"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice"
We evoke this sentiment a lot these days. When Black voting rights are blatantly eviscerated in Alabama. When transgender humans are bizarrely cast as… literal monsters? You know the rest of the list. In 1965 MLK Jr popularized the quote by 19th century abolitionist Theodore Parker - one era of struggle drawing hope from another.
This assumption has been a foundational motivator my whole life. Activists bring up this iconic quote for motivation when times are daunting, or for perspective when each day seems like the end of the world. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
But what if it doesn’t?
What if we don’t need to believe it, to have hope at all, in order to stay spiritually alive and ethically engaged?
Because the thing is, we don’t know if that arc will deliver us. That’s the truth. For some of us the precarity of the future presses right against our daily lives, not an anxious relic of ancestral trauma but an attuned nervous system responding to existential, systemic danger. We don’t know if we’re going to get through this. We don’t know if humanity will survive this at all.
Don’t worry, I’m not leaving you there, there’s an alternative to hope.
The alternative is Honesty. It’s being Right Here. It’s admitting again and again - “I don’t know.”
Take a breath. Say “I don’t know.” See what happens.
I just finished 7 weeks of Counting the Omer with over 30 of you (shout out to my incredible students, this year’s Omer practice was REMARKABLE.) In the Kabbalistic practice of Counting the Omer, the closing blessing thanks the Divine for “cleansing and clearing any debris that is in the way of the Light shining through.” Basically, Kabbalistically, we’re fancy tubes channeling life force energy, and it’s our jobs to be accountable to tube maintenence.
Every lie we tell - that’s debris in the way. Every time we conceal the truth to avoid discomfort - that’s debris. In Omer class one student shared how surprised they were when they shared something vulnerable that they’d been avoiding with their mother. It’s not just that their mom handled the news decently. It’s that in general, more love started flowing between them. That’s the spiritual strategy of truth-telling. A bit of dishonesty debris poisons our whole system. A bit of debris removal, ie truth-telling, brings soulful aliveness back to the entire system.
Today’s spiritual activism is asking us to be ruthlessly devoted to reality. It means being the person in the room willing to say “I’m don’t know.” It means offering the dignity of silence instead of offering the panacea of solutions.
Here’s the little trick though. To admit “I don’t know” goes both ways.
I don’t know if we’re going to get through this.
I also don’t know that we won’t.
As terrified as I am, as fucking fucked as this world feels right now, if I’m being honest So Help Me God - we just might survive. My cynicism is just as much a false grasp at control as my optimism.
When I work with clients in Seven Spiritual Direction, this is the leadership we’re developing. How do I discern if my entrenched beliefs are debris in the way of the Light shining through? How do I practice the courage to tolerate the unknowns of my life? I’m not confident that this is the spiritual training that was appropriate in 1853 when Theodore Parker first wrote about that long arc. But I’d bet on it for 2026 (with the caveat that i don’t really know).