This Pursuit of American Ruth
Yes, indeed. American Ruth. That’s not a mistake or a missing T. In the absence of a “less”er suffix, it simply means compassion, empathy, and heart. It means care, forgiveness, and love. It means I need to say a word or ten about this line we’ve drawn between the ideals of American goodness and the truth of American depravity. So let me start with something familiar, something most children wrestle with at one point or another.
You see, I’ve never been afraid of monsters. Not the ones under the bed or the ones hiding in the closet. None of that ever felt real enough to me. Though I did, for a few years, run behind the couch whenever Bruce Banner’s eyes turned green and I knew he was about to transform. What scared me wasn’t the existence of monsters, per se, but the monsters hiding inside people I really wanted to like, people I thought were good. I could come out from behind the couch once Banner was the Hulk, but not while he was changing. Not while he was becoming a monster.
Growing up, I had two very confident pictures in my head. First, that America was filled with more good people than bad. And second, that the church was their conscience of goodwill. After all, I had lived everywhere in the nation, from New York to Oregon and several states in between. I had even spent more than a quarter of a normal life in service to the church, witnessing in the streets of Portland and Seattle or traveling to places where poverty and tragedy needed the aid of several people willing to help. Turns out, it’s easy to see more good in the world, more good in people when the ones you surround yourself with are, for the sake of appearances at least, doing good things.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to deny the continued existence of goodness. Every day I go into work, I’m surrounded by hallways of selfless, caring people who love more than they hate, who give more than they take. And for me, going to work, with those kinds of people, is like a return to that childhood illusion, that the world I’m in, that the America I was born into, that the people I pass in my life are genuinely good. Or if they aren’t, all they need is a loving nudge from someone of goodwill, someone to remind them of their better angels.
But for that first quarter of my life, and sometimes in the life I try to live today, I’ve often had to suppress every ounce of evidence from personal experience and easily available information to the contrary. I’ve had to pretend that the man who once tried to molest me in a church was an isolated outsider, that people willing to harm children were always the exception and never the rule. I’ve had to pretend that the kids in an Iowa youth group didn’t slap my head from behind, over and over, trying to get a laugh from the cooler kids in their row, that most children weren’t like them. I’ve had to pretend that when I walked onto the streets of Portland and preached to a man at a Burger King bench, that his apprehensions of God were unorthodox, that when he declared God had turned his back on the earth, all he needed was a sure-fisted reminder that God was still there, that his apprehensions were just blindness, since, as the church always says, “God is good, all the time.”
Even today, it’s easy to compartmentalize the vile and violent behaviors we see, to excuse the officers who gun down black men at a traffic stop as atypical rather than systemic, to rationalize the treatment and detention of immigrants, legal or otherwise, because they’re behind walls and fences we conveniently forget, to allow ourselves to grow numb from one school shooting after another, or the aftermath of blame and hate. It’s almost comical the way we tell ourselves the news is always bad, so if we leave it off, the world is good again.
And then this morning, I got to thinking about that word ruthlessness. I was reading a few pages about the history of American immigration, underlining a section about the host of Texas Rangers who burned Mexicans alive, simply for being Mexican, or existing. It got me thinking about the lynching, defiling, torturing of blacks across the south, or that horrific and racist cause for which we were willing to raise arms against each other in war, to defend the right of one man to bond another in chains. It got me thinking about a laundry list of wrongs, of extraordinary perversions that have gone unchecked because our courts and our government allowed or endorsed them, from internment camps for the Japanese to the forced emigration of Chinese men and women in the west, the constant, forever attack of anyone and everyone who makes us feel the least bit uncomfortable. Ruthless, indeed.
Now if you’re thinking that sounds pretty awful and hopeless, I’d imagine there are two possible camps you fit into. The first is that you’re a bit offended, maybe even a little turned off by the fact that I dared to admit, in one form or another, that America can be and often is evil, verging on monstrous. If you’re in this camp, I won’t apologize. Because yes, it often is, regardless of who’s in charge. And your denial of this past, or your offense in my bringing it up is part of the reason we can’t seem to mature any further as a nation. But the second possible camp you might fit into is that you’re saddened and heartbroken by the reality of who we’ve been and who we are still. If you’re there, feeling sad or disappointed by the tracks of American carnage, I’d like to pose the following passage of Scripture that always seems to make my old Christians friends uncomfortable, squirming a bit in their seats.
“I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” Isaiah 45:7
To the most staunch believer, someone inclined to think that “God is good all the time,” this passage requires a dozen pretzel explanations. But to me, even back when I was a Christian, this was a passage that gave me a peculiar sense of peace. Not because I saw with clarity that evil was real, but because knowing it was real, that something or someone bigger than me had not only made it, but had it under control, gave me comfort, like knowing the sun will rise on the other side of the night, that light doesn’t exist without darkness.
As I said at the onset, I am not afraid of monsters. I have never been afraid of monsters. Only the transition between man and monster has ever made me climb behind a couch. So for me, today, admitting that the world, that America, that people aren’t very good, isn’t a choice to act deflated, to cower and hide. Nor is it my inclination to pretend, to put on a cover and act like everything is better than it is. On the contrary, I know there are monsters out there. I’ve already admitted the transition, admitted that they exist, that they’re here, now, doing monstrous things all around me. At times, I’m quite certain that I have also been a monster.
But what keeps me going, what keeps me from losing hope, is knowing that I work with, that I live with, that I still believe in angels of a certain kind, that even while the world and the nation where I reside may feel darker at times than others, it’s worth waiting for and talking about the coming light. It’s worth continuing this difficult pursuit of American Ruth. Because I can’t settle, because I won’t settle for a world that resigns itself to being ruthless.
