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<div class="story-meta-left"> <div class="story-logo"> <a href="https://www.dailygood.org"> <img alt="DailyGood" src="https://www.karunanews.org/pics/90x90.jpg"> </a> </div> <div class="story-meta-info"> <div class="story-author">By <a href="/author?name=On%20Being">On Being</a></div> <div class="story-details"> <span class="story-date">Aug 19, 2018</span> <span class="story-read-time">13 min read</span> </div> <div class="story-source">Source: <a href="https://onbeing.org/programs/rami-nashashibi-lucas-johnson-getting-proximate-to-pain-and-holding-to-the-power-of-love-jun2018/" target="_blank">onbeing.org</a></div> </div> </div>  <div class="story-meta-right">  <div class="utility-buttons"> <div class="dropdown"> <button class="utility-btn translate-btn dropdown-toggle py-1" type="button" id="translationDropdown" data-bs-toggle="dropdown" aria-expanded="false"> <i class="fa fa-language me-2" aria-hidden="true"></i>Cherokee </button> <ul class="dropdown-menu dropdown-menu-end 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again, the kid, he’s in shorts, it’s in summer, he has no shirt. You could see what he has on. The other kid is sitting there, watching this. And there’s like 15, 17 cops coming around.</p> <p>And finally, one cop comes by me and says, “What’s the problem?” I said, “Are you kidding? [<em>laughs</em>] We’re in Chicago. We’re in the district that Laquan got shot. I’m gonna sit and watch, to make sure this doesn’t have to unnecessarily escalate, officer. I don’t see a threat here.”</p> <p>But the fact that cars could just zoom by that and normalize that type of tension and experience — I think I’ve experienced, in a much lighter version, of being thrown on a cop car, being arrested for disorderly conduct in the 8th District, a while ago, and what it meant — the extraordinary, dehumanizing and enraging experience you have when officers are directly lying about their encounter that they had with you, in a court of law — and then being found guilty.</p> <p>But I do think, in those moments — Krista, with, I think the original question — in my mind, I’m hearing about the reality of the experience. How do you put yourself more proximate, in proximity to the pain? And I think, on the flipside, how do those of us who have proximity to the pain don’t get jaded and succumb to despair and cynicism about the possibility of reconciliation? And again, I think there are spiritual techniques and tools.</p> <p>For me, again, in the Muslim tradition, anyway, despair is just so antithetical. In fact, the word “despair” — “balasa” is the root word of “to despair,” and it’s, etymologically, directly connected to the word “Iblis,” which is “Satan.” So the idea of darkness and despair and succumbing to the inability to constantly see — and Muslim tradition is filled with stories that you have to present to Muslims, even in the context of something that seems as intractable as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, of people who were at each other’s necks during the time of the Prophet Mohammed, people who killed his family members, people who slaughtered innocents but found a way to reconcile as brothers and sisters. And so it might occasionally sound Pollyannish, in terms of where you’re coming from, but it’s an integral part of the tradition. Reconciliation is a part of the tradition. And if you’re sincere and genuine about it, you have to strive towards it still and not despair that you have gotten to a point where it’s impossible.</p> <p>[<em>music: “Saint Rose Of Lima” by The Mercury Program</em>]</p> <p><b>MS. TIPPETT:</b> I'm Krista Tippett, and this is <em>On Being</em>. Today, with Reverend Lucas Johnson of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and Rami Nashashibi of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network of Chicago.</p> <p>[<em>music: “Saint Rose Of Lima” by The Mercury Program</em>]</p> <p><b>MS. TIPPETT:</b> I want to end, talking about love. Actually, I recently was reading King’s speech in 1967, where he said, “Darkness cannot put out darkness, only light can do to that. And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems, and I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today” — nor today — and then he says, “I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love. I’m talking about a strong, demanding love, and I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens' Councilors to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear.” I wanted — just in the last few minutes, I feel like figuring out what “strong, demanding love” is in public; is, also, our work.</p> <p>I feel, we, culturally — we have named hate in our midst. We have named it. We call it out. We have created legal categories around it. And that creates a paradoxical — I don’t think just an opening and an invitation, but a responsibility to interrogate love in the same way, if he’s right that it’s the only thing big enough to drive out hate. And I think we actually all know this. I can’t prove it politically or scientifically — it’s true. We know it. But still, what is this strong, demanding love? What are its qualities, and how do we start to make it happen? And I feel like the two of you are living this, so what have you learned about this?</p> <p>[<em>laughter</em>]</p> <p><b>REV. JOHNSON:</b> As the Muslim, I feel like, it’s your turn to speak.</p> <p>[<em>laughter</em>]</p> <p><b>MR. NASHASHIBI:</b> Oh, it’s my turn. All right, I’ll take that. I guess I would think about it in two ways and try to be short with it. One, to maybe continue with King and continue with those last words of King — and I sent this to all our organizers, because we do all these organizing trainings, and everyone always struggles in our organizing trainings, especially in spiritual communities, with the word “power.” And we talk about, organizers need to build unapologetic power. And you cannot conflate power with “power corrupts” and “absolute power corrupts, absolutely.” “Why do we want power? We’re a spiritual people” — no. You need power. Power — the ability to act, to get things done.</p> <p>And what’s so brilliant in that last text is, King positions — one of the biggest, diametric, dichotomous misunderstandings is juxtaposing love against power. And what he was saying is, our love needs to drive us to build power, to build the ability, the capacity to move an agenda that is predicated on a better vision of the world. So I think, in part, that idea of expressing — because in that same text, he talks about love without power being sentimental —</p> <p><b>MS. TIPPETT:</b> Well, and what we do culturally, we know hate is powerful. We honor the power of hate. But we don’t think of love as — we don’t put those two things together as powerful — although, in our lives, we know it’s powerful.</p> <p><b>MR. NASHASHIBI:</b> And I think he talks about it very practically in that context of really what it means to build real agendas, coalitions, and alliances to sustain movements.</p> <p>So I think there is that, and I think love in public is about, do we love those who are directly affected, including ourselves, enough to make the type of sacrifices to build collective power to change those realities that are on the ground? I think that’s a really important question for all of us, around not just the more, I think, easier issues to talk about, but some of the more complicated set of social issues that really implicate all of us on some level or the other.</p> <p>And I think that also, then, links to the other aspect, for me, about love, which is the spiritual, more aspirational, I think, harder-to-achieve notion of love, which — again, I think about a hadith, a prophetic saying, that says: [<em>speaks Arabic</em>]: “Be distant from the dunya, if you will, the worldly. Don’t be so caught up in this world. Have genuine spiritual practices that are authentically aligned with the reality and understanding that we are all gonna meet our creator and that this world is very temporary and that, if you are genuinely rooted in that understanding, that you will obtain the love of the divine.” And that if you are, also — the second part of that is: “And be distant from just trying to keep up with the possessions of the people.” In other words, if you are genuinely — if your existence is not simply about material competition with others and what does that look like in our context of our modern reality, to be able to say that we’re not in it just for a vote; we’re not just in it for a particular benefit — that genuine commitment to people. If you are distant from simply aspiring towards the possessions of people, you will obtain the love of the people.</p> <p>And, I think — we have this one saying. Every morning, we come, and we have these young 18-to-25-year-olds, returning citizens, and we all gather, and it’s around 35 of us, and we always say, “Look, we only want one thing from you, one thing” — and they all know this now; they say — “your success in this life and your spiritual success as a person that aspires towards something greater.” And the context of love — it is profound to see people — we talk a lot, among guys who have really been jaded by this toxic masculinity — to be able to say “I love you.”</p> <p>And what’s really — the other day, I was at the bank, and one of those young brothers saw me as I was coming out. We were messing around with him, and he’s like, going, “Make it rain, Rami, make it rain.” We’re going outside of the bank. And then — this is a kid I knew from the neighborhood for many years, with nothing but that, just, hard look. He looked at me as I was leaving, and he said, “Man, I love you, man.” And I looked at him. I said, “Wow, I never thought I heard you say that.” He said, “I know, man.”</p> <p>[<em>laughter</em>]</p> <p>And for me, that was just that moment, that “wow.” And the guys, I walk in, and they’re like, “We’re saying ‘I love you’ all the time now around here. I can say that, and I mean it.” And I think, as corny as that might sound sometimes, it’s powerful to see that the force that animates work, for me, is believed. That love is genuine, that it’s authentic, and it’s part of what drives, I think, a sense of realness in terms of connection.</p> <p><b>REV. JOHNSON:</b> So I shouldn’t have asked you to go first.</p> <p>[<em>laughter</em>]</p> <p>No, but I’m reminded of this story. So within the Fellowship of Reconciliation, there’s been this — you referenced it earlier. The language of nonviolence wasn’t there, so it started as this movement of conscientious objectors, of people who said that “Our faith will not allow us to kill another person; we can’t participate in war.” But they went on to try to figure out what that looked like. And they talked about love in action. And so when early leaders of FOR went to India and met Gandhi and were trying to experiment with these Gandhian tactics in the racial justice struggle in the United States. There was this debate that happened within the organization around 1946, before the Journey of Reconciliation, the first of the Freedom Rides. And the debate was whether or not, by using these tactics, by taking an integrated bus, south — whether or not doing that would provoke the Southerners to violence and, therefore, inviting the Southerners to moral injury. In other words, was it true to our convictions if we did something that was provocative in that sense?</p> <p>And the answer, from A. J. Muste and Bayard Rustin and others, was: No; what we’re doing is, we’re inviting the Southerners to a response, the segregationists to a response, and we’re holding a mirror to them. And that is the most loving thing you can do, to confront people with the image of who they’ve become as they’ve committed these acts of violence. And it was oriented towards wanting people to be able to be the people that they believe themselves to be.</p> <p>And that’s an incredibly loving thing, and I think, for me, one of the difficult things, because we have a culture that’s so oriented towards punishment and punitive measures, and we want to punish people for what they’ve done. We don’t talk about the fact that none of us were born with this desire to be evil. Maybe that’s a theological claim that we might have to discuss, but I don’t believe that.</p> <p>And I think that the power of love to — and it is both an internal — another moment for A. J. Muste was, he was demonstrating on a picket line, and the reporter came up to him and said, “Mr. Muste, do you believe that your demonstrating will change the country?” And he responded by saying, “Young man, I’m demonstrating so that my country doesn’t change me.” And so I think that there’s this place where we have a responsibility to hold to the power of love that we know to be true and to not allow the world around us to deaden that in ourselves. And I think it’s really tempting. And not allowing that to die in ourselves is a part of what enables us to engage others in that way, but it’s a struggle.</p> <p><b>MS. TIPPETT:</b> That’s where I feel, though, that — maybe this is my thing — the power of the words we use and to call these things “love.” If people feel like, “Oh, so do I have to become an activist?” — that’s problematic. But “Am I a lover? Do I love the world? Do I love my children? Do I know that other people love their children; and what I want for my children” — right? So to me, that feels powerful.</p> <p>I wonder if, Lucas, this is something you’ve said about Vincent Harding, and I wondered if maybe, to end it — you guys are so great, and what I’m so excited about is that you’re out there doing what you’re doing, and everybody in here is doing what they’re doing, and we’re all in conversation. This is a work in progress that we’re experiencing and participating in.</p> <p>So can you read it? It’s faint.</p> <p><b>REV. JOHNSON:</b> Wait, this is what I wrote about Uncle Vincent.</p> <p>[<em>laughter</em>]</p> <p><b>MS. TIPPETT:</b> Yeah. You can —</p> <p>[<em>laughter</em>]</p> <p><b>REV. JOHNSON:</b> At first, I thought you were saying that he wrote it.</p> <p><b>MS. TIPPETT:</b> No, you wrote it. You can also say it in your own, current words.</p> <p><b>REV. JOHNSON:</b> No; this was true of Vincent Harding, who was a dear mentor and friend and who I miss. “He could see us, each of us whom he encountered. He did not see the caricatures of ourselves, nor what our ideological commitments had made us, or our fear had tricked us into becoming. He could see in us who we were destined to be: more fully human. And he used his gift of sight to help us see ourselves and each other.”</p> <p><b>MS. TIPPETT:</b> Lucas Johnson, Rami Nashashibi, thank you.</p> <p>[<em>applause</em>]</p> <p>[<em>music: “Brilliant Lies” by Ovum</em>]</p> <p><b>MS. TIPPETT:</b> Reverend Lucas Johnson is coordinator of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, the world’s oldest interfaith peace organization. He’s also an On Being fellow.</p> <p>Rami Nashashibi is founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, and a 2017 MacArthur fellow.</p> <p>[<em>music: “Brilliant Lies” by Ovum</em>]</p> <p><b>STAFF:</b> <em>On Being</em> is Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Mariah Helgeson, Maia Tarrell, Marie Sambilay, Erinn Farrell, Laurén Dørdal, Tony Liu, Bethany Iverson, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Profit Idowu, Casper ter Kuile, Angie Thurston, Sue Phillips, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Damon Lee, and Jeffrey Bissoy.</p> <p><b>MS. TIPPETT: </b>Special thanks this week to the wonderful 1440 Multiversity team, especially Susan Freddie, Susan Coles, Janna Smith, Michelle MacNamara, Steve Seabock, Avery Laurin, Joshua Greene, and David Dunning; also, our great colleague, Zack Rose.</p> <p>Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice you hear, singing our final credits in each show, is hip-hop artist Lizzo.</p> <p><em>On Being</em> was created at American Public Media. Our funding partners include:</p> <p>The George Family Foundation, in support of the Civil Conversations Project.</p> <p>The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at <a href="http://fetzer.org/">fetzer.org</a>.</p> <p>Kalliopeia Foundation, working to create a future where universal spiritual values form the foundation of how we care for our common home.</p> <p>Humanity United, advancing human dignity at home and around the world. 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