Regarding Spiritual Giants: A Cry From The Heart

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“If a man has not found something worth dying for, he is not fit to live.”~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

November’s speeding right along. The Pea Patch is uncommonly cold after what seems like a twenty-minute cursory nod to Fall. Indian summer was held hostage by the weather gods this year, no ransom announced, and now the trees are bare-boned once again, rising above a dense carpet of fading leaves. Coming late this year, Thanksgiving is right around the corner. For me, that brings another birthday to add to my collection and as always, images — from fifty years ago today — that are fused into my memory.

I want to write about that period in history — not that you haven’t had your fill in these last days, I suspect — but not about who did the shooting, or why. For me, and surely for many of you, the remembrance is highly personal, an indelible scar on the psyche of an impressionable young generation soon to be known as Boomers. It seems a moment so private in our sorrow, so sensory that it still brings sharp pangs of anxiety and quick tears, that to write about it in a logical fashion seems somehow to demean it. It has been called — and was — a moment when, literally, everything changed.

I don’t want to minimize anyone’s feelings by being that smarty-pants who says you had to have been there, but really, to get the full impact, you did. To get a real sense that the nation was stunned to its core, you had to be there and realize that even such a dramatic description as that is inadequate. The nation was, and in vital ways remains, heartsick.

Few people in the world have missed seeing the grainy footage of the events of November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas. If you have, you can probably still catch it on television this weekend. Two days later, on November 24th, JFK’s body was carried down the streets of Washington DC, on a caisson pulled by six white horses — followed by one riderless black one — and laid in state until the next day. Almost a quarter million people shuffled through the Capital’s rotunda in silent, tearful homage.

The next day — John-John’s third birthday and my 18th — the body was moved to Saint Matthew’s Cathedral for a requiem mass. The caisson was followed on foot by Jackie Kennedy, who was flanked on each side by Jack’s younger brothers, Robert and Ted, with a throng of family and friends, dignitaries and political figures trailing behind. After the service, the fallen president’s tiny son saluted his father’s casket from the steps of the cathedral — an iconic moment that touched even the hardest heart — and the procession moved on to Arlington and an eternal flame, lit in remembrance of the Camelot years that were, seemingly, snatched away in a moment of senseless violence.

The nation stopped for five long minutes that day. Trains, planes, automobiles remained motionless. Conversation ceased. Think of that happening today, in a world unable to shut its mouth for 30 seconds. The world went silent as people of all nationalities, races and religions mourned the loss of an American president and a young, vital presidency that seemed to capture the world’s hope for the future. Eric has covered the events that followed in detail this week, telling us that it was then that his mother decided the world to be dangerous. I’m impressed that she had that level of clarity. It took most of us longer than that.

There is a reason that we send our very young to war. Their dedication to concepts of idealism, patriotism and higher aspiration seem to congeal in the hearts and minds of our teens just as they’re ready to push out into the world, coincidentally useful to those who would take advantage of such naive splendor. Studies show that the political views developed during this critical period of our growth stay with us for life. (Speaking for myself, my politics haven’t changed a hair in the last fifty years, which polishes my hippie credentials and, perhaps, proves the point.)

Still too fresh-baked to have a sense of mortality, the young bring overflowing enthusiasm to social concerns and political activity. During JFK’s tenure, the Cold War was hot enough to make nuclear missile strikes possible, and the draft ensured that there would always be young soldiers available to hold the line against national threat. But those of us who were involved politically were more concerned with social upheaval and civil rights on the home front than with foreign war. That came later, with the advent of LBJ.

As if the shots fired in Dealey Plaza flipped the switch to the revolution that had quietly been brewing, the Boomers shot out of the gate in full force. In June of that year, JFK had proposed the Civil Rights Bill; the next day Medgar Evers was assassinated. In August, Martin Luther King, Jr. told us he had a dream. A few weeks prior to that, the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed, taking effect in October. On November 22nd JFK was murdered, his horrified wife scrambling on the back of the limo, attempting to gather up the bits of his shattered bone and brain — yes, it’s true — and by November 24th, LBJ had escalated our hoped-for peace into war in Vietnam.

All that happened in 1963. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam after he repudiated their practice of institutionalized racism. In spring of 1968 Reverend King was assassinated, followed two months later by Robert F. Kennedy. Each of these murders was assigned a random wing-nut, a quickly caught single shooter with imagined grievance, much as happened in Dallas years earlier. Those of us who had howled at the moon with the release of the Warren report 11 months after Kennedy’s death didn’t believe a word of it. Our innocence didn’t die with JFK, it became an open wound, opened again and again so we wouldn’t miss the obvious point.

While the enormity of November 22nd can’t be dismissed, it’s the whole of the sixties that created what I think of as the big chill for political activism. As difficult as it may be for some of you readers to believe, there was a time when it was unthinkable to believe the government would lie to us so egregiously. And while few were saying such a thing out loud, it was hard to ignore the fact that the bodies kept stacking up. Oswald? James Earl Ray? Sirhan? Really? Three’s a charm, n’est-ce pas?

Spiritual writer and A Course in Miracles facilitator, Marianne Williamson, says this about the period, and what she calls a multidimensional assault directed at the philosophical and spiritual idealism —  i.e., flower power, sexual revolution, fledgling women’s movement, push for nuclear disarmament and global peace process — being expressed in politics:

Those bullets who shot those people who were holding aloft the dreams of a generation … psychically paralyzed many of us because there was a loud, unspoken message in those assassinations: it was “you will now go home, there will be no further protest, you will leave the public sphere to those who want to control it. ”

So we did cower, didn’t we? We did take our genius and keep it in a very self-centered, consumer-based, even narcissistic sensibility. But we’re middle-aged now, the Baby Boomers are middle aged, and what happens is you get to an age where you say to yourself, what will I say to myself on my death bed?

And even though there was this loud unspoken message that came out of those assassinations — to not complain, to not protest or we might just kill you too, unsaid but implied — we have now reached an age where many of us, knowing that we might die knowing that we didn’t actually do what we came here to do is scarier than the thought that they might kill us if we do.

What can clearly be said about that era — opening us psychically with a shot heard ’round the world in a wide (4+ degrees) conjunction of Pluto and Uranus — and what came after, is that there was an undeniable spiritual signature to that time frame that, while not necessarily missing now seems dug deeper than ever under the cover of personal indifference and cynicism. And those of us who have made peace with the narrowly defined religious impulse surely won’t deny that religion has become complicit with politics in an effort to usurp government control and establish corporate alliance. There are fifty years of layered self-protection to be peeled away if we’re to recapture that spiritual intent of our true nature.

Catholic Sister Joan Chittister, whom I greatly admire, reminds us that JFK was not just a visionary but a man of spiritual insight, asking us to “to relinquish our national strategy of annihilation in order to pursue a strategy of peace” in what she calls ” … a bold, brave, beautiful and holy commitment to spiritual conversion in a national ecology of hatred, war-mongering, military madness and political polarization.”

She continues:

“And then, five months later, they killed him. Who? Who knows? But one thing for sure: It was someone who valued domination and death more than life, more than conversion, more than humanity — their own or anyone else’s.

“And while all of that was going on, at the same time, 50 years ago, Martin Luther King cried out, too, for human equality, economic justice, the end of war and the unification of a nation that had consciously divided itself. And yet we still stop and frisk, stop and humiliate, any of those who live outside the dominant culture, marginalized by it, harassed by it.

“Finally, in 1962, Pope John XXIII called the Catholic church, that bastion of monarchical yesterdays, beyond its resistance to the Reformation in which it had been cemented for more than 400 years. He called for the renewal of the very church itself, a force for life in the midst of a culture of death, a sign of unity in a war-making world rather than a wall of warriors devoted to the enshrinement of denominationalism. He called for a church that made the Gospel more important than the description of hell.”

And when it all went wrong, as Williamson asserts, we cowered and went shopping. Now, to our detriment, we no longer believe in government, in the inclination of power to tell us the truth, or in our own ability to speak truth back to power. It feels as if we are at the nadir of our own ineptitude, unable to impact as we once did, fighting a relentless war of words with our neighbor, with no win in sight. Our frustration with this restless 2012 energy keeps us just under the boiling point, punching at shadows and looking for someone to blame (easily recognized, but not prohibited).

Pluto and Uranus have us by the nape of the neck now, shaking us, but not in that same organic way it did long years ago. Squares bring situations that seem to come at us from outside ourselves, but that is just illusion, the ball is ever and always in our court, isn’t it? It’s up to us to engage, even if our innocence is battered and bruised. As Williamson suggests, there are scarier thoughts than going up against power.

NOT going up against power, for instance. NOT doing what we know is right. She asks us to step into our personal power and authenticity. She tells us that’s why we came. As well, the good sister Joan speaks of spiritual giants when she tells us:

“They warned us, all of them — JFK, Martin and John — to examine our policies and change our hearts, to open our arms and expand our souls, to stretch our minds beyond parochialism and chauvinism and domination or doom ourselves to watch the country destroy itself at its own hand.” […]

“From where I stand, with an African-American in the White House, a South American from the Peronista era in the Vatican and 10 million undocumented immigrants among us, it looks as if we are at another moment of possible conversion. We are choosing between past and present, between life and death.

But with JFK and Martin and good Pope John gone, the only question now is: Which way are you yourself tilting? Who would know it? And why not?”

Why not, indeed! Perhaps this business of spiritual giants is all a matter of perception. Once upon a time, the spiritually inclined had to look and sound a specific way. Not so much today. Spiritual giants are those who know how to remain in their own power, witness truth unflinchingly, and speak for compassion tenderly, no matter what others might bring to the table. The giants of this century will be those who have awakened to the beauty and right-use-ness of affirming life and healing, putting behind them the deadening sleep of nihilism and darker dreams.

Perhaps you know a spiritual giant living down the street or on line somewhere, or maybe you are one. Perhaps this whole business of being who we came to be is just about looking past the distractions, facing our fears and reviving that heart-connection that assures us we’re making a difference in the lives of those around us. Making the spiritual connection necessary to breathe in each moment of life as the greatest blessing of a (daily) Thanksgiving, finding the common thread that weaves us all together: the awakened and the sleepers as one, working the innate alchemy of love to birth a new Era of humankind.

We knew all this once, long ago. Marianne Williamson tells us that back in those days when kids gathered to wear flowers in their hair and reach out for Light, people at political rallies joined together to sing “All You Need Is Love.”

“Of course,” she quips, “we were stoned.” That line always gets a laugh, but then she adds, ” … but now we’re not.”

No. We’re not. Now we’re sober as a judge, wishing this was all behind us, but prepared in ways we still don’t quite understand to do what we came to do. Each of us who finds our old lives dissolving, our paths reconstituting in astounding ways, can be sure we’ve begun our metamorphosis into butterflies. It’s a time for the spiritual giant within each of us to screw up our courage, step into the hard-earned wisdom of a lifetime and begin to give it away.

We heal the wounds of generations past as we work together to right the wrongs of inequality and injustice that have made themselves so very clear to us all. The best response to ills done against us in past relationship, so they say, is a well-lived life and bright future. The best response to a history of manipulation and betrayal — to the chilling effect of watching our heroes murdered and our hopes and dreams squandered — is a clear identification of the tactics used to cow us and rejection of the self-serving ideology that limits us. If it took all this time to get on to ourselves, fine. As Marianne says, we aren’t stoned any more. Our point of power is NOW.

Here’s a happy addendum: Williamson began a movement a couple of years ago called Sister Giant, providing a series of lectures and events built around political activism which she described as “A meeting of the minds. A politics of the heart.” Recently, she announced her candidacy for election to the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s Congressional District 33. You can read why she was moved to do so and how to support her here. Don’t miss this. Your heart will thank you and, from me to you, may your Thanksgiving overflow with blessings!