Martin Luther King, Jr combined spirituality with activism – so on this weekend when we are celebrating King’s birthday and honoring his legacy, I wanted to look at this apparent tension. For instance, in September 1967, King addressed the annual conference of the American Psychological Association, an organization for helping people be well-adjusted, and he said:
“There are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. . . We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few”How do we combine inner peace with social agitation? How do we cultivate both acceptance and resistance to injustice? Martin Luther King Day is tomorrow, on the same day that the 47th president of the United States is to be inaugurated – which does bring a particular context to these questions.
There are injustices and harms – some of them, perhaps, may soon be worsening – and we are called to resist what is wrong, to not simply go along with it, not simply adjust to it. Acceptance doesn’t mean nonresponsive. It means recognizing reality – and responding with compassion to make things right where we can.
For Unitarian Universalists, the issue is encapsulated in the third of our historic principles: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth. But, wait. If we truly accept one another exactly as we are, then how come we’re also encouraging each other to change?
Parents negotiate this question from the moment of their first child’s birth. New parents holding their newborn for the first time are very apt to say, “She’s perfect” – or “he’s perfect.” They are, of course, right. That newborn IS perfect. Yet at the same time, the parents expect and hope their child will grow and change over the years ahead. But if that baby is perfect, why would they want it to change? They don’t want it to be any different from what it is right now – but eventually they expect growth, and they will teach their child and encourage it along a path of growth. The child’s current perfection lies in part in the perfection of that present moment – the timeless quality of the love that wraps around parent and child – the eternal now the parent may feel. The child’s current perfection also lies in the fact that this timeless present eternal now includes the baby’s potential – its as-yet-unknown trajectory of growing up.
Indeed, our capacity throughout life to learn and grow and change is a key element in what makes us perfect right now. Like a stone thrown in the air, our lives arc in a perfect parabola, whatever the angle, direction, or force. Perfection is dynamic – an ongoing, unfolding process rather than a static thing. Acceptance is the capacity to recognize this inherent perfection.
Psychologist Robert Cloninger developed a Temperament and Character Index that measures, among other things a person’s spirituality. On this measure, it’s the sum of three sub-scales. First, self-forgetfulness. This has to do with experiences of “flow” – with being immersed in an activity, being “in the zone”, and you’re
“performing at peak efficiency while having no sense of boundary between yourself and others. Most people have had this type of experience at least a few times in their lives. Spiritual people tend to have them more frequently.... People often experience flashes of insight or understanding when they are in this frame of mind. Creativity is maximized, originality is fostered. Even the most ordinary things seem fresh and new.”Second, transpersonal identification.
“The hallmark of this trait is a feeling of connectedness to the universe and everything in it – animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, anything and everything that can be seen, heard, smelled, or otherwise sensed. People who score high for transpersonal identification . . . sometimes feel that everything is part of one living organism.... Love of nature is a recurring theme in spirituality, from the beginnings of civilization up to the present.”Third, acceptance. This measure has to do with the sense that underneath, or behind, or in the midst of all the pain, and the tragedy, the suffering and the anguish, there is a fundamental joy of being.
In the 90s, I was a professor at predominantly African-American Fisk University, and later, I was a divinity student for a couple terms at a predominantly African-American divinity school, so I’ve had repeated exposure to Black Church worship and culture. One of the things I often heard, like a mantra of affirmation and hope, was: “God is good all the time; all the time god is good.” These were people that were not oblivious to, nor in denial about the very real pain, suffering, injustice and oppression in life. They or their families had often directly seen and felt the worst effects of prejudice and bigotry. They were not retreating into escapism from that reality, nor were they complacent about the need for the very hard ongoing work for social justice. When they greeted each other, and me, with a bounce in their step, a broad smile on their face, and an outstretched hand if not two outstretched arms, and the buoyant words, “God is good all the time; all the time, God is good,” they were expressing a deep sense of the joy of possibility and hope back behind or underneath the tragedy -- of which they were keenly aware. It wasn’t about whether there was anything in this wide reality that can appropriately be called “God.” It was about the felt sense, more than words can say, that the tragedy and unfairness and pain exists always within a wider context, a context deeply affirmable. Indeed, only within a context that ultimately felt holy, sacred, could tragedy be fully seen as tragedy instead of random pain.
From this kind of acceptance comes equanimity but not complacency. And without the calm, abiding equanimity to leaven the energy of anger that so often arises when working for social justice, activists burn out.
Acceptance means not hating. It doesn’t mean we don’t resist injustice, but we resist without hating. Martin Luther King urged us to not be adjusted to injustice, but he was clear that this didn’t mean hating anybody. He followed Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies. As he said,
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”King goes on to add:
“hate scars the soul and distorts the personality.... hate divides the personality -- and love, in an amazing and inexorable way, unites it.”King then adds:
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate. We get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.”Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation or complacency. It means we act out of compassion more than anger. And even where we do have some anger, we can be at peace with our own anger. We don’t have to be upset by injustice – we just calmly do everything we can stop it.
There are two sorts of pain and suffering. The first kind is what the world -- reality -- throws at us – sickness, old age, death -- the facts of injustice and everything else we don’t like. The second kind is our own reactivity against the first kind. We make our suffering so much worse be refusing to accept it, by getting upset about things. In the Buddhist scriptures there’s a text called the Sallatha Sutra, where the Buddha says:
“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental.”Spiritual maturity, spiritual development doesn’t prevent the first arrow, doesn’t generate immunity to it. But spiritual maturity does prevent that second arrow: which is our reactivity, our upset about the first arrow.
“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.” Said George Orwell, of all people. Acceptance is crucial for our well-being. And acceptance, as I said, does not mean resignation or complacency. Acceptance opens up the possibility of enjoyment. Without acceptance, there can be no equanimity, no peace – only a shifting kaleidoscope of anger, resentment, sadness, and fear.
Activism on behalf of changing things can be vigorous and energetic yet also grounded in a calm and peaceful equanimity. How does that work? Let me turn to some words of Ruben Habito. I’ve been a Zen practitioner for almost 23 years, during which time I’ve been a formal student of four Zen teachers. My first and longest-lasting was with Ruben Habito. Ruben is a slight Filipino man – in his 60s when I was studying with him. As a young man, he became a Jesuit priest, got stationed in Japan, and found himself practicing Zen at a monastery there for 16 years before coming to the states and taking a faculty position at SMU’s Perkins Theological School in Dallas. In one of his books, Healing Breath: Zen Spirituality for a Wounded Earth, Ruben wrote:
“To see the natural world as one’s own body radically changes our attitude to everything in it. The pain of Earth at the violence being wrought upon it ceases to be something out there, but comes to be our very own pain, crying out for redress and healing. In Zen sitting, breathing in and breathing out, we are disposed to listen to the sounds of Earth from the depths of our being. The lament of the forests turning into barren desert, the plaint of the oceans continually being violated with toxic matter that poisons the life nurtured therein, the cry of the dolphins and the fish, come to be our very own pain, our own cry, from the depths of our very being.”With deep acceptance of our world and of our selves comes a seeing through of the artificial boundary between what is me and what is other. Cultivating a love for what is turns out to also cultivate awareness that what is -- is me. “Mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars” – they are all me. The earth’s forests, deserts, oceans are my own body.
When I stop believing those thoughts that judge everything in light of my own separated, isolated interests, then I start recognizing that I’m not separated or isolated. Loving the world and loving myself become the same thing. And when that happens, I naturally reach out to soothe suffering.
Resistance to social injustice, to the despoiling of our planet, doesn’t so much feel like resistance anymore. It feels like simply being carried in the flow of love for what is. To put it in one word, the force which brings acceptance and resistance to pull in the same direction rather than in opposite directions is this: compassion.
Of course, there is a great deal of resistance in this world that isn’t grounded in compassion. Perhaps we can work on letting go of that kind of resistance. Resistance grounded in compassion rather than in the illusion of a separate self: that’s the kind of resistance that is also known as love -- and justice, as as been noted before, is what love looks like in public.
Social activism fueled predominantly by anger, by resentment, by condemnation of the evil other will burn out. It will also be counterproductive. It will fail us. Activism fueled predominantly by acceptance, by compassion, by loving all that is and therefore naturally moving to care for all that is – social activism that, while attentive to effective strategy, is not attached to results – that is what will save us.
The Satyana Institute, a nonprofit service and training organization has developed a set of principles for spiritual activism. Here’s their first principle:
“Transformation of motivation from anger/fear/despair to compassion/love/purpose. This is a vital challenge for today’s social change movement. This is not to deny the noble emotion of appropriate anger or outrage in the face of social injustice. Rather, this entails a crucial shift from fighting against evil to working for love, and the long-term results are very different, even if the outer activities appear virtually identical. Action follows Being, as the Sufi saying goes. Thus 'a positive future cannot emerge from the mind of anger and despair' [says the] Dalai Lama”And here’s their second principle:
“Non-attachment to outcome. This is difficult to put into practice, yet to the extent that we are attached to the results of our work, we rise and fall with our successes and failures—a sure path to burnout. Hold a clear intention, and let go of the outcome—recognizing that a larger wisdom is always operating. As Gandhi said, “the victory is in the doing,” not the results.”Being upset doesn’t help. In the long run, equanimity is more effective for resisting the wrongs we are called to resist.
Marin Luther King embodied a path of loving enemies – that is, opponents, the people who vote differently from you – while at the same time never being adjusted to injustice. He said:
“I believe we will have to find the militant middle between riots on the one hand and weak and timid supplication for justice on the other hand.”For King, that middle ground was civil disobedience, which he argued could “be aggressive but nonviolent” with the power to “dislocate but not destroy.” It’s acceptance and resistance.
May we go and do likewise.
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