Practicing Deep Community, Deep Hope, Deep Belief

On April 16, 2023 I had the honor of sharing my reflections with my church community. Below is a slightly extended and updated version of what I shared. Even with the small additions and updates, there is still so much more to say.

from the left a hand holds a lit match next to a short lit canlde in a flower-shaped candle holder. The background is all black.

Second Sunday of Easter, Sunday of Divine Mercy

Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20: 19-31

Good morning. It is so good to be with you all today. What a week it’s been. I have talked to many people who feel heart-broken, despondent, angry, frustrated, helpless, hopeless. Perhaps you are feeling these, too. We bring this collective pain, as well as our individual struggles, into this second Sunday of Easter. Today’s readings show us practices of deep community, invite us to root in deep hope, and encourage us to practice deep belief in the Christ of transformation, the Christ that has been with us for all time and was embodied for us through Jesus’ resurrection.

In our first reading we hear how the community of disciples shared all things in common and allocated resources according to need. In the second reading from the first letter of Peter and the gospel reading from John, we are invited into hope, into the practice of believing. To be sure, believing and expanding our hope are practices. If you are like Thomas, if you are like me, hope and trust in renewal and resurrection fluctuate and waver, particularly in times like these, when there is so much to grieve.

If you ever struggle to believe in what you cannot see, I offer a simple, but not always easy invitation: broaden your perspective. Orient yourself in another direction. Practice patience. We only need look to our yards and gardens to see that Life is stronger than death. Resurrection is the way of Creation. This isn’t to say we should ignore the pain and harm in the world, but rather to remember that it is only a part of the picture. Then we can seek the places where in the midst of it all, people are taking steps toward care, healing, and restoration. Ask yourself the question: What do I want to see? And then keep your eyes open for it.

I want to see a world of vibrant community in which meeting needs is prioritized over unfettered accumulation. I could easily look around and not see this. AND there are places where people are operating differently from the dominant cultural norms.

Here at St. William we are strengthening our interconnected community through small groups and community retreats. When members of the community express a need, others step up, offering resources in ways that support individual and collective well-being within and beyond our church community. When our LGBTQ+ siblings are hurting, when our Black and Brown siblings are hurting, when our immigrant and refugee siblings are hurting, our leadership makes public statements affirming that they, you, we all are worthy of care; individual community members write letters, rally in Frankfort, collect resources, and otherwise tend to needs. When members of the St. William community saw that free trade did not mean fair trade, Just Creations was born, now 33 years ago. These are just a few of our works of community. These are acts of seeing the Risen Christ and recognizing that we play a role in its joyful fruition. This is believing in the value of salvific acts, even when we’re not sure of outcomes.

What is the world you want to see? I want to see a world in which all people feel safe enough and supported enough that they don’t turn to guns to protect, defend, or avenge. I want to see a world in which violence is not seen as a viable and desirable strategy to meet needs. We are 106 days into 2023 and in the United States there have been at least 161 mass shootings, in which at least 4 people were injured or killed with a gun. I suspect that since the 146th such shooting happened Monday at Old National Bank in downtown Louisville, many of us have been feeling the impact of this ongoing violence particularly strongly. Last night at Chickasaw Park, Louisville experienced another mass shooting- 2 dead, 4 injured- the 158th in the country, the second in a week for our city. This was one of 7 mass shootings that happened on April 15th in the United States, the largest being in the small town of Dadesville, AL, where 4 people were killed and 20 injured at a Sweet 16 party. These are only the mass shootings, not even counting the other injuries and deaths from gun violence.

I do not put my faith in guns or violence. Guns are not part of the story of the Risen Christ. I do not put my faith solely in gun legislation. Stricter gun laws are a stopgap, but they’re only one step toward creating greater collective safety. I put my faith in the multi-faceted and creative expression of people power.

Two and a half weeks ago, I was one of a few hundred people from around Louisville who participated in an anti-violence summit with the guiding question, “What if Louisville were the safest city in the world?” I believe in the people who were in that room- the violence interrupters, the mental health professionals, the restorative justice and conflict resolution teachers and practitioners, the elders who have shown us the efficacy of nonviolence.

I have seen the power of nonviolence on the streets of Louisville, at Standing Rock, in Palestine, in Colombia, in Guatemala, and other places in the world. Erica Chenoweth’s extensive and ongoing research on nonviolent and violent movements gives any doubters evidence to show that nonviolent social movements for change are twice as effective as violent movements and all such movements that have involved just 3.5% of the population have succeeded. 3.5% Echoing the second reading, there is cause for rejoicing here.

The world I wish to see is one in which we are so bound to one another that we don’t need laws to restrict guns because no one has used them to hurt others. I dream of a world in which we don’t have prisons or police forces because we choose other ways of addressing and repairing harm. Beyond St. William we also have models of these, places where small pockets of people are practicing care-filled community.* We can see them. When we struggle to see and believe, may we turn toward one another and lean into the love-filled creative potential of Christ in our midst.   

We shall be known by the company we keep
by the ones who circle round to tend these fires
We shall be known by the ones who sow and reap
the seeds of change alive from deep within the earth

It is time now
It is time now that we thrive
It is time we lead ourselves into the well
It is time now, and what a time to be alive
In this great turning we shall learn to lead in love
In this great turning we shall learn to lead in love

(Listen here to “We Shall Be Known,” by MaMuse, performed by thrive East Bay Choir)

*In future writing I will name some of the places and people that help me hold onto hope.

The Invitation to Mourn, Palm Sunday reflections

This morning, Palm Sunday, I had the honor of sharing my reflections with my church community. It is never easy to pare down a message when there is so much one could choose to say. The following is where I settled for today.

John 12:12-16. Isaiah 50:4-7, Philippians 2:6-11, Mark 15:1-39

Blessings as we begin this Holy Week by joyfully welcoming Jesus with palms and ever so quickly turning toward mourning his condemnation and death. Two millennia later, we know that the joyful celebration of resurrection is coming, but on Palm Sunday we are not there yet. 

We are invited into mourning.

In April of 2022, we are still reckoning with COVID-19. We are facing rising inflation. We are seeing backlash against the racial justice uprisings of 2020 through legislation about how race can and can’t be talked about in schools. We have witnessed the signing of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and see other anti-LGBTQ+ legislation around the country. We are observing from afar the horrors of the war in Ukraine. At U.S. and other countries’ borders, we see governments and media outlets treating certain migrants as greater than or less than others, based on the hue of their skin and their country of origin. These are only a few of the layers upon layers of things that pain us.

As I say all these things, you may notice your heart beat getting faster, your body tensing up, your breath getting shallower or faster or even that you are holding your breath. When is she going to stop with this litany of pain? Why didn’t she name my particular pain? Maybe the litany has stimulated your righteous anger.

In Love and Rage, Lama Rod Owens, a Black, queer Buddhist minister, talks about his own grappling with anger in this way: “My anger is old, personal, and dependable. It is older than me, younger than the youngest child I know. It is so old that most of us no longer believe that it was ever born to begin with. It is the primordial deity that we come to worship, thinking that somehow it will be the revolutionary leader who will set us free. And yet it is also our jealous master.”

When I think about the chief priests, elders, scribes, or Pilate, when I think about the crowds yelling “Crucify him!” or the soldiers who beat and spit on Jesus, or the passersby who mocked him, I wonder if some form of anger had become their jealous master.

When I see the unwillingness of so many elected leaders to work together for the common good, when I see friends and family unwilling to cross lines of difference to talk to each other, I wonder if some form of anger has become their jealous master. When I think about how easy it is to use dehumanizing labels for those I disagree with, whether in power or not, to metaphorically beat them and spit on them, I wonder how often anger becomes my jealous master, too. 

Lama Rod continues, “Anger is actually trying to tell us something. Anger is confessing that it’s not the main event… One of the hardest things that I could ever admit to myself was that I was just hurt, that I wasn’t just pissed off… I was deeply in despair because of the situation. This realization just made me feel weak… And never in my life have I ever been told and ever been supported in touching deeply into this woundedness. I call it heartbrokenness.”

I suspect that if we allow ourselves to go deep beneath anger, we may find that our hearts are broken, too. We wear the strong armor of anger to try to shield ourselves from the heartbreak that may feel like weakness.

Anger is a normal human response to pain and suffering. Sometimes we need that armor to protect ourselves. But we’re not meant to wear it all the time. And the hard expression of anger doesn’t free us.

The hardness of our anger armor constricts our movement toward loving all our neighbors. When we wear the same righteous anger armor as someone else, we may feel connected to them, but that armor also separates us from others. Anger prevents us from knowing our deep interconnection with All.

On one of my first stints in Palestine with what is now Community Peacemaker Teams, I found myself getting really angry as I witnessed Israeli soldiers harass, beat, teargas, arrest, and otherwise do harm to Palestinians, including children. When I joined CPT, I had made a commitment to practicing nonviolence and I knew that honoring that commitment meant I needed to figure out what to do with my anger.

During the less volatile moments around the soldiers, who were not much older than the young men I had taught at Trinity, I started a practice of trying to look them in the eyes. As I caught their eyes, I thought, “I don’t hate you. I wish you peace. I wish you love.” In my own softening toward them, I recognized that if I had walked in their shoes, I might well be doing exactly what I saw them do. In heart-opening grief, I had a simultaneous awareness of our inherent interconnection and our situational disconnection, and a deep desire to reconnect.  

The soft practice of mourning has the potential to reconnect us and free us. Miki Kashtan says that “Mourning is a continual soft pathway to accepting reality without numbing ourselves, without distracting ourselves, without blaming ourselves, and without engaging in a spiritual bypass. Mourning brings tenderness to everything we put into it.” As we allow the tenderness of mourning, the world becomes softer, more ready for healing, more able to heal. Mourning together, we allow the communal composting of pain. In those moments of eye- and heart-connection with soldiers, I hope that I was both creating soil and planting seeds that someday will grow, bloom, and bear fruit.

Planting seeds on Ash Wednesday together, we opened ourselves to the pain and mystery of the transformation that happens in the dark and to trust that a burial does not always signify eternal death.   

In mourning as in planting, we recognize that we are not in control. As we relinquish the illusion of control, we surrender our will to God’s. As we align more closely with God’s will, perhaps, like Isaiah, we “might know how to speak to the weary a word that will sustain them.” We allow seeds to be planted in us and we plant seeds. We cannot control their growth.

As we align more closely with God’s will, we come closer to the path of Jesus. Jesus wore no armor. To some who observed him, Jesus may have looked weak. And yet, we know that Jesus freely chose the softness of embodied divinity. He chose to allow his heart and his human body to be broken. He chose the redemptive suffering of nonviolence that exposed the violence of the system he lived in, all the way to his death.

May we, too, choose the path of nonviolence. May we take deep breaths, slowing ourselves down enough to touch the tender longing, to feel the heartbreak beneath our anger. May we acknowledge and mourn the ways we ourselves have fallen into the patterns of violence embedded into our systems. May we name aloud the shame we feel, so we may see that we are not alone in it. May we choose to re-humanize those we have dehumanized. May we mourn the harm that others do and still choose to recognize that harm-doers are made in the image and likeness of God. May we not seek punishment, but advocate for restorative justice that aims to heal both the people who are harmed and the perpetrators of harm. During this Holy Week, may we mourn and allow our tears to water seeds of love, peace, connection, redemption, and hope.

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Excerpts from Love and Rage, Lama Rod Owens

I am including here a couple of longer excerpts (bits of which are included and inform the above) from Lama Rod Owens’ Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger.

My anger is old, personal, and dependable. It is older than me, younger than the youngest child I know. It is so old that most of us no longer believe that it was ever born to begin with. It is the primordial deity that we come to worship, thinking that somehow it will be the revolutionary leader who will set us free. And yet it is also our jealous master.

 Anger is actually trying to tell us something. Anger is confessing that it’s not the main event. There’s tension arising from my unwillingness to be with this deep sense of being hurt. When I begin to look at that, one of the hardest things that I could ever admit to myself was that I was just hurt, that I wasn’t just pissed off. I wasn’t pissed off because of racism or homophobia or something else. I was actually deeply, deeply hurt. I was deeply in despair because of the situation. This realization just made me feel weak.

 And never in my life have I ever been told and ever been supported in touching deeply into this woundedness. I call it heartbrokenness. To sink beneath the anger or to move through the anger was to recognize the anger for what it was: an indicator that my heart was broken. When I allowed myself to experience my heartbrokenness, my activism began to change. I wasn’t out there in the streets any longer trying to do stuff because I was angry. I was out because I was just really hurt and I wanted someone to recognize that. I wanted someone to recognize that for the first time my struggle wasn’t to get people free or to disrupt systems. My primary struggle was to embody and communicate that I was not OK, that I was struggling to be happy, and that I wasn’t, above all, being distracted by the anger. I suppose, in other words, my activism was to first to give myself permission to be free to feel deeply into my experience so I could enter into change work more myself and then deeper attunement to other people’s struggle.

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Okay, I can’t run, so maybe I should start befriending [anger] and learning from it. It’s always telling me, “Rod, you’re hurt right now and you just don’t have the courage to look at that, so I’m protecting you. I’m going to protect you as long as you choose not to look at what my function is.” That’s what anger is always telling me: no, look deeper, look deeper, don’t get distracted…

And yeah, it feels powerful... I hear people say, anger is important; we need it to be effective. I believe anger is like a controlled fire. We do controlled fires in forests to create room and space for new growth and to fertilize the soil. But that fire can get out of control if there aren’t any skilled people there controlling that fire. For us, if we have no wisdom, then our anger gets out of control, and it starts burning up everything. I see so many people burning up everything.

 This gets to the question of how do we actually create community with people who are enraged; their rage is really unchecked. For me, it’s that I really need to hold space for my anger, not add fuel to their fire. If I’m going to be in community with someone, then I feel that I’m holding space for their anger and for them to be angry. I’m not going to fuel their fire, throw logs on it, say, yeah, you’re justified; I would never say that. I would say, yes this is your experience right now, and you should own it and be with it, and yes, that anger is pointing to something…

 And once we gain some wisdom, we start asking ourselves what’s that anger about, what’s that anger pointing to? … So I remind myself I am experiencing this anger because I’m hurt in the situation, so I need to remember that this anger is reminding me to set boundaries, or to say something right now, or I’ll return to being hurt over and over again. But I still have a lot of work to do, though I’ve come a long way.

What We Pay Attention To, an unfinished story

A few days ago 72 Catholics, as a part of the Catholic Action for Immigrant Children Campaign. were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. I am proud to call some of them friends. Two days before their action, over a thousand progressive Jewish activists and allies blocked the entrances of the ICE headquarters in D.C.; dozens of them were also arrested. If I knew them, I’d be proud to call them friends, too. Both of these actions are parts of larger campaigns to support our immigrant brothers and sisters.

Earlier in the week in Greenville, S.C, the same place where people attending a Trump rally chanted “Send her back,” a restaurant owner pledged to give 100% of the restaurant’s sales to the American Immigration Council.

Responding to that chant which was directed at her, Rep. Ilhan Omar quoted Maya Angelou:

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I rise.

Yesterday at the Big Four Bridge, my favorite place in my city of Louisville, KY, hundreds gathered in 90+ degree heat to “reclaim the space” after racist graffiti was sprayed on the bridge a few days before. They were responding to a Tweet by local poet, truth teller, and leader Hannah Drake.  

Weekly in cities and villages throughout Palestine, Palestinians, sometimes with Israelis and internationals, gather to speak out against the Israeli military occupation, speak to reclaim their space, reclaim, exclaim their dignity and right to be.

In Puerto Rico, in Hong Kong, in other places around the world, people are remembering their power and using it to speak out, to call for, to create change. Are we paying attention?

Empowering, creating change happens in public protests. It happens in quieter ways, too. It can happen as parents and grandparents listen and talk to their children and grandchildren about the world, relationships, ways we do and can relate to each other. It can happen as people choose to honor each other in the fullness and complexity of their divine humanness, not for what they produce, but simply because they are.

I’ve been reading adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. Throughout the book, she offers this reminder: What we pay attention to grows.*

Knowing the stories above, the sense of courage and inspiration grows. I was going to say my sense. And then I remembered, I am a part of Creation, of All-That-Is. And if I am part of Creation and my sense of courage and inspiration grows, then the sense of courage and inspiration grows.

This evening on Facebook, a friend posed the question: If you could build anything, what would it be? There were many beautiful answers to this question from a large music school to cheap inexhaustible energy sources to a better world to a plan to fix our mental health care system to more affordable housing and on and on. Most of the answers fill me with hope and engage my imagination. We can only build these things if we can dream them first.

What we pay attention to grows.

I love this idea.

I believe it.

I don’t always know how to practice it well.

How do I or we bring to light devastating realities in a way that grows the healing and not the hurt?

Truth-telling is important. Empowering. And yet so often, in seeking to lift up the dignity-humanity-divinity of a person or group facing dehumanizing forces, we truth tell in a way that demonizes and dehumanizes the perpetrators of harm, thus perpetuating harm, though directed differently.

I get it. I’ve done it many times and since that way of thinking and speaking is all around me, I imagine I’ll do it again, even as I try to break the habit of shaming and blaming, a practice I turn both outward and inward.

My nonviolence and nonviolent communication training compels me then to ask this question:

How do I or we address these issues, these patterns of systemic harm in a way that honors the humanity of both perpetrator and victim, actor and receiver of harm?

Those actively doing harm, while perhaps not suffering in the way they are hurting others, are also suffering. They are not well, even if they are well-resourced.

Because when we are well, well at that deepest place within us,

well so that our divine-stardust-interconnected nature shines,

we don’t hurt other people. Not intentionally.

Or if we do,

in humility,

from that place of knowing that we can be both divine and imperfect all at once,

we find ways to try to make amends, to bring healing to the places of fracture.

When I lead Nonviolent Communication training, I often quote Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

Where even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense, I know that I cannot be fully healed until we all are fully healed. Until we’re all in that field.

The healing field.

The healed field.

If I wish harm to someone who’s hurt me or my friends or family or someone I don’t even know, I also suffer. I’m not in the healed field. Because that someone is a part of the Interconnected. And I am part of the Interconnected.

What we pay attention to grows. I do not want to pay attention to and grow the harm in the Interconnected.

I want to lie down in that field.

I want to pay attention to the potential for healing, to the ways of imagination that know and acknowledge the harm, that reveal it, but don’t get stuck in it.  

Yesterday at a retreat for a board I’m on, someone reminded us several times that we can’t do everything, but we can do something.

When we do something, we get unstuck.

Tonight my something is to write, first for myself, to process input in an attempt to create comprehensible output.

Then I share this with you, because maybe you didn’t know the stories I started with, or maybe you don’t know the work of adrienne maree brown, or maybe you’d forgotten that even though you can’t do everything, you can do something.

You can do something that grows your vision of what you want the world to look like. Even one small thing makes a difference.

And then maybe when you remember you can do something, that one small thing, you’ll do it.

And maybe someone else will notice.

And maybe they’ll remember their power, too, and they’ll do something.

And maybe someone else will notice and do something

and someone else and do

and someone

and

*She also writes a zillion other beautiful, simple, challenging things. If you haven’t read her work, check it out!