drawing the outline of his fullback body onto the paper on the wall.  When he stepped away from the wall, the group surrounded the shape and began laughing as they drew.  The smaller kids in the groups on both sides of them looked guardedly at them, seeming intimidated by their size and bravado, and perhaps their racial diversity, unusual here.  Parents chaperoning the other groups looked at Kathy and me with worry over what they were writing on their silhouette of Tattoo Man, focused as they were on the center of the body, the part that’s normally considered private.  I walked over and with feigned calm reminded them that younger kids would be looking at what they wrote and drew, so they should be careful.  And I returned to my observation seat across the hall with somewhat feigned trust in them, and feigned confidence in myself.

When they had all stepped back from the wall, their silhouette was quite distinct from the rest.  Its lines were darker and heavier, its physique was more imposing, and it bore real “tags”, intricately drawn combinations of letters, each forming the graffito of the particular artist.  They were pros.  I confess to feeling relief as they turned to move on to the next exercise.  But for the next two hours of the session, as docile groups came by and participated and added their shapes to the eventually well-filled wall, my eyes kept going to the words that the tough group had scrawled across the chest of Tattoo Man: Let Justice Rain. 

Let Justice Rain.  I confess that my proof-reading self questioned their use of the word rain thinking that they had intended to use the word reign.  But I noticed that they had drawn rows and rows of drops across the chest, surrounding those words.  I thought of the radical difference between the homonyms.  Rain falls, drops freely – Scripture suggests, moreover, that is falls on the just and the unjust, equitably, universally.  Reigning, on the other hand, involves power, and power does so often corrupt, and destroy.

So I’m grateful to those big, lumbering, posturing young people from Suttons Bay who gathered in close to each other, while some of us felt uncomfortable with their size and their strength and their difference from us, and who laughed and drew and tagged and left on that paper and in my heart the deepest truth of the day.  Justice, if it is to come, will come like rain.  It will rain on the trees that need to be hugged and on the homeless and hungry who need to be sheltered and fed. It will fall on the land that is to be preserved, and on the fish that need to spawn, and on the youth who are so big and different and vocal with each other that we are afraid or untrusting.  It will rain on the gated communities along the water and on the tents that are hidden in the woods until Safe Harbor opens.  It will rain on Leelanau County’s pristine coastland and on Kalkaska County’s fallow fields.  Oh, yes, and Justice will rain on us, too, and hopefully it will inspire in us “Action for People and Planet”.