I’ve had jury duty this week. We always groan when we get the summons, but really the whole process of American justice is fascinating. Everyone has the right to a trial by a jury of their peers. Peers? all these characters gathered at Government square? A trial by jury…not so in many parts of the world. As I gathered in the jury assembly room, along with some three hundred plus other summoned souls from Mobile County, I couldn’t help indulging in one of my favorite pastimes: people watching. There, the drama queen with skin tight jeans and three inch long nails painted some otherworldly color; a farmer with overalls, his face rimpled because of his days in the sun and worry, I imagine, as to the caprices of nature and market…his livelihood of water, fire, wind and earth; and the guy sitting next to me, speaking some form of an Appalachian English derivative. His shirt read, :”Who Dat Nation” …it had to be an extra large, still tight around his belly; shorts and knee socks, a ball cap he politely removed upon entering the room…He was jovial and talkative; I was trying to read my novel, but he insisted on telling about his scars, his knee surgery. “Doc says this’un’s got the arthritis all in it…but I tol him, I’m through wi’d da cuttin. This here scar I got cuttin back the fence row…a shoot a bamboo went all the way through my knuckle; it burned like hell for weeks, sorry pastor…and this’n I done with a skill saw…good thing the plug pulled out the wall or I’d a cut half my hand clean off…My wife says I’m a accident wait’n n’ happen”…His eyes deepened..”but she’s best thing ever happened to me…that’s for shore…He paused and looked at his leathery worn hands, at the ropey veins bearing their commerce, life and its renewal…He’s a good man, acquainted with joy and sorrow, of love and loss…just another ragged soul, like all of us, children of fire, wind, water and earth…a ragged soul reaching for life and pursued by death.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing… solidarity abounds across socio-economic and ethnic and racial lines in our quest for life in the shadow of death…we meet ourselves in the stranger…through welcome and conversation….there is beauty in knowing we are all in this life together, making our way as best we can with all courage and with all humility…our scars a map of the world…a world in pain but always on the mend…It is as if we are all drawn, we humans, and the elements themselves, as one organism towards one cardinal cosummation of justice and mercy; by justice I mean a life of collaborative community, and by mercy I mean amnesty where we’ve failed to pay attention to the beauty in which we live. I hope for the beautiful day wherein we see the truth of our selves in the eyes and hands of stranger…a soul like me…a map of the world like me.
