Some thoughts on justice, deserving, and God

I started this as a reply to social justice definitions thread but it has such a wider relevance that I decided to put it in its own thread.

To throw more confusion into the mix I don’t believe in justice.

Judith posted a good quote today that can explain:

If you are willing to look at another person's behaviour toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time cease to react at all.

Yogi Bhajan

Some time ago I worried very much over justice but eventually just got tired of it.

People’s actions—including those of high government officials—belong to none but to themselves and all are within their freedom to do. We may disagree in regards to their rightness but we have to deal with them nonetheless. Things do come around and what we have done to others, most often happens to us in turn. Sometimes we don’t know why things happen to us. But we have the choice to face hardship whenever it arises, and tend to ourself and others with a sense of loving care, or we can protest and turn to anger and resistance. The former accepts and embraces the way of things, like going into a delicate knot and slowly, caringly detangling it. The latter is like throwing the yarn on the floor, tearing at it, stomping on it. I will leave it to you to decide which will help.

Whenever I feel like getting angry I know I’m worn too thin. I don’t want to be like that and it doesn’t matter what I “deserve” or don’t deserve, I need to care for myself for the sake of all sentient beings. I need to rest and recover myself emotionally and physically. Eat something nourishing, sleep well, go for a long walk somewhere I haven’t been in a while, somewhere that makes me happy. I am the only one who can decide that I am worth caring for like this, nobody else. If I weren’t born no one would bat an eyelid. For some reason my parents believed I was worth raising and didn’t leave me to die on some mountaintop.

In nature everyone eats everyone else. There is a fairness, a coming-round, to it all, but on an individual scale we’re often left to wonder: do I deserve to be alive in this world? Do I deserve life more than the parsnips and potatoes and garlic I eat, or the acorns? The hen-of-the-woods and the oyster mushroom, the sunflower or pumpkin seed, the verdure of the nettle? What about the trees and grasses that once grew in the place where I live and cook and shelter from the whirling of the wind, the freezing of winter’s bite, the sun’s cruel midday glare?—did those plants deserve to be uprooted? Where I keep acorns that could have gone to the squirrels, dock-leaves that could have gone to the snails, but instead go to feeding my own life? Does the deer deserve the bite of the coyote, the tree the hard gnawing of the worm, the evil itch of the fungus infecting their life-bark? Does the parsnip, unearthed, deserve the evil dryness of the open air, the cruel warmth of the cooking-fire, the gnawing of the tooth? Or the little acorn, with such grand hopes, cracked and leached and chewed, boiled and chewed by another child of that land, a little sibling who has no mighty aspirations, little human being, little creature bound to the low places?

Do I deserve the medicines of the land that heal, that bring life, bring vitality and restore warmth? Does the earth deserve the rain that falls? Does the rock deserve the soil that grows?—that clothes it in excellence, in abundance, in beauty, in life? What of the sky—does it deserve the clouds that float through it, bringing life to the land? Do we deserve the warmth of the sun, bringing us energy and life and strength? Does the empty sky deserve the splendor of stars, of constellations, of the Milky Way? Are stars and planets the bane, the irritation of empty space? Are they divinely given, given by love, afforded by the Splendid, the Wondrous, by Mercy, by Grace?

Is the emptiness of the empty sky forgiven with the gift of stars?

Is the coldness of the sky forgiven with the sun? Is the dryness of the dry wind forgiven with clouds, with rain? Is the hardness of the ground forgiven with soft earth, with deep black mountain earth, with broad & beloved valley earth, with the white earth of the mountains, red earth of the valleys, with splendid earth, life-giving earth, hemlock earth, birch earth, maple earth, oak earth, sycamore & spruce earth, ash & pine earth?—forgiven with the sweetness of rain, the sweetness of water touching the dry land, soaking in, soaking deeply, making to live and fully filling with aliveness, with divinity, with the sweet scent of grass in the wind, sweet flower of the Joe-pye and the goldenrod, the wild carrot, crowned all over with the divine splendor of the bindweed-bloom, best of flowers, beloved by the pickerel-weed, by the shimmering of the lake, the water-flowers diverse in their splendor, the blueberries and huckleberries, the pines and the grape-boughs sweetly hanging over good earth—is the wantonness of the human soul, the childish nature within us—is it forgiven by the gifts we are given, the fruit we are afforded, handed down from Heaven, from the land, abundant earth, lovely earth?—is the evil within us not forgiven with the grace of wisdom to overcome, the wisdom to compassion, to kindness, to generosity and benevolence, the opportunity to heal what is broken, to mend what is wounded? Is this not wondrous—what, if any of it, is deserved by the greedy recipient, the hungry one who isn’t grateful yet, who forgets, who screams and stomps around, not realizing the wondrous that has been given to them? Do we, hungry and greedy, deserve the light, the warmth of the sun, the gifts of the black meadow, deep black mountain earth, or are we forgiven for our hunger, our eating of sweet apples, sweet parsnips of the meadow, drinking well, deeply, drinking the medicines of the land, good life imbibing into ourselves, our strange, undeserving selves in all our cruelty, our love, our splendor?—forgiven for these things by our ancestors, who feed us and forgive us for our hungry mouths, the pain and stress we cause to them? Does the human being deserve God?

I don’t think this is a question of deserving. Deserving has its limits and it cannot satisfy us here. No being lives because they deserve to live; they live because they have been loved and love has kept them alive. I did nothing to deserve life, nor did the squirrel, or the acorn, or the mouse, or the dock. We live by the love and grace of the gods/God.

And so there is no telling what a person “should” get, but in gratitude and recognition of the love that this planet affords us, in gratitude to our ancestors, to our communities, to all the diverse beings and humans who have helped us and sustained us and allowed us this wondrous gift of life, we can make the choice to live in a way that nourishes, that takes and gives thanks. Or we can live in hatred, and live in a way that destroys, that restricts and punishes and walls off and resists that which is. That is the immediate, personal choice we are left to make every single day of our life—no, every hour, or minute, of our life—do we react to difficulty by greed and hatred (I deserve, they deserve), by grasping or pushing away, or do we choose to do the work of really nourishing life in the ways that we can, holding love for ourselves and others, the same way that our parents may have raised us and fed us despite our not deserving it (being horrible greedy smelly noisy infants), the same way that the heavens rain down water of life on the earth, and we eventually learn to pay the sky back with gratitude, the way the parsnips give us delicious roots from the meadow—and somehow benefit in the end from all the digging?

Sometimes people treat me in ways where I am reminded that that is the exact way I treated others when I was younger, and now I have to deal with it. But this time I can choose to react the best I can by nourishing, loving, understanding, accepting. That way these things get resolved. We can act with anger, indignation and self-pity but then we have harmed others and ourselves in the process. Maybe oftentimes, as the Buddhists suggest, the bad things that happen to us are things from a previous life (or sometimes this one) that come around. At the very least, each of us has all the cruelty and all the love of our humanity, of all life.

It is still important to nourish ourselves and get away from people who are making it difficult to stay sane. That is the first priority! Oftentimes it’s easy to be judgmental of oneself and believe that one is lazy, a horrible person, etc. when the truth is you’re just tired and maybe a little sick. Some people don’t have this problem but many including myself do, of pushing ourselves too hard to be good in a way that’s not sustainable and not healing.

The saint doesn’t become a saint by destroying and purging their potential for evil and waywardness, rather, they can see and understand the potential for evil within themself and that is what gives them such compassion, such power. This is the same as kinship with all life. You see yourself in all beings, great and small, loving and cruel, of every species, and understanding yourself, you can see them as well; seeing them, you understand yourself. The evil within you is the evil within all beings, that’s why it is called “Devil”; it can come to anyone, anyone at all, but one must be looking out for it. And the good within you is the same good within all beings; that is why it is called “God”.(1)


1. This is confusing but I don’t know how else to put it. I am not saying that God is only a metaphor for love. I could just as easily say that all love is a metaphor for God. I believe they are one and the same. It is like “water”. Is water only the ocean, or is it just this cup of water I am holding? Is “father” only my personal father, or is it Heaven as well? And so on and so forth. What is the metaphor, what the original? I would say the entire world is composed of metaphor.

As far as justice and necessity go, some may say that they deserve to have their needs met. I feel that this view seems to dissolve when we consider the truth of birth and death. Before existing, we don’t exist, and after existing, we don’t exist (as a distinct being or pattern of energies). Now we exist. Why is that? Each of us could have not been born, and could have died yesterday. That alone should be cause for jubilation. Yes, Hallelujah! Somehow we are here! Do we need to be here? It is like the song, “Ten thousand were drowned that never were born”. Our being according to the way of God is a lamentation to some but a joy to others and to ourselves. Each of us was meant to be but sometimes the reasons are obscure. Life is a collecting, death is a scattering. The old tree dies and makes food for the fungus, soil for the wildflowers. When it falls, a new, beautiful, healthy young tree grows out of its remains.

In some mythologies, like the Norse, the world is created by the death and decay of a primordial being. They certainly knew their forest ecology, knew the way a dead sheep could make a meal for ten, a dead cow a meal for twenty.

“No one is older than a dead child, and Pengzu died young”, said Zhuang Zhou. What are we before we were born, what do we become after we die? Are we just our ghosts, or just our divine spirits? Do we count our scattering aggregates in with these things?

We do not know why we live. The mosquitoes nibble at us and they feed the gods our blood at the altar of life. Things nibble at us, people nibble at us. It isn’t fair, but it is. We can wave them off but they’ll be back. Are these things bad, or do they work for the splendor of life? Is the Devil an evil one, or is he, too, a son of God? The ways of things are numerous and obscure, but there is a way above the clouds, a way to the way of God. This way is winding and unknowable; its beginning is long before the gathering of birth, its ending long after the scattering of death. So let us offer all our sorrows as sacrifice to the Holy! A little hole in me lets the light shine through. But there’s no need to walk right at suffering; there is enough sorrow in life, enough hardship for a lifetime that God has given to us. The old tree needed to live a long time before it could fall and become food for the young!

Just to see it for what it is, and then to wave off the mosquito, to eat and fill our rumbling bellies, drink to soothe our parched throats; to sow good seeds in good earth and watch them prosper, or watch them carried off by the raccoons, the mink; yes, there is enough sorrow on this earth, and it comes like mosquitoes through an open window, comes like a mink to steal a chicken in the night, a plague to eat our children, a disease to eat away at the old. We needn’t make any sorrow for anyone, needn’t be harsh on our God-beloved souls. But certainly, we don’t “deserve” things any more than the mosquito “deserves” our blood.

Well said!

I always appreciate your thoughtful views.
As with so many words, justice might have many levels of meaning depending on who's using the word and in what context?

thank you for sharing your 'food for thought' 💜


(...and now I see a second post to read)