From Grade 1 to Grade 7, I lived in Sept Iles, Quebec. That's a very Franchophone area, hours past Quebec City on the North Shore. As children, some of us, some of the time, called each other names because of our different languages: "tête carrée" (square head), "frog". It would occasionally border on physical violence, like throwing rocks across the street at each other (but not hitting anyone). I felt the otherness of the French kids in me, participated in it, did not act to stop it.

At the height of the October crisis, when politicians were being kidnapped and murdered, and demonstrations were put down with tear gas, my parents decided it was time to leave. We ended up in Northern Ontario, in Red Lake (well, technically Ear Falls), where there was and is a large First Nations population. Again, the name calling but mostly in one direction: "redass" was popular. I didn't understand why things were this way, but again I felt how the otherness of First Nations people was inside me, how I was part of manufacturing and sustaining that, and how I did not act to stop it.

Since then, I've had periods of intense listening and marching and learning and arguing about both of these situations - with friends, family, co-workers and more. But I am English and I am white and I am male, and only beginning to understand how that has let me step in or out when I choose, to participate when I wish to, and to be granted this massive privilege solely by the accident of my birth.

This week, in light of #blm, we'll explore three African American voices: bell hooks, Martin Luther King, and rev Angel Kyodo Williams (also, M. Scott Peck, who bell hooks refers to).

Love according to M. Scott Peck

In Love as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks refers to M. Scott Peck's definition of love:

...the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. - M. Scott Peck

Q: How would you explain or point out love?

So many beautiful questions come out of this!

Q: What does it mean to extend yourself?

Q: What might nurturing spiritual growth look like? For yourself? For another?

Love as intention and action

..Everyone in our culture desires to some extent to be loving, yet many are in fact not loving. I therefore conclude that the desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. - M. Scott Peck

Love is as love does - through intention and action. It's crucial to bring these abstract ideas into practice, to make them real in the doing.

Q: Why would we not choose to love?

...his words echo Martin Luther King's declaration, "I have decided to love," which also emphasizes choice. King believed that love is "ultimately the only answer" to the problems facing this nation and the entire planet. I share that belief and the conviction that it is in choosing love, and beginning with love as the ethical foundation for politics, that we are best positioned to transform society in ways that enhance the collective good." - bell hooks, Love as the Practice of Freedom (PDF)

Q: Why do you think MLK and bell hooks came to that conclusion?

Love as Direct Action

Underlining that to love is not to condone and doesn't mean inaction:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that...a community is forced to confront the issue...there is a type of constructive, non-violent tension which is necessary for growth. MLK, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (PDF)

Love as Preference

that love was not to be limited to my bedroom or my family and just people that I thought that I liked; that what I was doing in the past and what we often do and what our culture calls us to do is to use love to be a quantifier of “Do I have a preference for you?” - rev Angel Kyodo Williams, On Being interview

Q: Can you separate preference from love? What happens when you do?

Love as Making Space

The way that I think of love most often these days is that love is space...developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are — that that is love. - rev Angel Kyodo Williams

Q: Would developing the capacity to let others be as they are feel like love to you?

And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us. - rev Angel Kyodo Williams

Q: How would you describe coming from a place of love? What would that look like?

Love & Spiritual Growth

our deepest capacity for growth comes not from walling ourselves off from the things that make us feel a sense of threat or discomfort or out of alignment or out of sorts, but rather, figuring out what is speaking to us when we feel those things, and what do we have to learn from that. - rev Angel Kyodo Williams

We extend and nurture ourselves. We extend by moving towards the discomfort. We nuture by doing that little by little, with patience and compassion for our human limitations and frailty.

Q: Are you willing to decide to love?

Q: Can you take that love as the foundation for engaging with family, with neighbours, with society at large?

We are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
— Gwendolyn Brooks