Day 57
protest
I am about as far from the protesting and violence as one can be. This morning I sit in my robe on the deck, where sunlight is spreading its fresh scent across the valley. The crows are talking to each other, and the woodpeckers are at work already.
“Solitude has its own special work: a deepening of awareness the world needs. A struggle against alienation. True solitude is deeply aware of the world’s needs. It does not hold the world at arm’s length.” says Thomas Merton. These words spread through me like sunlight. I know they are true, because here I am, alone, yet so acutely aware of the “world’s needs.” For they are present in my own aching heart that is increasingly aware of how close to extinction this beautiful place is. The needs of the whole world are present in every corner, where the tiniest life is attempting to survive.
From downtown Portland, my daughter sent me a video of thousands of people chanting “I can’t breathe.” Over the video she had typed the words “I love you” in white. The juxtaposition of these chanted words, repeating the plea of another black man under another boot, just before he died, against her words—I love you—made me cry.
I am painfully aware of the world’s need for those voices of protest and for those witnesses that feel love in the midst of pain. To close ourselves off from that pain, is to close ourselves off from that love. I would never have understood that, had I not removed myself from the city, come to this place, and allowed myself to feel, to cry, to acknowledge my own suffering and my own complacency and complicity, and to know how ruined this place is. It is an ongoing act of vulnerability that I trust, sometimes very hesitantly, will lead to transformation.
There was a time when I looked at protest as a futile act in the face of so much inhumane power and corruption. As if the only sacred words were “there is nothing new under the sun.” Protest against oppression and violence is the demand that there be something new, and for all my faith, I did not see the possibility of newness. What I have learned in my solitude is that it is in the messy acts of protest that we are able to suffer together, to give a voice to individual and collective pain, to communicate to one another that we are not alone, and to embody and witness in each other, hope and resistance. As always, a space that acknowledges the pain, that allows the emotions to flow, will often be the refuge of anger, righteous and unrighteous, of those who will use the collective protest as a place to meet violence with violence. It is a microcosm of our world. Yet, in the center of our cultural frustration, where the violent uprising and the peaceful protest attempt to co-exist, we are exposed to our collective misery. We are united in our frustration, in our experience of pain. It is not just an act of political solidarity, but also an act of emotional solidarity. And every place where we acknowledge the pain, there is love, there is a, sometimes almost invisible, door to healing.
We are all exposed, in the dark. Some of us are trying to find a way through, together, alone, creating solidarity in our common willingness to acknowledge the pain and manifest the love. Like so many before me, and so many others today, I feel the edges of that door in the dark. In my solitude I am trying to find the courage to open it, to be healed.
