I Am Overwhelmed . . . . . . . . .with Joy

I don’t know what is going on with me. Am I in some kind of sequestered delirium? Have I been captured by some kind of pathetic sentimentality?

 

All I know is that during these pandemic months I have read more, written more, listened to more music, looked at more art, Face Timed more with my kids and grandson, texted and talked on the phone more with my friends, participated with friends far away in worship and study over Zoom and Google Meets, walked more, meditated more, prayed more, had more romantic, home-cooked meals with my wife, Mary.

 

I have also teared up more out of such a deep feeling of gratitude for all the love and compassion and grace in which I live today, and in which I have walked all of my life.

 

My first thought is that I am just getting old and have crawled into some kind of sentimental pablum. Maybe I am just a pathetic fool too aware of his frailties and failings, now rolling downhill toward greater pain and suffering and eventually, death.  But that doesn’t feel at all accurate.

 

I think it might be just the opposite. I am overwhelmed to still be alive. My dad died when he was 54 and my mom when she was 49. My older brother died when he was 63. My first wife, Pauline, died when she was 31. She wanted so desperately to live longer, and she didn’t get to. I was the one who got to, and, yes, I dealt for some time with survivor’s guilt.

 

But just when I thought I would never know joy again, God thrust me into a new life so filled with wonder and opportunity, I can hardly believe I have actually lived it. It seems like a dream, too good to be true.

 

I don’t even know where to begin in listing all the amazing things I have experienced. Mary, my kids, their spouses and families, my grandson. So many mission-minded congregations filled with wonderful fellow staff members and deeply committed, giving, and loving members. Life-long friends from grade school, high school, college, seminary, and graduate school. Opportunities to travel and teach in Mexico, Central America, and Europe. Working with people dedicated beyond imagination trying to overcome oppression, racism, poverty, violence, war, sexism, depression and the general sense of meaninglessness that is so much a part of our society.

 

Sometimes we have to lose something in order to find it anew. At first, I lamented not being able to do the things I wanted to do, especially being with my family and friends. I guess we have all been forced to the sidelines in many ways. With that has come certain feelings of loss, and rightly so. But in order to lose something you have to first have it. And sometimes in the losing there is a finding. 

 

What I have found is a new level of gratitude, appreciation, and wonderment. What an amazing creation! What wonderful people! What a fulfilling life, filled with forgiveness, grace, love and hope. Sitting here, alone, I feel anything but alone. I feel surrounded by such love and care, such support and concern for my well-being.

 

Sitting at my desk, listening to my favorite music, looking out the window, I see the majestic Organ Mountains, and I feel the presence of all those by whom I am loved, I feel the presence of our majestic and compassionate God:

  

I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come?

My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.

He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.

The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.

The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.   [Psalm 121; NRSV]

Thanks, Readers, for Meandering with Me. Now, Are You Ready to Also Write?

View from our Cabin in Minnesota Where I Write in the Summer

Where would a writer be without a reader? Irish philosopher, George Berkeley, in the early 1700’s, posited this question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, however you would respond to that, it got me to thinking: “If a writer writes, and no one reads it, was anything written?”

 

Working on my blog, Meandering Spirituality, the other day, I noted that there have been over 30,000 clicks since I began writing it in 2012. Most, of course, are from the United States and Canada, but there are also clicks from around the world. 

 

This led me, first, to give thanks for all of you readers, known and unknown. Not just for reading my blog, but for posing questions, making responses and, in the process, inspiring me to keep reading, thinking, meditating, studying, writing. Secondly, I felt thanks for the modern technology that makes this kind of give and take between writer and reader possible at little, or no, expense to either. So today I write with great gratitude for you readers, for technology, and for the people who taught me and encouraged me to use that technology.

 
Last year I published my book When the Northern Lights went Dark: My Journey through Loss and Grief to Healing and Hope (Amazon). That book rattled around in my briefcases for some 30 years because I could not find a publisher, and I could not afford to self-publish, which meant purchasing, in advance, a large number of books before it even went to print.

 

Then along came Amazon, offering self-publishing for free, as long as you are willing to do all the work yourself. Immediately, upon pushing the “publish” button, my book was available digitally through Kindle. Then, if someone wants a paper copy, they order it, pay for it, and Amazon sends the manuscript to a local printer who prints it and mails it to the purchaser. What a gift these technologies are for both writer and reader!

 

I share this, not just out of gratitude for what it has meant for my own writing, but to encourage you, the reader, to write. I will even tell you what to write about: the stories of your life.

I can already hear most of you retorting: “But I don’t have anything to write about!” Oh, yes you do. Has anyone else lived your life? Has anyone else seen the world exactly as you do? Especially if you have grandchildren, start writing these stories and what you have learned and observed about life. Most of those grandchildren are likely too young to be asking, “Grandpa, grandma, what was it like growing up?”  However, one day they will ponder those questions and they will treasure having those stories and observations in written form. And don’t share just your happy stories. Share your struggles also so they know that, whatever they are going through, everyone has challenges from time to time that can seem daunting.

 

This will also be a great gift to your kids, eventually. Right now, they likely assume they know you better than they really do. But one day they, too, will treasure those stories and how they all tie together. For example, I am now writing a book that picks up where my last book left off, focusing on my life with my wife Mary, our kids, and my journey trying to figure out how to do social justice, peacemaking, cross-cultural, multi-racial ministry in the North American church. I sent the first chapter to my writer-daughter, Jessi, and she responded: “Wow, that was really exciting. I knew many of the stories and events, but I had no idea how they all related to each other!”

 

Now, of course, you could photocopy what you write and make copies for your family and friends, but you might decide to share what you write with a wider audience, and modern technology makes that possible. Please write me if you want more information on how to do this.

 

As for my blog, I am grateful to Lindean Barnett Christenson, my partner in ministry at Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church in Phoenix. As I headed to our Minnesota cabin in 2007 for a sabbatical focusing on spirituality related to nature (desert, mountain, cloud), she asked me to contribute to the blog she had started. I have since imported those posts into my own blog, which you can find under Nature Spirituality.

 

MLK's Pulpit in Montgomery

It was in the summer of 2012 that I started my blog, Meandering Spirituality. Mary and I were planning a lengthy trip to study the American Civil Rights Movement (and southern BBQ), and so, as we traveled, we visited and I wrote about Martin Luther King Jr., Selma, Little Rock, the Nashville Sin-Ins, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Memphis. These were my first 16 posts.

 

This was followed by a hiatus as I returned to busy, parish ministry, but, as I began to get ready to retire in 2016, I wrote “Retirement as a Calling” and that catapulted me into 65 posts in the past four years, along with the publishing of my first book.

 

Today I am overwhelmed with gratitude for you readers, the opportunity to focus on writing in retirement, all the people who have responded to my blog posts and book, all of the people who have read portions of what I have written and given me such helpful feedback and encouragement, including the eleven of you who wrote reviews on Amazon.

 

I pray for blessings on you as you continue your own Meandering, Spiritual Journey, and please give some serious thought to writing about that journey, how you see the world and what you have learned and experienced along the way.

Grandson, Dylan, Fire Island, New York

Have You Lost Your Spiritual Center?

If you are human, you have a spiritual center. If you are human, you most likely lost it somewhere along the way.

 

There may have been times when your life has been going along well enough that you didn’t notice that you had lost it. But as soon as struggle appears, with all its intense and often negative emotions, you most likely realized that you were lacking something, but you probably didn’t know what it was, let alone how to find it.

 

You may even have tried to find it. You might have gone to a therapist. You might have gone to worship. You might have picked up and started to read the scripture of your tradition. That might have helped some, but somehow you knew it was not getting you to where you wanted and needed to be.

You had a spiritual center in the womb. You basked in the warmth and love that surrounded you. You also were in touch with your spiritual center after you were born. You knew you were surrounded with love and people who really wanted to meet your every need.

 

But then something happened. Something that made you wonder if you really could trust the people around you and the world that enfolded you. And once that happened, things began to unravel quickly. As the days and months and years passed by, you had all kinds of feelings that fought against your spiritual center. You felt anger. You became suspicious. You were no longer sure the world was a safe place for you.

 

You felt remorse for things you had done and said. You were angry at others, and knew you should forgive them, but just couldn’t. You felt shame, that strange and permeating emotion that leads us to feel we just don’t quite measure up, we are not quite good enough.

 

When you were in the womb, you lived in the present. You weren’t obsessed with the past or what might happen in the future. You basked in life as it came to you. You trusted life as it came to you.

 

Now, you seldom live in the present. You fret over the past, and can’t quite get beyond the wrongs that were done to you. You still feel hurt by what your father said or didn’t say to you. Psychologists say that over half of grown men are still trying to please their fathers, long after they are gone. You remember the fights you had with your mother. You remember the unkind things you said to her, and the ways she may have hurt you.

 

The future is even worse. You don’t live in the present because you have so many things to worry about. Will we have enough money? Who will win the next election? Will my health hold up? Will I get Covid19, or will someone I love get it? Will I ever have grandchildren? Will there be enough rain for the crops this year? Will I ever find a good job? With all the cutbacks going on, will I lose my job? It is not that these things are not important. Some are life or death. But, as Jesus, said: “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” [Matthew 6:27]

 

Even when you are Facetiming your family or your friends, you think of the ways you failed them, you feel anxiety about their futures. You have trouble really listening to them right now, and hearing what they are saying, and feeling their love.

 

When we lose our spiritual center, we have difficulty living in the present, and thereby we lose our grounding, our secure center, our ability to give and receive forgiveness, our ability to give and receive love.

 

When we lose our spiritual center, we forget what we each know deep down in our hearts: that love is, in the end, the only thing that matters. Love is what we want, what we need, and--as hard as it is to believe--love is surrounding us and available each moment of life, making it possible to live joyously in the present. St. Paul said, “Now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” And every religious tradition I know of says the same, in one way or another.

 

 Spiritual writer, Mirabai Starr, explains:

 

The sacred scriptures of all faiths call us to love as we have never loved before. This requires effort, vigilance, and radical humility. Violence is easier than nonviolence, yet hate only perpetuates hate. The wisdom teachings remind us that love—active, engaged, fearless love—is the only way to save ourselves and each other from the firestorm of war that rages around us. There is a renewed urgency to this task now. We are asked not only to tolerate the other, but also to actively engage the love that transmutes the lead of ignorance and hatred into the gold of authentic connection. This is the “narrow gate” Christ speaks of in the Gospels [Matthew 7:13]. Don’t come this way unless you’re willing to stretch, bend, and transform for the sake of love.

 

Your spiritual center is God in you, connecting you through love with all the world. That center is filled with everything we need to live joyously in the present: forgiveness, trust, hope, reconciliation, love. There we can let the past go, and there we do not have to worry about the future. There we can find peace of mind and peace of spirit, every day of our lives.

 

Etty Hillesum, 1914-1943 

What and where is your spiritual center? No one put it better than Etty Hillesum, killed at Auschwitz in 1943:

 

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.

Civil Disobedience, Law and Order, and Active Nonviolent Protest

Throughout our nation we see example after example of Civil Disobedience through Active Nonviolent Protest running head on against cries for and actions promoting Law and Order. One might assume these are two polar opposites, and one must choose one over the other. However, Civil Disobedience, properly understood, is actually in harmony with Law and Order. Thomas Merton puts it succinctly: “The theory of civil disobedience permits only disobedience of a law that has been shown to be unjust and at the same time it affirms respect for law and order as such by accepting punishment for the act of disobedience. This aspect of civil disobedience is often overlooked. “[The Nonviolent Alternative, 227-28]

      

For example, in the Nashville Sit-ins described in my last post, the blacks taking a seat at “white only” lunch counters, when arrested, insisted on being taken to jail. As that happened, more blacks took the seats they had vacated, and were in turn hauled off to jail. In fact, the protests had almost been called off because there was not enough money to pay bail for so many protesters going to jail. However, the students had adopted a “Jail-No-Bail” philosophy, meaning they preferred to be punished by the law rather than be bailed out. Eventually there were so many students in jail that the police decided to simply let them go.

This position of “Jail-No-Bail” had been adopted by Martin Luther King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as a way of showing that the protests were not against the law as such, but only against laws they believed to be “unjust.”  There are many examples where King himself, John Lewis and other Civil Rights leaders refused bail as a way to draw greater attention to the injustices the movement was trying to bring to the light of day.

The concept of Civil Disobedience was first coined by Henry David Thoreau in his 1848 essay where he described his decision not to pay a state poll tax that had been enacted to prosecute a war in Mexico and support the Fugitives Slave Law that required slaves in free states to be returned to their owners in slave states. This was his way to protest what he felt were unjust laws and causes, and he spent time in jail as a result.

Philosopher John Rawls, in 1971, developed the concept of Civil Disobedience further. “Civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies. On this account, people who engage in civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions, as this shows their fidelity to the rule of law. Civil disobedience, given its place at the boundary of fidelity to law, is said to fall between legal protest, on the one hand, and conscientious refusal, . . . . on the other hand.” [Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]

The first task of Civil Disobedience, then, is to determine which laws are just and unjust. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained this in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” where he had landed because the city would not issue his group a permit to demonstrate, and he went ahead and began a march anyway.  The result was spending a week in jail.  King writes: “One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’” [LBJ, 93]

For example, I have been bringing groups to the border between El Paso and Juarez for nearly 20 years to focus on border violence and immigration laws. One time a Border Patrol agent explained that when his father worked for the Border Patrol, there were no barriers between the US in Mexico, except for the Rio Grande River, which can be easily crossed in most places. People freely went across to work in the US, and then returned at night to their homes in Mexico. Though technically illegal, many times, especially when the harvest of a certain crop was near, the agents were actually told to just “look the other way.”

Then began a long process of making the laws stricter. First, it was a misdemeanor to try to cross without papers. Then it was made a felony. Then, if you were caught trying to cross, you had to go back, wait a certain length of time, often years, and reapply for entry. And, by the way, these days it is nearly impossible to get re-entry papers.

Let me give you example of how this might play out. I met a family of a mother, father and daughter who crossed some 20 years ago when it was just a misdemeanor. They settled down, got work, paid taxes and eventually had two more children, who are US citizens. The daughter brought across as an infant applied for the DACA program, and was accepted.

A few years ago, the father went back to Mexico for his mother’s funeral. He had work papers, but there was something not signed properly, and, when he came to the border, he was sent back to Mexico. Now, if you were him, what would you do? He tried to cross, and again was caught. This time he was told he had to go back to Mexico for five years, and then reapply for entry. And the daughter in the DACA program has not known for the last few years what her future will be.

Those of us working for immigration reform are not saying there should be no laws, or no borders. But we are challenging the fairness of laws that have kept changing over the years, and now are tearing hard-working, peaceful families apart, and leaving DACA students, many of whom have completed college or served in the military, unable to know if they will be allowed to stay in the country in which they grew up.

Two days after "Blood Sunday" Protesters tried Again, Confronted Resistance, Knelt and Prayed, and Turned Back. Only on the third try, with Protection from Federal Troops, did they make it to Montgomery.

For the spiritual person, the basis on which one analyzes such laws comes from one’s understanding of what God wants for the world. Thomas Merton explains it this way: “The Christian is and must be by his very adoption as a son of God, in Christ, a peacemaker (Mt. 5:9).  The Christian is one whose life has sprung from a particular spiritual seed: the blood of the martyrs who, without offering forcible resistance, laid down their lives rather than submit to the unjust laws. . .  That is to say, the Christian is bound, like the martyrs, to obey God rather than the state whenever the state tries to usurp powers that do not and cannot belong to it.”  [The Nonviolent Alternative, 13]

When I was growing up, my parents used to regularly say to me, “Now, Brian, don’t get into trouble.” John Lewis’ parents told him the same thing. The difference was that the trouble he was contemplating was far more serious and important than any trouble I might get into. He was trying to overcome segregation laws that he believed were immoral, and opposed to the ways of God. 

John Lewis, on Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington DC, just days before he died.

In his words: “As a young man I tasted the bitter fruits of segregation and racial discrimination, and I didn’t like it. I used to ask my parents, my grandparents, and my great grandparents, ‘Why segregation? Why racial discrimination?’ And they would say, ‘That’s the way it is. Don’t get in trouble…’ But when I heard the words of Dr. King, I knew then that I could strike a blow against segregation and racial discrimination, and I decided to get in trouble. I decided to get in the way. But it was good trouble, necessary trouble. Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”  

His final words of comfort and direction were printed in the New York Times on July 30, 2020: “Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring."

Active Nonviolence is Dangerous

When John Lewis went into battle on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, he was armed with an army surplus backpack carrying the weapons of a toothbrush, an orange and an apple, and two books, one of them by Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who writes about the spirituality of nonviolent protest.

Lewis was only 25 years old, but he was already experienced in this kind of spiritual confrontation. When he was 20 at the Nashville Sit-Ins, he and his fellow counter sitters had mustard, ketchup and coffee poured 

on their heads, cigarettes put out in their hair, and they had been dragged from stools and kicked and punched as they tried to get some food and drink at segregated lunch counters in downtown Nashville. 

John Lewis and James Zwerg after Beating

When Lewis was 23, as part of the Freedom Riders form Washington DC to New Orleans, he was beaten twice, once in South Carolina and then again, into unconsciousness, along with James Zwerg, at the Greyhound bus depot in Montgomery, Alabama. In addition, one of the buses was fire bombed in Anniston, Alabama by 200 angry whites, but, fortunately, no one was seriously injured. As Lewis told us the last time I heard him speak, he had been arrested over 40 times and jailed many times. Active nonviolence is certainly not an endeavor for the faint of heart. 

In the next three posts I will reflect on why nonviolence can be so dangerous, the dynamics of civil disobedience, and the spirituality of nonviolence, which is at the heart of the Christian gospel, although the civil rights leaders of the 50’s and 60’s had to go to India and explore the work of Hindu Mahatma Gandhi in order to learn how to appropriate it’s truth and method.

Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama living in exile in India, who won the Nobel Peace Prize  in 1989 for nonviolent protest as a path to social change.

First, we have to distinguish between passive and active nonviolence. Passive nonviolence, which means sitting back and doing nothing, does not create social change. In fact, it makes things worse by unintentionally continuing to support the status quo. On the other hand, as Merton explains:

The genuine concept of nonviolence implies not only active and effective resistance to evil but in fact a more effective resistance. But the resistance which is taught in the Gospel is aimed not at the evildoer, but at evil in its source. It combats evil as such by doing good to the evildoer, and thus overcoming evil with good (Romans 12;21), which is the way our Lord Himself resisted evil. [The Nonviolent Alternative, 177]

How then, did this approach to social change make its way into the Civil Rights Movement?

James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you watched John Lewis’ funeral service, you saw a 91-year-old Methodist pastor, James Lawson, speak. He grew up in Ohio, and went as a missionary to India where he studied Ahimsa (nonviolent resistance) and Satyagrapha (steadfastness to truth), the form of nonviolent resistance developed by Gandhi. Returning to Ohio in 1955, he enrolled in the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College, where one of his professors introduced him to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1957, who urged him to move "to the South" by joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. There he began teaching nonviolent protest techniques in the basement of First Colored Baptist Church, along with its pastor Kelly Miller Smith, to students who included John Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette, who became the leaders of the Nashville Sit-Ins.

Diane Nash and Kelly Miller Smith

As for King, he encountered the concept of active nonviolence when, after graduating from Moorhouse College in Atlanta at the age of 19 (he was a brilliant student), he entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., and learned of Gandhi's use of active nonviolence to drive the British out of India. Then, in 1958, Martin and Coretta both went to India to learn more about the work of Gandhi for themselves. 

Merton explains further the relationship of this method of social change to spirituality:

What is certainly true is that Gandhi not only understood the ethic of the Gospel as well, if not in some ways better, than many Christians, but he is one of the very few men of  our time who applied Gospel principles to the problems of a political and social existence in such a way that his approach to these problems was inseparably religious and political at the same time. [180]

As for the way the civil rights leaders used this approach, Ambassador and Rev. Andrew Young summarizes it in his book A Way Out of No Way:

Nonviolent direct actions seek to change an unjust situation by addressing it openly and publicly in an attempt to raise it “before the court of public opinion” in the confidence that it can be changed without violence. There is no guarantee, of course, and no method is foolproof. However, with nonviolence or, as Gandhi called it, “truth force,” neither person nor property is destroyed. At times you will be called on to suffer, but never will you inflict suffering. [ 89]

As Ambassador Young infers, there may be people at the extremes, both left and right, who try to usurp such active nonviolent protests for their own goals, but those committed to nonviolent change will continue to focus on the need for change through a process that protects both life and property.

The power and effectiveness of this method of active nonviolence was so compelling that, in 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At his acceptance speech in Norway, King stated:

I conclude that this award is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. 

Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. [A Call to Conscience, 106]

What is Spirituality? Part IX: Hospitality

The final movement of the spiritual life is to focus on the Hearts of Others, as we move from hostility to hospitality. Now this is not inviting someone over for tea and cookies, although it may include that. It is the movement from the Latin hostis which means “enemy, stranger, foreigner,” to the Latin hostes which means being a “host” who welcomes the other as a “guest.”

We are living in a time of great confusion, anger, fear, misunderstanding, defensiveness and hurt feelings. We live in a time where nearly everyone seems to have an opinion and a need to express it. So much of our conversation, however, is talking past each other. As such, there seems to be no lack of hostility that continues to grow as we each feel misunderstood and unheard.

And so how do we turn that hostility into hospitality? If Nouwen is correct, it is through trying to suspend our own needs and convictions long enough to really listen to the other, not in order to convince them of the truth of what we believe, but so that we can come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of what the other person believes and needs.

For example, can we come to a deeper understanding of the fear of parents right now, whether it be the fear of sending their children to school in the midst of this pandemic, or the fear of parents of children of color who realize daily that they cannot protect their children from violence, including death.

James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates 

The late Toni Morrison said Ta-Nehisi Coates was the intellectual who for her filled the void left after James Baldwin died, and she describes his Between the World and Me as "visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading."

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful book is a letter to his son:

Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. . . . . Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us as endangered. [We are] a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them. . . . It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother’s hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. [82-83]

The first step in learning how to really listen to each other is to create a “safe space.”

Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. 

It is not a method of making our God and our way into the criteria of happiness, but the opening of an opportunity to others to find their God and their way. [Nouwen, Reaching Out, 51]

We may find this kind of hospitality difficult to offer, because we are so used to our relationships being transactional: that is, each party is in it for themselves and there is the assumption that if I give you something, you will give me something in return. 

We cannot change other people by our convictions, stories, advice and proposals, but we can offer a space where people are encouraged to disarm themselves, to lay aside their occupations and preoccupations and to listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in their own center. [54]

And so, a first step is to be able to empty ourselves so that we can be a good host. Nouwen continues:

Someone who is filled with ideas, concepts, opinions and convictions cannot be a good host. There is no inner space to listen, no openness to discover the gift of the other. Poverty of mind as a spiritual attitude is a growing willingness to recognize the incomprehensibility of the mystery of life. Poverty of mind demands the continuing refusal to identify God with any concept, theory, document or event.

A good host not only has to be poor in mind but also poor in heart. When our heart is filled with prejudices, worries, jealousies, there is little room for a stranger. In a fearful environment it is not easy to keep our hearts open to the wide range of human experiences. Real hospitality, however, is not exclusive but inclusive, and creates space for a large variety of human experiences. [74, 75]

In countless ways and places around our nation we have the opportunity to really listen to what people of color are trying to tell us about the pain and suffering they have been enduring for over 400 years. Is it possible that we might have some unique opportunities right now to really connect at a deep level?  Can we use this time to try to understand more deeply that there is experience and history beyond what we have each experienced, but which, if we are willing to listen, can teach us about the other and help us work together to transform the world into a place of greater equality, justice, peace and hope?

In these days when we may not be able to sit down across the table from someone whose experiences have been different than ours, we can still open ourselves to the unique experiences of others by reading their first-hand accounts of suffering, whether that be because of racism, coronavirus, poverty, sexism, inadequate health care, poor schools, or any of the multitude of ways in which people suffer today. 

As Nouwen writes, “When we are willing to detach ourselves from making our own limited experience the criterion for our approach to others, we may be able to see that life is greater than our life, history is greater than our history, experience greater than our experience and God greater than our God." [76]

Recent March in Selma, Alabama

We can then merge our own history and experience into the history and experience of others, and finally experience true community and solidarity. Such solidarity and deeper appreciation and understanding is what can transform the problems and challenges of our world, and at the same time fill our own lives with deeper meaning and purpose.