Monday, July 20, 2020

Our Brother John Lewis


A few years ago I sat with my wife in an audience at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, as Congressman John Lewis gave the Convocation Address to the thousands of incoming students and their families and friends gathered there to mark the start of their careers as college students. Our youngest son Trei was a part of this class.

The Congressman is a great example of someone who refused to live in the mold prescribed by the prevailing socio-historical circumstances into which he was born. He had to overcome much in his own experience…  And he did. 

The following is an excerpt from the biography published on his website:
He was born the son of sharecroppers on February 21, 1940, outside of Troy, Alabama.  He grew up on his family’s farm and attended segregated public schools in Pike County, Alabama.  As a young boy, he was inspired by the activism surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which he heard on radio broadcasts.  In those pivotal moments, he made a decision to become a part of the Civil Rights Movement. Ever since then, he has remained at the vanguard of progressive social movements and the human rights struggle in the United States.
As a student at Fisk University, John Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee.  In 1961, he volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides, which challenged segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South. Lewis risked his life on those Rides many times by simply sitting in seats reserved for white patrons.  He was also beaten severely by angry mobs and arrested by police for challenging the injustice of Jim Crow segregation in the South.

I listened, overwhelmed by a substantial empathy, and I observed the rapt attention being paid to this man by an audience currently reflective of the American demographic landscape. His resounding message: “Never give up! Never give in!” And as I sat there in that audience listening to Congressman Lewis, the words of Dr Maya Angelou came to mind :

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

The struggle continues.

Working Our Way Through Tough Circumstances


Out of the hard places in our experience can spring possibilities for growth and fulfillment that we will only know when we embrace the circumstances, no matter how challenging, that we find ourselves in. That embrace is not however an act in which we succumb to the dictates of what appears at first to be an overwhelming challenge.

Our ability to spring forth through the difficulties that are part of our environment is cultivated as a function of our willingness to explore the gaps that exist in those difficulties, and our recognition of the strength of being that is innate in every living thing.

No matter how dense with its own matter a circumstance may appear, there exists spaces in that apparent density that can be explored and exploited by living things subjected to that circumstance. 

The perceived impossibility of overcoming such obstacles is an illusion born of the fear that leads one to think and conclude that there is no way out. That fear results in a certain unwillingness to explore the nature and density of that which is perceived. The inevitable dogma of this way of being is - “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. Such a dogma is both a convenient truism and an admonition to the faint of heart.

Nothing is impossible to the determined being. The greater the challenge, the more enthusiastic the efforts to dissect and dislodge the obstacles that suppress the determination to be. Give it your all. You cannot lose that which you have never claimed. 

I Saw God Today…

( Reflections on life from a place of wonderful simplicity in Jamaica … years ago) I saw God today In simplicity of life In the hopefulness ...