The Storm Before the Calm

From Jesus to John Lennon wisdom teachers have asked us to give peace a chance. In times of widespread unrest and social disruption, it’s understandable that well-meaning people call for peace and love. But a note of caution is in order. In our calls for peace, is it universal love we’re after, or silence and compliance?

Is the light of truth meant to comfort us, or jar us awake?

When Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference went to Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 they went there to cause “good trouble,” to borrow a phrase from John Lewis. Even though school segregation had been struck down nearly a decade earlier by the US Supreme Court, many southern states continued to enforce Jim Crow laws. King went to Birmingham to protest these ongoing segregation statutes, and his method was to purposefully violate a court order banning parades, protests, pickets, boycotts, and marches. They went there to cause good trouble. And they did.

King and his movement filled the streets of Birmingham, braved Bull Connor’s fire hoses and dogs, and through television, brought the nonviolent struggle for human rights into America’s living rooms. Many were arrested, including Dr. King. In the Birmingham newspaper there was an op-ed penned by eight white clergy criticizing King’s methods. King grabbed a pencil and began writing a response in the margins of the newspaper, then on scraps of paper a fellow prisoner gave him. In his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” King makes the case that nonviolent “good trouble” is a necessary last resort because it’s the only thing that brings the dominant culture to the negotiation table. “Nonviolent direct action,” he wrote, “seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

King grounded his argument in the philosophy of Augustine, Aquinas, Niebuhr, and Thoreau – the idea that it is right to break human laws that violate moral or natural law, as long as we do it in an open, self-sacrificing, and compassionate way. In fact, it is our sacred duty to do so. As King famously wrote, “Everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

“History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily,” King wrote. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given up by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Now it is our work to re-perceive social unrest not as lawlessness and disorder, but as the messiness required in any birthing process. Think of it as “creative tension.”

The source of Dr. King’s greatest frustration was not the explicit racist, but the well-intentioned white moderate who agreed with the goals, but counseled patience while mouthing platitudes of law and order. “The Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the Ku Klux Klanner,” King wrote, “but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers…the absence of tension to…the presence of justice.”

Peace and harmony is the ultimate goal – on that we all agree. And when all human beings are afforded their God-given rights of dignity, access, and abundance, then peace and harmony will break out all on their own. But until there is justice, the façade of peace is reserved only for a privileged few, bought with the wages of systematic oppression. And that is no peace at all.

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the November/December 2020 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reprinted here with permission.]

A Pond's Reflection

Walden Pond

[This article first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the July/August edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

There are moments in American history where everything turned on a dime – the first shot at Concord, the Sunday morning attack on Pearl Harbor, Rosa Parks’s decision to keep her seat on the bus. In the history of American spirituality it’s no different. When Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond to conduct his famous, two year experiment in sustenance living he brought with him one book, the Indian spiritual classic the Bhagavad Gita. What happened at Walden Pond would ripple around the world and change everything.

Just eight years before, Thoreau had been a student at Harvard. It was there he stumbled upon the Bhagavad Gita. His was the first generation of Americans to have access to this 2,000 year old masterpiece, newly available in English. Like a handful of others – his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the preeminent American poet Walt Whitman – he was immediately struck by its depth and relevance. Here was a vision of divinity at once strange and familiar, a bracing call to courageous action in the midst of a messy world, and a ringing affirmation of the sacred nature of reality itself. Under the spell of the Gita, Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman would go on to create their own masterpieces reflecting a dawning realization – there is only one presence and power in the universe, and that it permeates all of reality, including us. This exalted humanism, this boundless mysticism, would become the hallmark of a uniquely American spirituality culminating in the New Thought movement, and everything that was to follow.

Today, when people say they are spiritual, not religious, they are reflecting an ancient truth – that wisdom is not found in institutions but in direct experience. Whether through scriptural study, meditation, devotion, social justice activism, or unmediated immersion in nature, every individual stands at the door of an immense transcendence and has only to walk through on their own two feet.

In 1846, during his second summer at Walden Pond, the tax collector came to see Thoreau. He was behind on his taxes. Thoreau refused to pay on the grounds that he thought it immoral to support the immoral actions of his government – an illegal, imperialistic war against Mexico and the ghastly institution of slavery. In Thoreau’s time one out of six Americans was a slave.

He was arrested and put in jail, albeit only for one night. He went on to write an essay about his experience known today as “Civil Disobedience.”  As a young anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, Gandhi read Thoreau’s essay during one of his many incarcerations. He later wrote that it “galvanized” him and formed the blueprint of his own campaigns. At the age of 15, Martin Luther King first read Thoreau’s essay at Morehouse College. He too was changed by it. Later in his career, King became an ardent devotee of Gandhi and the principles of non-violent non-cooperation first articulated in “Civil Disobedience.” It is a remarkable turn of events that an ancient Indian book, the Bhagavad Gita, would come to America to inspire Thoreau who then went on to influence Gandhi, an Indian working in South Africa, who went on to influence King, an African American working for justice in the Jim Crow south. We are indeed all one, and our story is one story.

In “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau articulates the four key principles of ethical political activism. First, use only moral and non-violent means, like boycotting and other forms of non-cooperation. Second, always work within the system before, during, and after your civil disobedience. Be politically engaged – vote, go to meetings, back candidates, or even run for office. Third, be open and public about your actions. No ski masks, no digital anonymity, nor clandestine vandalism. And four, be willing to accept the consequences of your actions, up to and including prison, fines, deportation, and unemployment. The whole purpose of non-violent civil disobedience is knowingly violating immoral laws with the sole purpose of overturning them. When we sacrifice ourselves, we raise the consciousness of others, even our so-called opponents.
         Thoreau, Gandhi, and King show us that spirituality and political action go hand in hand. If we are truly interested in awakening, we are interested in everyone's awakening. We cannot turn spirituality into a means of avoiding the messiness of the world. We have to take a position and take action, no matter how imperfect. Justice is the end and we are the means. We will never have perfect understanding. There will always be questions. But we must act anyway, not out of hatred nor rooted in simplistic, melodramatic judgments of good and evil, but in the knowledge that the Good is trying to be born, and we are all midwives. Each drop of water reflects the whole of the cosmos. So too, we are the eyes, ears, hands, mind, and heart of God. If not us, who? If not here, where? If not now, when?

Would Gandhi Tweet?

Would Gandhi Tweet?

Would Martin Luther King have a Facebook page?

Absolutely.

Both men were masters at using every available medium to great effect. They understood the fact that if you really want to change the world, it’s not enough to stand on the sidelines and be right. You have to overcome your natural aversion to self-promotion and get loud. How can you change people’s hearts and minds if they can’t see you, can’t hear you, and don’ know who you are?

After he graduated from law school in London Gandhi moved to South Africa where there were countless opportunities for a young lawyer to ply his trade. He quickly realized that the institutionalized racism of apartheid was no mere abstraction – as a dark skinned Indian he endured daily indignities and outright violence. He was reviled, thrown off of trains, and frequently arrested for refusing to cooperate with apartheid. While in prison he read Henry David Thoreau’s immortal essay Civil Disobedience and later wrote that he was “galvanized” by it. Thoreau laid out the four core principles of non-violent civil disobedience. First, use only moral and non-violent means, like boycotting and other forms of non-cooperation. Second, always work within the system before, during, and after your civil disobedience. In other words, be politically engaged – vote, go to meetings, back candidates, or even run for office. Third, be open and public about your actions. No ski masks, no digital anonymity, and no safe houses. And four, be willing to accept the consequences of your actions, up to and including prison, fines, deportation, and unemployment. Gandhi would enact these four principles with great effect.

The whole purpose of non-violent non-cooperation was to knowingly and publicly violate unjust laws with the sole purpose of overturning those laws. It was essential, therefore, that your actions be highly publicized so that the conscience of the nation, indeed of the world, could be raised. By sacrificing themselves and causing no harm to their oppressors, non-violent protestors shine the light of truth into the darkness of ignorance.

Martin Luther King and other leaders of the American civil rights movement were great students of both Thoreau and Gandhi. King understood the power of the principles of non-violence and employed them fearlessly, all with the keen sense of a trained publicist.

In March of 1955, a 15 year old unmarried pregnant African American girl named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white man on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested for violating the Jim Crow statutes of segregation. Dr. King and other civil rights leaders decided not to pursue her case and instead orchestrated another, similar event, this time with the married, more conventionally respectable Rosa Parks. In December of that same year Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on the bus and was arrested. So began the 385 day Montgomery Bus Boycott. The city’s African American population organized its own ersatz bus lines, carpools, and walking teams. The sheer spectacle of it attracted national attention and elevated both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King to celebrity status. Like Gandhi before him, King knew how to turn a local story into a universal struggle.

Eight years later in 1963, King and others ramped up the pressure in Birmingham, Alabama. They were met with brute force in the streets by the infamous chief of police Bull Connor with his police dogs and fire hoses. King’s call to “fill the prisons” brought thousands out in non-violent marches. The movement even began to use children as street protestors, over the objections of some of King’s more cautious compatriots. During one particularly violent episode a Life magazine photographer put down his camera to help a fallen child. Dr. King pulled the man aside saying, “Never do that – never put down your camera. That child is going to be alright. Take a picture. That’s how you can help.”

There’s no doubt that if King and Gandhi were alive and working today, they would employ a vast array of communication media to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Gandhi would Tweet, and Martin Luther King would have a Facebook page. And they would both use crowd-funding to build committed communities around important actions.

It’s not that different for artists.

The goal of making a film, staging a play, publishing a book, or producing an album is very different from the goal of social justice; nonetheless, an interesting parallel exists. You’re going to need publicity, and you’re going to need funding.

Michelangelo had the de Medici’s. Van Gogh had his brother Theo. The Rolling Stones have Prudential, Volkswagen, and Sprint. But independent artists only have each other, and their fans. Twitter, Facebook, and crowd-funding are the new tools of the trade.

There are no more record companies. Not really. Not like the old days. No one’s going to hand you a hundred thousand dollars to make an album and mount a tour. And that’s probably a good thing. The vast majority of bands never survived that system anyway. Independent artists have also largely abandoned radio – corporate radio isn’t interested in them and vice versa. YouTube has replaced radio as the medium for breaking new music, and it’s utterly democratized – no one’s in charge. All you have to do is make a great video of great song, and hope it goes viral. You do whatever you can to draw attention to yourself. You stop being afraid of being annoying. You ask everyone you know for help. And money. If it works your Twitter followers suddenly hit five figures, then six. Your Facebook page explodes. Fans all over the world start sharing your work with each other. Your CD Baby and iTunes income starts to pay the bills. The hive mind has spoken. We’re the record company now.

Two hours after I launched my 30 day Kickstarter campaign for my upcoming album Two Pines, a generous fan pledged at the $500 level. That means she gets a house concert, among other things. When I spoke with her I told her, “You know, you could charge at the door and easily make your $500 back.” Then she said an amazing thing. “No, I want all the money to go to the project.  I’m giving you the door.” I was floored. But then I understood. People want to help. They want to get inside art projects and be a part of them. They want to share in the creation of something that has value for them. Crowd-funding is a way for fans to have the ultimate fan experience – to stand with the artist in co-creation. Music is a collective art form. It belongs to no one. It exists in the space between us. We make it together. Artists and audiences are two halves of one thing. In my natural aversion for self-promotion I’d overlooked this dynamic. Kickstarter isn’t charity – it’s a way to draw exactly the right people into a supporting community around a shared body of work.

And that’s something worth Tweeting about.