By Susan Lee Sharp

Long after our MLK celebrations, recognitions and parades come to an end, our hunger for justice will remain. Kellogg Foundation’s National Day of Racial Healing happens on the Tuesday following the holiday weekend for a reason. When the significant and well-deserved party is over, there’s work to continue and work to begin, as Rev. Dr. King Jr. would have us do. Addressing local food insecurity is a good place to start. On Jan. 16, from 6:30- 8 p.m., please come to gather in community at Rowan County Library’s main branch. Together we’ll learn from and support four local organizations responding to food insecurity in Rowan County.

What does it mean to be hungry in the economically richest nation in the world? And what does it say about that nation? The need for food, for shelter, for warmth and safety bond us in our shared humanity. Yet these basic needs are out of reach for many. Immediate and direct acts of charity are necessary and important. Providing food to those in need is foundational and hopefully ongoing act of compassion. It may even be a starting point for ending hunger. Too often we don’t get off this starting block. We don’t go the distance toward examining and changing the social conditions that create food insecurity in our community. But, this effort to examine and change the system, to try and fail, to learn and try again — this, too, is charity. Also necessary and important.

Giving our time and talents, building our collective capacity to examine the root causes of hunger is the long haul that many of us consider as optional. But if donating food and money alone were sufficient to end hunger, then hunger would be a thing of the past. Still, hunger remains. Ending hunger calls us to clearly and courageously see ourselves, to see one another and our community through the lenses of past and present day inequities. What we are called to see isn’t easy to look at, or even to agree upon. Like the blind men discovering the elephant, we mistake our partial experience for the whole. To fully comprehend the elephant, we must connect our perspectives in order to move closer to the truth.

And like the elephant in the room, some truths aren’t easy to admit. The ongoing economic marginalization that undergirds the wealth of our nation is hidden well enough for those who would look away. But in scratching the surface we begin to see the root causes of hunger hiding in plain sight, flourishing in our nation’s soil. It’s time we go the distance, time to gather our collective capacity, time to analyze our nation’s difficult past in order to meet our community’s present challenges. It’s a long row to hoe, but the tools for this work are at hand. Today more than ever books, classes, webinars and seminars on systemic change abound. But these tools must be put to use, be taken into hand in ways that will blister and ache before the harvest is seen.

This, too, is charity.

Physical hunger is real and ever present for many. It’s pain and primacy is not to be denied. But human hunger doesn’t end there. Our hearts and our minds hunger, too.

We hunger for meaning and connection in our lives, and to make a positive difference in our world. We hunger to know ourselves and others as neighbors and friends. Only in and through one another can we do great things. It is in coming together that we find our greater selves. What would it mean to address hunger in ways so that each of us is truly fed? Let’s begin by widening our perspectives on what hunger is, and let’s acknowledge what it is, beyond food, that we hunger for. Let’s imagine what charity can be and can accomplish when we seek meaning and build connection by clearly seeing and honestly professing the true causes of need. Then together, learn how to transform them.

Sharing a National Day of Racial Healing invites us to consider going the distance together, invites us to cultivate our collective strength and to collaboratively build community capacity for change. Give your presence, give of your time. Longterm solutions are long overdue. Cornell West famously said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Let’s prove him right.

Susan Lee Sharp is co-chair Actions in Faith & Justice.