Greatness and Grief

It takes courage, and love, to tell the truth about what’s broken. For that, we owe a debt of gratitude to Black Lives Matter for compelling us to look in the mirror we have been avoiding. In that spirit, on this 4th of July Full Moon, let’s begin to face the overwhelming grief of our country’s origins. Now is the moment to let our hearts break for all those we have harmed, those we have lost, and for the time squandered on our watch. As we grieve, let us also honor the living monuments to strength and suffering that walk among us.

I humbly borrow that phrase from last week’s opinion piece in the New York Times written by poet Caroline Randall Williams: You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument. Her opening line is, I have rape-colored skin. Let’s stop for a moment and take that in: Ms. Williams is a Black woman whose ancestors were slaves, raped by their white owners. She asks, Who dares to tell me to celebrate them? But we can celebrate Ms. Williams, as we grieve alongside her for that brutal past, and the loss of our country’s honor. We can grieve for our lost humanity, sacrificed over the too-many years we accepted anything less than a full reckoning with our country’s past.

Martín Prechtel is right: Only nations capable of the true art of grief, grieving their mistakes and the deeply felt losses they have endured or caused to happen, can say that they are not pools of emotional stagnation dressed up in the spoils of ungrieved wars disguised as good business, heaping their unwept tears upon the poor and struggling as the currency of poverty. (The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise)

Once we open those flood gates, the torrent of sorrows comes swift and strong, threatening to drown us in its sheer overwhelming volume of horror. That is as it should be. Genocide. Slavery. A foreign policy of war and assassination. The decimation of the natural world. If we give ourselves fully to the grief of that reckoning, we may find within ourselves an unexpected capacity to supersede our limitations. A surprising image comes to mind: years ago, in a dream, I jumped off an impossibly high cliff into the sea, and plummeted so deep that I knew I would never reach the surface in time to fill my lungs. I knew, then, as I gazed at the unfamiliar liquid world around me, that I would have to learn to breathe underwater, so I did.

In turning to face the wreckage of our past, and the entrenched brutality of our current ways, we may yet find the greatness that has eluded us: a greatness that begins with the courage to bear collective witness, and allow it to transform us. Monuments to false greatness will no longer be necessary to shore up our fragile longing to feel worthy. True greatness will emerge as we accomplish the labor of repair, together.

I once had a teacher who said, Your greatest ally is a sincere critic, meaning, a critic with your best interests at heart will look you in the eye and speak the truth of your failures. That critic-ally wants you to succeed because s/he understands that the success of one enhances the success shared by all. We can become our own allies by telling ourselves the truth.

Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of a ‘new definition’ of greatness. He said, quoting the bible, (S)he who is greatest among you shall be your servant… How, then, shall we become great by serving those we have harmed? If we could name them all, we’d have service to shape us the rest of our days. What world will we conjure as we turn toward each other with fresh appreciation? Dr. King said, You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. Let’s take those as our marching orders, at home as well as in the streets.