Category: Uncategorized

 

The phone rings.  My friend asks me if I’d like to go pick blueberries with her, she’s in her car downstairs, waiting to see if I’d like to come along.

I’ve never picked blueberries.  It’s late in the afternoon.  The weather’s unseasonably mild, so I say yes, run downstairs, and join her in her daisy covered white Volkswagen.

We meander through the Maine hills, following painted signs: wooden signs painted in bright yellow, decorated with a single, over-sized large blueberry on each, “U Pick” lettered in black with arrows leading the way.  These signs are unlike most in these rural, economically depressed parts, where commerce is commonly expressed in make-shift, piecemeal, ripped cardboard with haphazard lettering, the carelessness testifying to inexperience coupled to hopelessness.  Not so these placards, bright and welcoming.  Not professional, but caring with their bright yellow backgrounds and gigantic blueberry portraits.

We turn left, go up a hill, and a large house with a gazebo stands at the top.  Around it are hundreds and hundreds of blueberry bushes, acres and acres full of berries.  From the hill-top we have a vista view of the mountains.  “Are those the White Mountains,” I ask my friend.  “I don’t know,” she says, looking around, trying to get an idea of which range we might be facing.  Sunlight in broad beaming shafts cuts through rain clouds and lights the mountains’ sides, the sky uncertain if it will rain or shine.  We get out of the car, go to the porch, the owners make their friendly introductions, give us each a decapitated milk jug to fill as we wish.  “Three-fifty a pound,” the wife says, with a broad smile.

We wander down into the rows, our paths diverging, as we enter into our own worlds.  My fingers begin their first berry picking experience.  Immediately I realize that I need to pay attention, or I’ll pick unripe berries with the ripe ones.  Attention, and a deliberate use of my fingers in separating berry from berry, and berry from bush; a new skill born.  Fingers meet berries, one by one, blue spheres like soft japa beads on a mala string, my fingers acquire nimbleness in this mediation.

Meditation.  Yes.  That’s what this is.  I pick blueberries one by one, and realize that there are only these berries, my fingers, the moment in which I separate ripe berry from bush, leaving the young ones to mature.  A breeze blows through my hair, and cuts the humidity.  I am serene, feeling nothing but the moment blowing through me like a cool breeze under a gentle though humid sun.  I look at the mountains.  It doesn’t matter what mountains they are any more; they are what they are, and I am what I am, and this moment is as it is.

Presence.  Presence everywhere.  I begin forming words around the moment, know the meditation will continue as words strung together, a mala of words, as my fingers caress berries, filling a topless gallon milk jug finger by finger.

My mind and heart live, blueberry by blueberry, the dissolve of my self into berries, moment, land, sky, mountains, Mystery, my love.  My fingers pray with these blue japa beads, my mind caresses the quiet joy of everything in unbound appreciation, knows only the sweetness that blue-purple stained fingers offer, fingers stained berry by berry, fingers blue-purple in shining Presence, until Presence returns to time under the weight of a full milk jug.

My friend and I unceremoniously wander back to each other, in unspoken synchronicity, our jugs full.

“It doesn’t matter what mountains those are, does it,” I say to her.

“No, it doesn’t,” she answers, in unquestioned, knowing agreement.

 

 

 

 

For years I had a story about my father; well, I had many stories, the bulk were uncomplimentary given my mother’s anger toward him, the man who destroyed her dream of a white picket fence, church on Sundays, and an impenetrable version of the American dream.  None of which were really her, given her personality and life choices, including my father: rather it was a mythos she enshrined about what being a wife, mother, and Christian looked like, even though she knew firsthand the hypocrisy of that mythos.

When I was young, every time I didn’t behave as she expected, she made certain to vent her frustration about him and our life circumstances, for I was just like my father.  This was true especially when I was emotionally “cold,” withdrawn and solitary, and singularly stubborn.  My emotional coldness was her biggest frustration, the distance certain to arouse accusations of being like the man who left her alone.  But I understood early that a child ought not be the emotional caretaker for an emotionally deprived adult, so I deliberately crafted the disdained emotional distance as a survival tool, a necessary distance to avoid her emotional morass.  She in turn fashioned me in my father’s image.

Yet despite her anger, my mother knew that he was a victim of circumstance.   His mother was emotionally incapable of raising her children, so his older sister, younger sister, and he were given to his mother’s aunt and uncle to raise.  These two had no interest in trouble making boys, so they shipped my father off to a military school at about eight years old.

There was a problem with this solution: my father was an artist, he wrote poetry and painted from a young age.  Military school was a death sentence, and any salvation his soul may have sought in the world deteriorated into rebellion, in a self-fulfilling prophecy about boys being bad.  When I write “death sentence,” I use the term literally.  For his spirit broke too young: the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at twenty-five was his soul’s cancer spread throughout his body.

He wasn’t just a bad boy, he was good-looking.  Charming bad boy.   Women flirted with him.  Waitresses, my mother told me, would run their hair through his thick blond curly hair, in front of her, as if she were not there.  My mother and father met, married, and lived in Alaska, and when I visited for a summer in my late teens — 100 dollars, a backpack, a book of Patti Smith poetry, and an invitation to stay with my godparents for a summer — the first thing women who knew him mentioned was his good looks.  “Boy, your father was good-looking,” I heard many times, as though this were the most worthwhile thing to tell a young woman about the father who died when she was six.

I don’t remember him.  His only visit to me, probably eight or nine months before his death, provides no residue of the man, which is odd given all the other excruciatingly painful details I remember about that visit.   I only remember the emotional contours of his person, a dying shadow figure with a suitcase full of experimental medications to ward off the inevitable.  I have a few photos though, and he looked staggeringly like Frank Converse.  Although Frank Converse’s hey day was before my time, the first time I saw him on television, I harbored a secret fantasy that my father had faked his own death, and was still alive — not because Frank Converse was handsome, but because he looked exactly like the pictures of my father.  The secret fantasy of my father living somewhere found a face and name, made more real because my father’s middle name was Frank.  I didn’t really believe that Frank Converse was my father, I understood the distance between the fantasy and reality, which is why every time I saw Frank Converse on television, my stomach ached, my throat tightened, and I’d cry alone and without comfort given the carefully crafted emotional walls built far too young.

***

A gentler story that mother told about my father went like this: one day, he found a drunken homeless man on the street.  My father took him to the drugstore, bought him some toiletries, brought him home, and had my mother make him a meal.  He let him use their shower, clean up, and they ate.  My father then took him out, and with the last twenty in his pocket bought him some new shoes.

“Your father had a kindness in him, such a deep kindness, that’s what I mostly fell in love with,” she would tell me in her forgiving moments.  “Just like you, you’re just like your father that way, kind.”

Emotional coldness, notwithstanding.

***

I’m doing the Jimmy Fund in September, the Boston Marathon route, 26.2 miles and raising money for cancer research.  It’s my fourth time, though the last time I participated was six years ago.  I can’t say that I am doing 26.2 primarily for cancer research — I’m doing it because I can do the Boston Marathon route at whatever pace I want, without being chipped, and I love a challenge, but on my own terms.  I’m also ambivalent about the current state of cancer research, but the event always proves overwhelmingly inspirational, and many of my critiques diminish when the stories pour in about people who Dana-Farber serves.  It’s an extraordinary day.  Every mile there’s a photo of a child at Dana-Farber, and they make placards thanking you — the number of survivors that one meets, the number of stories told, it’s a special day of people who beat the odds gathering.  It’s also a special day of remembering those who didn’t.

Every year I’ve participated, I’ve dedicated the 26.2 to a friend who has had cancer and survived, let them know I was taking them with me.  My old friend Bairn who passed not long after the first year; my friend Kath who was one of my biggest supporters the first year, and the following year had to go in for a radical mastectomy and reconstruction; the third year, for my godfather who let me be a hiking bum  in Alaska for an entire summer, and has successfully survived prostate cancer.

It occurred to me after registering this spring, that I have never dedicated the route to my father, who died of Hodgkin’s disease.  Not once.  How could I have avoided the obvious?  Because for so many years I had stories about his visit (“how could they have been so stupid as to traumatize a child like that”), the anger over being left alone with my mother’s unending well of demands and expectations, anger that he left, anger that he died, a burning anger that took me long and far but never with happiness or peace.  An anger that turned inside, consuming my mind in its depths.  “I can’t figure out why you are so angry,” mother would say, and I’d think, “God all mighty, how can you be so clueless.”  Once fueled by anger, I’ve let that fire become an incandescent light, a shared light between myself and the Divine, in which I no longer fear or blame.  There are now no walls between me and the world, and any that still exist I know will come down gently with time.  I choose freedom over anger, because it’s been given to me to do so, after decades of trial and error.  For this reason, my father now appears to me without tears, he stands as a poet, an artist, a man willing to give his last twenty dollars to put a pair of shoes on a homeless drunk.

I realize I’ve come full circle; or maybe I’ve finally grown up.  The stories only have meaning in the way I craft them.  Because I am no longer a victim of circumstance, I am the generous one.  I put on my running shoes, and dedicate 26.2 miles to the man who gave me life, poetry, art, and kindness.  In so doing, I take his too short incandescence into myself, and I increase my life’s light through his.

 

(If you’re interested in supporting my 26.2 with a tax deductible contribution, email me at julia@juliaharis.com and I’ll give you the details.  Thanks.)

 

“The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved
Has just made such a fantastic move

That the saint is now continually
Tripping over in joy and bursting out in Laughter

And saying, ‘I surrender.’

Whereas you, my dear,
I’m afraid you still think

You have a thousand serious moves.”

—  Hafiz, Daniel Linskey

 

 

We listen to Hafiz

and drink from Love

as ink pours from your pen

spilling transgressive ghazals

on my body

and soul, unfolding

odes of silence and

resurrection.

 

***

 

I rise with the sun

and walk in the hills,

the trees’ limbs

surrender themselves

to unbound blue,

so I surrender my arms

to the sky.  I lift my arms,

tree limbs become

my arms, their song

my song, their dance,

my dance.  I surrender,

twirling and circling;

in this sanctuary,

I am a dervish dancer,

branches, trunks, leaves

circle my spinning:

loosing ourselves to

ourselves, trees

and self, one in

another.

 

Laughter

rises from the earth,

convulsing in rapture;

I’m engulfed in delight.

I laugh in earth,

trees, sun, and sky,

together we spin,

spin, spin in laughter,

moment after ineffable moment:

the Beloved winks his eye

and laughs, lifts me

into the blue expanse,

and then tenderly tosses me into

 

the splendor of

everything.

 

***

Laughing,

we surrender

to laughter.  We

listen to Hafiz then

we burn his chessboard,

calling on the fire

that doesn’t consume.

In radiance its flames transfigure

a checkered playing field

into an acorn, and from

a sublimely rigged game

rises an oak sapling.

You reach for my hand,

my fingers squeeze yours:

together in stillness

we watch it mature.

 

We climb a grassy knoll;

our oak shades the hill,

an ancient expanse

of root, trunk, branch, and leaf.

In the ground

near its base we find

a knife without blade;

we etch our names in oak bark,

the names we have worn before,

name by name, we cover memory

with naming.  My arms

slip around your neck,

your arms slip

around my back;

we dance, circling

our ten thousand names,

drinking from Love,

a million seasons pass:

a dervish for two,

ecstasy in one.

 

With our every turn

the Beloved laughs louder,

black eyes filled with the night’s stars,

teeth shining with the moon,

the Beloved surrounds us in laughter;

we spin, spinning

as one, under oak,

stars, moon, laughter

until ecstasy’s circles

surrender to silence.

 

The Beloved laughs, rolls

us into a ball, breathes

on our round silent joy,

then again tosses us

to the ground.  We fall,

fall from stars and moon, fall

from laughter, fall onto a new

chess board; we forget fire, acorn,

sapling, oak; forget our dance around

ten thousand names.

 

The Beloved winks, tossing his head

in ecstatic abandon.  We rise

once more, wearing new names,

that we will carve into oak,

with the knife without blade,

when Laughter again remembers

 

the splendor

of everything.

 

 

 

“Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.”  —  Julian of Norwich

 

Today a friend told me, “we need to get you married.”

I hear this often from friends, in various ways, that the right one will come along, that my life will be better with a partner to make me whole, nuptials marking something extraordinary that I’m missing out on.

“You deserve someone special,” is a wonderful sentiment, but detached from more compelling realities.

I already have someone special: myself.  Any other relationship echoes my primary relationship, of my self to Love.  If Love is my first relationship, everything else comes from the primary relationship, in the most delightful and unexpected ways, because Love is creative, dynamic, and evolving.

Love infinitely expands, nuptials need not be included.

My friend means well, concerned that I am moving yet again, and he believes that marriage would give me “security.”

But I am always surprised by the claim that I’ll be happier and safer married: there are no guarantees.

I am safe in Love, not marriage.

***

I decided this past year that I was a nun in a past life, and my life as a sex worker entailed the same calling.  I am serious in this claim, believing that the echoes of our past lives stick to our behaviors in this lifetime, in subtle ways.

In medieval times, nuns were the only women with the luxury of an education, and they had more autonomy than any other woman of their time.  The first English language book written by a woman was Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (did you catch her first name).  Not only was it probably the first book in English written by a woman, it was rather heretical in its quiet mysticism and emphasis on God’s goodness.  Julian wasn’t taken to task for heresy, according to some scholars, because she was a cloistered anchoress, and not a threat to church authority.  Her gentle theology dovetails with our great mystical traditions in its luminosity and outpouring of Love, and its refusal to subject God to our egocentric infantilism of condemnation, judgement, hell, violence, etc.

In what some would call a prison of monastic seclusion, she was certainly the freest woman of her era, and her influence and respect have grown over the centuries.

Education.  Autonomy.  Love of Self.  Selfless service.  These I believe I previously lived, and these I have sought in this life.  Ergo, from nun to sex worker.  Because what most people don’t realize is the degree of selfless service that goes on in most working class sex work, stereotypes and morality slinging hyperbole to the contrary.  Pleasure is a catalyst to the soul, sometimes a temporary insanity of hormones or repression or psychic pain or a gazillion other impulses working themselves out, if one knows how to read the narratives and behavior.   Of course, one need not know how to read them, being available for another is enough.

Like a nun, much of what I have done involves listening, and then listening through.  As sex workers often live on the fringes, they safely hold secrets, they are the invisible secular psychic dumping ground of culture’s hatreds, biases, class divisions, and a host of other repressions.  Specifically, phone work is often like a confessional, myself being a secular confessor and psychotherapist of desire.

Every story has stories, traces, clues: nonjudgement mandatory.

Just like a nun.  In fact, more so.

***

My life is an adventure.  I wouldn’t trade myself or the wisdom I’ve gained for anyone’s version of how they think Love, spirituality, sex, or morality ought to be; and I wouldn’t marry someone who didn’t serve my Life’s greater purpose, my soul’s yearning for Love and its creative fulfillment: it’s the difference between knowing one’s deep Safety and hanging onto an illusion of security.

And, as I write, it occurs to me this impulse is also about the call to art and her many redemptions, the freedom of spirit to express itself in ways that four walls can never contain, and may, in fact, encumber when those four walls are shared with the wrong person.  Julian of Norwich had four very small walls to her anchorhold, but they enlarged into a grand magnitude because she shared those walls with and in Love, and Love alone.

I appreciate my friend’s concern, but to me packing up and moving again is part of the journey’s joy.  I know that I am being led where I need to be for the next part of the gig.

I believe the dictum is to serve something larger than one’s ego if one wants to live on the landscape of peace and freedom.

Marriage may or may not be part of creating that landscape, but it’s not a given to security.

I have Love.  I’m fine with moving again.

 

Tomatoes burgeon;

July heat is the reason for

stems heavy with blooms,

excessive flower clusters

waiting to fruit.

 

Broccoli rabe overflows

a terra cotta planter;

yellow blossoms pour

over its edges.

In a pot beside it,

arugula drips

with tiny white flowers;

over in the corner,

the grand creeping cucumbers

shoot out leaves larger

than two hand spans

from thick fuzzy stems,

almost overnight.

 

Friends and neighbors

told me I didn’t

properly plant my seeds;

seems I sowed too many

in my green enthusiasm.

Wearing again their

good intentions, they now warn,

“don’t let everything go to seed,

you won’t be able to eat

what you have over planted.”

 

I smile and say nothing;

I’ve no desire to consume

these buckets of flowering green.

At least not now. I’m content

to watch nature unfold,

as she will.  I watch her exuberance

in making seeds from flowers,

and she’s none the worse for it.

 

In the front yard,

I seeded a standing planter,

four feet off the ground.  It’s a garden misfit,

without apparent rhyme or reason in

the order of things.  From its bed,

the radishes have grown over four feet.

Their long, slender stems now rise like

monuments; nearly eight feet

off the ground, they tower over

tomatoes, rabe, arugula, cucumber,

in flowering pink profusion.

 

The overgrown bulbs

bulge from the soil; they show

their round red roots in shameless

exhibitionism, while their flowering

pink tops wave above.  I never knew that radishes

bloomed delicate pink-magenta flowers

which attract white butterflies; I never imagined dainty

lepidoptera playfully dancing around

fat bellied monuments that sing

red-purple love songs to diaphanous

winged creatures.

 

Perhaps next year

I will harvest radishes

and rabe and arugula; perhaps next year,

I will see something to eat,

something whose beauty

is folded into an even greater beauty.

This year I’m happy

to watch radishes in

 

wonder.

 

 

In a night sky
lit with Dixie Cup
stars that pour haiku
on the earth
under my feet,
I see our candles
burn bright,
lights to each
other.

You’ve twirled
me before
under twinkling
disposable paper
that spills
counted syllables
from which
fly Monarchs
toward an
invisible sun —
ten thousand
times ten
thousand times
I’ve spun
in your arms.

This time
we ride
a motorcycle
without helmets,
as I hold on tight,
and complain
about split ends,
and in the club
we visit
the band plays
swing jazz,
our fingers
entwined during
the spin; only
the place
and time
and syllables
differ.

I smile
at you
(and you
smile back);
my eyes
pour into
your eyes
(your eyes
pour into
mine); my
lips press
into your
heart (your
heart presses
into my
lips); my
words fold
into your
your words,
(your words
fold into
mine), in
love’s infinite
folding and
unfolding.

I laugh
in remembrance;
for we are as
you prophesied
when your soul
recognized mine,
and from some
forgotten place
I recalled
your voice’s
timeless echo:

together again,
as ten thousand
times ten thousand
times before,
we’ve brought
stars, syllables
and the dance
into Being.

 

I’ve never been one

to line up ducks in a row

and see how the world falls

in a row of ducks,

never been able to watch

as each duck joined

with other ducks

to take flight in an

accomplished life.

 

My ducks are

creatures of ephemeral

iridescent rubber,

they float on invisible waterways:

one floats south,

one north, one east, one west,

their original ducky meanings

invariably elude me.

Mesmerized, I watch

their luminous colors dance

under a pale yellow sun,

as they drift into a

horizon where sky

and water

merge into one.

 

I recognize

time’s a tyrant:

a pompous aggrandizer

who makes ducks in a row

and calendars

and clocks seem

obligatory and

inescapable.

 

In hubris,

I  turn away,

forsaking

a reality

that dissolves

into nothingness

with a breath.

 

I am a creature

beyond time;

I give myself to

the sun,

the moon,

the stars:

I’ve yielded to

iridescent stillness

 

and the horizon.

 

 

Long ago,

under California’s summer sun,

I came to love you.

 

I was too young,

you were too old,

and though I knew

I was a decoration,

I felt strength in your arms

and history in your heart,

whose rhythms murmured

under my head at midnight in

that remote, ramshackle ranch in

the valley.

 

Three days, maybe four

I knew peace and presence

in my twenties because of you,

the one who knew when to let go,

so that I could follow my heart

as you went free into your sunset.

 

I asked you for the tee-shirt you wore

the two days and two nights before I left for New York.

“I want to smell you until I return,”

I whispered in your ear, our heads on the pillow,

believing in my too young confidence

that returning was possible.

 

You gave me the shirt knowing

that I would not return,

would never again be the ornament whom

you had come to love more than

your judgement cautioned,

watched in resignation

as I grew beyond

any life we could inhabit together.

 

You knew what I did not:

your scent could not last,

because tee-shirts

have no regard for memory.

 

I arrived in Manhattan alone,

five hundred dollars in my wallet,

two suitcases in my arms,

and a man’s large tee

packed on top my life.

 

For weeks

I smelled your sweat and musk

in the cotton fibers,

until the dissolve

between scent and the memory of the scent

was imperceptible, as was

the dissolve between

when you quit calling long distance

and I knew that going back

was impossible

became certain.

 

I remembered you this week, for

I smelled the traces of love, innocence

and tenderness wrapped in longing, remembered those

few peaceful days in a decade

devoted to self-annihilation  of

epic proportions.

 

I remembered smelling your tee,

trying not to lose you

as I pressed my nose into the cotton,

remembered the inconsolable pain

of a disappearing scent,

and with it a life I knew

no longer waited for me.

 

This week, I smelled

the traces of love,

and I remembered you.

I finally understood that everything was

as it was meant to be.

We loved as best we could,

thinking ourselves two souls

inhabiting different lives.

 

But now I know we

are one Soul, that Love

is its own fragrance,

and in my inexperience

I mistook

the perfume of the Soul

for the sweat and musk on

a tee-shirt long ago

abandoned.

 

 

 

This morning I took a walk, four miles at dawn to start the day.

The air still wore the wet of last night’s thunderstorm.

The road I took this morning passes a lake, the water’s edge begins a half-a-mile from my door step.  Come spring, the lake sequesters itself behind woodland growth, pines and maples and birch, and lush, variegated ground flora.  In summer, the heat, humidity, and thunderstorms that tear the sky in two create overgrown canopies of green —  moss, lichen, leaves, and needles for endless miles in all directions.  When autumn arrives, the woods bit by bit unveil the lake like a slow parting curtain, until after the winter snow and cold arrive, and the spaces born by barren trees show a lake frozen solid.

As I approached the now concealed lake, a sweetness hung heavy and thick.  A berry scent saturated the roadway for about a quarter-of-a-mile: sweet like overripe blackberries, though I suspect they were wild blueberries, for this is blueberry country.  Wild blueberries grow abundant in New Hampshire, proliferating in self-sustaining mats through seeds and the plants’ prodigious underground rhizome networks.

Today the air was dense and viscous, and the smell of syrup engulfed me.

I stopped, walked next to the road’s edge, then into the ground flora to look for the berries.  I couldn’t see them, so I turned around and continued down the road.  The smell became stronger, each step a little more soaked in honey and fruit.

Berries?  Blueberries?  Must be blueberries, I thought, though they remained invisible.

The berry fragrance was thick and ubiquitous.  Yet the berries remained hidden, unseen.

Uncertainty and invisibility.  The unknown.  Imagination’s most fertile ground.  Stories coalesced from the ether and flowed on mind’s movie screen.

One story began at the lake’s shore.  I saw beyond history’s construction, saw the glaciers that once flowed, and the land carved by ice.  I then watched the ice river’s slow-moving withdrawal.  Frozen waters receding, until only the lake remained.  The winds carried in seeds, a few found their way into the soil, and wild animals foraging brought in more seeds on their fur and in their scat.  Trees sprouted on the barren landscape, one by one.

A blueberry seed or two found its way to the water’s edge, and from those first seeds, the land became a network for blueberry mats, and the drenched smell now hitting my nose.

I saw the rhizome networks expand themselves season after season, from the lake’s edge into the woodland floor.  I saw the berries blossom, fruit, then die, year after year, until the years could no longer be counted, millennia of life and death, all from the random seeds left by the wind and a few hungry animals.

I saw Indian women walking through the woods, picking berries and leaves, digging for roots, their children helping them fill reed woven baskets, broad faces burnished by sun and work talking about teas and puddings and drying the berries for winter.  I imagined a tongue now lost, strained to hear its syllables, imagined its clacking and cadences.

A falcon cried above, and I returned to the present, and the sweetness engulfing me.  The present, the woods today.  The ether’s cinema showed me a black bear with two cubs, the mother’s muzzle pointing straight up toward the sky, allured by the air-borne smell of jam, her cubs running around her, she led them to the syrup drizzled woodland ground, her light brown nose devouring stems, while her cubs batted at flies and mosquitoes, and romped in the undergrowth.

A doe and her fawns waited, then followed the black bears, gracefully picking around what the bears left.

Slow dissolve, and a fade out.  The movies’ textures ended.

I reached the end of the road, turned around, and came home, the fragrant undiscovered sweetness permanently sticking to aeons and glaciers and Indians and bears and deer.

 

 

Since the Charleston massacre, my Facebook feed is flooded with anger, diatribes, outrage over guns in America, fury over the Confederate flag flying in South Carolina, white privilege copiously commented on by whites, and op-ed discourses on America’s inability to transcend its history of racial violence.

While social media was (and is) in a furious meme and opine frenzy, the people who actually lost their loved ones spoke to the alleged killer:  we forgive you, God have mercy on your soul.

In doing so, those who lost their beloved family members honored the ones who did nothing but open their hearts and spiritual sanctuary to a stranger: they forgave, freely and generously.

With this act of grace, the families show a dignity and wisdom beyond our opinions, and the stranglehold of words and ideas driving the social media clamor.  They show power and personal integrity, refusing to be victims of ignorance and hate, a shimmering grace born of their faith.

Not empty platitudes or polysyllabic words on social theory, but the message of love and forgiveness, lived.

This singular triumph of uncommon strength comes written in the blood of nine human lives, and testifies to something larger than the families’ wounds, no matter how senseless and unimaginable.  The coroner “called the victims’ families ‘the most gracious group’ she has worked with” (source: ABC News).

In the families’ grace and strength, wisdom appears.

 

Forgiveness may not change policy, but it changes hearts and minds.

If we want a better world, one in which we move toward equality and justice, forgiveness is the necessary place to start.  Forgiveness shows love in action, the message that these families freely chose to give.  Lived love transforms diseased hearts, minds twisted in fear, and removes the blindness of ignorance and self-loathing.

Not immediately, and not in the ways we expect.  But over time, when practiced without flinching, without qualification, unconditionally.  For ourselves, and for others.

Forgiveness liberates the giver, and allows them the clarity to create purpose, and forge meaning and hope from chaos.

 

Charleston’s families have radically shown the way to power and social change.

 

 

Praying for their peace, and ours, in these coming days.