Guest Blog by Tabitha Sikich
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I was recently sitting at a local cafe here in Bend, Oregon when a little green card laying in front of me on the table caught my attention. It had these words printed on it:
could
you go to
prison for a cause
you believed
in
The question was a written prod. A nudge at the hero that often lies sleeping within the human heart. And it’s a question I believe everyone ought to consider. For what purpose would you go to prison, renounce everything, give your all?
The prompt reminded me of a biography I read about the life of William Lloyd Garrison, stateside abolitionist, publisher of The Liberator newspaper, and social reformer of the late 1800s. The book is Henry Mayer’s All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. And it tells the story of a man whose passion flung him forward into a life of heralding the demands of justice to a world blinded to the social malefactions sown deep within the seedbed of its culture.
I had initially picked up the book while in search of anecdotes that might serve to capture a reader’s intrigue and at the same time help teach the historical background of the fight for abolition. What I found was a biographical treasure-house and a remarkably inspiring read about a man whose zealous passion for righteousness to prevail drove him to declare war on the injustices of his time.
It was not that Garrison grew into manhood with prior aspirations of a career as self-assigned abolitionist. It was simply his understanding of truth, and his conviction that slavery was an ugly blemish on the face of justice that drove him forward. It was the knowledge of what redemption required by which he was compelled to act.
It seems that we are all aware of the reality that there are things in this world which require us to have real courage. We recognize that there are wrongs in need of being made right. But unlike this man who largely re-shaped a corrupt social structure that stood at the very center of the his people’s culture, most of us have not yet found a cause for which we have the drive to pour ourselves out with fervent abandon. Perhaps we’re in need of being shaken awake.
All on Fire might be the beginning of that needed remedy. Mayer’s book is an inspiring read that confronts indifference squarely in the face, and challenges our human tendency toward blindness to the injustices that currently thrive in our midst. Injustices whose hearts are kept beating by every man and woman who persists in their apathy or ignorance. It is a story about a man whose courageous willingness to step up as a herald emboldens the bravery in each of us to fight for justice.
Let the example of William Lloyd Garrison be a charge: Wake up. Injustice still reigns. And, in Mayer’s own words, “our story is not yet finished.”
