Binding Wounds and Unbinding Chains

Every second, 1 ½ acres of rainforest suffer deforestation. If destruction were to stop immediately, it would take at least 4,000 years for the ecosystem to recover.[i]

1 out of every 100 American citizens, a total of 2.4 million adults, is incarcerated in the United States.[ii]

1 in every 6 women in the U.S. will be sexually assaulted. Only 1 in every 16 rapists will ever see the inside of a jail.[iii]

Today, 22,000 children will die for no other reason than poverty.[iv]

As many as 300,000 people have died during the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, with another 2.7 million, now refugees, displaced.[v]

This is the world in which we live. And frankly, there are days when I do not want to get out of bed. Some days, I prefer the soft numbness and lethargy of sleep, television, Facebook, Google, and YouTube. I sit there, staring at the television or computer screen—because it is easier.

The statistics backfired. Instead of galvanizing my generation and others like it into action, they overwhelmed us with the staggering magnitude of the world’s suffering. Rather than face the agony of it all, we tuned out, we shut down. Powerlessness was disguised as apathy, hopelessness as hedonism.

It is easier to sleep, to party, to go online, than it is to contemplate the complexities of society’s injustices, to take action that addresses both systemic and immediate need, to develop relationships that entail trust and commitment (probably even disappointment), to care about the thousands, maybe millions, of people that—being honest—we cannot save today.

It is easier, and it is more realistic, is it not? More practical. The world’s problems are too big, too complex, to solve. Even when we try, the results often disappoint. The liberator of that post-colonial country becomes a dictator. The campaign to end worker exploitation concludes not with improved working conditions, but no working conditions at all: pure joblessness. We minister at a prison, or a homeless shelter, or a soup kitchen, but the people just keep coming—and nothing we do seems to change the systems that send them. If this is reality, and if it cannot be changed, then, yes, it is better to have a good time and not worry about any of it.

But the tactics of a generation seeking escape are not working. More and more of us are depressed, divorced, swallowing mouthfuls of anxiety medication. The news only screams louder about how the world is falling apart. Escaping to our own private lives is not any better, any simpler. An individual’s suffering, family life, quest for meaning and purpose, are just as convoluted and difficult to tackle as the economic crisis facing the United States.

Sartre was right: there is no exit. There is no escape, not in television, not in social media, not anywhere. But Sartre did not argue for apathy or surrender. Sartre was a political activist, a philosopher, a man who sought, in all of his existentialism, to claim responsibility and creative power for each moment. Sartre wrote, “In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one’s life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence.”[vi]

The realization that escape is impossible is call not for despair but for engagement. If we cannot escape “choice,” if we cannot recuse our seats at the table and retreat to a private, neutral corner, then we pull up our chairs and we get down to business. We risk choosing. We lay it all on the table, life itself. All for the sake of connection and creativity, seeing and being seen by the Other across the table, bound no longer to passivity. What Sartre was describing was empowerment—humans empowered to live and die as free agents.

Sartre, of course, conceived this unbounded-ness as freedom even from a Creator: without a creator, humans are free, Sartre thought, to create themselves. But it is precisely to God, the infinite, that we shall look, because without God, we remain bound to our finitude. Without God, we are in fact not free at all and the justice we seek will be nothing more than the perpetuation of our own limitations and tyrannies. For Unbound: An Interactive Journal of Christian Social Justice, then, the unbounded-ness means freedom from an “existence determined” by human systems that exploit and oppress: the freedom to think outside of their master narratives; the freedom to bind the wounds they have inflicted; and the freedom to act as if our beings exist in intimate and inextricable relationship with the Creator—a God who is unbound to everything except God’s own nature (love, relationality) and who invites us to participate in that unbounded-ness.

Unbound is, therefore, committed to pursuing freedom for the kind of extravagant, radical social justice and community made real by a man who did in fact lay it all on the line, his life included—the God-human who embodied the reconciliation of human finitude and divine possibility—that Jesus of Nazareth who became the Other, who became one of the oppressed and told us in no uncertain terms where we might find him: on the street, in the prison, in the hospital, and among “illegal” immigrants (Mt. 25).