Among the many sins accounted by various faiths, including the so-called seven deadly sins, I know of none that include apathy. As close as you get is sloth, which does not quite capture the willful dis-engagement that is the characteristic I wanted to talk about today. Now you may feel that sloth, in simpler words, idleness, is hardly a great evil and I am not here to debate that point. For me, apathy is a far greater pit into which we all tumble at some point.

Apathy implies knowledge, the awareness that we are called to do something but do not do so. It is not that we simply do not care, although I suppose that could be the case if we were truly sociopathic. What I speak of is far worse but far more pervasive. It is our unwillingness to take up the cause, especially when our silence is tacit approval of any injustice.

There are many reasons we hold back. Fear is often one, whether for our personal safety, or more often fear of censure. We may not wish to stand out from the crowd, to say and act on what we see. Let someone else take up that role, we may even applaud them and possibly make a small donation to their fight. Their fight. It isn’t ours you see. We approve, but that is about as far as we go.

To be clear, this post is not about activism—though I have nothing against those whose conscience bids them to action. Neither am I prepared to dismiss those who attend political rallies, sit or stand-ins, or any other form of engagement, though I do wonder if attendance without dialog serves the useful purpose of calling out the issues which prompt us to be part of the mob. It feels good to stand with those who echo our sentiments and chant our slogans, play the chorus to a bellowing voice prompting us, the audience. This is at least a modest improvement over staying at home watching our TVs or reading a social media post about what did or more likely did not happen. We can safely pat ourselves on the back and reason that we have done something. But what have we done?

Before I go any further let me hasten to say that I am not pointing fingers. I’ve been here, done that. I am not proud of my silence; my willingness to go along to get along. No one wishes to be that one person who is always calling our attention to issues so great that we must conclude they are beyond our meager ability to rectify. Neither am I calling for contention—it too does nothing to alter the landscape.

What prompted this post was a chance meeting the other day with a man who in answering a simple question about local parking enforcement, went the next step. He asked if he might help guide us to whatever destinations we had in mind. A simple thing surely. It was not that he was just being polite, there was a purpose to his offer. He was newly located to the community we were visiting—a community filled with old and gracious homes as well as scarred and impoverished moonscapes of demolished buildings and equally destitute citizens.

We learned over the course of the next half hour that this man had chosen to live in the community because he recognized in it the opportunity to restore it and its people. Engaging passersby was not his job—in fact he volunteered along with a number of his colleagues out of the desire to reduce the stigma attached to the community, one that kept visitors away and economic opportunity at bay. Following our wandering conversation, we spent a little time ambling around, had a good meal and vowed that we would come back, soon. We also told friends and family about our experience and perhaps they might visit as well.

You might be thinking, well that’s all very nice, but what does it have to do with injustice, and just how much good was our new found friend doing one person at a time? As for injustice, I would observe that this man chose to make this community his home—he could have easily elected to live in dozens of other nearby places. It is a place known for poverty, crime, and indifference. And while there are a few blocks of gentrification, that vast acreage is hardly attractive or safe. Not only did he choose to live there, he deputized himself and called on his friends to join him in doing something about attracting others to come to his community, spend their money and leave feeling good about their experience. As we stood on the street talking, locals passed by. Everyone greeted us, and the civility and sweetness of those greetings reminded me of a small town I lived in once many years ago.

In the face of a challenge so great that mayors, city councils, and other elected officials were reduced to tired homilies and empty gestures, our self-appointed ambassador had reduced the insurmountable to a problem he could do something to address. Help visitors feel welcome—help them to feel safe and to seek out and find things they might enjoy. They’ll come back, tell others, and over time attract new businesses, shops, restaurants, who knows what else to take a chance there. Yes, it will take much, much more—but our guide was doing what he could, nothing less.

What if this man were joined by tens, hundreds, even thousands of his fellow citizens? What if every able-bodied man and woman made it their responsibility to do something each day to make their community a safer, more welcoming and better place to live? What if they let go of apathy and practiced enlightened self-interest? How long would it take to transform their city then? Big problems are big because we are just one or two. Injustices of every kind remain because only a few speak out, refuse to accept what they know to be wrong. Apathy, our failure to do unto others as we would have them do unto us is the sin so great that it need not appear on any list. It is inscribed on our hearts every time we fail to speak or act.