Rev. Joseph Boyd
I remember when I first attended seminary hearing a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr that became popular by Cornel West, “that justice is what love looks like in public.” It was years later that I would hear another quote that “tenderness is what love feels like in private.” Part of the reason this moment is so difficult for many is because we are being asked to love both in public and in private – to exercise justice for those who are vulnerable and to remain tenderhearted with those in our household, our community, with our fellow church members and family. I have yet to meet a person who excels at both – this kind of public and private love. But it is exactly that kind of person that I hope to become, and that person has everything to do with how we see ourselves, and the way we are asked and called to be in the world.

The world is vast, with far more going on in every single moment than we will ever know. If it was in our DNA to live 10, 20 times the average life span, we would still be scratching the surface of what it is to be alive, and what there is to discover and grow into. With such a relatively brief lifetime, it is worth spending time thinking about the kind of person we want to become, because we don’t know how much time we’ll have to live into this intention. We don’t know how many months or years will be afforded to us to grow into both tenderness and justice, or into words of our own choosing.

One of the things I appreciate about this moment, is that life feels more precious to me. My sense of awe for the everyday lives of those I come in contact with has deepened, and my appreciation that in each of us there is a great depth and compassion that is always present, even if the person themself cannot see it. I feel like in some ways my eyes and heart have opened a little bit more, and I notice things now I never took time to notice before. I’m in awe of all that was present for all of my life, but I couldn’t quite feel or give attention to, and this time has forced me to slow down and notice those things. I’m in awe of love a mother has for her child. I’m in awe of those who go to work doing tasks that each of us relies on, and not getting the proper payment or health insurance one should be owed. I’m in awe of all the ways collectively we are becoming more sensitive to realties of tenderness and justice, and the great growing pains I witness both personally and as a community. I’m in awe that we still have the opportunity on this day to grow into who we might be, while humbly accepting the person we are in this moment. Awe is not the same thing as liking or agreeing with what is witnessed. There is certainly a lot about this moment that seems cold, calculated, unmerciful, and unjust. But I’m in awe of the growing ability to meet these realities with a full heart, and with an entire generation graduating high school and college ready to apply their vigor and creativity to problems that are no longer tolerable or acceptable. I’m in awe of our capacity to grow past what we and our parents have done, and deconstruct the house we live in: the nation, our values, our sense of self. We have been willing to reassess where we are, and to see how our specific place or position contributes or hinders growth toward the kind of people we aim to become.  A people that holds these values: generosity of spirit and material resources, love of self and neighbor, a worldview that inspires as well as comforts us, a way of living that promotes health and well-being, a centering of the margins, so that we can understand who we really are.

I have never been more resolute in my belief that this is the most important and most enlivening to time to be alive in American history. As a great giant of a nation, a people full of potential for tenderness and justice, a people yearning to discover who they really are, a single individual who is on the path to discerning their calling: all of this is more possible now on a large scale that it has ever been. A global understanding of ourselves, an understanding of ourselves in context, a reexamination of the soil that caused us to grow into the person we’ve become.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is at a crossroads and has reached a point of disillusionment. The life he had before no longer seems to serve in the way it once did. The life he had no longer works in the moment he finds himself in. The first important attribute of this moment is that he doesn’t want to be in it. It’s very important we be honest ourselves and start from this universal position. Whatever moment we’re in, is not exactly how we imagined or what we wanted. Arjuna is being asked to fight in a great battle that he knows will lead to the death of his loved ones: mentors, family, those who have shaped him into becoming the person he has become. Like many of us today, he would rather not engage in such carnage. He would rather abstain and wait for the moment to pass, and let someone with much more knowledge, experience, or aptitude take care of it. His first response, like ours perhaps, is a wariness and fear of engaging in practice, beyond just talk and intellectual ideas. The importance of this text to both Hindu thought and the organization of social movements across the globe, cannot be fairly calculated because it is so great.

Mahatma Gandhi, the great proponent of ahimsa or radical nonviolence would return to this text daily as he sought a way to be a full human being in the midst of great doubt and great responsibility. Gandhi, like Arjuna, had a very important question: how do we be a full human being in the midst of warfare and death? How do we live by our values when we are asked to enter a situation that is about life and death? Most of us like Arjuna, like Gandhi would have the understandable first reaction of trying to absolve ourselves of being in such a heightened and stressful situation. Krishna comes to the aid of Arjuna and shows a way of being that has influenced great movement makers including Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and Nelson Mandela, among many others: you have it within you to engage this precarious moment while still holding to principles that will preserve and lift up your humanity. There is a way to be a person of action, someone who enters the battlefield of life, and yet be a person of hope and peace. The advice Krishna gives Arjuna is very practical, doable, and down to earth. One of the main teachings is give up the endgame, give up your ideas of what any action will lead into in your lifetime and beyond. Just do the action you sense is right, and do it completely, leaving no part of yourself out. Give yourself over completely to the task that is yours to do, and then let it go, and trust it will take its course beyond your ability to know. It is a practice of complete engagement and complete surrender. Gandhi made the important discovery for his life and the life of many others that when you are being summoned to engage in a great battle, a battle that is about life and death, lead with life, not with death. The value of ahimsa or nonviolence is not just a literal value of not killing, it is a way in itself, a way to engage and be a person of action: lead with what you love, instead of merely fighting what you hate. This was the lesson Martin Luther King Jr. learned and put into practice – lead with what and who you love, lead with life, your life, instead of spending your energy in waste combatting what you fear and dislike. Save your energy and invest it in your values, not in trying to rebuff the values of your foes.

There is always life waiting for us to grow into it, to grow into the person we might become. And the wonderful thing about this kind of growth is in a community like this we help each other grow by living in our values, in a way that we may never fully realize ourselves. I remember the first time I met someone knowingly who belonged to the Dalit caste in India. Dalit is a Hindi term meaning “oppressed, suppressed, downtrodden.” Another popular term for the caste is the Untouchables, a group of people in the caste system who worked the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs for little pay. In our modern parlance we would also call them essential workers. It was the first time I met someone who told me they were not a fan of Mahatma Gandhi, and that their people were left out of the narrative of a free and prosperous India. The person I met was working in New York City, interested in creating a worldview, a theology that would lift up those who were continually “oppressed, suppressed, downtrodden.” His work and life I could tell was not just about a sense of justice, or a sense of right and wrong, though it was also about that. He led with a tenderness, a tenderness for his mother, his uncles, his siblings who were not afforded the opportunities he had. Though nobody in America would notice he was a Dalit, he knew where he came from, and he pledged to make the daily life of those who grew up like him more humane and proud.

Without tenderness, all of this just sounds like an ideology, an intellectual idea that may be strong but lacks the full breadth and depth of what we are capable of. This month we have been engaging the theme of “Reconstruction.” In this country, that has commonly referred to the historical period following the Civil War when the South reconstructed itself to align with the Union, a reconstruction period that though valiant on the parts of African Americans, was equally challenged by whites who stuck to ideals of the status quo. Though this term reconstruction is used mostly to talk about Southerners as a group, and African Americans in particular, I think there is a personal dimension to reconstruction that we cannot afford to overlook.

Identities are never fixed and permanent. Even if we maintain the same identity over a lifetime, our relationship to that identity will change, and holds the promise of transformative change. The social changes we are witnessing aren’t just changing the larger culture, it is also changing the ways we see and relate to ourselves. It is changing the way we see and feel our own life, but not all of these changes are left up to powers larger than ourselves. We play an important role in that change. The great battlefield of life is most acute on this ground. The greatest battle is not between two separate groups of people, it is between one person in a battle to understand who they really are and what they’re capable of. Like our protagonist Arjuna, the greatest battle is in deconstructing all that we take ourselves to be, all we’ve taken in by our loved ones, our mentors, our community, and deciding the next right course of action with no idea of what results that action will have. It’s understandable then, like Arjuna to try mightily to avoid or skip over this great battle. It is understandable we might want to distance ourselves or even downplay the importance of this great inner struggle to be the person of intention we know ourselves to be capable of.

Deconstructing, taking apart who we may think we are is not the most difficult part. Seeing that we are more than what our parents see in us, more than what our culture has expected of us, more than our school or employer expected of us. The most necessary and scary part is the reconstruction of ourselves. It is not an overnight process and it seems to be a project ill-suited to detailed plans and expectations. The reconstruction of ourselves begins with a wholehearted action, an action where we surrender the results. The only true possessions, according to Buddhism, are our actions. We are what we do, we are what we practice, we become the action we take. In this time of necessary bold action, let us participate, and not squander our energy trying to calculate the results. Let us act wholeheartedly, remembering the pull of tenderness as we seek justice.