by Troy Bronsink, Hive Director/Founder
Without inner change there is no outer change.
Without collective change, no change matters.”
-rev. angel Kyoto williams
Justice is what Love looks like in public. -Cornell West
Even four years ago when the Hive began, the word justice could get lost in debates, ambiguity, and relativism, lacking, at times, the urgency of West’s imperative. But the recent murder of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor at the hands of law enforcement has erased any such ambiguity and captured the attention of the world.
Awareness of the generations of injustices experienced by our sisters and brothers of color is catching up to the majority population, resulting in public and private tensions manifesting in ways that our nation has not felt in half a century. Anger, grief, empathy, and overwhelm are just a few of the countless emotions that are swelling up as we, as a society, are being forced to look at death-dealing, structural racism in this country we collectively steward.
And so to paraphrase angel Kyoto williams, our present need for collective change demands we take more seriously our practices of inner change.
In her TED talk, Kelly McGonigal suggests stress should not be a bad word. We need to reclaim the power of stress. Showing courage in the face of stress and joining others at their points of stress increases the oxytocin levels that support us growth and resilience. She explains that stress in everything from athletics, to intimacy, to learning is a useful and necessary force. In this moment we need skills to reclaim the force of our collective stress. The compounded tension of a global pandemic, loss of jobs, police brutality, and the unjust death and susceptibility of our black and brown neighbors has brought our collective stress to new level.
Contemplative practices in community can help us identify intention and resistance, as well as the resilience to bear the weight of holding both at once. In what is sometimes called the Law of Three, the relationship between the (1)Affirming force and the (2)Denying force brings forth an unforeseen and new (3)Reconciling force . This seems especially relevant to this moment of unprecedented tension (to learn more contemporary applications on Law of Three search Cynthia Bourgeault).
🙏Affirming: What practices do you have that help you recognize your intention? Are you aware of who and what you bow to in respect and compassion? Spiritual mentor to the Civil Rights movement, Howard Thurman, describes it this way:
“What is the fundamental thing that I am after?… What is my point? … What is it that I really want?… In the fulfillment of myself, this thing will follow… the thing to which I am devoted– its quality, its character, its dimension– these things begin to invade me and I become not merely like the thing that I seek but I become one with the thing that I seek.”
To know my intention I have to move beyond my choices, my desires to increase pleasure and reduce pain. These desires, summed up as our ego, thrive on choices- thumbs up and down, swipe left or right, buy it online and get it tomorrow, reinforced by profit-driven tools that privately curate our music, art, and news as commodified consumption.
I have to slow down. I have to quiet down. And I have to go deep. I have to wrestle with what do I really want? Yet, affirmation does not end with the individual, it must be held collectively. We have to ween ourselves from the individualist addictions of liberty-expressed-as-consumption.
What do my actions affirm within my partnership, my family, with my neighbors? What do I affirm in the stranger, and even in my enemy? The courage and humility to say Black Lives Matter requires grace to say out-loud what we affirm, even (and especially) when current structures do not reward or reinforce this truth. If I can’t affirm the larger whole, then my affirmation will be malnourished and impotent, bearing little fruit.
✊Denying: What practices do you have that help you say No! Not the thumbs down or angry emoji. Not the knee jerk facebook post or unfriending, as inconsequential as flipping someone off in traffic. The no that is a denying force is grounded. It is a dam in the river of what else wants to be. Resistance must be seen and felt to be affective.
Denying demands we recognize boundaries, that we not underestimate force, that we dare intimate confrontation, and we equip ourselves to persistently pay the cost of holding the line while remaining in relationship.
In twelve-step groups, this includes making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and then making amends. Hunger strikes, reparations, defunding death dealing systems, and even difficult arguments with loved ones are all examples of refusals that raise the voice of a larger refusal into the collective sphere.
Without our no, our yes has no meaning.
🤲 Reconciling: The third force is not balance or compromise, it is born from a discipline of holding the affirmation and denial with an inner passion and an outer vulnerability. Differently than forgive and forget, the reconciling force is something that arises as a new creation. Like a tree sprouting from a seed that has died in the face of the wet soil. The reconciling force is not plan B, it arises when plans A and B are no longer sufficient.
Parker Palmer writes about this when he says, “The tension that comes when I try to hold paradox together is not hell-bent on tearing me apart. Instead, it is a power that wants to pull my heart open to something larger than myself… The tension will not break my heart‚ it will make my heart larger.” Too few relationships, families, neighborhoods, faith communities, or associations are able to hold this sort of tension. We prefer affinity groups of like-minded individuals because we are seeking mirrors that affirm what we affirm, and walls that keep out what we fear or dislike.
In the Christian tradition, Jesus called his community of friends to deny their “selves”, and take up their crosses. St. Francis of Assisi summed this up with, “May I bear patiently the weight of being neither good nor thought good.” How might we practice holding this tension, extending grace when we fail, suffering through shame, yet sticking to it enough to participate in possibilities that emerge from this new naked transparency?
These are not practices we can develop in solitude and isolation. Love must go deep, and must go public. Integrating these inner and outer depths require community and relationships. If we are to make this exodus, we need a people.
🙏 Who do you affirm inwardly and outwardly? Have you made this known to the collective? Where do you go to practice this muscle of affirmation in your inner life and in society at large? Have you met the ground of your being where you can feel that connection to affirming self, and humanity, and creation? What is it that you really want?
✊ What have you said no to? What is the cost you are willing to pay to stand against violence, injustice, and hate? Have you discovered the power within to go without? To stand in spite of overwhelm, fear, depression, or anger? Have you found ways to practice moving beyond fragility and integrate emotions like overwhelm, guilt, fear, and anger such that you can remain standing within a community as a participant and co-creator? This is something I’m still learning. It is a life-long-work.
The Contemplative tradition is not for bypassing negative feelings or normalizing unfair and unjust structures, your practice can help you wake up daily like the late civil rights activist, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, with radical amazement, taking nothing for granted.
🤲 What practices and community norms help you stay? Outer change requires an inner stance of listening to the present. Protests, meetings, new arisings will require a collective that is ready to yield when the arising force presents itself, to recognize that we are the people we’ve been waiting for.
For our black, brown and native friends this will mean brave spaces that are diverse, as well as safer. POC specific healing caucuses, and friendships committed to building resilience. For people like myself who have to do work to unveil the costs that POC bear to benefit white bodies in our racist structures, it means agreeing to listen, to read, to grow, to show up, and to strengthen the capacity to bear the weight of being seen as neither good nor thought good while acting publicly to affirm humanity and resist violence and oppression.
In this time we need community spaces to 🙏affirm, ✊deny, and 🤲 hold the tension.
If you have such a place, share it with others, put it to work for this moment of acute tension. If you are a part of the Hive, press your fellow members and facilitators to bravely hold this tension, and to take action. If you don’t have such a place, consider our online classes and events, to outfit you to sustain the long, hard work ahead as our wider culture grieves the failure of systems, bravely dismantles them, and seeks to build together more just, alternative futures.
