Editor's Note: The following is a manuscript of Felicia Murrell's talk from the Open Table Event, in conversation with Wm. Paul Young.
FELICIA MURRELL
I want to begin by saying this is not an easy ask.
For me, AND is the bridge to our re-turn, our homecoming, turning once again to ourselves, to Divine Love and to one another. For me, I’m holding both individual responsibility to participate with the Divine in our integration AND collective activism in a world that is a conflux of bodies in different states/stages of being who are responsible for the systems, bureaucracy and structures that inhibit the livelihood and flourishing of all bodies.
Racism IS most definitely systemic. AND the fear, insecurities and incorrect interpretation of “subdue the earth” which has led to a patriarchal obsession with dominance (of people, places, creation, and things) is very much a heart issue that has to be transformed through an experiential knowledge of Love.
Dualism does not resolve tension; it only furthers the divide.
Yes, there are laws that can be changed. But even with more equitable policies of the 90s, poverty and mass incarceration, and wage and wealth gaps abound.
How helpful are laws if people’s hearts are not transformed? It only means that when power changes, laws change. One only has to look to our Supreme Court to see this at play.
I don’t want to get into a tug of war of facts or statistics so I’m resisting the urge to lean on a lot of data and history. Often we wield information to attempt to convince or sway someone. “There has always been...” is too often used to dismiss what is. And I don’t want to get into a game of comparing suffering or domination stories.
Information does not create transformation.
We have to trust Spirit for the part we as a society can’t do, which is heart transformation.
If hell is a state of mind created by the illusion of Love’s absence, then perhaps heaven is the awareness of the Divine within and our intentional participation with Love.
How does participating with Love aid in alleviating fear - society’s and my own?
Much time has passed since George Floyd was murdered. Since books by Black people rocketed to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. Since corporations made anti-racist statements declaring Black Lives Matter and people turned their social media profiles black in solidarity with the suffering.
What has changed? In you, in me, in the world... What has changed?
Did we rush too quickly to fix, to absolve ourselves of discomfort? To avoid the pain caused by a long history of messes made, realities ignored. Did we learn how to be sad together, to grieve with or just be? To allow the weight of the moment to be its own masterclass. Or have we rushed in brandishing our savior capes to plant a chair over the poop so our houses have an appearance of ordered cleanliness regardless of the smell?
Have we really slowed down enough to hear in the time that has passed since George Floyd was murdered? In that span of time, have we made space for people to vent and unburden their insides without crowding out discomfort, theirs and ours?
Can we name the most marginalized persons or people group in our local area, community, state, region and the nation? What are their concerns? What are their fears? What does their heart cry sound like? What legislative and civic changes need to be addressed to ensure they are empowered to live?
Pus draining from old wounds is a necessary thing to stave off infection. But not everyone can tolerate open sores.
Phobias and -isms have no place in the labor of Love. To that end, when we talk about restoration, transformation, I want to know who is actively and intentionally participating with the Divine in healing and liberation. Who are those unfazed by gore and know how to love with strong stomachs?
Who has learned to handle the gruesome, to sit in the discomfort of their own pain, to allow space for others to live in theirs?
As a child of the South, I lived in the fear that dripped from my family’s muscle memory. A fear that ordered my coming and going, my way to be in the world. Demanding that I be small, invisible. That I shrink myself to the tiniest possible existence so I wouldn’t be next. The next one to die. The next one to be raped or maimed.
Even when the white hooded robes made its way to the back of people’s closets and lynching and cross burning were no longer a thing, in the South we knew there were still ways to be lynched, still ways to be railroaded. Still police willing to carry out long-held beliefs.
Today, as an adult, access to safety is still a constant I carry with me. I’m Googling “is this town safe for black people.” I have to consider inflamed racial and political climates when deciding where to live, where to travel, where to shop. There are certain towns that are still unsafe for Black people at night even though sundown towns are supposedly no longer a thing.
As a woman clothed in Black skin facing all kinds of prejudices and hostilities, I could tell you story after story after story upon which we could sit and grieve. Because my lived reality is one that does not allow me to be passive or in denial. Access to safety, being secure without worry, these are very real concerns.
What I realize is that if I never grieve the injustices against my personhood, I will rob my soul of the necessary path it needs to experience transformational alchemy. And I'll never be able to integrate what my heart knows to be true: every human, no matter their body, has been created for freedom - to live, move and have their being in Divine Love. To experience the fullness of humanity as they participate with Love in the unfolding of mystery. No one should still be trying to prove their inherent worth. Matter is the minimum. And while many of us can agree with that in theory, how we vote, how we participate with Divine Love, how we go about our day, who we are in relationship with does not always reflect that.
Which brings me to us and Christ, to touches of love and turning toward that re-ligament us to one another and the way of Love.
Love, the way of Love, is our way forward to the restoration and renewal of all things. We think we have many problems, but we really have only one: a lack of love.
Or perhaps more succinctly, we lack an awareness of the love that is already there and how to integrate it into our lives and participate with the flow of it in the world.
What I want to attempt to convey is what the constitution failed to convey hundreds of years ago and what most of our policies in some subtle or not so subtle form continue to perpetuate: my humanity matters. I am human. We are humans.
In a domination paradigm enlivened by capitalism and hierarchies of success that foster winners and losers, to win at any cost requires us to distance ourselves from one another’s humanity. It’s the only way to not be affected by the pain and struggle that others experience.
Sometimes it feels like we’ve gained the whole world and lost our souls.
Sadly, there are people who advocate for “power over” in the same way power over has been used against them. That’s not me.
I don’t believe a hard swing to the opposite pole of supremacy is what Love is inviting us into. Nothing good is accomplished in the volleying back and forth. When I look at Jesus, it seems to me that he was more for something than he was against. Jesus was for people. I believe the Jesus way is a communal paradigm: “power with” with Love as the Source of power.
What I’m interested in is truth-telling, grieving with one another, empathy.
I think in some ways, the whole of society is complicit in how our collective actions, non-action and silence perpetuate marginalization – not just here in America but around the globe.
So I’m interested in acknowledging the harm, telling the truth as necessary steps to repair trust and move towards liberty and freedom for all. I don’t think passivity and denial are the work of Love. I think we have to turn and stare the hairy monster in the face. To acknowledge the ways we have embodied violence against ourselves and others. The ways in which our silence forms an alliance with violence, like turning my head while someone is battered in the room next to me and I do nothing.”
I was them... I am them.
There is freedom in accepting all of me – every mistake I’ve made, every willful participation with domination, power, and violence. Not as an excuse for my jagged edges, but as an invitation to return to myself. To offer an apology, to make amends. To own the places where I’ve caused harm or been harsh. This is the freedom I’ve found in grief’s discomfort and empathy’s spaciousness.
To stare the naked truth in the face, to see it, hear it, embrace it without collapsing into the ground under the weight of my or history’s ugly parts.
This is an arduous commitment Love is inviting us into - one of truth-telling; fully seeing; and empathetic listening. To live and be in the world, to move beyond theories and suspicions into relationship building. To forge our way in the web of interconnectedness. This is not a quick work, nor is it an easy work. Because it may be rife with tension and discomfort, it will take patience, humility and kindness. But I believe this is the work of Love - not to excuse away how we have been but to hold ourselves accountable for the damage we have wrought AND to be responsible for our healing.
I’m interested in how we hold both our ontological oneness AND the particularities of our diversity with deep regard AND tell the truth about our history and our fears AND be carriers of Love AND celebrate the whole of who we are as interconnected beings without diminishing anyone in the process.
To that end, I think two things are at play for me.
First, “AND” - I totally believe that ontologically we are one human race AND because I believe that God is so intentional, I am remiss to deny the particularities of our biodiversity - among humans, plants, fish, animals, flowers, etc.
If I am to believe in the creative ingenuity of our Creator, I feel like if God wanted us all to be homogeneous, we would have been. But we aren’t.
And I wonder if that’s not the invitation of grace, that we learn to hold the tension of ontological oneness while relationally weaving the particularities of our diversity into a
beautiful tapestry as we do the work of navigating this messy, beautiful, complex, divine journey we call life.
I don’t want a singular humanity at the expense of our diversity. I want both. It feels to me as if the Trinity and our known ecosystems invite us into that.
Secondly, I don’t think we achieve ontological oneness by erasing our history, the hard and the good of it, or our culture. We can’t bypass our way to harmony.
History then serves as guardrails or memorial stones for the tapestry we are weaving together.
So when I speak of oneness, oneness does not spiritually bypass the beauty of particularity, but harmoniously holds all things together. Oneness honors the colorful spectrum of humanity without trying to erase or deny its biodiversity. Oneness undergirds distinction, diversity, and multiplicity.
In this oneness that celebrates all difference, we can each live into our full humanity, embracing our true selves, and mutually give ourselves to the well-being of others without fear of absorption or domination.
At least I’d like to think so.
But I also want to acknowledge that in our complexity, we are “meaning making beings” and it’s easy to come up with ideas and theories that assuage our discomfort and absolve us from participating with the Divine in acts of justice.
Justice being love lived in our actions and acknowledgment of humanity, no matter how alike or different that human is.
Justice being right alignment. Every person on the planet has the right to exist in their own skin and to walk out their journey with the Divine in their way without my policing their path based on my agreement with their decisions or my own personal beliefs.
Hostility and prejudice are often fueled through scarcity mindsets and the idea of self- protection it propagates. Dichotomy of extremes split our interconnectedness.
Fear creates the worst illusions and drives us into chaos and madness. Truth flourishes in the soil of love. In the face of fear, there are the choices that create opportunities for Love to be fully formed in me:
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Curiosity over assumption
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Self-kindness over judgment
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Community over isolation
Instead of being motivated by fear, we can choose the way of Love.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless."
And while there is truth to his wisdom, behavior modification without heart change creates actors not transformed people.
I firmly believe in a lot of ways, behavior modification has failed us.
My friend, Trevor Galpin always says, “when the heart is changed, we will automatically be different because your heart is who you.”
And I believe that. I know that to be true of my own becoming.
But I also know the world does not have time for every person's heart to be changed of their own accord before legislation changes to protect the most marginalized person in our midst.
So, I keep leaning into Love for a non-dual understanding of the dance between legislating the collective and personal inner transformation. And I also have the words of African philosopher Bayo Akomolafe in my ear: “What if the ways we are in response to a crisis are the crisis? How do our solutions leave us trapped in cycles of sameness?”
What if the ways we attempt to heal only produce more of the same?
The only thing that disrupted a cycle of sameness for me is Love. Love changed me. Love transformed me. In the silence of communing with Love, there was a mercy, a grace, some would call it a spaciousness to see and to hold, to surrender and to allow. To release my grip on certainty. My need to be right. My need for external validation. Yes, I am still deeply grieved and disappointed a lot by people. By their microaggressions, by the things they don’t get...
AND I also understand that in a world created to run and survive on a dominance paradigm, the push and pull we feel is intentional. Fear has been harnessed. The intent of its power to drive a wedge between us.
Lives are overrun by abuses of power - the need for it, the certainty of it, the subjugation of it, to lord over another and dominate.
The system is what it is.
The system was built for the dominant culture to thrive and everyone else to be subservient. The system is given legitimacy by perpetuating the idea of a savior, and in order for the savior to succeed he needs destitute people in dire straits to save.
Every hero needs a victim afraid of a villain. The system created a narrative that white men were the heroes. White women were the victims and Black and brown people were the villains.
Poverty, inferiority and suspicion are all tools of the system to help the hero and the victim easily identify who will be scapegoated as their villain.
What is a reckoning without truth-telling? Without acknowledging what has shaped us?
What do you need to acknowledge? What do you need to accept? What do you need to re-imagine?
Because most of our ‘yeah, buts’ are passed down from someone else’s discomfort or rooted in our own, we all need to unlearn learned myths, half-truths and falsities that have been perpetuated to create power, class and privilege, to justify domination and create structures tailored to the advancement of some above another.
In Christ, where there is no fight. In Christ, where there is no wrestle. In Christ, away from the strong energetic pull of ego's power struggle, I turn face to face to face. I can admit that my position allows me to see only what I see, not anyone else. That’s humbling...if I allow it to be. Spirit, show me how or what positionality has prevented me from bearing witness to? Where has positionality blocked me from participating with empathy?
I stop. I pause. I listen. I admit that I don’t know. I admit that I can’t fathom, can’t imagine.
But Christ can. Spirit, show me what I cannot see. Help me feel what I’ve never had to feel. Spirit, what is it that I think I know that I really don’t have a clue about. What is it that I need to know. Spirit, teach me to dance with you in the act of loving.
Spirit, make clear the sound of my own heart. And then, help me listen to the sound of another.
Empathy is placing myself into the story of another and gazing through their eyes: seeing their lived experience; thinking for perhaps the first time how that person would feel encountering certain things—certain policies, language, or interactions, receiving their pain, but not through a myopic imagining or pity.
Empathy allows our hearts to break open to the painful, fearful, or even joyous experiences of a life we never have to personally live in such a deep way that we can never again unknow what we’ve come to know. Empathy fosters kindred connection.
And there, in the clear-eyed seeing of who we are to one another—interconnected, where nothing lives separate and distinct from the other, where there is uniqueness of personhood and space for the ways in which we vary and are different from one another—is the invitation into the possibility of the moment.
Empathy allows our heart to meld as our lives are woven together by the Master Weaver until there is only the restoration of all things as all are (to use Julian of Norwich language) oned in the Oneing of Love.
Empathy is spacious. Empathy, not as an act of saviorism because someone is beneath me and needs a hand up. Empathy as shared power within the communal paradigm.
What is in your heart that you need me to hear? Is it possible to offer reciprocity instead of defense?
Could we choose one another without denying, discounting or overlooking the pain we've wrought on one another? We can no longer afford people to modify their behavior without addressing the condition of their heart.
We can't go forward without a reckoning of the past. The unsanitized truth must be given space to breathe.
I don’t want to impose a narrative that rushes me toward a fix just for the sake of fixing and avoiding discomfort. But I keep asking myself: If the fear of man, saving face, is more important than telling the truth, how do we ever get to the other side if we do not humble ourselves to hear a reality that expresses concerns different from our own?
I know the truth is painful to bear full on. It's why we've always told it slant, white- washed it, prettied it up.
But now, now is the time to bear it. To tell it and to not ridicule others in their revealing.
Sometimes things have to break open and fall apart in order to come together. Don’t turn from the discomfort. Don’t hide from the wrestle.
I can’t help but think of Mamie Till, of her decision to allow her son’s murdered and mutilated body to lay open in a casket for public viewing, so people could see the atrocity of not only what happens to Black men and women, but the level of vile hate one would have to possess to brutally, ritually, mindfully maim another without remorse.
Emmett Till’s body was a mirror for society.
But it was Mamie Till’s brave decision to lay the truth bare that invited us in to see ourselves.
And here we are again, needing to see ourselves. Don’t run.
Stand. Relax your shoulders. Soften your belly. Eyes wide open.
Breathe deep and decide you’re here for this.
Let’s all be here for this...
The Beloved calls us all to a perspective of love.
A perspective that destroys hierarchies and enlarges my view of the circle of life.
A perspective that's free from intimidation, insecurity, fear, worry of what others perceive.
Love is not easily threatened. Love isn't territorial.
Love is welcoming. Love excludes no one. Love does not force someone to think like me.
When I understand the way of Love, catch a glimpse at the magnitude of Love’s acceptance, my heart is no longer pitted against or fragmented. My heart has been made whole.
Rev angel Kyodo Williams said: “Love is space. It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are, for that is love. To come from a place of love is to be in the acceptance of what is even in the face of moving it towards something that is more just, more whole. “
Let our story begin and end with Love. Let Love be the pause, the period, the high watermark and the exclamation point that dot the narratives we tell ourselves. Offer the benefit of the doubt. Allow the mystery of Love to fill in the blanks instead of judgment. Let us listen to the unsaid with our heart and not our suspicions.
How do we find our way out of exhaustion and judgment? Grace.
May the scales fall from our eyes and our hearts be enlarged with compassion.
May the other become us and may our scarcity mindset and fear of loss of power give way to generosity and equality.
May the fire that reveals, that lights the way, burn away everything that stands in the way of Love's greatest reveal... LOVE. And may we mirror all that we see when truly we behold Love as Love is. May the truth of our being match the way of Love.
In the words of my friend Paul, “the only way forward is toward.” This is the invitation before us. Will we move toward one another in love?
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