Greetings,
This is a sacred moment for our country and the world. I am a student of history and through it I have learned that story of racism and hatred stretches far beyond the last 400 years of slavery and systemic oppression that plagues our country.
Black Lives Matter is a call to action to protect some of the most vulnerable people in this country. Latinos and Native Americans also suffer similar oppression. However, the discrimination against black people is global and deliberate to some degree. The people of African descent are by far the most oppressed, discriminated people that have ever existed. The attitudes of bias and beliefs against their darker skin is woven into our religious and spiritual language of “darkness and light.” It is presumed that darkness is bad or evil, light is good. This is a subtle, but powerful inception of our psyche. It tends to create a bias against people with darker skin color.
Black Lives Matter movement has been an education to me personally. I have admired the strength and love that the movement has brought forward through the unfathomable pain. It is so deeply healing, inspiring, and eye-opening. It as awakened in me a call to uproot systemic racism, as well as economic and social oppression that is woven into the policies, cultural attitudes, historic folklore, and other threads that make up of this country. To me a movement like this is an opportunity to look closely at bias and beliefs that create separateness and violence among people. These biases and beliefs are manipulated by people in power and these biases and beliefs compel us to act in shameful ways towards each other.
Black Lives Matter is an opportunity for a spiritual awakening as a society. To see that we are all one and equal. When any race or tribe of people or any one individual suffers at the hand of another, all of humanity suffers the blow. All people can be prosperous only when the most vulnerable among us are made safe and made whole.
I am grateful for this solemn and sacred moment for the opportunity to be learning through humility, awkwardness and discomfort to become a better people, to learn to meet each person with mindfulness and spaciousness, without bias and assumptions. I am grateful for this opportunity to cultivate the spiritual discipline of non-violence in this way. Most of all, I am grateful for the privilege to stand, walk, pray, and speak up in support of this movement for equal Justice and Peace for all.
Like the great leaders of the past, MLK Jr., Mandela, and Gandhi, we are committed this as a personal practice to be renewed daily so that may become a way of life with time.
Thank you!
