Calling and Identity
My identity as an activist brought me to this moment, facing off against Boston Police officers in front of the Federal Reserve Building overlooking Dewey Square. Excited after a long march, my comrades and I yelled such obscenities as only a crowd could produce. I remember the moment quite clearly. I saw her. This woman’s face wasn’t as mean or as mocking as the rest of the police; she just seemed… concerned. I directed my ire toward her: “Don’t you have children? Do they know what you are doing here?” Then it hit me—maybe she does have children, maybe a partner, maybe brothers and sisters, for certain she has parents. She is a person with a whole life a whole identity independent of what she is doing now. I saw her. Now, I could also see us; it was like an out-of-body experience. I could hear our words and see our faces: they were distorted, disfigured, so ugly. Something in me broke.
I would later come to realize that at this moment, I had to confront a question that Howard Thurman articulates in his work Disciplines of the Spirit: “Is what I am doing an expression of my fundamental intent toward any [person] when I am most myself?” Here was a moment when my identity as activist collided with my identity as a believer in the inherent dignity and worthiness of every human being and our indisputable connectedness—in short, my identity as a follower of Christ.
In the almost seven years since this moment, I’ve been working through the tension between Love and Justice. This journey has led me to some wild experiences and diverse communities across the country and across the globe. Thankfully, as with most of these large questions, I am not the first person to wrestle with this tension. Luckily, much of the history of this inquiry is captured within our great religious traditions. I’ve been blessed to engage with scholars, activists, community leaders, the deeply invested, and the sincerely disinterested, and my journey has led me to this conclusion:
A spirit of retaliation has come to dominate movements for justice that are properly arising in response to the darkness that seems to be engulfing our society in the form of division through the various -isms. This spirit is not opposed to the darkness but is in fact one with it. A successful confrontation with this darkness requires the cultivation of a spirit of reconciliation, its true opposite. The cultivation of this spirit is the purview of our religious communities.
I have been hesitant to fully articulate this conclusion. First, it isn’t very original, and my millenial ego is telling me that “if you ain’t saying something new, you ain’t really saying nothing at all.” But secondly, and much closer to the heart, I hesitate because I sense the ways that this conclusion alienates me from communities of justice seekers and the disinherited, whom I love. I fear this will separate me from my communities as these thoughts, ideas, and the actions they demand will be perceived as giving shelter to those we have identified as enemies and placing unfair burdens on those whom we call victims.
I am fearful both because I don’t want to be isolated from my communities but also because God’s people have suffered enough under leaders and ideologies that readily overlook their suffering and are willing to trade away their humanity for symbolic concessions. I know the hurt and pain—I hear the cry of the disinherited. I am the disinherited. I know the hearts and the sincerity of allies who yield to the felt pain in the collective unconscious and rise up against oppression. I am an ally. I know and feel and yet I hear the whisper that says, “This does not let you off the hook.” The call to seek and reclaim the common humanity of all of God’s people trapped in systems and ideologies that distort us all into ugly things demands an answer. I can no longer wait. And the authentic response of my heart is to love. To somehow figure out how, in the midst of this great darkness, to fight hard not just for Justice but for Love.
Presently, this journey has taken me across the ocean to Northern Ireland for the next seven months to work at a peace and reconciliation center committed to “transforming division through human encounter.” This place was born in the darkness of Irish civil unrest, euphemistically called “the Troubles,” that dragged on from 1968 to1998 and led to the deaths of over 3,500 people and maiming of almost 50,000. Here I hope to be exposed to the spirit of reconciliation to grow deeper in my understanding of the difficult process of learning how to love and turn back to the other. I consider it a great blessing to be able to reflect upon this journey to understand reconciliation in my past, present, and future with the State of Formation: Voices of Renewal Fellowship. I am grateful to Soren Hessler and Br. Larry Whitney for alerting me to the opportunity. And I am grateful to you, dear reader—whoever you are, wherever you are—for joining me along this leg of my journey.