Write Thru Crisis – Peaceful Justice. The first time I helped someone out who’d been bullied I was a young teen in my upstate New York hometown. Years later, a woman named Marsha told me the story. Some neighborhood boys had lifted her by her overall straps and hung her on a picket fence. I apparently came along and took her down.
I don’t remember the incident. But I do remember how good it made me feel that I corrected this small injustice which loomed so large for her that she’d never forgotten it, or my act of mercy. Like most positive things about me, my merciful instinct originated with Grandma. “If you’re not making the world a better place, why are you here?” she would ask.
Grandma lived by those words, and my guess is that most of you do too. You have your own history of mercies, small and large, remembered or mostly forgotten, when the world was a better place because you were in residence. Moments when you lived by the messages we are meant to impart to others. “Don’t give up. You are not alone. You matter.”
In each of these moments we are agents of peaceful justice. Each of these moments is a story worth telling, worth bringing back to life and honoring. Some of your tales of justice are personal and private, like rescuing a little girl who’s been pinioned on a picket fence. Some are on a grander scale and public, like my daughter in the street, risking safety to shout out her truth.
My daughter shares her peaceful justice story in Twitter shorthand. I follow its episodes with pride and trepidation. I’ve seen video of police and soldiers, armed and ready, too near to her for my comfort. “Ready for what?” I ask myself and don’t want to hear the answer I fear.
Many of our stories of peaceful justice feature real-life heroes we love and admire. They live in our families, friend circles, neighborhoods, classrooms, workplaces. Their stories remind us of the potential for good we all possess, and lift us on a wave of hope. My favorites often feature the Hero in Your Mirror – you, and the gift you are to those you touch with your heart.
My granddaughter is another of my real-life heroes. In high school, she reached beyond her natural self-consciousness to lobby in Washington for social and economic justice. In college, she learned how to carry those causes further. Now, she is poised to fulfill her great-grandmother’s credo and make the world a better place.
These are some of my stories. What are yours? Who are your heroes? What are their deeds of mercy, their efforts for the betterment of others? Don’t forget to remember your own deeds too. Your life will be enriched by telling your stories. Humanity is enriched when we share our passionate and compassionate selves. Write Thru Crisis about Peaceful Justice.
Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.
Alice has spent most of her professional life in publishing, as book editor, literary agent, workshop leader, and author. She’s published 16 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir, and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript That Sells (revised version coming soon). Her current work in progress includes Hero in the Mirror: How to Write Your Best Story of You.
Meet the good people who gifted Alice with their mercy and compassion in her memoir Lifted to the Light: A Story of Struggle and Kindness. Available HERE.
Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.
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A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, as a storyteller, I long to decode its secret. I need to know why it has remained the narrative star it is for so very long with such a vast audience. What exactly did Charles Dickens create that keeps us coming back year after year to be absorbed yet again by this tale?
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because it is essentially a ghost story, filled with things that go bump in the night, most literally, in Scrooge’s case. In the old Alistair Sim film version, which I favor, the gloomy black and white medium, the booming apocalyptic sound effects, Ebenezer’s perpetual scowl. All of it draws me back again year after “rolling year.”
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, as a human being on the path of my life in this world, there is a wound in my heart. It is a deep hole, bored by the continual dropping of hot coals of malice or neglect onto that spot when I was very young. This hollow place begs, every day in every way, to be filled, and the only way to fill it is with love. But this love must be received and absorbed, and the problem is that the heart surrounding the wound has been singed by those hot coals into believing itself unlovable.
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because Ebenezer offers us an answer. He points us toward a road to take to a place where healing can happen, and that place is within ourselves, within each of our hearts. Action is required, of course, as is always the case where redemption stories are concerned, and Scrooge’s story is about redemption for sure. That action is love, in its active verb form. Please, indulge me if I now relate that call to action to myself.
A Wrong Way Home