A World in Which It Will Be Easier to Love
Hello dear friends! A version of this month’s essay was originally published by the Center for Action and Contemplation as part of their We Conspire series that features writers and leaders working to integrate the movements for contemplative spirituality and justice. The cooperative I lead was honored to receive a grant from CAC this past year. Along with their grant support, I was invited to write an essay on the ways contemplative spirituality and the kind of social change organizing we’re attempting at the Community Purchasing Alliance of Massachusetts weave together and influence one another in my life (Shoutout to my brilliant, rabble-rousing, creative CPA MA co-conspirators! The thumbnail image for this newsletter is from one of our amazing board retreats <3). I’m so grateful for CAC’s support and honored to share this with you! As always, thank you for reading, dear one, and for being part of this little community.
One more thing before we dive into the meat. It’s now been a little over 6 months since I relaunched this newsletter as Toward Solidarity and began a more regular practice of sharing writings. This newsletter is free and I intend for it to stay that way. I love writing but am not trying to make my living off of it. What makes the writing worthwhile is knowing it is being read. The number of subscribers has grown by almost 40% since the relaunch, which is incredible — I’m so grateful for all of you who have joined! I’ve only made one real appeal so far, so its time for another: would you please share this newsletter with your friends, colleagues, and community? My goal is to break 200 subscribers by the end of the year. We need 38 more folks to join to make it. Thanks for your help!
A World in Which it is Easier to Love
I was four months into the professional phase of my journey trying to “do justice” as an expression of my faith when I began collecting the names of the dead.
Like every year on the longest night, the activists, social workers, and faith leaders who walk alongside folks surviving on the streets of our city were planning a memorial of lament for our unhoused neighbors who died that year. We would gather as a public witness to the dignity of the discarded. But first someone needed to collect the names.
I was new to the area, so while the job was heavy, as I called social service agencies to add names of the recently departed to our growing list, the task did not at first penetrate those layers of scar tissue within me, the ones we accumulate to navigate life in a wounded and wounding world. That changed when someone told me to write down the name “Gary.”
I pushed back. Pressed for detail. Gary just got an apartment last month. Gary I knew. Gary I walked alongside for months, awed at his relentless determination. Gary the one who did everything right. Gary who actually got his housing. “Gary,” they said, “was found last week on his apartment floor. We’re so sorry for your loss.”
When try to describe the various struggles I’ve participated in over the past decade that now add to something I suppose we could call a career—about my work with people experiencing homelessness, or organizing on economic and racial justice campaigns, or my current project building a cooperative of congregations and nonprofits who leverage their collective purchasing power to close Boston's racial wealth gap—when I describe these things, people often say with the best of intentions something like, “Oh, that must be so rewarding!”
We’ve all heard some version of it if we’re in this work. And I know they are well meaning. It’s a response that typically comes from the person’s own longing to do work that feels more meaningful. But friends, the first place my mind tends to wander when I hear that response is a fantasy of punching that well meaning person right in the throat. Which is a way of saying, I’m no natural contemplative riding the waves of zen. Such fantasies of violence are, I suppose, my ego’s reaction to being thrown back to that moment, and the many like it in the dozen years since, when I was sobbing on a curb by a busy downtown street as my body refused to process that Gary really was dead.
The poor are those who die before their time, as Gustavo Gutierrez often put it. To enter their world as one attempting the sort of communion we might hope to call solidarity is to be plunged into suffering. In that place we often find ourselves awash in grief of a very particular kind. It’s the sort of grief evoked by a form of violence that not only never needed to happen, but which our society chose to make an endemic feature of its arrangements. That’s why this sort of grief can so easily slide into rage or despair or both.
When Howard Thurman, that great mystic teacher of the Black Freedom Movement, asked what meaning the religion of Jesus had to those with their “backs against the wall,” he concluded it had to speak directly to the primary question on the lips of the oppressed: “Under what terms is survival possible?”
My experience has been that in a secondary but connected way, this question of survival is on the lips of all who seek to confront injustice and abolish structures of oppression. How can we survive this vocation ever in the face of death?
In answer, Thurman pointed to the unbounded freedom of the inner depths where the borders between God and the self dissolve. Survival—life—begins in the healing silence of contemplative communion where we continually draw upon the Spirit which pours herself out as the silent assurance of our own belovedness, indeed as our very self. What we must always remember is that this same Spirit who comes as our comforter and, indeed, shows herself to be the ground of our very being, is also continually pouring herself out for the liberation of the poor. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to declare good news to the poor!” as Jesus said at the very outset of his ministry. The Spirit-Liberator begs us to come, follow, and do likewise. And she offers us the resources to do so from that deep place of silently secured belovedness.
These two outpourings of the Spirit, for inner freedom and social freedom, are one. There is no union with the liberating Spirit of God other than the union we discover through participation with the work of liberation.
. . .
The second place my mind goes, once those awkward visions of throat punching subside, is to dream again what it could be like if this well meaning person were to join in the work of building a world in which Gary no longer had to die.
Friends, if, as the mystics teach, contemplation is to lead us into union with God…
If in union with God we find ourselves in loving communion with our neighbor…
If loving communion with our neighbor leads to solidarity with them against the sources of their oppression…
Then would not the next step mean something like building a world of relationships, homes, neighborhoods, institutions, congregations, policies, and — dare we say it — political economies designed to reflect and reinforce the life-giving love which is at the luminous center of this loving communion of solidarity?
Such are the questions and dreams that led me into organizing the democratically-governed, racial-justice seeking cooperative I now lead.
Let’s go back to Thurman. The great mystic spoke of his work as a quest to help others cultivate “the inner resources needed for the creation of a friendly world of friendly men.” This quote always resonates in my heart with another from the Brazilian philosopher Paolo Freire who described his hope as “the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.” Indeed, this is the work.
The function of contemplation is to set us free, through love, to become love, such that all creation can be drawn back into the dance of love. There, together in that gracious dance of communion, through the Spirit’s continuous outpouring of love, we can become a healed and healing creation — we become a movement capable of building a world in which the names of those who died before their time need no longer be gathered.
Read more of my writing on spirituality & solidarity
Go back to where this Toward Solidarity started!
The most popular post so far:
A goodie from the pre-relaunch archives:
One of my favorite essays for those looking to move on to the 301 content:
A Few More Resources on Contemplative Solidarity
Anchored by the brilliant Dr. Barbara Holmes, The Cosmic We podcast (produced by the Center for Action and Contemplation) is dropping gems. They describe their project as a podcast that “goes beyond race and racism to consider relatedness as the organizing principle of the universe, exploring our shared cosmic origins though a cultural lens that fuses science, mysticism, spirituality, and the creative arts.”
Two decades before the monks at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, MA began to distill a practice that became known as Centering Prayer, Howard Thurman delivered a series of lectures that were captured in a slim book called The Creative Encounter in which he describes a practice drawn from the long contemplative tradition of Christianity with steps amazingly aligned with what Thomas Keating would later popularize. I read it this summer immediately after finishing his autobiography With Head and Heart (where the “friendly people, friendly world” quote above comes from) and loved Thurman’s project of linking inner freedom and outer freedom, his insistence that these practices should have some natural effect on our behaviors and attitudes, and his foregrounding that cultivating inner love should mean practicing outer love. For Thurman, this all very logically means that contemplative practice leads us to build social systems oriented toward love which, for his time, must mean the abolition of Jim Crow society. There were moments when it felt dated, but its full of gems and worth a read. No inward myopia and disregard for justice to be found with this mystic. (Also, if you haven’t read Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, honestly, you just have to).
I know of no better guide to the spiritual life as a journey with God into solidarity with the poor than Gustavo Gutierrez. I want to write a lot more about him as one of the greatest, though least heralded, mystic teachers of the last 100 years, but today I want to shout-out his short book We Drink From Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People. This is his attempt to record the spiritual life of Latin American poor people’s movements for liberation. In the forward, Henri Nouwen describes sitting under Guiterrez’s teaching during his journeys through Latin America as a conversion experience. Nouwen was forced to reckon with the ways his own spiritual life and teachings had become abstract, individualized, and ineffectual to the world’s great social injustices. In its place, Gutierrez teaches us the communal and political dimensions of encountering God in history among movement struggles against death and for life.
Finally, I’d like to give a shoutout to the Adam Bucko’s work. I caught onto him earlier this year. It’s been a privilege to soak in his wisdom through podcasts (like this one and this one) and reading his latest book of stories and guidance on engaged contemplation in the bowels of an unjust world (which I referenced in a newsletter earlier this year). I also highly recommend joining the online contemplative services his organization, the Center for Spiritual Imagination, hosts each Tuesday evening at 7pm EST. They were a powerful grounding space for me this Spring and I’m eager for their fall relaunch in October. The
also just launched a Substack, which is already fire, so definitely check it out and subscribe!