Old Roots, New Shoots: Back to Where I Began

“And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

~ T.S. Eliot

How I needed – how we in the audience all needed – to hear  columnist David Brook’s comments that were shared last week at a forum hosted by PathNorth, here in DC. His words of community, equity, decency and man’s “soul that yearns for goodness” stood in glaring contrast to the gut-wrenching sight of our president who was soon to trash a fellow leader, Trudeau as “dishonest and weak.” Trump’s fellow bullies then piling on, promising the leader of Canada a “special place in hell.” So the demeaning, indecency, the ego-mania is now going international, and in the process threatening to undo an alliance that has knitted western democracies together since World War II. 

With a self-deprecating grin, Brooks described himself now as “bi-polar,” on the one hand appalled and frightened by the specter of one man taking a wrecking ball to our nation, to international alliances and to fundamental civility, and on the other hand, hope at the sight of hundreds of “new groups springing up all over…community people creating a gospel with their actions, people joining, people starting new groups, people getting out from behind their computers.” He compared Trump’s America to the rampant Social Darwinism and glaring income and social inequities of the late 19^th century. The “Gilded Age,” as Brooks pointed out, spawned the “Progressive Era,” an era that produced child labor laws that pulled eight- and nine year-olds out of New England’s clothing mills, that saw the rise of civic groups, unions, the women’s movement and so much more.

Brooks then shared a parable that I found, at first, stunningly fatuous. He described a person trying to stop the inexorable advance of bamboo:  first digging up the bamboo; then an overlay of gravel; then dirt; then a layer of cement.  And in a year? A green shoot poking up through the cement.

Absurd, I thought:  take on Trump with… a green shoot? What could one person do against the Trump juggernaut? Not much. But what’s  the option?  Wait for one person to rescue us? Give up? Hope our system will self correct (it won’t)?  But then…what of a million “green shoots?”

Martin Luther King, Jr., who derailed my original career path, spurred the growing of “green shoots” across the nation. The faith community was the locus of political action as it confronted Jim Crow laws, segregation, voter suppression, lynchings and church bombings. The faith community stirred the heart and feet of a generation. It stirred mine. My feet took me to divinity school. I graduated, but chose not to be ordained; rather, in 1965, I began a long and rewarding career that took me into the non-profit sector, then government, then back to the non-profit world.  MLK planted and nurtured my green shoot.

Fifty-three years later Trump was elected president of the United States. After the shock, the tears and paralysis, fledgling shoots began to grow. In our small corner of the universe, a few of us laid the foundation for a group called Lewinsville Faith in Action. “Informed by faith and fact, and in partnership with others, LFA pledges to work for political, social, economic and environmental policies that are based on justice and compassion.” (www.lewinsvillefaithinaction.org) LFA rests on three pillars:  Policy and political actions focused on electoral politics, redistricting, immigration, gun violence, budgeting and tax reform, equitable and inclusive health care, energy and the environment; support for the “beloved community,” confronting personal disappointments (“What can I do?  I’m just one little person?”), keeping hope alive and feet moving; and grounding our work in faith that is both transactional—living our values through positive actions—and transformational, deepening our understanding of how people of faith should act in challenging times such as these.

And so even if my knees don’t work so well I, along with the wonderful “LFA’ers” and new partners, have been picketing, speaking with state delegates in the Virginia legislature, contacting members of Congress, writing op-eds, meeting monthly with LFA’s amazing and sustaining group of people, people who act faithfully and think strategically.

Green shoots?  Green shoots confronting a layer of cement? Perhaps it’s not cement. Perhaps it’s a lot of hot air. And hot air is just what bamboo needs to grow and to thrive.

And as Eliot notes, “We shall know it for the first time.”  What a gift after a career of more than 50 years to again have faith quickened and feet moved.

 

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