My mental health turned a corner this week.
I’m not sure that I can attribute that pivot to any one particular moment, person, place or holy encounter, but rather the change crept in like the early morning rays of light which gently caress the bedspread at the dawn of a new day. I felt my heart softening, stretching, bending to make room for words, thoughts and conversations which only a couple of weeks ago would have caused a snap to take place.
Phillip and I recently joined a book club made up of people from different churches in New York City who all have a common yearning for justice to be outworked through their faith. We’re halfway through the book, ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree’ by James H. Cone and it was as I read this following description of Dr Martin Luther King Jr that I recognized a shift had taken place within me.
“What sustained him was the sense of God’s love, which gave him the interior resources to bear the burdens and tribulations of life, come what may.”
- James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree
I drank those words in and, as I did so, realised that I had been thirsty for a long time.
James H. Cone unpacks the correlation between the cross which Jesus died on - a symbol of hope, salvation and victory for Christians all over the world - and the lynching tree - the very image of which injects fear, trauma, hatred and oppression to people of colour who look upon it and see a weapon of death, torture and dehumanisation. It is a powerful and confronting read.
He refers to the life of MLK at one point and it was here that I was, this week, reminded of the power that grounding yourself in love has. King was given countless opportunities to not just be angry, but to abide in anger. He experienced suffering in a way that I have not known, and nor will I ever have to, that ultimately ended in his martyrdom. He wasn’t perfect, but his life is a testament to the redemptive power of love which enables us to embrace the one across from us who hates our very presence, and can rise above the anger of injustice and seek to forgive as well as to reconcile.
I have felt the heat emanating from within the dark furnace of anger and I have looked into its black heart, but no comfort did I receive from its warmth. Instead I have wrestled, twisting and turning, whilst all the while burning. It was only as the coals began to cool that I remembered the relief that water brings. Fire consumes, and when you’re burning you want everyone else to be eaten up by the same flames. But water has the ability to wash and cleanse, to refresh and renew. One element doesn’t cancel out the other, holding greater value than the first, but rather the two in tandem teach the soul a deeper lesson.
As I ruminated on the life and words of MLK, I took some notes for my own. I think feeling the depths of anger towards injustice is vital, but what we choose to do next is even more so. Anger can only lead us so far, can only teach so many lessons and impart so much wisdom. But love is comprised of the richest of ingredients that can literally cause a blind man to see and form an enemy into a brother.
I have been eating more anger than I have been drinking love recently, and I desperately need to hydrate. I want to be able to look across the table at those I see as being in the wrong and still be willing to lay my life down for them. ‘For greater love hath no man than this…’
“If physical death is the price I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from the permanent death of the spirit, then nothing could be more redemptive.”
- Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
