All that is very necessary soul work. But the truth is that we cannot become the best person we can possibly be alone. God is a Community of Love, Three Divine individual and equal Persons Who are One in Love. And so when God created us in God's Image, God created us as social animals, meant to be together.
How many people during this time of social isolation because of the pandemic are using Face Time and Zoom to stay connected? How many are enduring depression because they cannot see or hold their loved ones?! Somehow one of the great gifts that can flow from this pandemic is rediscovering our deep, necessary connectedness with one another. Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills in this way: we’ve just “forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Dorothy Day, the activist who founded the Catholic Worker movement, described the terrible loneliness we each feel until we can become secure in another's love. "We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community."
We all belong to many communities in our lives, because just one group can never give us everything we need to grow. Family, friends, workplace, neighborhood, Church - all these teach us new ways of being, deeper ways of loving others as unique and equal individuals, and being loved as the unique person we are. We learn gradually not to be threatened by others, but instead to be gifted by their differences. When we truly love each other, we set the other person free to be and become his/her deepest, truest self.
And there are many ways of being "Church." Fr. Richard Rohr says, "Too often, the formal church has been unable to create any authentic practical community, especially over the last half-century. In response, we see the emergence of new faith communities seeking to return to this foundational definition of church. These may not look like our versions of traditional “church,” but they often exemplify the kinds of actual community that Jesus, Paul, and early Christians envisioned. People are gathering digitally and in person today through neighborhood associations, study groups, community gardens, social services, and volunteer groups. They’re seeking creative ways of coming together, nurturing connection, of healing and whole-making. The “invisible” church might be doing this just as much, if not more, than the visible one. The Holy Spirit is humble and seems to work best anonymously. I suspect that is why the Holy Spirit is often pictured as a simple bird or blowing wind that is here one minute and seemingly gone and then nowhere (John 3:8)."
Yet as we reach out to build a community with others who have the same interests, the same vision, do we also ever take the huge risk of reaching out to someone whose life is very different from ours because he or she has a different skin color or ethnicity? It is false to say that to set another free in love is to be color-blind. No, to truly love another, we love the other in his her entirety: skin color, religion or lack of it, body type, personality type, culture, language, age. To truly love another exists when both people can be vulnerable with each other, share their life experiences, painful and joyful, share their deepest fears and insecurities, knowing that you are not going to be judged.
Astoundingly, because of the murder of George Floyd, people are doing exactly that. As peaceful protests explode across the country - and I speak of the peaceful protests rather than the rioting and violence - we see huge new multi-colored, multi-ethnic communities forming, uniting in one purpose: to work for equality between whites and persons of color. People of color are acknowledging their pain, their inequality, their sense that their lives do not matter as much as white lives. Many whites are listening and acknowledging that they need to be educated in what it's like to live in America when you are black. Blacks and whites are acknowledging that here, in America, they have forgotten that they belong to each other.
America's greatest Peace Activist, Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose marches included people of various colors, was inspired by a great black teacher, philosopher, and theologian named Howard Thurman, who founded America's first interracial and interfaith Church. (Photo above)
Fr. Richard Rohr tells us about him:
"As Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) observed, one of the most segregated hours in the United States still occurs on Sunday mornings when we attend church services. ( Martin Luther King, Jr., “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” Sermon, August 9, 1953) Yet as early as the 1940s, African-American writer and mystic Howard Thurman (1899–1981) was seeking to build a worshipping community across racial differences. In 1944, along with his white co-pastor Alfred Fisk (1905–1959), Thurman co-founded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, the country’s first interracial, interfaith congregation. Reverend Thurman describes how the collective experience of God became the center of the community’s life, unifying people from many different backgrounds and cultural expressions:
"Fellowship Church was a unique idea, fresh, untried. There were no precedents and no traditions to aid in structuring the present or gauging the future. Yet [my wife] Sue and I knew that all our accumulated experiences of the past had given us two crucial gifts for this undertaking: a profound conviction that meaningful and creative experiences between peoples can be more compelling than all the ideas, concepts, faiths, fears, ideologies, and prejudices that divide them; and absolute faith that if such experiences can be multiplied and sustained over a time interval of sufficient duration any barrier that separates one person from another can be undermined and eliminated. We were sure that the ground of such meaningful experiences could be provided by the widest possible associations around common interest and common concerns.....
"Our worship became increasingly a celebration before God of life lived during the week; the daily life and the period of worship were one . . . rhythm. Increasing numbers of people who were engaged in the common life of the city of San Francisco found in the church restoration, inspiration, and courage for their work on behalf of social change in the community. The worship experience became a watering hole for this widely diverse and often disparate group of members and visitors from many walks of life.
"It was not long before I realized that what I had learned and experienced as to the meaning of love had to be communicated as a witness to the God in me and in our personal conduct as a witnessing congregation.
"What had I learned about love? One of the central things was that the experience of being understood by another was of primary importance. Somewhere deep within was a “place” beyond all faults and virtues that had to be confirmed before I could run the risk of opening my life up to another. To find ultimate security in an ultimate vulnerability, this is to be loved." (Adapted from Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1979), 144, 145–146, 148.)
Here is a prayer exercise to help you to become your truest self by interacting with someone of perhaps a different skin color, a different life experience. If this has been your life experience, I listen and lament with you. Here is someone being vulnerable with us, angry and in pain with us. Can your heart reach out to hold this person's heart carefully, to accept this vulnerable soul? Hold this wounded life safely, securely? I found this poem on a website called "The Moral Universe," but couldn't find the author. Prayerfully read this and enter into community with him/her:
LAMENTATION FOR GEORGE FLOYD:
White men and women have thought of black bodies for centuries as something they can do what they will with.
Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the 13th Amendment nor the Voting Rights Act nor the institution of a category of felonies called hate crimes has changed this.
Black bodies have only been good for making wealth off of or using as scapegoats for white rage.
How long, O Lord, how long?
The murder of George Floyd was committed in plain sight; the four cops knew exactly what they are were doing. They intended to kill him and they did, right out in public. How can we breathe when he couldn’t?
How long, O Lord, how long?
I fear the pandemic of white supremacy more, a great, great deal more, than I fear COVID-19, though for black bodies, both are methods of genocide.
How long, O Lord, how long?
I woke up today with such a weight of anger, grief, and despair that I could barely move. Prayer time didn’t help. All I wanted to do was post to white policeman, “Keep your fucking hands off black bodies.”
How long, O Lord, how long?
The list of names has gotten so long, we could fill a Vietnam Memorial with them. George, Amadou, Philando, Oscar, Jamal, John, Sandra, Ahmaud, Breona, Emmet, Jordan, Eric, Jimmie Lee, and hundreds of others whose names are recorded at the Equal Justice Initiative’s Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
This list doesn’t even include the thousands of black bodies who have been killed or neglected in prisons.
How long, O Lord, how long?
When Saul sent men to kill David, David wrote Psalm 59 in lament. When I read verses 1-7 now, I hear the voices of all the black bodies crying from their graves.
59 Deliver me from my enemies, O my God;
protect me from those who rise up against me;
2 deliver me from those who work evil,
and save me from bloodthirsty men.
3 For behold, they lie in wait for my life;
fierce men stir up strife against me.
For no transgression or sin of mine, O LORD,
4 for no fault of mine, they run and make ready.
Awake, come to meet me, and see!
5 You, LORD God of hosts, are God of Israel.
Rouse yourself to punish all the nations;
spare none of those who treacherously plot evil.
6 Each evening they come back,
howling like dogs
and prowling about the city."
As Howard Thurman said, "What had I learned about love? One of the central things was that the experience of being understood by another was of primary importance. Somewhere deep within was a “place” beyond all faults and virtues that had to be confirmed before I could run the risk of opening my life up to another. To find ultimate security in an ultimate vulnerability, this is to be loved."
Can we accept the tragedy that many of Thurman's family and friends experienced terrible segregation and oppression, and that many blacks still do? That their crying need is to be able to be real and vulnerable with whites and be accepted in their entirety, respected and loved for who they are so they can be secure? And safe? And, I might add, the reverse is true: whites need to be accepted by blacks in their vulnerability and entirety, be respected for who they are so they find security, And safety. Then each can become their truest self.
May you find many communities where you are able to be vulnerable, to show your gifts, your fears, your weaknesses, your foibles, and know you are accepted for who you are, where you are secure, where you are safe. May you find many communities where you share a common cause, a common vision, to make this world a better place. May you find at least one community where you worship God together and the faces are different colors, and there may even be different languages, and you all know you are God's children, and it is safe for all to be there.
We never want to forget that we belong to each other. We all want to pass through that long loneliness of being alone and discover that the only solution for all of us is love lived in community, a love that mirrors the love of the Community Which is God.