~ continued from yesterday (since this is posted in four installments and written as a conversation, you may want to hit “Previous” and read 1/4 and 2/4 or the last paragraph or two of the preceding post to get the context and flow)

Reverence for creation comes easily to most people. Reverence for other people presents more of a challenge, especially if those people’s lives happen to impinge upon your own. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

(a man asks Brother Weeps) “So, reverence is or isn’t just for those who are greater than us? I thought you said –“

“Let’s make a distinction: we revere those who are magnanimous, literally, great souls. Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Thea Bowman, Jose Hobday, John Lewis. Absolutely. But reverence is a bit different. Reverence, as I see it, is not meant to be operative only when gazing at the Christ-child in the crib or at the Dalai Lama. That’s back to loving the lovable. That’s easy. That’s basic — to love aunt Esther (chuckling).

The spiritual explanation and the paradoxical wisdom of this is that in the conscious act and experience of beholding — for example, a person we don’t respect or we find insufferable — lies the new possibility to discover or evoke the inherent value of something or the inestimable worth of someone independent of what they do or who they know or their net worth..

But, not just to behold the inestimable worth, but to reflect it back. And what we reflect back sometimes is the deepest truth or beauty that the person we find intolerable is not able to see or believe about himself. Let’s be honest, we probably can’t see it either most of the time. But we don’t have to see it to believe it or to mirror or offer it. Sometimes it’s for us to hold what the other person can’t hold for herself. Otherwise, they wouldn’t act so irreverently, right? There is no one who acts irreverently, let alone diabolically, who is not profoundly unhappy, or unwell, or deeply wounded. It doesn’t excuse it, but it might explain it. Even so, none of that negates their belovedness.

That’s a conviction about God and humans that our faith is rooted in. It’s not optional. That’s what we’ve signed on for or been signed with at our baptism even when it doesn’t seem like the water and chrism took on some folks (light laughter).” Brother Weeps passed the bible back and again let the quiet surround them.

“This new possibility, reflecting or holding for the other what they can’t see in or hold as true for themselves is one aspect of the Christ-life. No one said it would be easy. It’s our vocation, let alone a principle of nonviolence and the right-side-up gospel of Jesus in an upside-down world. It involves awe as we are challenged with discovering or maybe trying to believe in the sacred mystery within another person we may not even feel kind or respectful toward.

We need to be careful not to have only the image of the bowing monk before the tabernacle as our picture of what reverence looks like. Or Mother Teresa bowing and saying “Namaste” to the destitute or dying in Calcutta. It’s not something we can fake or are asked to fabricate. But, remember, viewed from the outside, reverence may bear no obvious signs to an onlooker, but rather is an inner disposition rooted in an inner freedom and conviction. It resembles in motivation and performance something similar to what inspires practitioners of nonviolent direct-action. It’s helpful to remember what Dr. King taught: that we are commanded to love our enemy, not necessarily to like them.

It’s also important to remember that reverence is not looking the other way when confronted with boorish behavior. It is not being a push over, a milquetoast, a silent and complicit bystander in the face of bullying, dishonesty, cruelty, injustice. Right? Reverence does not condone rudeness, spitefulness, arrogance, or rancor. But it does disallow hatefulness, revenge, retaliation, an eye for an eye. It forbids us from convincing ourselves that acting as irreverently and viciously in return is either justified, enduringly satisfying, or any real solution.

In my opinion, this is the obvious and major difference between the civil rights protesters from the 1960’s – SNCC, for example, and many of the protesters on the streets today. I’m not talking about the extremist that make up the 5% on the right and the 5% on the left. I’m talking about the well-intentioned, good-hearted 90%. Most of these people, despite being good, have never studied or been trained in nonviolence as a spiritual practice the way people were in the late 50’s and early 1960’s.”

“What was snick?” asked a woman.

Snick is SNCC, the acronym for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A group or organization of mostly black college students who conducted sit-ins and protests to expose systemic racism and to assert their rights as Americans: to vote or to use water fountains or restrooms or go into stores that had signs in the windows announcing “Whites Only,”  let alone get into an all-white University.

But, before a direct action, and as part of the organization’s commitment to nonviolence, members were required to go through training, not only by studying the spiritual roots of nonviolence as a practice of protest, but also in role plays where people were screaming obscenities in their faces, pushing and shoving, blowing smoke in their eyes, and threatening violence against them so that they would maintain their composure and conviction when it was not make-believe. You may have seen photos or a film clip from 1960 of the four composed black students (later called The Greensboro 4) who are shown sitting at the Whites Only lunch counter in a Woolworths Store in Greensboro, North Carolina as a protest against segregation or an even larger group of protesters doing the same less than a month later in Nashville, Tennessee when a group of menacing white men shouted at and mocked them, poured milkshakes on the student’s heads, and physically assaulted them (SEE below).

So they had studied and trained not to respond in kind to the violent mob’s behavior. But their ability to maintain their equanimity was rooted in the biblical conviction that each and every person is made in the image of God. And they avoided retaliation partially because they knew first hand the vile face, fists, and force of irreverence.

And here is where the speech cloud above our sympathetic heads in the year 2021 says, “No way! Or “Well, the hell with that!” or “What’s the fun in that if you can’t give them a taste of their own foul medicine? Turn the fire hoses and dogs on them for a change.” Believe me, I get it.

to be continued . . .

⊕ Following the lead of the Greensboro 4—four black students college students who sat at the Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter on February 1, 1960, a similar and larger sit-in took place in Nashville, TN. This is a segment from the Award-Winning Documentary film Eyes on the Prize. Click twice to play.

Goodpeople, please consider passing on THE ALMOND TREE to others, then do so. I appreciate it. ~ Dan

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