Nathan Phillips Meditation

(screen shot from AJ+ video on Facebook)

It has occurred to me that if Rosa Parks had taken a seat in the front of a bus during an administration like our current political administration, she could well have experienced what Nathan Phillips experienced and been discounted in the way Nathan Phillips has been by our current president and that dwindling portion of American citizens that stand with him.

Below is what I transcribed from captions of the video by AJ+, "Nathan Phillips on Racism," that was posted on January 23, 2019, and seems to only be available for viewing on Facebook.  I am not on Facebook but am grateful that this video was brought to my attention.  I hope that you can view the video and witness the integrity with which Nathan Phillips speaks.  I have watched the complete YouTube video footage that gives the context in which Nathan Phillips stepped forward, and I continue to respect him and meditate on what occurred. 

https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/nathan-phillips-on-racism/1880919632005555/

Nathan Phillips:  This is America. The dream of freedom, of pursuit of happiness, hurts me. The history we have as America, the genocide against the Indigenous people, the enslavement of the Black people.

AJ+ Narrator:  Nathan Phillips has been fighting for the rights of Indigenous people for decades.  The 64-year-old attended the Indigenous People's March, thinking he would highlight injustices that Indigenous people face. Instead, he was in the media spotlight for intervening in a standoff between anti-abortion students and Hebrew Israelite activists and for Nathan, the experience has left him scarred for life.

Nathan Phillips:  That was what I was seeing.  I was seeing this clear as black and white ... racism, bigotry, hatred etched in my mind.

AJ+ Narrator:  The Indigenous war vet (am's note:  This is a misunderstanding that has been cleared up.  Nathan Phillips is a Vietnam-era veteran, not a war vet) has witnessed injustices against his people for decades.  

Nathan Phillips:  I was taken away from my family and put in a foster home.  It was a time, in this country, they called assimilation.  It was a period of time that they, America, [in] terms of their Indian policy -- Indian problem.  During that time of assimilation, they took away hundreds of thousands of children away from their parents, separated us, put us in foster cares, put us in boarding schools.  A lot of those children that were taken away, never got home.

AJ+ Narrator:  Indigenous people are more likely to be killed in police encounters, 83% of Indigenous women have experienced violence in their lifetime and most perpetrators are non-Indigenous.  So what happened at the recent march is nothing new to Nathan.

Nathan Phillips:  I seen that, so I got scared.  Not so much for myself but for my future generations yet to come.  What kind of country are we going to leave that next generation? Just talking about Indigenous youth or Black or all our next generation.  Indigenous people don't believe we have time to be squabbling and bickering over race, religion.

AJ+ Narrator:  But he thinks things are only getting worse for Indigenous people.

Nathan Phillips:  We're seeing it daily in the news.  We're seeing this rhetoric that's being spilled by our leaders. Our lawmakers are saying horrible things.  As they were ripping at each other, it was ripping at my heart.  My country here in my land, my home, my America.

AJ+ Narrator:  Despite the standoff, Nathan still has hope.

Nathan Phillips:  I see a better future. I do see a better future here.  Not only here in America, but throughout the world.  There are a lot of people who are just realizing that if we don't do something now, it's going to be too late. I guess what I say to a lot of people: peace and love.  Put that in your heart and love for all humans.

Hearing the voice of a Christian on Easter Morning 2018 / The Second Day of Passover 5778

With immense gratitude for having witnessed the power of the human spirit in Maya Angelou this Easter morning and for the local non-Christian friend who shared this powerful Christian voice with me, another non-Christian.

"I'm grateful to be a practicing Christian.  I'm always amazed when people say, 'I'm a Christian.'  I think, 'Already?' It's an ongoing process. You know, you keep trying.  And blowing it and trying and blowing it." -- Maya Angelou

A local friend of mine who will be 90 years old soon said that all she knows for sure is that "something" happened on Easter morning all those centuries ago.  She doesn't claim to know what happened.  I've never heard her talk about virgin birth or resurrection.  She doesn't insist that anyone else believe that something happened.  She belongs to one of several local First Congregational Churches (United Church of Christ) which have lesbians as pastors.  My friend has been a Christian all her life, a life of turmoil and grace.

My friend stands with a diverse group of Christians throughout the centuries, including Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez as well as numerous dear friends of mine who identify as Christian and who have walked through their lives or continue to walk through their lives in what they hope is the true spirit of Jesus.

This morning I'm reminded of what John Lennon said in 1966, when I was 16 years old.  His words stayed with me:

"Christianity will go, he had said.  It will vanish and shrink.  I needn't argue about that; I know I'm right and I will be proved right.  We're more popular than Jesus now.  I don't know which will go first -- rock & roll or Christianity.  Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary.  It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

At that time, I was attending the Episcopal Church every Sunday with my family.  My family went to church together until the fall of 1967 when I stopped going to church during my freshman year of college because so many of my friends by that time were Jewish and/or atheist, and I could no longer listen to sermons that denied the validity of the beliefs of Jewish people as well as anyone who was not a Christian.  Not long after I stopped going to church, my mother stopped going to church. This was not long after one of the priests at our church was found to have been molesting one of the choir boys who was the same age I was. Within a year of the time I left the church, my younger sisters also stopped going to church.  My father continued to go to church alone for a while, but then he stopped going to church as well, never to join a church again until he became a member of the Crystal Cathedral.  He never visited the Crystal Cathedral but faithfully watched its services on television from 1994 until his death in 2003, donating 10% of his income to that church and continuing to wonder if Jesus truly was the "son of God."

It has been my good fortune to learn over and over again that all followers of Jesus are not thick and ordinary. Maya Angelou was not thick and ordinary.  My father was not thick and ordinary.  My Christian friends are not thick and ordinary.  Something still keeps me from identifying as a Christian, but it does not keep me from listening with all my heart to those Christians who do not twist Jesus' message and who inspire me to experience the loving power that Martin Luther King, Jr., talked about again and again in his sermons:

"Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.  The transformed nonconformist, moreover, never uses the passive sort of patience as an exercise to do nothing.  And this very transformation saves him from speaking irresponsible words that estrange without reconciling ... He recognizes that social change will not come overnight, yet he works as though it is an imminent possibility." (p. 18, Strength To Love, a book of sermons published in 1963 and published again with an introduction by Coretta Scott King, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968)

From the book, The Glorious Impossible, by Madeleine L'Engle:

"... After his resurrection he was never recognized by sight, but by his voice, or in the breaking of bread, the eating of fish ..."

May this day, Easter 2018 as well as the second day of Passover 5778, be an opportunity to listen for voices, Christian or otherwise, who speak out against the ever-present forces of injustice.

Christmas Eve meditation / There is Something, and everything is possible

"You undoubtedly know that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a progressive Christian and champion of civil rights and the social gospel. You may also know that he spoke out against the Vietnam War, harshly criticized U.S. foreign policy, and questioned the capitalist system that produced poverty. But do you know his theology?

Right up until Dr. King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had traveled to support striking sanitation workers, the civil right leader worked--not as a secular activist but as a Baptist minister--to awaken the conscience of a nation. What was the meaning of Jesus for Dr. King? Did he see Jesus as divine? How did he interpret the Bible?"

(from the Tikkun article ,"King's God:  The Unknown Faith of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," by Robert James "Be" Scofield)

Transcript for the speech above:  A Christmas Sermon on Peace (1967)

Then I got to thinking about Mavis Staples and the Staple Singers' connection with the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.:

And Bob Dylan and Santa Claus:

And the Sufi dancers at the end of this video that was released the same year by Bob Dylan:

And Nelson Mandela.

And Chief Seattle:

"Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors - the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of  our people."

And Rosa Parks:

"God has always given me the strength to say what is right ... I had the strength of God and my ancestors with me." (from The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks)

And I remember the words of an elderly Jewish woman who was a friend of mine, "I don't have to be a Christian in order to be moved by the life of Jesus."

I have no religious affiliation, and I am not Buddhist, atheist, agnostic.  I am among those who can relate to what an elderly atheist friend of mine said in her last years -- that she didn't believe in a traditional God, but that she did experience, in her heart, Something that had brought peace to her in the last 14 years of her life.

"... And to see you're really only very small / And life flows on within you and without you..."

(George Harrison, from "Within You Without You")

"... the possibility that there might be something significant in the little things around them."

(from A Winter Walk, by Tolbert McCarroll)

"Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible."

(From Going Home:  Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, by Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk)

BORN ON JANUARY 15, 1929

" . . . even a little of true nonviolence acts in a silent, subtle, unseen way and leavens the whole society." (Mahatma Gandhi)

It was on DECEMBER 1, 1955, that Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the NAACP, refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. On JANUARY 27, 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr, a 27-year-old Baptist minister, one of the leaders of the ensuing Montgomery Bus Boycott, had this experience:

"I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud.

The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. "I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone."

At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: "Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever." Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything."

(from Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story)

Martin Luther King, Jr, would have been 79 years old today. Imagine.

A Civil Rights Timeline

REMEMBERING DECEMBER 1, 1955

I will no longer act on the outside in a way that contradicts the truth that I hold deeply on the inside. I will no longer act as if I were less than the whole person I know myself to be.
(Rosa Parks)

On December 1, 1955, Parks became famous for refusing to obey bus driver James Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger.

("Woman Listening" (chalk pastel on paper from the early 1980s), by Old Girl Of The North Country)