A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH

Maya Angelou's poetry is a shining beacon of truth in the murky times.  

As Quakers worldwide witnessed the grotesque violation of the Westminster Quaker Meeting space by the Metropolitan police, an act that had not occurred in the living memory of British Quakers, we must double down on our insistence that Quaker houses of worship are inviolable places where the police, the military and government informants are not welcome as enforcers. 

We must draw a line in the sand about what we will tolerate as the encroachments on human decency continue unabated. 

Angelou wrote: 
When we come to it

When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches

The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

Is it so hard to imagine that we are now at an inflection point in American history where the sapling of American democracy is now bent and ready to break.  This is not the birches of Robert Frost.  This tree is much more fragile. This tree is only able to bend for so long before it will be crippled and twisted forever.  

What does this have to do with our blessed community?  Is politics, the deeply temporal realm of man, not also in the realm of spirit?  Should we allow our values (and soon our children) be consumed in the "minstrel show of hate." 

I would argue that there is a time for quiet and a time for witness (quiet or vocal).  The brave and startling truth is that "We, this people", as Angelou wrote "have the power to fashion this earth..."

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible

We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it. 

And when will we come to it?  The hour is getting late.  We cannot stand by and wait for the oligarchs' campaign to implode.  It won't.  

In our own spiritual discernment I urge all Quakers to: 

• Take a deep look at what is happening to others and then map that onto ourselves.  
  
  • No one is safe.  Westminster was a test case. 
    
• Inquire into your heart and see what you find there.  
  • In Chile the mothers of the disappeared stood in front of La Moneda Palace, the home of Pinochet, to witness what had been done to their sons and daughters. 
• What are you willing to do? 
  • George Lakey wrote that "non-violent direct action is the street heat of successful movements."  

Let us now ... come to it !!

For the entire poem of Maya Angelou

https://www.best-poems.net/poem/a-brave-and-startling-truth-by-maya-angelou.html

~ Joseph Olejak