You Are a Part of Me I Do Not Yet Know

I just found a book I've been searching for for 30 years. Or maybe waiting for, since it wasn't written until last year. But it responds to thoughts I've had for at least that long.

See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

by Valerie Kaur

Activist Valeria Kaur has spent her career--her life--documenting hate crimes and working to change our landscape that permits them to happen. As a Sikh, she has particularly focused on her religious community, while at the same time spreading her net wide to include everyone. This book tells her journey and uses it to illustrate the beliefs that have prompted her actions. She describes her system of revolutionary love, and invites the rest of us to join her. This book speaks to my deepest values, and I must give it the highest rating possible to match what it means to me.

When you love someone, you fight to protect them when they are in harm's way. If you "see no stranger" and choose to love all people, then you must fight for anyone who is suffering from the harm of injustice. This was the path of the warrior-sage: The warrior fights, the sage loves. Revolutionary love.

Kaur is a lawyer who started off studying comparative religion and got a divinity degree along the way. I'm a librarian who got a divinity degree along the way. I remember a particular conversation as key to my decision to attend seminary. I was catching up with a close friend I hadn't seen in a few years, and he was telling me about his recent Christian awakening (I'm not sure if it was a conversion or a reinvigoration). To him, Christianity was a tool for dividing the world into us and them. I had always seen Christianity as calling us to see no them, to spread love in way that makes everyone us. His view was not the first time I'd encountered this version of Christianity--this was during the ascent of the "religious right," which was dominating news and politics and, it seemed, society--and seeing it in a good friend made it personal. I couldn't stand seeing what I knew as a tool of love being used for division and hate. But so many people saw my understanding as wrong. Was I misguided? Did I not really understand my faith? I needed to study and learn more.

I ended up not actively using my degree (my first wife told me I spent three years and thousands of dollars on what amounted to therapy), but it reaffirmed my values and remains a fundamental part of who I am. Another core part of me is my love for the music of Peter Gabriel, one of my first musical passions. His song "Not One of Us" often plays in my head, with it's two big repeated lines: it's only water in a stranger's tears and no, you're not one of us. Here are the full lyrics:

It's only water

In a stranger's tear

Looks are deceptive

But distinctions are clear

A foreign body

And a foreign mind

Never welcome

In the land of the blind

You may look like we do

Talk like we do

But you know how it is

You're not one of us

Not one of us

No you're not one of us

Not one of us

Not one of us

No you're not one of us

There's safety in numbers

When you learn to divide

How can we be in

If there is no outside

All shades of opinion

Feed an open mind

But your values are twisted

Let us help you unwind

You may look like we do

Talk like we do

But you know how it is

You're not one of us

Not one of us

No you're not one of us

You're not one of us

Not one of us

No you're not one of us

Not shown is how many times it's only water gets chanted in the background. Ten years ago I included the song in the post It's Only Water in a Stranger's Tears: Or, We Do Not Take Care of One Another and last year I worked it into Pandemic Potpourri. I've loved it for much longer. Though the song doesn't explicitly say so, it's always been clear to me (and anyone who knows Gabriel) that the lyrics are an indictment of the attitude they describe. They imply that seeing someone as "not one of us" is wrong, and that we should strive to always see tears as more than water. To do that we need to stop seeing others as strangers.

Kaur's book, from the title to the end, is a response to this song that's moved me since I was a teenager. She has taken what the song implies and spells it out as an actionable philosophy. The first chapter, which lays the foundation for everything else, is about seeing no strangers by eliminating the idea of us and them to make everyone a part of us. The second chapter ("grieve.") describes how we do that by learning to grieve with others--to see the humanity in their tears. It builds from there.

The book's three sections:

1. see no stranger: loving others
2. tend the would: loving opponents
3. breathe and push: loving ourselves

She has created this diagram (copied from her website):

From the book:

The inner ring of the compass (wonder, rage, breathe) contains internal actions, where transformation happens primarily within one's own mind and body. The middle ring (grieve, listen, push) contains interpersonal actions, where transformation happens in relationship with other people. The outer ring (fight, reimagine, transition) is made up of social actions, where transformation happens within the context of community. All three levels of transformation--internal, interpersonal, and social--are engaged in the labor of revolutionary love.

All of my elective classes in seminary were in the social theory/social ethics department. I couldn't help but be delighted by this information on the verso page as I opened the book to get started on it.

Love--Political aspect. | Love--Social aspects. What else is there, really, that matters? I looked up the Dewey Decimal call number 177 out of curiosity. It is the "Ethics of social relations." Perfect.

So, with that introduction, more from the book. That is as good a thesis as anything I noted.

If you cringe when people say that love is the answer, I do, too. The problem is not with love but with the way we talk about it. We mostly talk about love as a flood of emotion. But feelings alone are too fickle and fluid to sustain political action. Social reformers through history led entire nonviolent movements anchored in love as an ethic. Time and again, people gave their bodies and breath for one another, not only in the face of fire hoses and firing squads, but also in the quieter venues of their daily lives. Black feminists like bell hooks have long envisioned a world where the love ethic is a foundation for all arenas of our society. I believe we can reclaim love as a force for justice for a new time.

Here is my offering:

"Love" is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving--a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.

"Revolutionary love" is the choice to enter into wonder and labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. It is not a formal code or prescription but an orientation to life that is personal and political and rooted in joy. Loving only ourselves is escapism; loving only our opponents is self-loathing; loving only others is ineffective. All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.

Love is a verb. Also:

When we labor in love, labor is not only a means but an end in itself.

I love the etymology of the Sikh word for God.

Waheguru, Waheguru!" Papa Ji would say. It was our word for God, but he would say it throughout the day like it was a deep breath. "Wahe" is an expression of awe, and "guru" is the light that dispels darkness. So even God's name was an expression of wonder at the divine around us and within us.

I didn't know much about Sikhism before reading it--and it's meant to partially be a small primer on the religion--so I was surprised and pleased to learn it has many things in common with my family's pacifist Mennonite tradition.

The call to love beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. It echoes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual teachers, and social reformers through the centuries. Guru Nanak called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, Mirabai to love without limit. They all expanded the circle of who counts as one of us, and therefore who is worthy of our care and concern. These teachings were rooted in the linguistic, cultural, and spiritual contexts of their time, but they spoke of a common vision of our interconnectedness and interdependence. It is the ancient Sanskrit truth that we can look upon anyone or anything and say: Tat tvam asi, "I am that." It is the African philosophy: Ubuntu, "I am because you are." It is the Mayan precept: In La'Kech, "You are my other me."

What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say--as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.

But you don't have to be religious in order to open to wonder. You only have to reclaim a sliver of what you once knew as a child. If you remember how to wonder, then you already have what you need to learn how to love.

Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence. Once people stop wondering about others, once they no longer see others as part of them, they disable their instinct for empathy. And once they lose empathy, they can do anything to them, or allow anything to be done to them. Entire institutions built to preserve the interests of one group of people over another depend on this failure of imagination. Violence comes in the form of policies by the state and sometimes bloodshed in the streets. More often, it comes in forms that are hard to see, unless we find a way to make them visible through our stories.

The first chapter of the book is "wonder.".

If you choose to see no stranger, then you must love people, even when they do not love you. You must wonder about them even when they refuse to wonder about you. You must even protect them when they are in harm's way.

No more not one of us.

Our minds are primed to see the world in terms of us and them. We can't help it. The moment we look upon another person's face, our minds discern in an instant whether or not they are one of us--part our family or community or country--or one of them. This happens before conscious thought. Our bodies release hormones that prime us to trust and listen to those we see as part of us and to fear and resent them. It is easier to feel empathy and compassion for one of us, much harder for one of them. When one of us does something bad, we tend to attribute it to circumstance, but when one of them does the same, we attribute it to essence--Oh, that's just how they are. We think of us as complex and multidimensional; we tend to think of them as simple and one-dimensional. We are much more likely to intervene when we already see a victim of violence as part of us. We tend to stand by when people we see as them are harmed, whether by policies of the state or violence on the street. In other words, who we see as one of us determines who we let inside our circle of care and concern.

The most powerful force shaping who we see as us and them is the dominant stories in our social landscape. They are produced by ideologies and theologies that divide the world into good or bad, saved or unsaved, with us or against us. Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or not we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others and ourselves. In brain-imaging studies, for example, nearly half of black people, queer people, and women exhibited unconscious fear and distrust in response to pictures of people who looked like them. In other words, we live in a culture that makes us strange to ourselves.

Of stranger's tears:

Grieving is an act of revolutionary love: Grieving together, we ease each other's suffering and come to know each other. Only when we know each other can we understand *how* to stand up and fight for each other--and the world we want.

Kaur's story of Sikh's in the U.S. is of a people struggling to maintain their orientation to revolutionary love in the face of hatred, discrimination, and white supremacy. It started when her grandfather immigrated in the early 1900s.

Baba Ji was slated for deportation on the grounds that he was likely to become a "public charge," dependent on the government for subsistence, because there was too much prejudice against his class of people for him to earn a living. The state cited racism to justify its racism.

Loving others isn't just about them; it also allows us to stay more connected to the best parts of ourselves.

I do not owe my opponents my affection, warmth, or regard. But I do owe *myself* a chance to live in this world without the burden of hate.

And:

The goal of listening is not to feel empathy for our opponents, or validate their ideas, or even change their mind in the moment. Our goal is to understand them.

After a mass shooting at a Sikh place of worship (gurdwara) in Oak Creek, Wisconsin:

"I see a lot of victims," Police Chief John Edwards told me. "I am used to seeing people want revenge. Meeting this group of people changed me. All I've seen is compassion and love and support--not only for us but for the entire city. For Wade Michael Page, too. It's changed a lot of people. My officers spend a lot of time at the gurdwara now. They stop in, they go to the services--that's unusual."

Fifteen years later, Kaur accompanied the brother of the first person shot "in retaliation" for the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers, a close family friend of hers, to talk to his murderer in prison.

"One day, when I go to heaven to be judged by God, I will ask to see your brother, and I will hug him, and I will ask him for forgiveness."

"We already forgave you," Rana said, choking back tears. Forgiveness is not forgetting: Forgiveness is freedom from hate.

"If I had the power to take you out from prison, I would do it right now," Rana said. "If one day you come out, we can both go to the world and tell the story."

Rana had never wanted him put to death, because it foreclosed the possibility of apology and transformation. Now here he was, reimagining our story, recruiting Frank as his brother and transitioning into someplace new.

Only forgiveness allows you to create something new.

On the subject of grieving, this showed up in my feed today and moved me. From Terrain.org, by Jonathan Johnson.

In a New Grief

The world heals in around a house.

Look at the old photos. 

            Black and white,

bare. No sycamore shade. 

            No rose bushes

up to the porch rail. The first owners

are new to the new wood, recently

            forest and not yet settled.

All the floors perfectly level. 

            The first layer of paint.

The first generation of starlings only now

              building nests in the eve.

Also from the feed, something for me:

More than just my being in the right place at the right time, it was my being the right race, the right religion, the right sex, the right socioeconomic group, having the right accent, the right clothes, going to the right schools . . . 

I believe it came from The New Yorker.

And one topical thing from the feed. Lately the news has been full of stories about opposition to "critical race theory," including the passage of laws forbidding it.

A more thoughtful take from Baratunde Thurston; from Will it be illegal to teach about the Juneteenth holiday?

To truly love someone, you must strive to truly know them. If you only want to know the parts of them that make you feel good, that isn’t love. There are people who claim to love the United States but are afraid to truly know the United States. They don’t want to hear the painful truths about our history alongside the happy truths. They want to cherry-pick a history that makes them feel good about themselves. That is not love. That is not patriotism. That is fear, selfishness, and cowardice.

That ties in nicely with Kaur's book.

See no strangers.