I woke up this morning thinking about Dr. King. His words, either reading them or listening to him speak, can still move me to tears over 40 years later. He served us all. His willingness to feel the pain and suffering of his congregation, his community, both African-American and white, changed our hearts and minds. He was able to instill both the courage to protest and the courage to hope. The willingness to actually feel pain appears to have the magical ability to generate love. Dr. King’s power came from his ability to call us all back to love. This means for some of us that we had to face our own darkness, our bigotry and narrow-mindedness, our reluctance to allow ourselves to truly witness our neighbor’s pain. It meant for others the courage to face powerlessness, despair or shame. For all of us, he epitomized what it meant to hope, to dare to believe in human dignity.
It occurs to me that both white guilt and African-American struggles with self-esteem come from our inability to really feel this pain, to drink this cup to the bitter dregs. We want to hide behind analysis and concepts rather than endure the wrenching reality of feeling our own pain. We were willing to go part way with Dr. King but we hold back from truly allowing our hearts to break and until we do, until we can allow the immensity of this pain to be felt as a living, breathing reality in our bodies and our souls, we have kept it locked away from the power of our love.
Ideas are a wonderful way to make sense of things, but they can also buffer us from actually feeling. Ideas can move us to anger or action, but they cannot move us to love. It is only the courage to surrender fully, to actually feel the pain in our stomach, the tightening in our chest, our deeply held tears that has any hope of releasing and allowing us to access the real power of our hearts. Love is not an idea – it is a vibrant power, the only real force for change that we’ve ever had.
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