Based on the gospel song of the same name by Rev. Dr. Charles Albert Tindley, one of the most influential African American ministers of the turn of the 20th century, “We Shall Overcome” became synonymous with the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. The song was originally said to be sung by tobacco workers striking in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1945. By 1950, however, the song became a favorite among activist singers like Pete Seeger. By 1963, Joan Baez was leading a crowd of 300,000 protestors at the Lincoln Memorial in the song, and in 1968 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted the lyrics in his last sermon before he was assassinated.
Nonviolence Begins Within
This week’s Daily Meditations begin with Richard Rohr’s teaching that our ability to choose nonviolence is inextricably tied to our own inner healing.
There is always a linkage between the inner journey of contemplation and our ability to work against violence in the world, in our culture, and in ourselves. As long as we bring to our actions a violence that primarily exists within ourselves, nothing really changes. The future is always the same as the present. That’s why we have to change the present.
We have to begin within and allow ourselves to be transformed. Then the future can be different than the present. Otherwise, we have no evidence that we’re going to do anything different tomorrow, next week, or next year. We’re going to react next week to the violence that emerges in our wider culture, in our institutions, and in our families just as we react right now. And so we always have to return to what I have often called “cleaning the lens.” Authentic spirituality is always on the first level about us—as individuals. It always is. We want it to be about our partners, our coworkers, or our pastors. We want to use spirituality to change other people, but true spirituality always changes us.
We founded the CAC to give activists a grounded spirituality so they could work for social change from a place other than anger, ideology, or mere willpower. Many people intellectually accept Gandhi’s or Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachings on nonviolence and try to execute it by willpower, but that’s not what I call a “mystery of participation.” Such people aren’t participating in a qualitatively new and different life in themselves. They have changed their minds but not their hearts. In real moments of tension and trial, such people are as much a part of the problem as the people they oppose. Their will and egos are still totally in control with their need to be right, to win, and to have success, which almost always leads to violence of some kind.
I think that was the great disappointment with political activism and even many of the nonviolent movements of the 1960s and 70s in the U.S. It was not really transformation. It wasn’t really coming from what we would call—to use a very old-fashioned, religious word—holiness. Such action was often not coming from holiness, but simply the intellect and will, which are not the transformed self.
What we’re seeking is pure or clear action. When we find inside ourselves the positive place of communion and holiness, there’s nothing to react to. Such action can be very firm, because it comes from that place where we know what’s real, what’s good, what’s true, and what’s beautiful. The giveaway is that the energy at that point is entirely positive. That’s when we know it’s prayer energy and that is what I think it means to be a person of true nonviolence.
A Loving Inner Witness
Richard continues to explain how contemplation heals us from the judgments and thoughts that so often lead to violence against ourselves and others.
We each carry a certain amount of pain from our very birth. If that pain is not healed and transformed, it actually increases as we grow older, and we transmit it to people around us. We can become violent in our attitudes, gestures, words, and actions.
We must nip this process in the bud by acknowledging and owning our own pain, rather than projecting it elsewhere. For myself, I can’t pretend to be loving when inside I’m not, when I know I’ve had cruel, judgmental, and harsh thoughts about others. At the moment the thought arises, I have to catch myself and hand over the annoyance or anger to God. Contemplative practice helps me develop this capacity to watch myself, to let go of the thought, and to connect with my loving Inner Witness. Let me explain why this is so effective and so important.
If we can simply observe the negative pattern in ourselves, we have already begun to separate from it. The watcher is now over here, observing ourselves thinking that thought—over there. Unless we can become the watcher, we’ll almost always identify with our feelings and our judgments. They feel like real and objective truth.
Most people I know are overly identified with their own thoughts and feelings. They don’t really have feelings; their feelings have them. That may be what earlier Christians meant by being “possessed” by a demon. That’s why so many of Jesus’ miracles are the exorcism of devils. Most of us don’t take that literally anymore, but the devil is still a powerful metaphor, and it demands that we take it quite seriously. Everyone has a few devils. I know I’m “possessed” at least once or twice a day, even if just for a few minutes!
There are all kinds of demons. In other words, there are lots of times when we cannot not think a certain way. When we see certain people, we get afraid. When we see other people, we get angry. For example, numerous studies show that many white Americans have an implicit, unacknowledged fear of Black men. Most of us are not consciously or explicitly racist, but many of us have an implicit and totally denied racial bias. This is why all healing and prayer must descend into the unconscious where the lies we’ve believed are hidden in our wounds and embedded in the social reality of our cultures.
During contemplation, forgotten painful experiences may arise. In such cases, it helps to meet with a spiritual director or therapist to process old wounds and trauma in healthy ways. Over a lifetime of practice, contemplation gradually helps us detach from who we think we are and rest in our authentic identity as Love. At first this may feel like an “identity transplant” until we learn how to permanently rest in God.
Evening
Slowly evening takes on the garments held for it by a line of ancient trees. You look, and the world recedes from you. Part of it moves heavenward, the rest falls away. And you are left, belonging to neither fully, not quite so dark as the silent house, not quite so sure of eternity as that shining now in the night sky, a point of light. You are left, for reasons you can’t explain, with a life that is anxious and huge, so that, at times confined, at times expanding, it becomes in you now stone, now star.
Book of Images
A Year with Rilke (p. 203). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Click Image for John White's Original Vision For CO2's
