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Faith & Values: Keeping faith in turbulent times

This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about the founders of my congregation, St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, who gathered for the first time in September 1963.

That summer, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been killed outside his home in Mississippi. Three months later, just one week before our first service, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. Exactly three months after our founding, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and 15 months later, Malcolm X — less than a year after his pilgrimage to Mecca, which my friend Ali Akguner wrote about last week in this column. Three years later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated two months apart.

How did people with enough hope to start a new church welcoming people of all races sustain their faith in a time of unrelenting violence? The high-profile cases I mentioned above were just the tip of the iceberg. Violence can take many forms, as Coretta Scott King noted in a speech on June 19, 1968 — two months after being widowed and two weeks after RFK was killed. “I remind you that starving a child is violence,” she said. “Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her child is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of willpower to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.”

Seeking to be a nonviolent presence in a violent world is no small challenge — and it starts within. As the song says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” Many of us would never dream of saying to other people the things we say to ourselves when we make a mistake or come up short. My former therapist liked to point out that it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment if a recording of our negative self-talk were played over the loudspeakers in a prison.

So nonviolence starts at home, with cultivating a kind and forgiving response to our own human frailty. Thanks to a workshop I recently attended, I’ve started a (semi-)regular practice of centering prayer, what the handout they gave us calls a way of “being present, in faith and in love, to the Divine dwelling at the center of your being.” Sitting quietly for 20 minutes twice a day, I close my eyes, breathe, and try to rest and renew my spirit. When I start thinking about my to-do list, or replaying a conversation from 10 years ago, or stressing about my next sermon, I gently return to the center with a simple word. Over time, this practice, or one like it from many spiritual traditions, can help calm the violence within.

As we grow kinder toward ourselves, we may find it easier to be kind to others, both family and friends and the strangers we encounter in our daily lives. At St. Martin’s this summer we’re reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s book “An Altar in the World,” with a different spiritual practice each week to help us become more fully human. Last week’s practice was community. “The hardest spiritual work in the world,” Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “is to love the neighbor as the self — to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince, or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.”

We encounter these other humans all the time: fellow drivers, store clerks, neighbors, faces in a crowd, even the people we hear on the radio or see on our screens. “The point,” Taylor writes, “is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery.”

I don’t know if what our prayer book calls “respecting the dignity of every human being” helped the founders of St. Martin’s keep the faith in their turbulent time. But I know that remembering the humanity of others, especially those with whom I disagree most strongly, helps me be a better human as I navigate our own anxious, divisive days. This Sunday we’ll be singing a song I first shared at one of HART Multifaith Thanksgiving services a couple of years ago, one that I’ve returned to many times since in my own struggle to be a peaceful presence in a violent world.

“You gotta put one foot in front of the other,” the song goes, “and lead with love.” May it be so!

The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.