I recently re-read Harper
Lee’s 1960 classic To Kill a Mockingbird,
and I had forgotten that the novel is not simply about a lawyer and his pursuit
of justice. At its core, it is a story about growing up, about coming of age in
a world that does not always make sense and is not always safe and predictable.
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| Courtesy Emily Hopkins |
That a lawyer, Atticus
Finch, is the steadying anchor and a true compass in an upside-down world, is a
lawyer’s bonus that has made for hundreds of law review articles and countless
Continuing Legal Education programs. Yet the protagonists of the story are
children. Jean Louise Finch, or “Scout”—six-years old at the beginning of the
novel—grows into the wider world over three summers, and she tells of these
formative years in retrospect, through her childish eyes. The story is
beautiful mainly because of these eyes and their perspective on the world, a
world that seems to be changing. Her safe, normal world gives way before her
eyes to a dangerous and unfamiliar one. The innocence of a child in the face of
“grown-up” conflict, hatred, and outright evil seems to me to be the broadest
theme of To Kill a Mockingbird.
The instruction and
example of Atticus Finch, Scout’s father and lawyer-statesman of Macomb County,
has made him the most beloved lawyer—fictional or not—in American history.
(Perhaps he is the only beloved
lawyer in American history, but I digress).
Early on, Atticus reproves
Scout: "You will never really understand a person until you consider
things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in
it." This simple theme of empathy—perhaps even grace—touches every page of
the story.
This sort of instruction
and straightforward morality is what makes Atticus Atticus. It is Atticus Finch
who embodies the simple moral truths—and there are a slew of them—that enrich
the novel. It is this basic, even childlike, morality and his stubborn
determination to live it that links Atticus to his children, and ultimately, to
their engagement with a dark and difficult world.
Jesus recommended
child-like faith to his followers and also instructed them at one point to
engage the world “innocent as doves.” At the same time, however, he admonished
them to be wise as serpents, and even “wary of men.”
It is in this integration
that Atticus is our role model. He knows the world. He has taken the measure of
his neighbors, and he knows their courage, their cowardice, their fears, and
their prejudice. He does not become like them or excuse their sin. There is no
mushy “tolerance;” instead he has graceful empathy. He doesn’t teach Scout not
to judge; he teaches her to judge rightly and to act with sacrificial love.
He simply tries to walk
around in his neighbor’s skin and then do what is right.
Atticus challenges his
white neighbors to "walk around in the skin" of a black man. He
demands that his lower middle-class children “consider things” from the “point
of view” of poor white families and the mysterious and maligned Boo Radley, who
lives across the street. To Atticus, walking around in the skin of others is a
practice, not a proverb.
This remains a painfully
powerful challenge today, relevant both directions across a variety of
religious, political, ethnic, and financial divisions. The novel suggests how
infrequently human beings are inclined to such a task and how difficult a task
it is, even when undertaken. It takes a sort of grace, an others-awareness that
is rare. It was rare in the 30's when the book is set, rare in the 60's when
Lee wrote, and rarer still today in our age of self-promotion, image, media
hype, and ambition. As this others-awareness unfolds in the parenting,
lawyering, and living of Atticus Finch, one is struck by the staggering
difficulty of actually "considering something from another's point of
view."
This realization is all
the more affecting in light of current high-profile public tension surrounding
the marriage debates, claims of racial injustice, religious freedom
discussions, and political discourse generally across the country. The public
punditry and discourse surrounding these issues and incidents features a little
bit of everything. A little bit of everything, that is, except “considering
something from another’s point of view.” We all have our take, our spin, our
opinion, but with few exceptions, we show very little empathy or grace. This is
no less true for more intimate community and academic discourse than it is
across the sound-bite-handicapped news media.
We cannot actually be someone else, and we have no real
desire to walk around in someone else’s skin. It is unnatural, uncomfortable,
and even painful. Often, it is also counter-cultural. In Mockingbird, the moral courage of Atticus is grounded in a
counter-cultural empathy that is and was always destined to be a losing
proposition. “Are we going to win, Atticus?” asks Scout.
“No, honey.”
Hence, a battle for the
child-like.
Mockingbird’s epigraph is from Charles Lamb: “Lawyers, I
suppose, were children once.” At once foreshadowing this major theme and
linking the main characters, it is a wonderful tease.
The essay from which the
quote is taken finds Lamb reminiscing, not coincidentally, on the
barristers—“the old benchers”—of the Inner Temple in London, where he spent his
early childhood. He wonders aloud why the “childish” marble statues have been
removed from the fountains, suggesting that surely, even lawyers were children
once. To Kill a Mockingbird asks the
same question asked by Lamb: “Is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the
best some of the child’s heart left?”
It takes the heart of a
child, of course, to playfully engage the mysterious and violent Boo Radley, to
break up an angry mob with an innocent greeting, to see the world as it could
be. But it also takes a wise and graceful heart to do those kinds of things,
knowing all the while the real danger of the fallen world, the real hate
involved, the real cost of walking around in someone else’s skin.
It takes courage to have
the heart of the child toward one’s neighbors, knowing the world for the unsafe
and unpredictable place that it is.
Note: A version of this
post appears in Volume 4, no. 3 Journal of Christian Legal Thought. Used by permission.
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