Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker has this to say about the recent conviction of 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen in the Philadelphia, Mississippi, murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner some 41 years ago: justice has at long last been served. The ghosts of the three young men who were killed by Klansmen for registering Negroes to vote during Freedom Summer in 1964 had witnessed convictions of only seven of the eighteen men charged with their deaths ... until now, with the successful prosecution of the supposed minister of God who masterminded their slayings.
Tucker wraps up her column, which chastises all who today find Killen's prosecution inappropriate, by quoting the also-slain Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
No words could be more apt to my own worldview. I could not believe in God if I didn't believe there's a moral arc to the cosmos, bending it ever so slowly toward justice.
Nor could I believe in the moral arc if I did not believe in God. The two ideas are, in my mind, virtually synonymous.
More and more, I find that my belief in God says there are in effect two realities, one of which we perceive with our eyes and the other with our hearts. But the eyes-reality is, ultimately, false. In the end, the heart-reality will win.
The eyes-reality is the one which our egos attach themselves to, which is why, at bottom, Christianity is a matter of "crucifying the private ego" — see my thoughts on this phrase of Father Ron Rolheiser's in To Crucify the Ego (Part I) and To Crucify the Ego (Part II).
I would go so far as to say that every story of heroism — Dr. King's, Jesus's, ours — is fundamentally one in which the hero is led to abandon his everyday, practical, ego-identified reality and follow "the Force" toward justice, where justice is anything that reveals the heart-actuality beneath the "eyes" pseudo-reality.
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