the divine meditation newsletter: love is inevitable
This newsletter contains mention of police brutality.
In December 2023, after a harrowing experience of police brutality during a direct action to stop the genocide in Gaza, I went on a week-long silent meditation retreat. At the time, I only had a faint sense of what drew me to the retreat. Today, I can appreciate how life-changing this sequence of events really was.
During the action, I had stared into the eyes of police officers as they threw the people beside me down cement stairs. I thought to myself, ‘This is traumatic. We are all being traumatized.’ As I write this, I can clearly conjure up the memory of one officer’s face as he grabbed and threw a protester to the ground. The fear surging in me as I turned to my friend Catherine and said, “I’m scared.” We never forget violence.
Before traveling to the action, I pulled a tarot card while asking, ‘What will this experience be like?’ The card I pulled was The Devil. The card depicts chains around the necks of two captives which are loose enough to be removed. In her book, Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore writes of how this “hints at the possibility that their stuckness is a choice.” After the action, I heard a story of how one officer, looking shocked and afraid himself, said, “I don’t want to do this,” to which Catherine emphatically responded, “you don’t have to.”
I could have walked away from this experience with more hate in my heart. And initially, I did. But there was something in me which also knew that drawing a conclusion of hate was going to create more suffering – also a form of stuckness. I think of the words of my teacher Vinny Ferraro who said, “May no one know the violence it took to become this soft.”
Interestingly, the meditation retreat I attended was about cultivating the heart of forgiveness. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was searching for a spiritual fabric to hold all of the devastation we are witnessing. This fabric needed a sturdiness* to match the pace at which we are witnessing harm happen.
Practicing meditation for several hours a day during retreat, I became more acquainted with going into the timeless space that’s accessible through sitting. A vaster space than even the one technology offers us. One that is encompassing of, yet somehow also separate from, our thoughts, identities, job, possessions, trauma.
Going there brought me here: I believe we live in a universe where no matter what you do, “good” or “bad,” you are loved. I believe the universe loves us no matter what. That this thing we call love is the frequency that all of life is held in. That every being is a part of each other. It’s no less miraculous than that.
For many of us, I imagine it may be hard to apply this belief to the dictators of the world. Why start there? I don’t have to look much further than my own existence to see this grace at play.
No matter how much good I do, there is also harm in many of my daily choices. It’s the dissonance of wearing clothes made in sweatshops. The numerous times I do not recycle a container. The phone I use. The taxes I pay which fund war. There is no entirely innocent existence. I too am implicated in the suffering in the world.
And yet, no matter what, I don’t question if I’m loved by the universe. Not because I’m special, or do less harm than other creatures, but simply because. Richard Rohr writes, “God loves things by becoming them.” If you’re here, you’re loved. I’m talking about a quality of love that exists beyond our human lives. Imagine the sound of a harmonious piano chord that never ends. I think that’s what the universe’s love for us is like. (i.e. ‘All dogs go to heaven’ applies to you and me!)
Would we really want to exist where this wasn’t the universal law?
If that’s in our cosmic DNA, I have faith in this: that love and justice are inevitable. A loving world is inevitable – we already live in it. Justice – not a punishing justice, but a justice which reflects that no being is more or less than anyone else – is inevitable.
What moves me greatly are the stories across human history where people have tapped into this knowing. Where their actions remind us of universal love and where their once-enemies are transformed by that love. Where millions of us are transformed by that love.
Like the story of Durham community organizer, Ann Atwater, and former KKK leader, C.P. Ellis. Through a courageous process led by facilitator Bill Riddick to decide whether or not to integrate Durham schools, they became allies, and later on friends. The process ended with Ellis renouncing his Klan membership and voting in favor of integration. Their friendship changed the course of my and thousands of other Durham children's lives.**
“I often wonder how C.P. and I both changed enough that we were able to work together—to even be friends. In church the preacher says that if you want to be like Jesus you must be “born again.” That really is the only way I can describe it. Something came into our lives those two weeks we spent working together on the “Save Our Schools” meetings. The blinders came off and we both saw that our fighting one another wasn’t doing anything to help the children. We didn’t become friends because we wanted to. What happened, really, was we saw how much we had in common. Then we couldn’t imagine not being friends. But we couldn’t be friends without forgiving one another. ” –Ann Atwater, What Forgiveness Costs
I’m struck by this account of forgiveness and the mention of Christianity. Maybe it’s because I’m 33, maybe it’s because he was a Palestinian Jew, but I’ve found myself with a growing curiosity about Jesus. (An unintended result of living this year as if it were my last is an increased openness to worldviews that I may have once written off as “not my thing.”)
I didn’t grow up as a Christian, yet I grew up singing songs about an elusive Christ in school, asking questions about heaven, and going to see Kirk Franklin perform at an amusement park. It’s true that there’s a story in here about Christian supremacy in the US. And right beside it is a story of how this may have radically expanded my sense of self as a Bengali child shaped by southern Black and white Christian communities***.
After 33 years of never opening a Bible, I’m having my own ‘come to Jesus’ moment as I realize just how profound – and abolitionist – his call to “love your enemies” really was. When I came to abolitionist values later on in life, I noted that churches are some of the only neighborhood spaces we have – however imperfect – where we can go and imagine our own forgiveness.
Somewhere along the way, I conflated the forgiveness of unaddressed harm with enabling the same harm that once happened to happen again. This fear was in the way of forgiveness. I’m starting to see, as teacher Frank Ostaseski said in our Year to Live class, that you can “forgive the person, not the act” and that, “all forgiveness is self-forgiveness.” (And I laughed in relief when teacher Vinny said, “just because I forgive you doesn’t mean you’re coming to my house! That’s got nothing to do with it!”) I may be forgiving you, but again, because we are of each other, I am also freeing myself from further suffering.
During the retreat, our meditation teacher Louije Kim spoke of healing not as something you “have” or acquire, but really as a way of seeing the world. I think this is why I find myself living in the question of, ‘what is my worldview?’ these days. The way we view everything has immense power to free us. As I open to the mysticism of the universe, and its inevitable loving nature, I feel as though I am being called to do nothing less than see with the eyes of love.
*I recommend this beautiful piece written by my friend adé on how all weaving requires tension; and is quite literally held together by tension. When I say “spiritual fabric,” I mean a worldview which can hold an immense amount of tension.
**Only learning this local history as an adult, I think of the many unseen ways their story of conflict transformation may have influenced me.
***As I learn more about the caste system in India, I hear stories of how Christianity provided access to basic resources like health care and education for Dalit communities. Not uncomplicated, but it expanded my sense of how the missionary work that accompanied British colonization expanded access to human rights and dignity for many caste oppressed peoples.
Years back, I thought my mom was “colonized” in her thinking for saying that the British brought “some good things” to India. Then, I heard accounts of how doctors in India would refuse to even touch and therefore treat people labeled from birth as “lower” castes. It challenged my thinking to learn that Christianity was a force for humanity in the absence of it– as I was more familiar with it’s role in the context of indigenous genocide, forced assimilation, and chattel slavery here. From my mom’s perspective, even as an upper caste child, I wonder if the “good” she alluded to was the felt difference of more social equality within Christian institutions, in comparison to Hindu ones.