The New Year is here, and none of us knows what 2018 shall bring. The only thing we can control is what we, ourselves acting with others, bring to this world.
Amid the ongoing attacks on women, immigrants, people of color, the environment and the poor, each of us has the power to decide whether we live in hope or fall into despair.
Our power rests on our ability to care for our own bodies and spirits, and to live with purpose and integrity in a broken world.
Movement building is about hope. It is about the evidence of things unseen.
It is about knowing that love heals and hate destroys, and that indifference renders us lukewarm to life and irrelevant to the fight.
Our power resides in our ability to maintain hope, join with others in love and fight back.
That’s what I believe anyway. In times like these, we need things to believe in.
I lost whatever faith I had in God when I was about 10 years old. I just couldn’t do it. To me, even at my first communion, the bread was only bread.
Our power resides in our ability to maintain hope, join with others in love and fight back.
Last week, at a memorial for a vendor who passed, someone brought a stack of pizzas that we all ate together out on the cold windy sidewalk. The spirit of communion felt more real for me in that moment than it ever has in church.
In recent days, a fragment of a Catholic-school-days hymn has resurrected itself in my head. It goes like this: “Whatsoever you do / for the least of my brothers / that you do unto me.”
I hear this as it was sung in church, coming up from the ground of silence. I hear women’s voices singing in harmony. I feel the evidence of things unseen.
The hymn comes from a bit in Matthew where Jesus talks about how his Father shall judge us. He doesn’t say anything about whether we went to church or pledged our faith. He asks about what we did.
“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
The people who don’t do that, says Jesus, can all go to hell. I believe in that.
Pope Francis was channeling this Jesus during his New Year’s Vatican address, which called for justice and compassion for refugees and immigrants.
The pope also said we should take a moment of silence each day to “keep our freedom from being corroded by the banality of consumerism, the blare of commercials, the stream of empty words and the overpowering waves of empty chatter and loud shouting.”
I may not be so down with God, but I do like this pope.
In silence, there is connection to ourselves and others. In silence, there is holiness. In those quiet moments of listening, we keep ourselves whole and find our resolve for action.
The silence we carry within us is antithetical to the silence of complicity. The silence that abdicates. The silence of capitulation.
The silence within us, when we listen closely, compels us to speak up.
On Monday, Jan. 15, the 36th Annual Martin Luther King Day Celebration begins at 9:30 a.m. with more than 25 community workshops.
This month brings two opportunities to stand together in our power. On Monday, Jan. 15, the 36th Annual Martin Luther King Day Celebration begins at 9:30 a.m. with more than 25 community workshops.
The theme this year is “Take a Knee for Justice.” The rally and speakers begin at 11 a.m., and the march from Garfield High School to a location to be announced begins at 12:30 p.m. As always, the Real Change group will be found with our banner near the flagpole.
And on Saturday, Jan. 20, The Seattle Women’s March 2.0 begins at 10 a.m. from Cal Anderson Park in Capitol Hill. We will be there with our banner as well.
2017 has been a year of standing up, kneeling down and breaking silence.
In this, there is power.
Our work continues.
Tim Harris is the Founding Director Real Change and has been active as a poor people’s organizer for more than two decades. Prior to moving to Seattle in 1994, Harris founded street newspaper Spare Change in Boston while working as Executive Director of Boston Jobs with Peace.
Wait, there's more. Check out the full January 3rd issue.