SURPRIZED BY GOODNESS
Inaugural June Callwood Lecture, Toronto Reference Library
by Mary Jo Leddy

April 26, 2007

          Long ago but not too far away, I gave a talk at Queen’s Park on the occasion of receiving the Ida Nudel Human Rights Award. The year before, the Award had been given to June Callwood.
          So she was in the audience, listening intently, as I offered a brief reflection on an insight which had begun to dawn on me as I had struggled in the long shadow of injustice: evil is rather sadly predictable but goodness is more mysterious and surprising. As the audience began to disperse, June approached me and said that, for her, this was a genuinely fresh idea and one that she would ponder very seriously.
I knew then that she had understood that something foundational was at stake, a determination that could make all the difference in the world. We were each, in different ways, thinking long and hard about whether we could count on goodness and kindness to change the world. Although we had met each other before, that evening was the beginning of a long friendship sustained by many lunches along Bloor Street West and tested in the occasional squirmish with the powers that be.
          So it seems fitting, in this Inaugural Lecture, to think further about something I intuited but barely understood almost twenty five years ago.  It is not that I see more clearly now but I do see reality more surely –perhaps because I have had the privilege of living and working with refugees for the past sixteen years.
          It was never my intention to get involved with refugees. It was not, as they say, part of my game plan. Sixteen years ago there were other “causes” and “issues” I was more concerned about.
It really was by the way, by accident as it were, that I met a refugee, a woman from Eritrea and her five children. It was the moment when I was faced, summoned, commanded. I recall that moment, one now repeated now many times over in various and different ways.
       

 There is a knock at the door.
You can choose not to answer.
 For reasons unclear even to yourself
 you open the door slightly and see
THE EYES and then
the blur of a face as it looks down
and then up again.
It is the face of a stranger,
 the face of a woman.
You do not know who she is;
you do not even know who you are, for sure.
You could close the door. Perhaps she senses this.
The face of a woman with the eyes
says what she cannot speak:
You could say No.
You do not know what to do.
You used to know before
you learned how systems can file
people away… forever.
But you know you are, here and now
the one, the one who must respond:
This YOU must do. There is no other. 
You are faced.              
The stranger moves forward
and fills the frame of your mind
and slowly comes into focus.
And you become focused.
Your life becomes weighty, consequential, significant.

            It is this face to face encounter, more than any sense of guilt or righteousness,  that becomes the core of the ethical experience which has guided my work for justice. Such a moment evokes feelings of compassion which lead to practical forms of kindness. It is within this reach of mercy that I have become convinced of  the necessity (and near impossibility) of justice.
            Systems that Deface
            You see there is a person and so you see there is a problem. You have been faced by someone and you begin to see that the systems they are forced to live in seem designed to deface human beings, to render them invisible, to muffle their cry for justice and their hope for peace. This is a social and even spiritual shock for the one who now knows the refugee by name, who sees the face as the landscape of one particular history.  This person has been given Client ID number and has been filed away in the nice Canadian way. From time to time pro forma letters arrive to signal that another hurdle has been passed and that the end, the place of safety, has been reached.
            However, sometimes the letter says. “You have not been determined to be a Convention Refugee”.  And then, “You have fifteen days to present yourself at the Immigration Detention Centre.” Case closed. Another life is filed away.
            The Immigration officer who issued the form letter never has to see the hand that trembles after the envelope is opened. If you are near, not far away in some clinical distance or protected by the illusion of social objectivity, you tremble and are afraid.

            This is the time of temptation. It is all too easy to begin to demonize particular people who are supposedly in charge of the system that churns out such cruelty.  It is tempting to caricature the struggle as that of US against THEM and indeed such a take on the way things work tends to attract people inclined to this dualistic way of looking at the world.  WE are right and THEY are wrong. WE are on the side of the angels against the demonic forces of evil.
            The struggle is to remain life-size in a time of hyper morality. The refugee advocate, who now knows the real refugee, who is neither better nor worse than the conventional stereotype, must resist the temptation to demonize immigration officials and/or politicians. It is a challenge to continue to believe that the employees of the system are also human and could be summoned to life-size responsibility.
            There is indeed something demonic in this situation but it is not the officials in the system but rather the system itself. The reflections of the political thinker Hannah Arendt on bureaucratic systems are as relevant today as they were more than fifty years ago. She described the ways in which ordinary people doing a good job could contribute to evil of great consequence – without ever knowing it or willing it -- because the system could act as a buffer between their intentions and the consequences of their actions. Bureaucracies, in her analysis, are structured in such a way that it seems as if nobody is responsible for the terrible consequences of the accumulated actions of those within it – not those on the top, who never see the people affected by their decisions; not those on the bottom who see what is happening but who think of themselves as victims who are powerless to change the imperatives of the system. Those on the top can argue that they never really killed anyone while those on the bottom can say that they were only following the orders of someone higher up. 
She makes the important observation that, in some medieval paintings, the devil is depicted as the faceless one, the masked one,  the Nobody. In the various systems which hold the power of life and death over refugees, it often seems that NOBODY is responsible. Some refugees who arrive in Canada learn what happens when NOBODY is responsible. NOBODY can kill you just as anybody or somebody could do so.
            One of the challenges involved in working with refugees, with people who are poor, with those who have been violated, is to summon all concerned to face themselves. It becomes an ethical imperative to say: Systems have been created by human beings and therefore can be changed by human beings; systems must be changed so that human beings can face each other and face the consequences of their actions. statement of someone who holds another by the hand…and trembles.
I remember witnessing an interview between an Immigration officer and a widow from Africa who had arrived in Canada with her two little boys. The officer began by asking the standard questions about why she was afraid for her safety and that of her sons. After he had made some sketchy notes, he looked up and asked, rather sarcastically, “So what do you think you have to contribute to this country.” She thought for a while and then said, quite simply. “My children. I contribute my children.”
“Yeah sure,” he said. He left the room and then we did. As we were going down the corridor towards the exit, I caught sight of him turning a corner and went after him in a fury. “She was right you know. And don’t you know? If someone asked you what might be the most important thing you would contribute with your life, wouldn’t you say your children?” He blushed, looked down and walked away.
            We need to remain life size in a time of hyper morality when we cast for angels and demons in political dramas. We tend to demonize our opponents and can see no good in them. We may think we have to idealize the causes we work for all the while knowing the struggles, the uncertainties and frailties of the people we count on as allies.
            To remain life-size involves reclaiming the ordinary, daily quality of evil. Most of the evil in this world is not done by vicious monsters but by people who are thoughtless, who turn away, who shrug off responsibility, who are simply too busy to care. This is what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil and it is sadly predictable. However, if we take this ordinary evil for granted, the systems of injustice will grind on. Evil may be predictable but it is neither inevitable nor invincible.
            Resisting the banality of evil involves, I believe, a spirited and stubborn refusal to take ordinary goodness for granted. 
            Many blocks south of this library is the Air Canada Centre. Night after night, a young man by the name of Jecob Myoboke goes there to work, for minimum wage. He rolls up the turf after sports events, puts away the floors after rock concerts. As the sun begins to rise, he goes home and sleeps for three hours before he goes onto his next job at a garage.  He has arranged his work so that he can be home in time to cook supper for his younger brother, so he can sure Abel does his homework and says his prayers at night. The younger brother Abel is a soccer star, someone who dances with the stars and who hopes to go to university.       Jecob and Abel came to Romero House Rwanda after they had been orphaned during the genocide. Jecob was 15 and Abel was 12.  They do not know who brought them to Canada or why. They huddled together in the bus terminal on Bay Street for two days until person from Africa spoke to them in their own language and then phoned Romero House. Jecob has been working since he was 15 to support his little brother.
            It is such as he, it is such daily goodness, that upholds this city.
            On the street where I live there is a mother who keeps herself awake a night by making lovely cards with dried flowers, who keeps herself awake so she can be attentive to the breathing of her severely disabled sun. It is such as she who sustain our neighbourhood. It is such as the hundreds, the thousands, of mothers and fathers who awaken every night to the sound of their child crying,  and who stay awake until the child settles. And who go to work tired and who are ready to wake up in the middle of the night again and again.  This is the ordinary goodness and generosity that sustains the fabric of our society.
            North of this city, in a remote and vast area called the Conroy Marsh, a monk chants in the forest although hardly anyone hears.  A few years ago, a friend and I discovered his one room log “monastery” when we had lost our way while looking for a camping spot. The monk lives on berries, vegetables and fish. His life has become a praiseworthy chant. It is such as these who sustain the universe.
            This is ordinary goodness and we are surrounded and upheld by it everyday. It should never be taken for granted. We need to take note of goodness.

            You and I are a mix of the best and the worst; we are fallible, flawed and fabulously generous at times. Yet which way do we bend, which way do we tend? Which way does the universe tend? Martin Luther King believed that “The arc of the moral universe is long but it tends towards justice.”
You and I have a very fundamental choice to make. We must decide whether we are going to believe that people tend towards goodness or tend towards evil. This is not only a philosophical or theological question but also a matter of great personal and political importance. How we weigh in on this question will make a great difference in our lives and in the world in which we live and move and have our being. The evidence before us is inconclusive: the earth holds the memory of genocide and environmental degredation; it also preserves the relics of great beauty and social conservation. In the end, how we weigh in on the world with our lives becomes something like an act of faith.
When we sift and sort our own lives do we expect that we are better than we know or worse than we think?  When we lobby for social change are we going to expect people to do the right thing or will we expect indifference and hostility?
            The astonishing reality is that our belief in the basic tendency of human beings will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
            If we expect the best in others, and in ourselves, we will sometimes be disappointed but we will, more often than not, find the good that we are looking for. If we expect the worst in others, and in ourselves, we will probably find it.
We are living in perilous times, our planet is at risk, our country is being auctioned away, company by company. In the midst of these global and national crises, there are politicians who are willing to appeal to the worst in us -- who tell us that what matters most to us is money, who play to our fears of those who are not like us, who say that we must look after ourselves rather than caring about the common good. These politicians will find the selfish, snarling citizens they are catering to.
Nevertheless, I believe that he future will belong to politicians and public figures who summon what is best in us and what is good in this country – who remind us that we can act out of great decency and generosity, that we are capable of caring about more than ourselves, capable of investing in a future that we might never see, capable of loving this fragile and astonishing country called Canada, capable of caring about the earth as our common good.
During the last week, I have reflected on the enormous outpouring of gratitude for the life of June Callwood. My sense is that people were touched by her faith in what was best in us. She did not come to this belief easily or lightly – she was too intelligent and perceptive for that. Nevertheless, she weighed in with her life and chose to give more weight to goodness and kindness.
            It is easy and tempting to define ourselves in terms of who or what we are against. The rest of the country may define itself by being against Toronto or we may all define Canada by being against the United States. Socially conscious people may define themselves by being against injustice, against racism, against violence. The tragic reality is that we will inevitably become like that which we are fighting against. In long struggle against injustice, racism and violence, we will become unjust, racist and violent. It makes all the difference in the world whether we are FOR justice or AGAINST injustice. If you look at injustice long enough it goes through your eyes to the back of your head and you begin to replicate the patterns of thought that you have become all too familiar with.
             
            Let me conclude by returning to the experience of seeing a problem because you have first seen a person. This person is not an abstraction, a cause, an issue, an object of social concern. This person has a name and a face and, in time, you have a great affection for her and her children and the husband and father who finally arrives. This is who you are for. This is why you can think with affection and act with affection. The struggle and failure will continue, social analysis and strategizing will become even more imperative and the meetings will still be boring and interminable.
            Nevertheless, you will know who you are for and why you are acting for social justice. Then it gets a little easier to begin to think about how to effect change. For sure, this I know for sure.
            Thank you June.