The burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.
The opening quote comes from W. E. B. Du Bois in his book, The Souls of Black Folk, written in 1903. Is he saying that we, as a nation, need to carry the burden? While Dubois may have been talking about the burden of our shared history of enslavement, oppression, terror…a history that in actuality continues to this day. And of course, there is so much more that feels like a burden today. Our opening music spoke to the heavy load of so many burdens…including war…war on Mother Earth, her creatures, on our fellow humans and the devastation of genocide throughout history and that is happening right now.
I was reminded of these burdens…both personal and collective this past week when I attended a training on the treatment of trauma. My mentor, Gabor Mate was there. While he is speaking, he always includes a period where he takes questions from the audience. Of course, this involves some risk…a risk he is willing to take. A woman in the audience asked, How can you have compassion for those animals who attacked Israel on October 7th? Mate paused a second but then responded. He began by discussing the devastation and terror visited upon indigenous people in North America. He then proceeded to give her an education of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…beginning with the founding of Israel, the killing of Palestinians throughout history. Mate is one to cite sources and he did this as well, despite his obvious emotionality regarding her comment. The woman kept interrupting and became hostile. Mate was finally able to transition to another question, but he was able to compose himself and make an apology for his lack of control. This event had a profound effect on me. I realized how he was able to model a kind of way of being in the world that few of us are able to muster. It points perhaps to the general meaning of yesterday’s celebration of Yom Kippur. It is a time to start again, acknowledging our unconscious and underlying promises and oaths…the ones that can arise and hurt other people around us if we are not careful. It is perhaps also a time to put our lives in perspective…a more collective perspective, as people. It is perhaps a time of coming together to bend our energies to the righting of these great wrongs. This may be the mystical meaning of the music of the Kol Nidre sung in Jewish congregations yesterday.
Now I know that this is sensitive territory…it is tender and raw. That was illustrated by what happened at the conference. But what we may be experiencing when we hear such deeply profound music may be a collectivity that rarely happens. Although the traditional meaning of Yom Kippur is to unite the Jews of the world, I choose to take that to mean all our relations…and we are related.
Well, then if it is our responsibility to first unburden ourselves and then work on the unburdening of the nation…of humanity, it is time to recognize that the hands of none of us are clean. We are all called to this work. The responsibility of the burden does not fall on any one group, as Dubois was arguing…it is a collective responsibility that finds its motivation…its energy from within each of us. We have indeed abdicated this responsibility…we have been deaf to the call of the Great Spirit of Life. As poet Lee Carroll Pieper put it:
Many are called but most are frozen in corporate or collective cold,
these are the stalled who choose not to be chosen except to be bought and sold.
We are stalled...we are frozen...unable to shoulder the responsibility because it is too much, yet Thomas Merton reminds us that:
A spirituality that preaches resignation under official brutalities, servile acquiescence in frustration and sterility, and total submission to organized injustice is one which has lost interest in holiness and remains concerned only with a spurious notion of 'order'.
When we have given up...when we have acquiesced in frustration...in total submission to injustice, we have lost interest in holiness…in the sacredness of our world. Is this not a society…a world that has lost interest in holiness...in the sacredness of life...in the sacredness of our time in history...a time when we are faced with a great work...a great work of the transformation of a society burdened by its history...struggling with the legacy of brutality and shame. And we are all responsible. The hands of none of us are clean...we must, as Dubois says, bend our energies to righting these great wrongs.
Of course, we are not starting from scratch...we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors...and those who continue today with the righting of the wrongs…many are right here in this community. They are people who have, despite great obstacles, spoken up for the vulnerable in our society and continue this path. We know that this transformation is not easy. Poet and artist M.C. Richards explains this transformation as the birth of humanity. She wrote:
Let no one think that the birth of humanity is to be felt without terror. The transformations that await us cost everything in the way of courage and sacrifice. Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other.
These are times fraught with terror. In acknowledging this terror, past and present, we realize that we cannot just talk about it, we have to actually do it...we have to join with our creator in the continual re-creation of the world.
There’s one more thread of this burden that I would like to address. As a psycho-therapist, in addition to a minister, I encounter personal burdens every day. I was reminded this week of a piece of that burden that I experienced in my own family. Thursday would have been my father’s 94th birthday. He was a man that carried a tremendous burden that he was able to shoulder, in large part, because of his relationships with others. He led a trade association with the slogan, We Do Better Together…something that left an indelible mark on my own life. His connections with others upheld his ability to work toward the moment of his high resolve every day of his life, despite sometimes crippling anxiety and depression. This was his burden…a burden that so many share. He, like many others, lived because of his connections with other human beings…those who walked the way with him and those that influenced his life from afar. He always asked me about spirituality from my perspective, but I think he had it all figured out. His favorite song probably explains this better than I could…
May we walk together, learning to bend our precious energies to the righting of the great wrongs of this world.
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