The future is always the same as the present. That’s why we have to change the present.
-Richard Rohr OFM
We have to begin within and allow ourselves to be transformed. Then the future
can be different than the present. Otherwise, we have no evidence that we’re
going to do anything different tomorrow, next week, or next year. We’re going to
react next week to the violence that emerges in our wider culture, in our
institutions, and in our families just as we react right now. And so we always have
to return to what I have often called “cleaning the lens.” Authentic spirituality is
always on the first level about us—as individuals. It always is. We want it to be
about our partners, our coworkers, or our pastors. We want to use spirituality to
change other people, but true spirituality always changes us.
Many people intellectually accept Gandhi’s or Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachings
on nonviolence and try to execute it by willpower, but that’s not what I call a
“mystery of participation.” Such people aren’t participating in a qualitatively new
and different life in themselves. They have changed their minds but not their
hearts. In real moments of tension and trial, such people are as much a part of the
problem as the people they oppose. Their will and egos are still totally in control
with their need to be right, to win, and to have success, which almost always
leads to violence of some kind.
I think that was the great disappointment with political activism and even many
of the nonviolent movements of the 1960s and 70s in the U.S. It was not really
transformation. It wasn’t really coming from what we would call—to use a very
old-fashioned, religious word—holiness. Such action was often not coming from
holiness, but simply the intellect and will, which are not the transformed self.
Change Starts From Within
We each carry a certain amount of pain from our very birth. If that pain is not
healed and transformed, it actually increases as we grow older, and we transmit it to people around us. We can become violent in our attitudes, gestures, words,
and actions.
We must nip this process in the bud by acknowledging and owning our own pain,
rather than projecting it elsewhere. For myself, I can’t pretend to be loving when
inside I’m not, when I know I’ve had cruel, judgmental, and harsh thoughts about
others. At the moment the thought arises, I have to catch myself and hand over
the annoyance or anger to God. Contemplative practice helps me develop this
capacity to watch myself, to let go of the thought, and to connect with my loving
Inner Witness. Let me explain why this is so effective and so important. Unless we
can become the watcher, we’ll almost always identify with our feelings and our
judgments. They feel like real and objective truth.
Most people I know are overly identified with their own thoughts and feelings.
They don’t really have feelings; their feelings have them. That may be what earlier
Christians meant by being “possessed” by a demon. That’s why so many of Jesus’
miracles are the exorcism of devils. Most of us don’t take that literally anymore,
but the devil is still a powerful metaphor, and it demands that we take it quite
seriously. Everyone has a few devils. I know I’m “possessed” at least once or twice
a day, even if just for a few minutes!
There are all kinds of demons. In other words, there are lots of times when we
cannot not think a certain way. When we see certain people, we get afraid. When
we see other people, we get angry. For example, numerous studies show that
many white Americans have an implicit, unacknowledged fear of Black men. Most
of us are not consciously or explicitly racist, but many of us have an implicit and
totally denied racial bias. This is why all healing and prayer must descend into
the unconscious where the lies we’ve believed are hidden in our wounds and
embedded in the social reality of our cultures. During contemplation, forgotten
painful experiences may arise. In such cases, it helps to meet with a spiritual
director or therapist to process old wounds and trauma in healthy ways.
Building Beloved Community
When we talk about building a world where all people can achieve justice and
fulfill our potential as human beings, we really mean all people. That is Dr. Martin
Luther King’s vision of “Beloved Community,” where all people can live in peace.
Beloved Community is an acknowledgment that the only way for a peace to ever
be sustainable, the only way that our people can always be safe, is if all people are
free.
Building Beloved Community is not about loving the people who are easy to love.
It is about cultivating love for those that are difficult to love. Those people over
there. The others. The people who voted for that guy. The people who work in the
very systems that are destroying our communities. The corrupt corporate CEO.
The foreign dictator responsible for countless deaths.
If you are not struggling to love people, if you are not trying to build
understanding with those you disagree with, then you are not really doing the
work of building Beloved Community. The work of building Beloved Community
is understanding that we’re not trying to win over people, but to win people
over. Historically, winning a war has meant defeating the opponent. There is a
clear winner and a clear loser.... But in nonviolence, once in a while you have to
defend somebody, but it means you’re always willing to suffer first for the
cause—that is to say, for communion with your enemies. If you overcome your
enemies, you’ve failed. If you make your enemies your partners, that is beloved
community.
∎
