Breaking the Cycle of Violence
March 31st, 2021 by JDVaughn Leave a reply »
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I doubt very much that I
need to point out the many ways we practice scapegoating in our society today.
We do it on both the political left and right, in our churches and community
groups, by finger-pointing and punishing. We are convinced that “they” (whoever
“they” are) are the entirety of the problem. It takes great spiritual and
psychological maturity to recognize and break the cycle. Felicia Murrell,
a writer, editor, and friend of the CAC, shares her own desire to walk a new
and courageous path as an African American woman:
It might feel good, after years of being
shackled to scarcity, victimhood, poverty, suspicion, and inferiority, to
project onto a scapegoat (holding the system complicit by association) the
burden of hundreds of years of pain. We feel righteous. We long for someone
else to feel what we feel or, at the very least, to validate that it’s okay for
us to feel what we feel. Heavily laden with years and years of collective
racial anger, misuse, and abuse, we lumber into liminality with all these
feelings, these shackles of oppression.
And there, in liminal space—the space of
sitting with our truths; the place of mystery, the unknown; the place where we
let go of our injured expectations to be seen, to be known, to be welcomed—we
offer ourselves what we’ve longed to have given to us. We acknowledge our
feelings—the power and depth of each one—giving them space to roll through us,
to breathe and take on life.
Instead of projecting outward or looking for
resolution, we sit with them, breathe through them—allowing them to be as they
are within us. We cry the tears our ancestors could not. We feel the fatigue
they were not allowed to feel. We give in to the vulnerability that would have
cost them their lives—not blaming, not finger-pointing, but honest
truth-telling of our dehumanizing, painful history.
On the threshold between what was and what will be, we unburden ourselves of our fierce, dogged determination to control the outcome of other people’s opinions of us, and there the alchemy happens.
With transformation comes power. . . . What will we do with our power? What will we call forth?
There at the threshold, we
decide. Do I wield my power to force control, to shape the narrative and
determine what will be and how it will be? Do I allow myself to be honest about
humanity’s failings and the abuse of power, seeing the ways in which I too
could become like that which I oppose? Can I acknowledge the monster side of my
humanity: lament it, forgive it, and let it go, realizing that it may cycle around
again? . . .
In liminal
space, I discover a formlessness that blurs the intersection of diversity and
unity. The ambitious cry of, “’til all are one!” somehow morphs in liminal
space and I realize we all are already one.
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