The “S” word

December 9, 2006 in Activism, Buddhism, Building Community, Detroit Summer, Mind & Spirit, Travels

The intersection of spirituality in activist work continues to be a growing interest of mine. Mostly because I am exploring it in my personal journey, but I also believe that activists need to find out what role spirituality has (or doesn’t have) in their lives, in order to sustain and deepen our work. Below are portions of writing from a recent article I published in Critical Moment. I invite you to read the full article by following the links on my “Articles” page. I would love to hear any reactions, comments, or feedback.

Beloved Communities: Deepening Our Activism and Healing Our Communities

By the rivers of Babylon
Where we sat down
And there we wept
When we remembered Zion
-“Rivers of Babylon,” Black spiritual

As an activist, I’ve heard and sang plenty of “freedom songs” in marches and rallies. But the first time I actually felt a Black spiritual was last month at a Beloved Communities Initiative gathering…The feeling it produced was familiar to me, as a Chinese/Taiwanese Buddhist and my experiences in Sangha, the community of Buddhist practitioners. Both song and Sangha have an indescribable capacity to provide clarity, connection and renewal. The historical use of spirituals, however, is unique to the Black community and in its transcendent ability to bring together a community of people towards collective struggle and hope. For the gathering I was attending, it opened us to even deeper reflection on the state of our communities.

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The gathering had an impressive roster of veteran civil rights activists, freedom fighters and community organizers from around the country, as well as one remarkable individual from Salvador, Brazil. All of us had been invited by the initiative’s organizers, through the Institute for Democratic Renewal/Project Change, to engage in deep reflection and conversations about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for the “Beloved Community.”

The weekend opened with a series of questions put forth by organizers of the gathering. What are the characteristics of a beloved community? How are some communities actualizing the vision for a beloved community in their locales? What makes the understanding of a beloved community important to the work we are doing now? How do we bring together a network of beloved communities to an actual movement that will transform our society?

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At first glance, [our various work] appeared divergent in their composition, approaches and goals. However, themes emerged as we examined these as expressions of beloved communities. For example, many of these efforts brought together communities with strong connections to elders and ancestors, where members of the community are able to look upon their histories to draw lessons, guidance, and purpose.

In our discussions, the phrase “hidden wholeness” came up several times, as an underlying value and aspect of the beloved community. This phrase describes the universality of all our particular experiences; no matter what identities we experience (race, ethnicity, class, ability, gender, sexuality, etc.). Because the dominant society fragments our identities, communities and histories, one role a beloved community can serve is to affirm these particularities while strengthening our connectedness by uncovering the hidden wholeness. We spoke of how traumatizing our society can be to individuals and communities, bringing out an urgent need for healing through spiritual connection or practice. I saw that this process of healing could begin from the telling of our stories and speaking our truths in the presence of a beloved community.

Many organizing conferences or events that I’ve attended mostly encourage folks to discuss the issues or strategize on how to take power from a political structure. Very few of these convenings challenge us to speak as ourselves and share our stories as a way to live out the transformation and change that we seek. The opportunity for me to attend this gathering supported my personal search for spiritual growth, particularly as a young community activist. It has been challenging for me to retell the story of that weekend in Tennessee to my family and community. As an organizer, I’m eager to share fruits of my experiences with others, but I came across such unfamiliarity, or perhaps fear, with talking about the role of spirituality in our activist work. Some readers may even feel I’m coming across too abstractly, or may wonder whether I had some funny out-of-body experience with my head still in the clouds.

I’m not necessarily trying to send the masses to church or join some other form of organized religion. But I do believe that many young people have a hunger for spirituality and life-affirming relationships because of the way that the dominant culture damages and silences our ability to live out our fullest potentials. This is why so many of us are drawn to the transformative politics of organizations like Detroit Summer, the Boggs Center, Veterans of Hope and Tewa Women United. They are the places we go to affirm ourselves and heal our anger and losses, while planting in us new seeds of validation and hope. The beloved community is not going to suddenly appear after the “revolution” is over. Instead, we can work today to live the beloved community in our every waking moment, and in our every breath.