“Arise My Fair One”: Thoughts On Radical Compassion and Contemplation in the Work Against Racism
This was a talk given at an on-line Presbyterian retreat for Companions on the Inner Way, August 8, 2020. It has been lightly revised so it can be read, but was composed as a talk rather than an essay.
My Beloved speaks and says to me:
‘Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;
for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtle-dove
is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.’
--Song of Songs
I am not sure why this passage from Song of Songs came to me as I began thinking about our time together. The winter is far from past and the fig trees are a long way from blossoming. The turtle doves of peace and justice remain silent. But this is the passage that I have been working with, not as a dreamy escape but as a way to be fully present.
This is a book which, like all of the Bible, has many meanings. But its most obvious meaning is about the sweetness and intimacy of love. It is lovely to think that those who gathered the canon included this testimony to lovers. But it is usually understood to be an evocation of the intimate love between the divine Beloved and Israel or the soul or creation. It is in this sense that I wanted to explore the passage now, during our time of dislocation, crisis, and moral reckoning.
There are many things we are each called to do now. But I want to take a step back and consider that, for religious people, it is by rooting ourselves deeply and firmly in the living waters of the divine Beloved that we will act well, courageously, kindly, and thoughtfully as we experience pandemic, climate change, and deeper awakening to the atrocities of our racialized caste system. We live in a tumultuous time and the sweetness of intimacy with God will make us good sailors, as we face wild waters. I would like to think that arising and coming with the Beloved is not heading toward a quiet picnic area but an invitation to the enormous adventure of radical compassion. The winter will be over when we recognize in each other the fairest face in heaven and respond accordingly.
During a similar period of our history when people engaged the struggle for justice, Howard Thurman evoked the power of the Spirit at work among us:
“There is a spirit abroad in life of which the Judeo-Christian ethic is but one expression. It is a spirit that makes for wholeness and for community; …it settles into the pools of light in the face of a little girl as with her frailty she challenges the hard frightened heart of a police chief; it walks along the lonely road with the solitary protest marcher and settles over him with a benediction as he falls by the assassin’s bullet fired from ambush; it kindles the fires of unity in the heart of Jewish Rabbi, Catholic Priest, and Protestant Minister as they join arms together, giving witness to their God on behalf of a brotherhood that transcends creed, race, sex, and religion; it makes a path to Walden Pond and ignites the flame of nonviolence in the mind of a Thoreau and burns through his liquid words from the Atlantic to the Pacific; it broods over the demonstrators for justice and brings comfort to the desolate and forgotten who have no memory of what it is to feel the rhythm of belonging to the race of men; it knows no country and its allies are to be found wherever the heart is kind and the collective will and the private endeavor seek to make justice where injustice abounds, to make peace where chaos is rampant, and to make the voice heard on behalf of the helpless and weak. It is the voice of God and the voice of man; it is the meaning of all the strivings of the whole human race toward a world of friendly men and [women] underneath a friendly sky.”
–Howard Thurman
These words remind us of the movement of the Spirit to which we might be especially attuned during tumultuous times. In a similar spirit, I am not thinking about this passage from the Song of Songs as suggesting a way of being in the midst of turmoil.
In thinking these connections, I want to start by remembering our natural goodness. I am thinking of my own formation as a little Presbyterian child learning “Jesus Loves Me” and “Jesus Loves the Little Children of the World.” I am thinking of my grandfather, a Presbyterian pastor in the south who, in the 1930’s crossed the color line to greet the Black Baptist pastor. This was not the result of non-violent training or even any particular thoughtfulness about racial politics. For him, it was simply the natural thing to do when encountering a fellow pastor. I want to think of all of the natural kindness that flows from all of you and your parents and aunts and uncles and children. This includes the small things you are hardly aware of. And it includes all of our imperfect efforts to reckon with injustice.
“Arise my fair one and come away with me” – in a sense all of these small, even childish, acts of goodness – indicate that we are already engaged in this beautiful dance with the Holy One, who weaves through our lives in a million visible and invisible ways.
This basic goodness is mirrored in the gospel. The gospel is breath-takingly beautiful and almost shockingly simple. Love one another, just as it says in that childish song about Jesus loving all the children of the world.
But what does this mean, asks the author of the Didache – a first century Christian text? For this writer, it means that you do not do anything that you would not like done to you. Hardly anything could be simpler than this. If you would not like something done to you or said to you or someone you love, then don’t do it. If there is a system or rule that you would find demeaning or harmful then don’t support it. There is nothing complicated about this.
Jesus began his ministry by saying Metanoia – the kingdom of God is at hand. This is often translated in Presbyterian Bibles as repent. But it might mean something closer to wake up, turn around, transform your thinking. It is not about expressing remorse for your sins and being forgiven. It is about waking up to the truth of where you are and who you are. If you understood – if you felt – who you are, you would recognize who everyone else is – and this is the kingdom of God. It is within and among us. Right now. Right here. If you could feel how beloved you are and if you could delight in how beloved every other being on this planet is - you would already be in the divine kingdom.
But the gospel writers also knew that this simple reality is almost impossibly difficult. And these writers offered a mytho-poetic account for why this is the case. The gospel writers had apparently not read Augustine and do not talk about original sin and guilt. They talk about something that to our modern ears sounds silly and strange. To our Presbyterian ears it sounds almost like blasphemy. The various gospel writers, as well as Paul and other New Testament writers, talk about Satan as the ruler of this world.1
When I first tumbled onto this idea I was rather taken aback, being a good Presbyterian child and aware of the doctrine of divine providence. But I find it one of the most fascinating things in the New Testament. I do not mean that a nasty demon with horns and a tail sits in his underworld palace and rules as the invisible chief tyrant of human history. But if we play with the poetry a bit, we see something important.
The Jesus movement is born in the cradle of Roman imperialism. Rome had fairly recently colonized Palestine and violently subdued its defenders. They were impoverishing its inhabitants, syphoning off money to the coffers of Rome, leaving artisans, farmers, fishermen, and others in near poverty. Combat-ready troops patrolled roads and towns, quick to repress any resistance, quick to demand humiliating subservience from townspeople. “Carry my pack.” “Bring me water.” Rome was busily colonizing as much of the known world as it could. Endless war was the order of the day. It amused itself with spectacles of violence and torture that packed thousands of citizens into its amphitheaters. Its criminal justice system was ubiquitous and deadly.
It symbolized all of this with potent religious language: Caesar is the bringer of the pax Romana – he is the prince of peace; a son of god, god-like in his power, good to those loyal to him and cruel to those who oppose him. Worship him and be saved. Followers of Jesus, like their Jewish siblings, lived with the constant vertigo of dwelling in two worlds. There was the world they were called to as worshipers of the God of Israel – who called on followers to love justice, to practice kindness, to walk humbly. And there was the world all around them – the economic structures that created an abyss between the rich and the poor, entertainment that sated on violence, social patterns of hierarchy and domination, and religion that sacralized all of this.
How can one live in two such different worlds, especially when everything draws one to the second one? In subtle and obvious ways, its values seep into everyone, whatever they believe, whatever they do. How fragile is the light from Galilee, how blinding the glare of imperial brightness. To resist Rome could mean torture and death. But how much more subtle the infiltration of Rome into the fledgling Jesus movement, the reassertion of a logic of domination and subservience – slavery, patriarchy, class privilege – into Christianity.
It is difficult even to raise this to awareness. The obviousness of the rule of men over slaves and women didn’t have to be thought about – it was simply reality. And how quickly we ascribe social reality to God’s will. Is this love? Well, it must be, since it is God’s will – however harsh, violent, demeaning, destructive – it must be the way God intends us to love one another.
But the early Christians did struggle for a foothold in truth so they would not simply be washed away by the obviousness of Roman values. A frequent metaphor for the huge gap between a Roman view of reality and the gospel’s was the domination of humanity by “the enemy” – by Satan. Looking at how Roman society worked, Christians should not see the divine will but the tyranny of Satan. History is a struggle between the power of tyranny, deception, and domination and divine goodness. As Gregory of Nyssa and others insist, this struggle must be a non-violent one. God cannot use domination or violence to unseat the demonic – this would simply be to exchange one tyrant for another. In the dominant explanations of the passion for about the first 1000 years, the cross is the Trinity’s non-violent way of extricating humanity from slavery. By tricking Satan into taking divine power into the realm of death and hell, death and hell were abolished.
The significance of this extended metaphor is to say that social reality and political power do not align with the vision of God for humanity. The way the world works is not the way God works. This means that to live out the gospel in all of its simplicity and beauty is extremely difficult. Jesus’ call to wake up occurs in the midst of obfuscation and deception. The simple call to love one another is twisted through the logic of domination that structures society.
I think that an over-reliance on an alternative mythology – fall, atonement, forgiveness – obscures the powerful insight of early Christians into the dynamics of power that govern history. If we are more or less passive inheritors of both guilt and forgiveness, we are not called on to understand how history is working in our lives, our societies, and our churches. But if we attend to this ancient wisdom, we are called into a struggle between two fundamentally different ways of being in the world – I won’t say of God and the devil but rather of the gospel and empire – a way of radical compassion and a way of domination.
I have located this discussion in terms of early followers of Christ and their effort to understand how to live the radical call of the gospel in a world governed by completely different values. We get some sense of how hard this is when we realize the ways that values of Rome utterly alien to the gospel became canonized in some of the later New Testament writings: slaves be obedient to you masters, wives be obedient to your husbands, women be silent in church.
But what do tyranny, deception, and domination look like in our own time? Some of the features characteristic of ancient Rome we might recognize: the movement of resources into the hands of a wealthy elite, violence as entertainment, constant warfare, and the domination of some groups of people by others. In our case, this means the long atrocity of white supremacy and a racial caste system. But it also is present in all of the other ways we find it so difficult to act as if all human beings are precious and beautiful – immigrants, women, gay and lesbian and trans people, poor folk in Appalachia, Moslems, and all the others – and the earth itself. We might also recognize the power of religion to sacralize these things. Perhaps the most visible of this idolatry of power is Trump’s caustic clearing away of non-violent protesters so he could stand in front of a church holding a Bible in his hand. Nothing could more aptly symbolize the unholy unity of racism, military and political power, and Christianity.
We do not have to think of Satan pulling the strings here, but the poetics of the demonic give us a tool to disentangle the beauty of the gospel from the logic of domination. As we try to live out the gospel of radical compassion, we can become more alert to what we are up against – how surreptitious the infiltration of Christianity by Rome is, how seductive the packaging of lies, how normal the logic of domination and hierarchy. As we unmask the tyranny and cruelty that has been naturalized in our society, we will be better prepared to be courageous and honest. This means that we need neither abandon the gospel because it is impossible nor spend a lot of energy berating ourselves for the ways we succumb to a world alien to its values.
We live in a world governed by oppression and domination and we cannot expect that being baptized in the church magically protects us from their influence. We inhale assumptions about race, class, prosperity, merit – like secondhand smoke. We are embedded in white racist structures and assumptions. We find the belittling of women or the degradation of trans people normal. We are hardly aware of the poverty that haunts millions of Americans.
But the Holy Trinity dwells with us in THIS KIND OF WORLD, calling us to metanoia. God did not come to some other kind of world. Our divine Beloved was presumably not surprised to wake up in a manger and think, darn – this is not at all like paradise! This is the world in which the Beloved has come to us and the world which we are called to love.
The Beloved is speaking to us, calling to us, singing to us – “Arise my love ,my fair one, come away.” The kingdom of God is at hand – look, see, taste – these beings around you are beautiful and they suffer. Let us arise together and delight in their beauty and goodness and tend to their suffering.
What does it mean to fall in love with the gospel – again, still, more deeply – knowing that we live in a world in which deception and domination structure so much of our experience? We can remember the simple goodness that I began with, which is also part of us. These things grow together, like the wheat and the tares. However insistent the tyranny of oppression, you also feel and know the goodness in you and in your communities that make it so desirable to stay alive to ways we can learn to love one another by identifying and resisting racism.
As Companions on the Inner Way it won’t surprise you that I will emphasize the importance of inner work that is both the joy and the discipline of the gospel. I think it is important to start with the joy. It is easy to think even of our religious life in terms of productivity and results, of successes and failures. These are the categories of the marketplace, not the gospel. We pray and meditate, sing and journal not in earnest self-discipline but because it is an enormous joy to dedicate time to be with our divine Beloved. It is not another task. It is not a duty or obligation. It is not something that will make us better or more deserving. We do it for the same reason we hold hands with our lover or dandle a child or grandchild in our lap. We do it for the same reason we pause in silence as the sun goes down or in the after-glow of a poem. Many of our old hymns capture this joyfulness – “He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.” “In the arms of my dear savior, oh there are 10,000 charms.”
Fair are the meadows, fairer still the woodlands
Robed in the blooming garb of spring
Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer
Who makes the woeful heart to sing.
When we think about cultivating intimacy with the Beloved we may think of familiar practices – centering prayer or lectio divina. I invite you to think also of weaving the presence of the Beloved into any and all of the quotidian moments of the day. Jesus – today we are going to grieve together. Mother Christ, let’s go into the garden together. Lady Wisdom, let’s just sit together as the dusk draws on. Of course, our Beloved is with us everywhere and always. But we can turn our mind toward the Beloved and gently practice the presence of God. “I find him everywhere, because that is where he is” as Marguerite Porete says.
This joyful practice of the presence of the Beloved -- in spiritual disciplines, in the ordinary moments of daily life, in the painful emotions we feel as we read the news -- is a way of sending our roots ever more deeply into the living water of divine love. We nourish ourselves constantly and spontaneously – not only in moments of dedicated practice or worship but simply as a natural part of life.
Each of us will practice intimacy with the Beloved in our own way. For some, that language does not make sense – something else works better. But whatever form it takes, this yearning for connection is a well-spring of the gospel. When Jesus introduced “Abba” as a name of God, it was not to reify a masculine identity but to evoke a sense of intimacy and tenderness. The gospel invites us into this sense of nearness and gentleness. Julian of Norwich does something similar when she writes of Mother Christ. For her, however awesome and fundamentally mysterious divinity is, somehow the Compassionate One tenderly condescends to us, dwelling in our deep heart’s core.
This sense of intimacy is another way of talking about the resilience of radical faith – not belief in things – but a trust and confidence that absolutely nothing can erode. When we are well planted in radical faith, sweet intimacy nourishes us so that the great difficulties of life are less overwhelming. We can encounter the truth of racism with courage rather than self-loathing. We can experience whatever we have to experience of pandemic, loss, or grief without despair. I do not mean we experience these things without pain – pain is a part of life. But we can experience pain without it overcoming us.
We can also open our eyes to the beauty around us. We can discover Black poets or painters we didn’t know about. We can celebrate non-violent warriors like John Lewis with joy for who he was, even as we sorrow at his passing. We can be glad for the courage and energy of medical workers and protestors, even as we lament what they are up against. We can take joy in the small things in our own lives. We can observe the small treasures around us – the happy child we pass on the playground, the zesty energy of a summer storm. My point is, that in practicing intimacy with the divine Beloved we are more attuned not only to the suffering of the world but also its quotidian joys and beauties – the lilies of the field and the stormy seas.
This sinking into intimacy with the Beloved is the deepest source of the capacity for radical love, compassion, and justice.
Effortlessly,
Love flows from God into humanity,
Like a bird
Who rivers the air
Without moving her wings.
Thus we move in God’s world
One in body and soul,
Though outwardly separate in form.
As the Source strikes the note,
Humanity sings –
The Holy Spirit is our harpist,
And all strings
Which are touched in Love
Must sound.
--Mechthild of Magdeburg
The gospel is Janus faced: it looks outward as well as inward. This interior work of practicing intimacy is twinned with radical compassion for the world. Refreshed by the living presence of the Beloved we can enter the struggle to live the gospel in the midst of deception and domination with a courageous heart.
I think intimacy with the Beloved calls us to up our game when we think about what compassion or love mean. I invite us to learn from some of the great artists of radical compassion. I’ll begin with Fannie Lou Hamer, was one of the great mothers of the civil rights movement.
Watch a video of Fannie Lou Hamer here.
She experienced first-hand the enormous violence of systemic racism – poverty, lack of education, fear always lingering at the border of a day, terror, life-threatening beatings, jail. But she insisted – that “there ain’t no such a thing as I can hate anyone and hope to see God’s face.”
These are inspiring words, but before we smile and pass on – let us linger a bit longer here. Everything in our body protests when we are beaten or humiliated. Everything in our society reinforces our demand that the bad guys get punished. It is as automatic as blinking when dust comes toward our eye. But the gospel dismantles our natural response and imposes on us the simple and impossible command that we love one another. This love is not a pious vaguery. It is the impossible possibility that we refuse to feel contempt for others, that we desire the welfare of others – whether they are tormented in our appalling prisons or tortured by the spirit of domination, rage, and cruelty.
I recently listened to Krista Tippet’s interview with John Lewis in “On Being.” It is inspiring to know that such a human being has lived on this planet. But one thing he emphasizes when he talks about the absence of hatred or bitterness he feels is that “they studied.” They practiced. They did not think it would be easy to face dogs, beatings, hatred, fear, death and respond with dignity and agape – the non-romantic love that recognizes the humanity of all others. It is by hard and serious practice that this capacity is nurtured. Without that seriousness, it might be a mere sentimentality. It might be distorted and harmful. “I’m a good Christian so I love and forgive my abuser.” It is important to acknowledge the wrongness of what is happening, to feel the situation with integrity and honesty. One must work with what is real and not a fantasy of what one “should” feel – to move through the truth of the situation to find this hard-won freedom that Lewis talks about.
Watch a video of John Lewis here.
Rosemarie Freeney Harding, another mother of the civil rights, evokes this spirit of radical compassion throughout her beautiful memoir, Remnants. She recounts the civil rights movement, but her focus is on the multi-generational spirituality of compassion that she inherited from mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. She describes a bad fight in her neighborhood when she was a girl and her mother’s reaction: “We could almost see Mama Freeney go someplace when she received difficult information … someplace inside herself, I think. And I got the feeling that whomever the bad news was about, was there in that place with her. Those times, she could get very quiet. Not just from not speaking, but as if she was shutting out all the extraneous flutter around her … Like she was manufacturing silk from all the contradictions of life and would soon spin it into an uncommon skein of armor and empathy.” Harding adds that her parents’ compassion for all the people in the neighborhood “gave me the example of a sympathy and concern that could recognize pain that linked perpetrators and victims to the larger circumstances of their lives.” (Remnants 80, 81).
This family tradition of radical compassion was challenged and refined during Harding’s participation in the civil rights movement. At one point in the book she describes a particularly painful episode of violence against a pregnant woman in her circle. Here are excerpts from her story:
“It’s hard for me now to explain her actions in terms that do not sound like romantic idealism or a spiritual naiveté. But what I am trying to emphasize to you in this example is how deeply and how seriously many people were grappling with the meaning of nonviolence during the Movement days. … What we saw and felt in Marion’s presence, in her response to the trauma she was living through had the excellent quality of a victory, but where otherwise a dominance might have been, there was instead dominion – a kind of understanding. … That’s what Marion gave us. That quality of compassion. I am not condoning the brutality of the police; neither am I suggesting that nonviolent means uncritical self-sacrifice. Rather the point I wish to make is about a quality of spirit that was present … for those of us participating in freedom work for which we often suffered, that spirit allowed connection to a deep source of balance and renewal that transcended the particular physical or psychic infliction aimed at us. In fact, it was even capable of including our inflictors in its aura.” (Remnants 158-9)
I hesitated to read this to you because for those of us who are not in the middle of the struggle and who have not experienced firsthand the enormous violence and brutality these women and men did, a story like this can become something sentimental or sweet, a thin gruel strained through “Jesus loves me this I know.”
But I think it is important for us to know that this spirit of radical compassion is possible, however hard-won. We may not be able to experience it ourselves but we can cherish it as an ideal and a victory that others have won. “We feebly struggle they in glory shine.”
It is something like this impossible radical compassion that is behind the call the Lover sings out to the Beloved – “My Beloved speaks to me and says to me – arise my love, my fair one and come away.”
Come away from empire, from the logic of domination, from hierarchy, deception, and lies. Come away into the land where the turtle-dove is singing – not because we have flown into cloud cuckoo land but because here, now, in the midst of the world as it is we have the power to love one another – to notice where we find it impossible to care for another or endure, but not to give up. Here, now the fig trees are putting forth figs and the vines putting forth their fragrance – as we struggle to love one another in this kind of world and no other – in the midst of a white supremacist society that we both abhor and participate in.
The ancient poetry that says Satan is the ruler of this world reminds us that we live in an ambiguous time and place. That we are befuddled and confused and often just plain wrong. The society we love and the religion we cherish participate in the world as it is – mistaken, deceptive, often cruel. We can remember our natural goodness, our child-like, simple happiness in other people’s happiness. We get glimmers of what it would be like to see the world through the eyes of the Beloved. In the Song of Songs, the lover appears and disappears: “upon my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but found him not, I called him but he gave no answer” (Song of Songs 3:1). But we remember the Beloved’s words – “Arise my love, my fair one.” And we call out – wait – we’re coming – you run too fast – but we’re on our way.
1. Paul Tillich was a particularly artful interpreter of the demonic in Christianity. It is sprinkled through his writings, especially vol 3 of his Systematic Theology. Jack Forstman makes use of it, too, in Christian Faith in Dark Times.