From Your Minister
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I began attending the Quaker Meeting close to my apartment on Sunday mornings. Week after week I sat with them. Nope, no awakening for me there. Probably a good thing, too, because I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with it. But at one of those Meetings I heard about a daylong workshop on Indian Treaties.
I went to the workshop, honestly, for something to do. It was free. It would last all day. Maybe I would meet some people. I went alone, stopping on the way to eat a soul-less breakfast at a chain restaurant. And then I sat down in the workshop, listening as I had listened through college classes and movies and a million other things. Hoping to be engaged, but more or less passive.
The speakers began. I listened dutifully. And then a young firebrand, an activist from the American Indian Movement by the name of John Trudell, got up to speak. The words he said are etched in my heart and soul forever. After describing the ways white Americans, by not honoring treaties, did not respect the word of our own elders, he said, “America, you are spiritually bankrupt.” He went on to describe what that meant.
And somehow those words—just five words—jarred something loose in my life. The drinking, the job I didn’t care about, the soul-less breakfast, it all lit up in recognition of his words. I came into a focus I’d never had before. I must have known the word spiritual, because I knew exactly what he was talking about, but I had never seen someone point the way across the bridge toward another place to live.
That’s what woke me up. An embodied experience, maybe something akin to what’s called “transmission” in many spiritual communities. Perhaps it’s because of this particular awakening that I have never been able to separate, for a moment, spirituality from social justice. Perhaps, had I awakened elsewhere, I would have lived a whole different life. I’ll never know.
It’s not that I hadn’t tried a wide variety of ways to wake up before. In college, my friends and I had chanted with the Hare Krishnas, attended meetings of an odd Buddhist sect that believed in overcoming desires by fulfilling every one of them, had taken the Scientologists’ personality survey. We had transported ourselves to a variety of places with a variety of drugs. We had hopped freights, hitch-hiked, taken ridiculous risks that I hope my own kid will refrain from taking. But a deeper awakening did not come.
It’s not like I hadn’t engaged in work for justice before. I was raised UU! I had marched, chanted, dialogued, lobbied, picketed, educated myself on issues, been filled with righteous indignation with the best of them.
I had just never before seen that sacred place where justice and spirituality flow together as the same river. I had never experienced—without artificial stimulants—the epiphany of Alice Walker’s character Shug, in The Color Purple: “I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed.”
It’s a funny thing about awakening. I was in a room of hundreds of people that notable day. I wonder if any of the rest of them heard the truth of those five words, “America, you are spiritually bankrupt,” and felt their jaws go slack in recognition, felt their soul open up, saw tiny breadcrumbs shimmering with the promise of a path to new life if taken seriously.
Awakening is alchemical, and mostly mysterious. One thing I’ll stake my life on, though: No matter whether we are in a crowded room of activists, or meditating for years in a Himalayan cave, none of us wakes up in isolation. I believe that we awaken as part of something big and beautiful, whatever name we call it. Indra’s net. God. The Universe. The interdependent web.
Here’s the thing: I think doorways to awakening are around us moment after moment, all day, every day. But only some of those doors come with a key to open them and walk through. A key with our name on it. What awakens you may just provide me with a dull moment to space out or send someone a text message. Why I awakened from deep slumber one Saturday, years ago, remains a mystery to me. But awakening changed everything, and for this I will always be grateful.
Each day, each moment, may you notice the doorways beckoning on all sides of you, telling you that life is behind them. May you recognize your alignment with the ones who hand you their key. May you walk through those doorways, knowing that to do so will change everything. And, when you are awakened, may you share what you can see with all who cry out for its beauty.
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