The title “Every Single Other” comes from a kind of mantra we recite at the end of worship at Peace Christian Church which my partner and I, both retired ordained Christian ministers, attend. The congregation is affiliated with two theologically progressive denominations in the United States, the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

“Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s spirit is in them – living and breathing God. Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life.” Ro 8:5-6 (The Message Peterson translation)

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton was on his customary shopping rounds in Louisville, waiting on a busy downtown street for the traffic light to change.  The sidewalks were crowded with people and suddenly Merton experienced what he described as an epiphany. He saw each person as he imagined God saw them.  All of them in search of meaning and joy.  All in need of love.  He wrote in his Confessions of a Guilty Bystander “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness.” Merton’s “epiphany” helped guide him for the rest of his life.

A former member of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, Michael Harrington, wrote the small book that helped guide the policies and programs of the Kennedy and Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty.  The Other America detailed with current statistics the suffering of the poor from hunger, illnesses, violence and broken families.  It helped lay the groundwork for the civil and human rights legislation that moved the nation closer to its founding vision of “liberty and justice for all”.  It helped lay the groundwork for Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and expanded aid for persons injured at work.  

I’ve thought about that book while watching and supporting the nationwide Poor People’s Campaign over the last two and a half years.  The Campaign now is active in organizing and partnering with other groups in calls for a living wage, for union representation of workers, for Medicare for All, for giving voice to the demands of low wage workers and the unemployed.  The Campaign highlights current conditions of 140 million poor and low income persons in the U.S. Since the 60’s little has been done legislatively to improve housing, health care, and wage security for the “other America”.  Many view state and federal policies after 1980 as constituting a “war on the poor” in contrast to the progress of the War on Poverty towards a more just society.

Years after his epiphany on the Louisville street corner, Merton wrote a sentence that for me beautifully captures the struggle we all, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, those with and without faith in a loving Creator, face in loving “every single other”.  It returns to me again and again as a prayer to leave behind “obsession with the self” and be freed to lead a more “spacious life”. Merton wrote, “If today I hear God’s voice, may I not reject a softer, more compassionate heart.”  With the spirit of this prayer in mind, I wrote a poem/prayer shortly before the U.S. presidential election that imagines the hardening of heart we must overcome to help bring about a government “of, by and for the people” (Lincoln’s description of our political system).  The poem tries to direct our attention to those rendered voiceless and to some of the characteristics of a heart that has hardened.

Election Time in the Super Power

Hear our prayer, O Lord –

         Of the silenced, unseen, unheard,

         Of the devalued and degraded,

         Of those known by their labels,

         Of all considered disposable when they

             are considered at all.

Let our cries come to You, O Lord –

By those who confuse ambition with conviction,

By neighbors who cede power

     to one who boasts of his own.

By all brought up to doubt and never trust,

  By all who seek to preserve their

           dignity with falsehood,

Hear our prayer, O Lord  –

For us whose ‘we’ keeps shrinking,

       For the others known by their fangs,

       For those who must prepare for a future in peril,         

For us all whose freedom comes at a cost.