This week, Lindsay and I were back in Orange County to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of moving from Southern California to Southeast Michigan in August 2014. My sister-in-law Kristen organized the event in my mom’s backyard. It was immaculate.
Dear friends and former colleagues showed up to raise a glass and eat tacos and listen to a few stories. Members of our board testified from the mic. My friend Peter flew down from Portland to celebrate and play popular tunes on his ukulele. We were bathing in beloved community.
Back in Spring 2014, Lindsay and I sent out a letter to many of these beloveds asking them to consider financially supporting our "reverse mission" work. We aren't trying to save Detroit. Detroit is trying to save us. We thought we’d let Detroit work on our soul for a year or two. But Detroit keeps calling our name - and this small group of donors has continued to generously support this ministry of mutuality.
Our little non-profit is called Kardia Kaiomene. It comes from Greek words in Luke’s Gospel that mean “burning hearts.” As we pivot back-and-forth from Detroit to Orange County - and many small towns and cities in between - we meet people at the intersection of personal healing and collective liberation. We are fueled by hope. Everywhere we travel, we find hearts burning for intimacy, community and justice.
Kardia Kaiomene is committed to kind of soul accompaniment that is mutual, vulnerable and accountable. We build bridges between the suburbs and “the other America” by bearing witness to what we see in the streets, community-organizing spaces, city-council meetings, courtrooms, food pantries and soup kitchens - in Detroit and beyond. We also facilitate intimate small groups and one-on-one connections for people of faith and conscience who are getting free from the confines of old ideologies and institutions stripped of spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage.
We are small – but small is all.
Because collective liberation depends on a critical mass – which will never come without intentionally cultivating critical connections.
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Some of our conceptual framework for this work has been gleaned from Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs, community organizers who lived on the eastside of Detroit for decades. We never met them, but their legacy lives on in many Detroiters we know.
Jimmy and Grace were committed to a kind of spiritual and political revolution that compelled middle-class people to make material sacrifices in a quest to build a world that works for everyone.
Jimmy and Grace challenged people of faith and conscience to reject the American Dream of endless expansion and exploitation. They focused on deepening ties with a few kindreds committed to Something Else.
Jimmy and Grace were political in a way that went far beyond the halls of electoral politics. They were spiritual in a way that broke through the walls of organized religion.
Jimmy and Grace knew that the transformation of American society was not possible without a shift in consciousness, and a shift in consciousness was not possible without a critical mass, and a critical mass was not possible without creating critical connections.
Jimmy and Grace knew that a more compelling social paradigm was needed:
a radical shift from
one-inch deep and one-mile wide relationships to
one-mile deep and one-inch wide relationships.
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This week, in the lead-up to our party in the Southern California suburbs, I read a letter that Jimmy Boggs wrote from Detroit exactly 40 years ago.
Jimmy Boggs was a Black man born in the Jim Crow South who moved to Detroit to work in an auto factory for almost three decades. He wrote the letter fifty days before the 1984 Presidential election that re-elected Ronald Reagan in a landslide.
The letter that Jimmy wrote reads like he wrote it this week.
Jimmy Boggs wrote the letter to leaders who were committed to building a just and humane society. He summoned his friends and colleagues to chart a new and different course. He said he was issuing the call before the election – so that it would be clear that the need for a new movement was not dependent on the results of the election.
Jimmy Boggs called on fellow leaders to stop collaborating with the system. He said that when folks collaborate with a corrupt system, the corruption inevitably spreads from ruling elites to collaborators.
Jimmy Boggs said that America will never truly be great without a movement of people who challenge the system around every corner and who commit to getting healed from the spiritual malformation that inevitably comes from placing our faith and hope in some inherently corrupt corporate-sponsored messiah to come save us.
Jimmy Boggs said that this movement must work outside the electoral arena because once any movement allows itself to be incorporated into electoral politics, it cannot be resurrected. Jimmy witnessed what happened to the movement energy of the 1960s. The corrupt two-party system co-opted it and used it in the service of corporate profit.
Jimmy Boggs was about building an everyday movement that would replace the every-four-years spectacle.
Jimmy Boggs was about building an everyday movement that is participatory and embodied - which is totally different than an electoral politics primed by the passive and disempowering nature of political identity and party affiliation.
Jimmy Boggs was about building an everyday movement that triggered the fault-lines of the system through mutual aid, collective study, boycotts, divestment and a disciplined commitment to a completely different way-of-life. With a few others.
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We are on the verge of another “make-or-break election.” Just as we have been every four years since 1984.
Maybe this election will be different.
It might very well be the case that if Trump wins, the corrupt American system will go def con five on the nuclear scale of authoritarianism and our lives will turn into an episode of The Handmaid's Tale.
It might very well be the case that if Harris wins, white militias will come out of the woodworks with their weapons, beards and big trucks in a coup attempt that will make January 6 look like a country music festival.
It might very well be the case that this election will be our last election as we enter the final apocalyptic chapter of white America’s addiction to supremacy stories.
But maybe this election will beckon us back to Jimmy Boggs.
Because it is most definitely the case that no matter who wins in November, electoral politics will not lead us to the promised land.
It is most definitely the case that no matter who wins in November, we will continue to navigate a system built on the suffering of Black people, Native communities, essential workers, Palestinians and the dark-skinned masses of the Global South.
It is most definitely the case that no matter who wins in November, we will continue to navigate a system of unchecked corporate power that fully supports an occupation and genocide in Gaza, illegal settlements in the West Bank, police brutality and mass incarceration across the US, austerity measures and climate chaos for the most vulnerable, and daily distortions and distractions delivered to our screens by mainstream media sources from NPR and The NY Times to MSNBC, CNN and Fox.
It is most definitely the case that no matter who wins in November, we will continue to navigate a system that abandons our adolescents, our seniors, our workers, our small farmers, our immuno-compromised, our uninsured, our unemployed, our undocumented, our ghettos, our reservations, our trans and non-binary neighbors and many others.
It is most definitely the case that no matter who wins in November, we will need each other more than ever.
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In a five weeks, we should take fifteen minutes to vote. But until then, and every day after, I believe that we should commit our time and energy and resources to Something Else.
A movement that runs through the intersection of personal healing and collective liberation.
A movement that runs outside the walls of corporate-sponsored religious institutions and the halls of corporate-sponsored political parties.
A movement that refuses to collaborate with any institution that signs off on a system that is fully dependent on the suffering of people all over the planet.
A movement that perpetually challenges this system, not only because this system decimates the material lives and livelihoods of others, but also because it malforms the souls of those of us who benefit materially from its racist perspectives and policies.
Jimmy and Grace Boggs were not purist, pessimistic or cynical. They lived with radical agency and a robust anthropology, acknowledging that the American system wraps around everything – including our souls - like the tentacles of an octopus.
What a spiritual tension.
As we navigate the corrupt system,
a Love supreme empowers us
to collaborate less,
to challenge more and
to create Something Else.
This does not just happen.
This is not just let go and let God.
This is about amplifying hope.
This is about summoning our agency.
This is about asking, seeking and knocking around every crack and corner of American culture until we find what our souls truly yearn for.
I am convinced that when we vigilantly embrace an empowerment framework, a Love supreme will lead us to the prophetic remnant that refuses to ignore or justify genocides and ginormous wealth divides. This beloved community is comprised of imperfect people who are sincere and curious about the possibility of a political and spiritual alternative animated by justice, compassion, truth and humility.
This movement has been around since long before 1984. It just doesn't get much air-time in the corporate media.
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I encourage you to revisit the list of twenty-two Gen X and Millennial movement leaders that I compiled earlier this month. Many of them continue to get unfairly accused and cancelled for going public for a free Palestine.
Steven Thrasher was suspended by Northwestern University. His interview on Democracy Now is fire.
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Rashida Tlaib continues to endure disingenuous accusations of being antisemitic. I am grateful forPrem Thakker for taking readers through the step-by-step process of how Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, CNN anchors and other high profile people distorted Rashida's words. It's slanderous.
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Seattle-based rapper Macklemore just came out with his second Palestinian liberation anthem. The video is beautifully done. David Zirinreports on how the Seattle professional sports scene is condemning him.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is coming out with a new book called The Message - and his experience in the occupied Palestinian territories features large. Check out this long article on Coates in New York Magazine.
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In a ground-breaking pro-publica piece, Brett Murphy says that, while Gaza starved, USAID and State's refugees bureau came to a legally explosive conclusion — Israel had deliberately prevented food and medicine from getting in. But US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told congress the exact opposite, so the arms could keep flowing.
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Next week, I will focus on the one-year anniversary of the beginning of Israel's brutal barrage of Gaza. It has been a long and illuminating year, full of grief and resistance. adrienne maree brown is publicizing a zoom gathering for prayer and action next Sunday, October 6 at 2pmEDT.
Here's the summary and link.
We come together to pray a multitude of voices, languages, streams of traditions with the intention that these practices can irrigate us, steady us, open us, fortify us, anchor us, & move us towards radical action in our ongoing commitment to & work for a free Palestine knowing that prayers are not enough in a ongoing genocide knowing that the notion of praying is sometimes used as a way to bypass the rigorous work that is required in this moment we will be rigorous in our prayers praying together not as a way to bring comfort or ease for ourselves, but to continue to be steadfast, to move & act with courage & conviction.
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEkcuyhpjsoGdDvArqU1-9wuDfn7ZAmx0LM#/registration
