Memoirs are my favorite genre. I appreciate learning about people outside my circle … my personal community. Additionally, when I read about courageous and inspiring people, it gives me hope. I need their examples to undergird the qualities I seek to exemplify during this fraught time in our world.
See No Stranger is written by a Sikh woman. All I’ve known about Sikhism’s religion and cultural background is what I’ve gained from news reporting violence against them. From those reports, I noticed they wear turbans, have darkish skin, and are often mistaken for Muslims. And I can’t help but notice that they hurt just like we all do when violence is done against us.
In reading this book, I learned that Sikhism is a major world religion. Sikhs believe in One God, equality, and social justice. Many Sikhs wear articles of faith (turbans), keep their hair long and uncut to show their commitment to serve others.
The first teacher of this faith, deeply troubled by the violence around him, went into seclusion and emerged with a vision of the Oneness of humanity and the world. “Love made him see with new eyes: Everyone around him was a part of him he did not know.”
While holding to the vision, he acknowledged the voice inside all of us that names an illusion of separateness … a voice that when quieted through practice, experiences the disappearance of boundaries and the truth that we are part of one another.
Having learned all this, I see the first teacher of the Sikh’s having a lot in common with the first teacher of my tradition. I think he and Jesus could have been best buddies … you know, the kind of relationship where you feel really “gotten.”
Sikhs apply their teaching through practices of revolutionary love. I think we Christians have a lot to learn from them. Their practices honor both the inner and the outer spiritual journeys … something much needed and lacking in our Christian tradition today.
See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love expands my world.
Valerie Kaur chronicles her evolution into a woman full of wisdom, courage, and inspiration in a violent world. Valerie and her Sikh community carry the values and practices that give me hope.
Sikhs = People Who Are a Part of Me I Do Not Know
Personal and Collective Faithfulness
As I read, I was filled with respect and awe at Valerie’s many stories of laboring to practice revolutionary love … her personal story set amidst her community’s collective stories of violence perpetrated against them. I admire their struggle to remain faithful to their founder’s vision of Oneness. As individuals and as a community, they demonstrate profound courage as well as growth in resilience, wisdom, and strength. Among the many stories, I’ve chosen a couple … one collective and one personal … to relay here because they touched me so deeply.
Revolutionary Love is the call of our times. It is to look upon the face of anyone and say, ‘You are a part of me I do not yet know.’ It is a Revolution of the Heart. ~Valarie Kaur
Curiosity and Deep Listening
A sense of curiosity and wonder undergirds the Sikh practice of deep listening. This process has the potential to transform the pain behind alienation and rage versus transfer it to others.
When loving becomes hard, they give birth to revolutionary love through labor.
They retreat
They rage
They try again to listen
Valarie and others in her community find that the more they listen to those who perpetrate violence against them, the less they hate.
She admits that sometimes the hardest people to listen to are the ones closest to us.
A Community Labors ~~ Oak Creek, Wisconsin
Laboring through mass murder, even reading about it, is bearable when we breath together. It calms the nervous system.
Breathe in four counts
Hold for four counts
Out for four counts
INHALE!
On August 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page walked into a Sikh Temple and community center in Oak Park, Wisconsin … a Sunday morning when it was filled with about 40 people preparing for the day’s services. He carried a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun.
I was struck by the difference between Valerie’s description of the event and that on Wikipedia. Wikipedia gives the details and the numbers … like an impersonal news report.
Valerie walks us through the gunman’s rampage … naming names and giving descriptions of the spirit of each person in the path of the gunman … of the survivors who emerged from hiding to find their loved ones wounded or slaughtered … bringing the people alive in our mind’s eye … including police officers who arrived at the scene … until the gunman shot himself in the head and it was over.
When a sacred place is ravaged, it’s as if our bodies themselves have been violated.
EXHALE!
Local, regional, and national communities went through the motions of acknowledging the hate crime.
“But our community longed for the deeper spiritual and emotional assurance that we were welcome in a nation that had produced the gunman …”
She notes that Muslim perpetrators are called terrorists while white perpetrators are called mentally ill lone wolves.
Valerie, among other roles, is a filmmaker who chronicles hate crimes. She watched with a keen eye as the community returned to the Temple one week later and literally began to rebuild and reorganize itself.
The survivors created rituals of cleansing in the spirit of Oneness along with defiant declarations that they would not be deterred from rising up.
They anchored themselves while breathing through guilt, rage, and grief.
The names of the wounded and dead rang out … including the shooters.
Behind the expressionless face that stalked the halls was a pained white man who deserved peace … may there be grace for all of humanity … our community is not about retaliation, just love. … the secret … ever-rising spirits even in the darkness … joy even in struggle … one breath at a time.
There is power in your faith! ~ Rev. Jesse Jackson
Forgiving the shooter was a declaration of autonomy as if to say, “…no matter what you do to us, we will not allow you to make us hate you.” Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice; it energizes us in the fight for justice.
Valarie’s Personal Labor
When somebody gives you pain, how do you love that person? That’s the real test of love. ~Valerie’s mother
Watching her mother stop the cycle of oppression in their family led Valerie to consider letting go of the animosity she held for a family member who had sexually assaulted her when they were young. They had not talked or seen each other in years. She had rejected all his attempts to reconnect. And at this point in her life, forgiveness appeared as a gift to herself at the end of her long process of healing internally and externally.
She invited her cousin, who had been as close to her as a brother, to enter with her into a truth and reconciliation process similar to that used by the South African Commission at the end of apartheid. He accepted her invitation.
The power of the process they went through was like nothing I’ve ever heard of. It deeply moved me.
Reconciliation rests on accountability:
- The survivor shares the impact of the harm & allows the offender to feel intense emotional pain for their actions as a way of reconnecting with empathy and compassion.
- The survivor asks, “Do you acknowledge … ?
- The survivor waits for the offender to process the new information about the impact of their harmful actions.
- The offender speaks their acknowledgment and remorse. They accept responsibility for their actions.
- This is repeated until all the consequences are named and acknowledged.
- Both accept that the survivor doesn’t owe the offender a relationship going forward.
Valarie’s cousin took responsibility and apologized in a satisfactory way. Still, she kept her distance from him.
And then she began to wonder. Her curiosity about how he was able to fully accept responsibility led her to ask him to tell her his story about what happened. This time, she listened.
- What was your 16-year-old thinking the night the assault happened?
- What do you feel now when you look back?
- How do you explain your threatening behavior toward my fiancé?
- Why did you …?
They breathed and pushed through reconciliation, each time creating more space and understanding than either thought possible.
What made the apology genuine:
- Her cousin was willing to wonder about himself, his psyche, family, and conditioning to investigate the reasons he had committed harm;
- He was willing to wonder about her and imagine how she felt and all the suffering that followed as a result;
- He was specific and detailed in his admission of what he’d done and took full responsibility for the consequences;
- He did the work of reparation.
Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” ~Bryan Stevenson
This is the labor of revolutionary love. What could such liberation look like for our society as a whole?
Since January 20, many of us feel overwhelmed and frightened by the rapid-fire changes being made by the current administration … many of them designed to traumatize us. They leave us breathless.
Your breathlessness is a sign of your bravery. It means you are awake to what’s happening right now: The world is in transition. ~Valarie Kaur
Thank you so much for giving us the essence of See no Stranger. I receive Valerie’s newsletters and I have heard her interviewed but I have not read the book. The two examples you gave of revolutionary love in action, help me now see how profoundly deep this process is. It is truly revolutionary in our world where blame and defensiveness reign.
You do inspire me to read the book. Thanks!
Love,
Ani