In an interview for the Daily Meditations, Sikh activist and author Valarie Kaur places love at the center of our ability to bring about wholeness in a divided world:
What does it mean to return to a kind of wholeness where the way that we love informs what we do in the world and what we do in the world deepens our love?….
What I want to remind us all is that as much as we must fight for our convictions and stand for what is just, remember that all those people who vote against you are not disappearing after Election Day or Inauguration Day. We have to find a way to live together still. The only way we will birth a multiracial democracy is if we hold up a vision of a future that leaves no one behind, not even our worst opponents. So you might be in the position to have that conversation with the neighbor down the street or the uncle at the family table or the teenager who doesn’t want to vote because she’s too cynical. What might happen if you leave them alone? [Philosopher] Hannah Arendt says isolation breeds radicalization. [1] You might be the person to puncture the [social media] algorithm, to sit in spaces of deep listening—and deep listening is an act of surrender. You risk being changed by what you hear.
We don’t see those spaces modeled in the world around us. We have to create them in the spaces between us. Oftentimes it means listening over time, being in relationship. Human beings mirror each other, so if you come with daggers out, they’ll come out daggers out. If you come out and you really wonder “Why?,” beneath the slogans and the soundbites, you’ll hear the person’s story and you’ll see their wound. You’ll see their grief. You’ll see their rage. You might not agree with it, but I’ve come to understand that there are no such things as monsters in this world, only human beings who are wounded, who act out of their fear or insecurity or rage. That does not make them any less dangerous, but once we see their wound, they lose their power over us. And we get to ask ourselves: How do we want to take that information into what we do next?
I invite people to take their wounds [and] their opponents’ wounds into spaces of re-imagination—of imagining an outcome, a policy, a relationship that leaves no one outside of our circle of care, not even “them.” This kind of labor, this kind of revolutionary love, it’s not the sacrifice of an individual, it’s a practice of a community.
When we invite people to practice revolutionary love, we always ask, “What is your role in this season of your life?”…. Whatever you choose, it can be a vital practice of love, of revolutionary love. And if all of us are playing our role—not more, not less—then together we’re creating the culture shift that we so desperately need.
References:
[1] See Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976).
Adapted from Valarie Kaur, “Becoming a Sage Warrior,” Daily Meditations, October 28, 2024, Center for Action and Contemplation, video, 38:13.
Image credit and inspiration: Eyoel Khassay, Untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Ethiopia, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We plant trees as an offering of communal good for the future.
Story from Our Community:
In my experience, we go through multiple cycles of order, disorder, and reorder. I just retired as a clergywoman and am once again in a stage of disorder. The good news is that I can recognize it now. I’m now able to relax into the tumbling of my world. Reorder has not yet emerged, and won’t for a while, but I am confident Spirit will see me through.
—Kim D.
