Monday, February 6, we will meet online.
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This Monday February 6, Magda will facilitate.
I have been thinking much lately about love and fear, its opposite. I have been pondering how fear can be converted into love and courage or their antitheses, anger and hatred. In these months of January and February, months in which we celebrate love and Black history, and commemorate both Thich Nhat Hanh’s passing and Martin Luther King’s birthday, I would like to honor the brave hearts who have overcome fear and walked through fire as they sought to bring love to our world.
BRAVE HEARTS WHO WALK THROUGH FIRE
In Brothers in the Beloved Community, the Rev. Dr. Marc Andrus writes about Thay’s first communication with King, a letter describing the act of self-immolation famously practiced by Thich Quang Duc and Nhat Chi Mai during the war in Vietnam. Contrary to the common Western perception of suicide, Thay describes these protests as acts of love and courage, aimed at reducing suffering and fostering interbeing. Andrus discusses Sister Chan Khong’s explanation for why Thich Quang Duc’s heart was not burnt during either the immolation or the subsequent cremation, instead just turning a deeper brownish red each time. Sister Khong interprets this phenomenon as a sign of the power of love in the monk’s heart. We find an echo of this in Thay’s letter, where he writes that the actions of these Boddhisatvas represent a lotus in a sea of fire, in the midst of world burning with napalm, hatred and incomprehension. This metaphor would be invoked again in Thay’s 1967 work Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. Thay’s letter also draws a parallel between these Boddhisatvas and the ones involved in the Civil Rights Movement, who in their own way went through fire to bring justice and interbeing to American society.
FEAR OF THE OTHER
When I first started working with teenagers who had all kinds of needs and challenges, I felt a great deal of fear. But I soon understood that I had to work through my fear and convert it into love and courage if I wanted to find meaning in my vocation and make a difference in the lives of young people.
My interest in the concept of fear has led me to read Thay’s Fear as well as other texts about the subject. I have sought to explore the root causes and manifestations of fear, as well as how it may be transformed through mindful practices. The Nikole Hannah-Jones-edited 1619 Project, a collection of essays about the many, often neglected connections between African-American history and the broader history of the United States, tells stories that speak to the worst kinds of fear imaginable to me as a woman and as a mother: the full awareness that one's body and children are at the absolute disposition of whoever may be one’s owner, or that the fate of one’s children may depend on fearful, angry and hateful mobs. After reading several chapters relating the history of violence against African-Americans, I was surprised to find that the chapter entitled Fear concerned not the fear felt by African-Americans but, instead, the fear felt by whites. White fear translated into extreme cruelty during periods in which African-Americans were finally being granted more freedom and opportunity.
DETACHED BODDHISATVAS
“They kicked me off the plantation, they set me free. It’s the best thing that could happen. Now I can work for my people.” Fannie Lou Hamer
“We have been given great offense on account of our womanhood, which seems to be as objectionable as our abolitionism.” Angelina Grimké
When I think of brave hearts who have turned fear into courage, Black women who have faced the double burden of gender and race come to mind. One giant for me is Mississippian Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer had ample reason to be overcome by fear as a Black female activist during the Civil Rights Era. She was harassed by the Ku Klux Klan and endured police beatings that permanently disabled her. I wonder what experiences helped transform her fear into courage as she joined the Civil Rights Movement, fought to register voters, founded a political party and challenged a president. As a mother, I wonder if a major turning point was when her daughter died because the local hospital refused to treat the child of a civil rights activist. Did her courage derive from a state of detachment as someone who had lost so much? “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d a been a little scared,” Hamer once said. “But what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”
The Grimké sisters offer another, though in many ways very different, example of courageous activism. Angelina and Sarah had much to lose in their struggle for a fairer society as they were born into a white family of slaveowners in Charleston. Despite not being highly literate or great speakers, they advocated against slavery and described the horrors of their plantation, being driven out of their community as a result. They also shouldered an added burden as women who dared to speak up. As Sara Evans writes, “No one in the antebellum south after 1830 could speak against slavery and remain there - least of all a woman” (Personal Politics, p. 25). Why did they choose to lose it all, turning fear into courage? Was it due in part to the spiritual strength and insight they gained from their conversion to the Quaker religion in their twenties?
WHAT IF?
Thay describes the power of mindfulness to transform the energy of potentially overwhelming emotions:
“When fear, craving, or desire comes up, we need to be able to recognize it with mindfulness and smile to it with compassion. ‘Hello, fear; hello, craving. Hello, little child; hello, ancestors.’ Following our breathing, and in the safe island of the present moment, we transmit the energy of stability, compassion, and non-fear to our inner child and our ancestors.”
The Art of Living, p. 141
It seems to me that many in the community of white oppressors did not develop the insight that would help them understand their fear and their irrational, often self-destructive attachment to separatist views and practices. They failed to understand that lynch mobs, instead of protecting them, only brought more suffering to American society as a whole. The illusion of racial superiority even prevented many whites from escaping poverty as they refused to join labor unions that would associate them with African-Americans.
What if white churches and schools had developed insight into their own tendencies of fear and attachment, their complexes of superiority, the true roots of their suffering? What if this insight had helped them consider the spiritual possibility of transforming fear into love, healing and reconciliation? What if they had chosen to support the Boddhisatvas who walked through fire to promote interbeing? What if they had encouraged their children to explore and redeem the suffering of their ancestors? What if they had preached that self-salvation depended on fostering a beloved community, and that their real enemy was fear converted into hatred?
WHAT I SEE
As I reflect on the powerful energies of fear and love, I am inspired by those brave hearts, detached lotuses in seas of fire, who have found the courage to transform fear into love despite it all. Thay describes our hearts as either cut by knives or connected through bridges. I see beams of light like golden roads linking these Boddhisatvas’ crimson hearts, bringing the world together in a rainbow. The beating of their hearts continues in all those committed to perpetuating their legacies. The sun and moon join in illuminating them in a mandala where the lotus is born from mud and fire.
Questions to Explore
What are my perceptions of fear and love and how they manifest in my life?
How can we maximize the possibilities of fear transformed into love?
Who are the Boddhisatvas who inspire me and how do/can I perpetuate their legacy?
How can we - individually and as a sangha - help bring more interbeing into our local community, American society and the world?