By Mark Kutolowski
“There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men's sins.” - Father Zosima, from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
My heart breaks and my spirit shudders as I emerge from a media fast to learn about the cruel and unjust murder of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of white police. This is both a grievous tragedy and also one example among thousands of the bitter fruit of our national history of racism, structural injustice, and violence against black people. What can be said in the face of this evil?
First, I recognize my need to listen more deeply to the voices of black people, indigenous people, and people of color. One of the effects of white privilege in my life has been that I, as a middle class white man, was consistently told throughout my upbringing and schooling to trust and believe in myself and that I could accomplish anything I set out to do. I was told, hundreds of times, that I was a future world leader. One effect of this conditioning is that I over-value my own opinion and am overly comfortable with the sound of my own voice in conversation. I have an inner ‘demon’ or voice that often tells me ‘I am right’ without regard to a real assessment of the truth value of my speech. I need to be diligent about this voice and keep watch. In recent years, I have had the gift of working closely with some remarkable people of color in spiritual leadership. I have been struck both by the power of the Spirit working through these brothers and sisters, but also by the presence of inner voices within some of them telling them that their words are not important or that they don’t belong in leadership—voices that try to strip them of their inner authority in God. For these women and men, learning to trust their inner wisdom means learning to recognize and limit the influence of these disempowering voices. This is one of the practical effects of racial oppression. Both sets of inner voices speak untruth, but mine is an untruth of inflation while theirs is an untruth of deflation. Practically speaking, that means that in spiritual discussion and in dialogue about racism, I need to learn to trust their voices more and my own less.[1]
Racism, like other -isms (sexism, classism, etc.), is a state of the heart. It is a bitter fruit of the human condition—the lost awareness of our own divine nature. When we have forgotten that we bear the image and likeness of God, imago dei, we simultaneously become unable to see both our own divine life and the divine image present in others. Sadly, this is the universal human experience as we come into egoic consciousness. It is where we begin the adult spiritual journey – but we can grow into a conscious awareness of imago dei in ourselves and others. To the degree that we truly open to the presence of God in ourselves, we instantly become capable of seeing the presence of God in others, including those who may look very different from us. This spiritual vision opens the way for love and intimacy across all barriers of human difference. Without this vision, we fail to see the ‘other’ truly, our center of concern remains the self, and we are capable of all manner of disrespect and violence. I doubt that any secular or humanistic campaign to combat racism will ultimately succeed, because the roots of racism are in this separation of self from divine love.
One of the most valuable ways we can address racism is to open our hearts to feel pain—our own pain and the pain of others. Some of the defining features of American culture are forgetfulness of the past coupled with the hope of a better future and the inability to feel pain and discomfort. Our culture conditions us from an early age to prefer solutions and improvements over being present with pain and paradox. Partially because of this tendency, we have never collectively faced the immense pain of our histories of slavery, of lynching, of genocide of Native Americans, or even of our civil war. We have never had a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ like the one that took place in the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa. The pain of these events lingers, unprocessed, in our collective and individual psyches. Especially for white, middle-class Americans, we may try to smile, be cheerful, and walk around as if all is well with the world. It’s not.[2] To actually be at peace with reality requires abiding with the pain of the immense suffering that has occurred in our nation’s history and in our personal history as well. Neither denying the pain nor over-identifying with an aspect of the pain is healing. Only presence (abiding with the pain in com-passion—'suffering with’) heals. Trauma psychology has identified that oppression damages the psyche of three categories of people—the oppressed, the oppressors, and the bystanders. We all have a legacy of ancestral (as well as this lifetime) psychic damage from oppression. Simply being present with this pain is a major and necessary step to personal and collective healing. When we deny this pain, we inevitably participate in its perpetuation in the world—whether as oppressed, oppressor, or bystander.
I have found, as a spiritual director and retreat leader, that we are generally only able to be with pain to the extent that we are able to access an awareness of the presence of God. In other words, if our pain is greater than that which our individual psyche can bear, the only way to be present with the pain is to hold it in the light of the infinite. All pain is finite, and divine love is infinite. No matter how deep or how old, our pain can be held in the immensity of God. This does not take away our pain, but it gives strength to bear it that goes beyond the limits of our individual psyche.
Structural injustice is simply the compounded effect of the distortions of the human person described above. With enough time and social organization, self-centeredness, inability to see the divine image in others, and hiding from pain will lead to social, political and economic orders that perpetuate injustice. Attempting to reform the structure without dealing with the roots of this dis-ease will not lead to lasting results. Yet, reform must extend beyond the personal to address structural issues. Again, it can be deeply painful to begin to see the depths of structural injustice in our society. For example, the industrial agricultural system is now utterly dependent on a permanent underclass of near-slave labor for both field harvesting and processing. No American with other options would take these jobs. They instead are filled by desperately poor (and brown-skinned) immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Without this labor pool, our current food system would quickly collapse. In its current state, the ability of our food system to feed this country depends on the plantation-style exploitation of brown people. If we were to recognize the dignity and divinity of each of these laborers and treat them accordingly, the food system would fall apart. This is what I mean by structural injustice—the system as it exists requires the dehumanization of whole classes of people to keep functioning.
I am convinced that there is no ‘quick fix’ to the problem of racial injustice in this country. It is not a matter of ‘re-form’, or getting rid of a few ‘bad apples’ in our police forces, or of any other surface adjustments to the systems and structures that are in place. In giving these reflections I offer no simple solution, only an invitation to open our hearts to love, to feel, to weep, and to face reality as it is. I am convinced of the power of prayer. When one person opens their heart to human suffering and to the presence of God, something happens which brings healing to both that individual and through them to the whole of humanity in some small and hidden way. To be present with both human suffering and our true home in God is to walk the way of Christ, fully open to both human and divine reality.
What I have written about here is not a complete response to the violence and injustice of our time, but it is a place to begin, and a spiritually grounded foundation for a more outward call for justice. May God have mercy on us all.
[1] Most spiritual literature has historically been written by members of a small, elite class within society, as literacy was quite rare until modern times. This does not invalidate the great insights of classical spiritual literature, but we must keep this context in mind when reading ancient texts. This is true across ancient cultures, not just in early Christian literature. For example, the Buddha was a former prince.
[2] Spiritually, in the heart of God, all is indeed very well. But in our world, there is great suffering. On earth, it is not yet ‘as it is in heaven’