“Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
— Matthew 10:16“We must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as citizens, but may it never be said, my friends, that to gain it we used the inferior methods of falsehood, malice, hate and violence.”
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“[L]ife at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony,” Martin Luther King, Jr., once said. And in his sermon A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart, Dr. King invites us to join him in reflecting creatively on the power of combining clear thinking and a strong mind with the capacity to feel heartbreak and genuine love. Weaving together teachings ranging from Hegel to the book of Matthew, Dr. King discusses the pitfalls – vulnerability to extreme forms of social manipulation and hate-motivated violence; and ultimately, to a society’s downfall – associated with the opposite of a tough mind: being “soft-minded” in response to the challenges we face.
Speaking to the disciples of Jesus and Black folks in the struggle for justice, Dr. King’s argument was twofold: “[we] must bring together tough mindedness and tenderheartedness, if we are to move creatively toward to goal of freedom and justice;” and, we must actively engage in resistance to injustice, but we must do so nonviolently.
King’s words speak to me as powerfully today as they did when I first encountered and read this sermon in his phenomenal book Strength to Love many years ago. Indeed, in light of the resurgence of the ideology of white supremacy and the violent politics of White Nationalism, they carry a particular message of hope and light into my broken heart now.
We who are called to live a path of loving awareness often find, at or near the very heart of our work some way to minister to the afflicted: to offer compassionate service to the hearts, minds and spirits of others.
Even so, and as we do this work as best we can in hard times, we not infrequently find ourselves challenged to discern wise action.
We want to engage in practices and projects with the potential to face up to these disheartening, even terrifying realities at every turn, and to do so with a level of strength and steel capable of transforming them. But we don’t want to fall into the traps of dogmatic anger and overzealous partisanship.
We want stand up for others without unconsciously doing some new harm along the way. It’s not easy.
And even when we believe we are on the right track, we sometimes find ourselves on the defensive. These days, again, our audiences are not always convinced of the value of a nonviolent approach.
In recent engagements, I’ve had young students ask me questions that reveal their skepticism of the path of nonviolence. They’ve challenged me to respond to the following actual questions:
“When is it the time to act from hate?”
“Is it possible that violence in service of justice is the other side of nonviolence, that there is a place for both?”
“Why is it always up to us to act nonviolently, to be the ones trying to create beloved community?”
These queries, emerging from young adult, relatively privileged students of mine from a range of backgrounds in the 21st century, are sobering. Indeed, I find them not a little disheartening. And at the same time, they are entirely predictable, given the resurgence of violence in our times.
I don’t know the answers to my students’ questions. But I do know that for me, inviting or creating space for asking questions like this is essential. And cultivating spaces together for holding such genuine and hard questions – questions that stretch me to consider all of what might be in the room, even that which goes against my own values – is absolutely essential. Such spaces are necessary to experiencing the process of growing together. In them, though we may sweat, squirm, feel our discomfort rising into our chests and cheeks, our fear making it difficult for us to speak. And we can bring our awareness practices to bear in ways that help us understand all of this better, opening the possibility of responding rather than reacting in the face of all that arises as our bodies interact in the social world. As we do so, we are creating the path to a kind of wisdom in action capable of helping us find our way. It’s a path capable of cultivating a tough mind and tender heart.
Over the course of my career, I’ve become increasingly dedicated to the personal, interpersonal and collective work of exploring and building the capacity to integrate such seeming opposites. To me, doing so is not merely an idea. It is a call to engage in a range of meditative practices and allied means of support (study, and committing to being accountable and engaged in supportive community) capable of developing a way of being that blends opposites, that balances extremes, and fuels my own growth and healing as I seek to support others in the very same.
I call this the practice of “Oceaning.” It is the practice of becoming more aware of the depths of the ocean in which we are always, already swimming in together. It is the practices of allowing opposites to co-exist, without grasping prematurely after what appear to be resolutions to that which is not yet resolvable.
The metaphor of the ocean works as a description, on many levels. For one thing, anyone who knows anything about oceans knows that one enters them, if at all, with reverence and no small amount of training. A tough mind and tender heart both — paradoxically — proceed from and help develop in us a sense of reverence for the rich complexity of our own and others’ experiences. Tapping into a sense of awe, a sense that everyone comes bearing a lesson to teach me, helps promote the reverence that enables me to see another rightly.
But even as we cultivate such a view, we sometimes find ourselves struggling in a world of others, alongside those whose values and experiences don’t much match our own.
We can find ourselves in over our heads and at risk of either flailing helplessly; or, of stopping, sinking and drowning. How do we move through the oceans in which we move in these times, without being in some way overwhelmed, drowning and overcome?
For me, as a long-term student of engaged Buddhism, there is comfort in knowing that the Buddha’s teachings include suggestions for making it through rough waters with ease. Indeed, some 2,500 years ago, he taught a way of navigating what he referred to as “the floods”: we move through the waters that threaten to overwhelm us in everyday life by not stretching and not straining, but instead by undertaking a path of sensitivity-in-action that came to be known as “the Middle Way.
The essence of the Middle Way is presence-based, engaged mindfulness. As we seek to move through the difficulties we face, we cultivate care in moving at just the speed that seems appropriate for the situation. And as we do so, we practice becoming mindful of just what we and others can handle at the time. We practice not straining, or taking on more than we can handle. On the other hand, practice refraining from dropping our anchors and getting stuck — in greed, hatred or delusion (or fatigue, worry, doubt). We practice continuing to go on when and however possible, with a loving heart; and, with a growing sense of faith in the possibility that constant change always avails.
As a student of these teachings, I’ve come to rely more and more on them in my work to teach and to support others in doing the inner work of justice. I’ve deepened my practices of meditation, I’ve relied on them more explicitly in my teaching and engagements with others. I’ve seen in my own life how a regular practice of meditation and reflection helps me to face difficult emotions when they arise — anger, rage, sadness and threatening depression, disappointment, dread and fear, in myself and in others. I have worked on cultivating the capacity to transform these into the inspiration to take actions that actually restore my own sense of hope and possibility.
And I have become more committed to sharing these practices with others as a means of providing the inner infrastructure for cultivating the inner capacity to integrate the full range of skills necessary for flourishing in these times, including not only a tough mind and soft heart, but a well-supported nervous system and a grounded body. Like others, including the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, I see these practices as a means of carrying forth Dr. King’s message in an embodied, heartful version of the gospel of Christ, providing concrete ways of supporting myself and others in the difficult moments of being together at the point of our differences in these times.
In these simple ways, and inspired by Dr. King, Thich Nhat Hanh and a long lineage of others, I am exploring the very means of integrating mind, heart, body, spirit and soul for resilient service when and where needed.
And this, then, is my humble prayer: May we each more fully cultivate and practice bringing integrating all that we are into all that we do. May we fruitfully balance the opposites in ourselves as daily aspects of our own lives. May we cultivate ways of being a space around which others can bring the conflicting aspects of themselves into awareness. And may we work to do this in ways that make our progress visible as part of our everyday lives, as we walk alongside real people, right where and as we are, moment by unrepeatable moment.
This, to me, is the inner work of building a tough-hearted and strong-minded inner structure for Beloved community.
