Imagining the Moral Arc

For 170 years, religious liberals have been inspired by Rev. Theodore Parker’s imagining of a moral arc to the universe. Like Parker, we may not fully understand that universe, can only see a “little ways” along the arc, but still hold fast to the belief that “it bends toward justice.” It is a compelling vision, and I have turned to it many times. But a prophetic moral imagination must remind us that Parker did not quite imagine enough – his vision creates a risk of complacency, of thinking and hoping the moral arc bends on its own and that it always and inevitably “bends toward justice.” We bend the arc, or it does not bend at all. To think about a different, a better, and a more just universe is not enough. Hope is insufficient on its own. “Hope,” as James Luther Adams wrote, “is a virtue, but only when it is accompanied by prediction and by the daring venture of new decision.”  Our congregations should imagine the ways we can make those daring new decisions, even and especially when they are uncomfortable.

Prodding ourselves out of comfort – toward a world that sometimes feels like it is only imaginary – is part of what church is for. I hope people seek religious community at least in part to find ways to confront the risk that comes with trying to be present to, for and in the world, and in the hope that we need not imagine and create alone. Cannot do it alone. Moral imagination calls us to brave being in the world as it is while also imagining and paving the path to how it could be. It also calls us to grace for the times we and others stray from that path, or when we blaze a path in the wrong direction. It does not imagine our perfection. Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd’s notion of a form of metanoia “that holds that all of life should be an opportunity for renewal” offers a path for spiritual resilience in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and human fallibility. A practice and theology of atonement, McDonald Ladd writes in her brilliant book After the Good News, would allow us to “take our broken dreams, our vicious memories, our sins both great and small and bless them for the chance they give us to begin again.” To imagine a new way forward. This kind of religious imagination means having the courage to see our potential and to strive toward the honest – and often messy – connection between people, to keep reaching for the link between what we do and how we act and the sense of our purpose, our potential, our power and joy in being.

I strive to be a Unitarian Universalist minister who helps people imagine a sacred more. To imagine bravely is to see the world – its beauty and potential, its love and interconnection, as well as its silence and indifference, its anger and hate and fear – and to love it enough to keep trying to make it better, to make ourselves and each other better. It is to know we cannot fix everything, but we might be able to transform something for the better if we try. To accept that to try will inevitably mean to sometimes fail, and to try anyway. To always remember, to accept, that we, and the people we love, the people we can’t stand, the beautiful and breaking world we inhabit together, all of this is never complete, and never perfect. To let it transform and to transform us.