I thought that I would share quite personally my own experience this week
and how I have been trying to work with myself and as you know I do that
sometimes and it's not easy because this is so immediate and raw but I felt
like it was important to; that last week, I think it was Thursday or towards the end of the week,
the president went to El Paso to offer comfort in the wake of a
deadly attack against Hispanic people by a person who wanted to stop the invasion
of immigrants into this country, and just hours before, as many of you are aware,
the administration sent federal agents to meatpacking plants in Mississippi and
arrested about 680 mostly Latino immigrants just a few hours before he
went to offer comfort. And there was mass confusion in those communities; the older
children were just in their first day of school of these parents that were being
hauled away in buses and imprisoned. And so, on the news, what I could hear was
people yelling: 'Let them go, let them go, they are children here' and I could hear
children crying, and that's when I just felt this welling up of anger at the cruelty
this tearing apart of Latino immigrant families, and that the
president was choosing to use the same language as used by the terrorists, 'the
invasion of immigrants'; so continuing to create this same atmosphere for violence
so this, it welled up in me, a lot of anger. And I went on to - I turned off the
news, I said: 'Oh okay, you know, this is', I could feel it in me - went on, went back to work
including writing talks about peace and love and meditation and everything I do,
but there I was feeling this grimness,
and this tightness and my heart was like clenched and my anger was very focused
I was very much 'bad othering', and then just more and more in the back of my
mind: 'Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed'
over and over again: 'Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by
love alone is healed, this is the ancient and eternal law' and it brings tears
right now because it's such a truth. It's like: okay, so this body-mind got
caught in that tightness but there's such a bigger truth, so I stopped working
and I sat down to meditate and I did a few things: the first thing is what I
call a u-turn, where instead of aiming my anger outward at bad others,
I turned it around and I said: 'okay, what's really going on inside here?' and under the anger
what I was feeling was a huge amount of fear; a fear and powerlessness for
the harm being caused to people that are vulnerable, including, it's not very many
degrees of separation anymore, it's like you know, friends and their families - that close.
So fear, and then underneath that was caring, and there was mixed in to the
caring just a huge amount of grief. And so I wept, you know, I went from the
the anger into the weeping and I just sat there as I often do with my hands on
my heart and I just cried. What followed that - I can loop back a
little later was some more reflecting and then some action that I felt
might be helpful in our world situation, my own little way,
but what I want to explore together is this basic grounds of how we wake up
out of the trance that keeps us small that aims blame at maybe a particular
person or a group and come to some larger place of understanding, and that's
what I really want to explore and some of you may be thinking: 'Yeah but
outrage and anger is totally appropriate' because, you know, you need the energy to
do something; and it is appropriate, anger is intelligent. And I certainly wasn't
saying: 'Oh I shouldn't be angry'; in fact I think we have to listen to our anger and
I know many, many people that are feeling incredibly angry and disturbed and it's
there's an intelligence that knows that when there's violent speech and violent
action against fellow beings, that it's crushing to know that and that we want
to help so that it's intelligent and here's one of my favorite lines this is
from a very dear friend and Buddhist teacher Ruth King, she says: 'Anger is
initiatory, it is not transformative.'
Anger is initiatory, it is not transformative. We need the energy,
it wakes us up, it alerts us; but then we need to keep on going to what's next.
Another teacher of mine, Ruby Sales, who's a civil rights activist and
an elder, she describes non-redemptive anger as
when you lose access to your deepest intelligence and wisdom; redemptive
anger is when you get energized but then you move on to out-of-care acting. So
non-redemptive anger, getting stuck in 'bad othering', actually fuels
the soul sickness of our society and there's a wisdom in us that knows what Martin
Luther King means by 'soul force', that knows that when we're really, really
alive with caring and when we join hands, that's soul force; we can act out of
compassion to make a difference.
'Hatred never ceases by hatred but by
love alone is ceased; this is an ancient and eternal law.'
[bells]