​Dear God, might I too make good trouble?


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quotations from Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells,
Fannie Lou Hamer, ​Maya Angelou, and Rosa Parks

reflections on love and Bloody Sunday
by John Lewis, John Cobb, and Bruce Epperly

"Take up the battle. Take it up. It's yours. This is your life. This is your world." (Maya Angelou)

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"If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back." (Sojourner Truth)

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“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”  (Ida Wells)

"Nobody's free until everybody's free." (Fannie Lou Hamer)

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"You have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars, to change the world." (Harriet Tubman)

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​"Differences of race, nationality, or religion should not be used to deny any human being citizenship rights or privileges." (Rosa Parks)

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John Lewis
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(February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020)

John Lewis and John Cobb on Love
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John Lewis

I think sometimes people are afraid to say I love you. But we’re afraid to say, especially in public life, many elected officials or worldly elected officials, are afraid to talk about love. Maybe people tend to think something is so emotional about it. Maybe it’s a sign of weakness. And we’re not supposed to cry. We’re supposed to be strong, but love is strong. Love is powerful.
The movement created what I like to call a nonviolent revolution. It was love at its best. It’s one of the highest form of love. That you beat me, you arrest me, you take me to jail, you almost kill me, but in spite of that, I’m going to still love you. I know Dr. King used to joke sometime and say things like, “Just love the hell outta everybody. Just love ’em.”

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I think all of us in life, not just in the Western world, but all over the world, we need to come to that point. We need to evolve to that plane, to that level where we’re not ashamed to say to someone, “I love you, I’m sorry, Pardon me, Will you please forgive me? Excuse me.” What is it? Have we lost something? Can we be just human and say I love you? I think so — so many occasions we think of love as being romantic and all of that, but just love because it’s good in itself, just love living creatures.

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But the teaching, the training, the reading, and coming in contact with great teachers. Martin Luther King Jr. had a tremendous influence on me and the reading and the study of Gandhi.

When I saw the film several years ago of Gandhi and saw the march to the sea, it reminded me of the march from Selma to Montgomery. That there come a time where you have to be prepared to literally put your physical body in the way to go against something that is evil, unjust, and you prepare to suffer the consequences.

But whatever you do, whatever your response is, is with love, kindness, and that sense of faith. In my religious tradition is this belief that it’s going to work out. It is going to work out. It’s all going to be all right. And people will ask me from time to time, “What shall we do, John, during the sit-ins or during the freedom rides?” And I would say, “We need to find a way to dramatize the issue. We need to find a way to get in the way, but it should be in a peaceful, loving, nonviolent fashion.” Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.

- John Lewis interview with Krista Tippett in On Being

John Cobb

​One wonders whether history must always be like this, with "us" feeling that we are justified in taking any action that will support our side against "them."  We process folk say "No." All of us are composed of our relations to our own past but also to the myriad of "others."  We are truly members one of another.  The wounds of others wound us. Their genuine fulfillment fulfills us.  This is true not only of those we call "friends."  It is true of those we call "foes."

Whitehead noticed in the extraordinary "Galilean origins of Christianity" an emphasis on "the tender elements in the world which slowly and in quietness operate by love."  A Hindu, Gandhi, noticed that Jesus called us to love our enemies, and he incorporated not only love of the British but also Hindu love of Muslims and vice versa into his successful struggle to free India from British rule.  A Christian, Martin Luther King, learned from  Gandhi that we need not treat Jesus' teaching as simply impractical idealism, and he broke his people out of segregation.  Another Christian, Nelson Mandela, invented a truth and reconciliation program that also expressed a realistic love of enemy. Indeed, if we search through history, alongside the thousands of instances of treachery and cruelty, of deceit and revenge, here and there people have attained freedom and justice while expressing love for their oppressors, 

​This has two advantages.  Hatred and violence toward others may win a battle here and there, or even build an empire, but the hatred engendered in the defeated festers in them and endangers whatever may have been gained.  Killing leads to more killing, but the independence of India has not resulted in a bitter Britain.  Whereas even today the scars on the white Southern psyche from the Civil War corrupt American politics,  the desegregation of public facilities is genuinely accepted by most white Southerners without rancor,  It is hatred, deceit, and violence that are unrealistic solutions to human problems.  They are leading the world toward the suicide of the human species. Love is the realistic answer.

-- John Cobb, Love is the Realistic Answer

​Reflections on Bloody Sunday

Process Theology, Prophetic Healing, and Good Trouble

Bruce Epperly
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At approximately at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 7, 1965, 300 protestors, led by Hosea Williams, John Lewis, Albert Turner and Bob Mants, gathered at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama, and proceeded to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were marching in response to the beating and eventual death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, while he was trying to protect his mother and grandmother, following a civil rights march in Marion, Alabama.  On that Bloody Sunday, protestors were met with the full force of the law, gassed, beaten and brutalized, in an example of state-sponsored violence that horrified the nation and galvanized in support for the Civil Rights Act.

Despite expansion of civil rights in the USA, the voices of racism ring loud and clear in our nation.  The Trump administration’s rolling back of civil rights protections and tacit support of white nationalists allowed what was once hidden to become public, placarded on the media and excused by political leaders, most recently in their tepid response to the white nationalist attack on the USA Capitol.  We need only remember the juxtaposition of protest and pandemic, and the poignant recitations of “I can’t breathe” and “Say her name,” along with terrorists in the Capitol, many of whom describe themselves as Christian, to recognize that the soul of America is wounded and in need of healing.

As civil rights and prominence of persons of color (BIPOC) and the LGBTQ are expanded in the USA, there has been a vociferous reaction from disenfranchised whites, who see their privilege slipping away, and demagogues who manipulate their grievances for political gain.  Resolution seems an impossibility in this time of incivility and polarization.  Even the national crisis of pandemic is unable bring our nation together in common cause.

Alfred North Whitehead did not shy away from conflict.  He recognized that conflict and challenge were essential to the evolution of planets and civilizations.  The “adventure of ideas” creates stresses between tradition and novelty and status quo and reformation.  Whitehead observes that:

There stands an inexorable law that apart from some transcendent aim the civilized life either wallows in pleasure or relapses slowly into a barren repetition  with waning  intensities of feeling.[1]

Reformation and challenge are essential to the growth of civilization. The transcendent aim, the call of the future, is always in contrast – dare we say, at odds – with the current personal or political situation.  The transcendent aim, energizing prophetic challenge and social reform, is always viewed as a threat to the  intellectual, economic, and political norm. Creative transformation of our personal lives and political structures creates the conflict between what is and what is meant to be.  Experiences of discord are painful but necessary in progress of humankind.

The Discord of the Universe arises from the fact that modes of Beauty are various, and not of necessity compatible. And yet some admixture of Discord is a necessary factor in the transition from mode to mode. The objective life of the past and the future in the present is an inevitable element of disturbance.  Discord may take the form of freshness or hope, or it may be horror or pain.[2]
 
Discord can destroy a society or give birth to a “more perfect union” of “liberty and justice for all.”  Upholders of the status quo or those who want to return to an earlier “Eden” in which BIPOC, LGBTQ, and women were (un)seen and not heard, whether Bull Connor, George Wallace, David Duke, Donald Trump, or Franklin Graham, are horrified by change and assume any widening of civil rights is an attack on their values, forgetting its true meaning - the call of god’s new horizon.

From a process-relational perspective, discord can be holy. Prophetic discord grounded in God’s aim at truth, beauty, and goodness calls persons and political leaders to “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” (Amos 5:24) and the affirmation of provocative possibilities standing in judgment of everything standing in the way of God’s vision.

I believe that Congressional leader and civil rights activist John Lewis would have called such prophetic discord “good trouble.”  As Lewis counsels, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”  From Lewis’ perspective and mine, God is the source of good trouble! God challenges everything that stands in the way of God’s children experiencing abundant life.

Howard Thurman, African American mystic, theologian, and pastor, whose work influenced Martin Luther King, noted that the mystic’s encounter with the Living God inspires social activism.  The mystic’s social agenda has to do with “the removal of all the prevents God from coming to himself in the life of the individual. Whatever there is that blocks this, calls for action.”[3]  The mystic’s work is prophetic and often creates discord among those whom the mystic activist challenges.  But this discord is ultimately aimed at prophetic healing, the redemption of oppressor and oppressed alike in a transformed social order.  Prophetic healing is akin to surgery: it sees the holiness of the oppressor and though the operation may be painful, it aims at redemption of oppressors and the soul of the nation.

As we remember Bloody Sunday, let us discern where God calls us to “make good trouble,” creating divine discord in challenging injustice, healing the nation, and furthering God’s vision of truth, beauty, goodness, and justice.

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Bruce G. Epperly is a pastor, professor, and author of over sixty books, including PROPHETIC HEALING: THE CONTEMPLATIVE VISION OF HOWARD THURMAN; WALKING WITH FRANCIS OF ASSISI: FROM PRIVILEGE TO ACTISM; and MYSTICS IN ACTION: 12 SAINTS FOR TODAY.

[1] Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1933, 1967), 85. [
[2] Ibid., 266.
[3] Howard Thurman, Mysticism and Social Action: Lawrence Lectures and Discussions with Howard Thurman (London: IARF, 2014), Kindle Location, 244-245.