Giving Up Indifference for Lent
by Jim Wallis
Here is what Pope Francis said to the world in his Lenten message: “Indifference to our neighbor and to God also represents a real temptation for us Christians. Each year during Lent we need to hear once more the voice of the prophets who cry out and trouble our conscience.“
Instead of giving up chocolate or alcohol for Lent, the pope seems to want us to give up our indifference to others. He continued: “We end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.“
Francis’s focus on the “indifference to our neighbor” hit me hard as I am on the road for my new book America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America. We have been to six cities so far — Chicago, the Twin Cities, St. Louis/Ferguson, Atlanta, New York, and Washington, D.C.; next we head to the West Coast. The “town meetings” we are doing have evoked some extremely honest conversation from very multiracial audiences.
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