The Time that Is Given Us

I’ve been reading this week in the book of Esther. It’s a familiar story, but troubling when I pause to  consider details.

Abusive power, sexual exploitation, unbridled ambition, deliberate instigation of racial violence. It’s an amazingly detailed narrative, set in 5th century BC Persia.

Esther, a young Jewish woman chosen to be queen, is warned by her cousin Mordecai that her people are in danger of genocide. He urges her to act, saying “who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”

With grace, courage and amazing diplomacy, Esther intervenes, risking her own life to save the lives of her fellow Jews scattered throughout the Persian empire. She is rewarded with the estate of her enemy, Haman, and with an edict allowing the Jews to kill and plunder those who sought to kill and plunder them.

That one phrase of Mordecai’s, “for such a time as this,” echoes through times of conflict in Scripture. Gideon, Moses, Joshua, David, Rahab: individuals in the right time and place become pivot points for historical change.

 The same is true through history: individuals make a difference.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday night, after a valiant fight with pancreatic cancer. While many grieve, others rejoice. I find myself reflecting on her courage, tenacity and incredible discipline. Early in her life she envisioned a world in which women’s rights were equal to those of men, and fought for those rights with every tool she could find. 

In her early career she was denied jobs or was paid less than men because of her gender. In the 1970s she co-founded and led the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I look back to the changes won in that decade and those following. I look back to my own jobs lost to gender discrimination, to lower salaries because I was a woman, my own tangles with workmen who wanted to my husband’s signature rather than mine. 

 For some, Bader Ginsburg will be remembered solely for her unyielding defense of a women’a right to abortion. In her 1993 confirmation hearing she said, unequivocally,

 “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices." 

Hold in balance the world she envisioned: a world where men value the work of women, share equally in the care of children, where housing, medical care, education, paid family leave are available to every person, every parent.

I’ll post on that question, of abortion and women’s well-being, next week. What moves me as I reflect on her life today is her tenacity and courage. Her only sister died of meningitis when they were tiny. Her mother died of cancer the day before her high school graduation. She nursed her young husband Martin through law school while caring for a toddler daughter, continuing her own legal studies, fighting for the right to take challenging positions never before given to female students. Together they cared for their two children and four grandchildren, until Martin’s death to cancer in 2010. And for twenty years continued as a Supreme Court justice while fighting her own recurrent bouts with colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer.

When asked how she wanted to be remembered, she said:

 "Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. ‘Cause I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid."

 I find myself returning to a quote from Tolkein’s Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo is lamenting the unsettled times, the unsought adventure confronting his small band of fellow travelers:

 “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Was Ruth Bader Ginsburg right in the way she used her abilities?

 Was the full outcome of Esther’s intervention the best she could have brought about?

 What is it WE are called to do, today, tomorrow, these times we’ve been given?

Talking with a friend pulled in too many directions, I said “I’m trying to do each day the things that only I can do.”

 In 2014 I wrote about the Examen included in Tyler Wigg Steven’s The World Is Not Ours to Save. Some of the questions he asked are ever more in our current context:

• Do we give our support in finances and time to efforts that work for peace among the nations, according to the measure we have received? ·
• Do we consistently seek to pour out any national status accorded to us, using our status to undermined the imbalanced and unjust structures that create status in the first place?
• Where we are disadvantaged, do we refuse to be defined as victims?
• Do we renounce or redirect gain that we receive from injustice, employing any benefit we might receive in the service of those who are oppressed?
• Where we do not occupy a privileged status, do we conduct ourselves in a way that forces oppressors to encounter our full humanity, our being made in the image of God?
• Do we stand firm in the face of unjust threat?
• Do we refuse that anyone in our community be made to fear?

So many in our communities are living in fear, as we wrestle with our own fears, our own anxieties. Injustice compounds in ways that leave us feeling helpless. 

I find myself, more than ever, starting each day in prayer:
What is it I’m to do today?
How will I be available to the need of the world?
How will I use the gifts I’ve been given, the opportunities before me, to further the work God has given me to do?

Years ago someone gave me this poem written by Bonaro W Overstreet in 1955. I quoted it in an early blog post during the sleepy election season of 2013:

(To One Who Doubts the Worth of Doing Anything
If You Can’t Do Everything) 

You say the Little efforts that I make
will do no good:
they never will prevail 
to tip the hovering scale
where Justice hangs in balance.

 I don’t think I ever thought they would.
But I am prejudiced beyond debate
in favor of my right to choose
which side shall feel
the stubborn ounces of my weight.

Since those days, I’ve seen more clearly than I could have imagined: when those stubborn ounces of our weight are used in obedience to God’s calling, doors open, opportunities multiply. We are not the ones who decide the outcome, yet our obedience, courage, discipline, tenacity, are part of the story God is writing in our time.