“I have walked the long road to freedom. …

I have discovered the secret that

After climbing a great hill, one only finds

That there are many more hills to climb.”

We celebrate Nelson Mandela for leading South Africa…for being one of the leaders that helped South Africa end apartheid, liberate itself from that oppressive system. He led the creation of an impressively egalitarian and justice-based constitution, guaranteeing not only racial justice…you would expect that in reaction to apartheid… but economic justice as well…guarantees of education and housing and medical care… gender justice and justice for queer South Africans.

It is a truly remarkable document. Aspirational, of course. But what an aspiration. What a clear and compelling vision.

Mandela supported the Truth and Reconciliation Process, so that the ending of apartheid did not simply deteriorate into retribution and violence.

But if you follow any international news, you know that South Africa did not become the Promised Land…in one giant step forward. The promises of the constitution remain, in many ways, aspirations…a vision…rather than reality.

And in his autobiography, Mandela wrote that “after climbing a great hill, one finds only that there are many more hills to climb.”

He looked back, from the mountain top,

“On the distance I have come.

But…

I dare not linger, for my long walk

Is not ended.”

He looked out from the mountaintop. That metaphor is so common for transformational leaders of liberating movements.

“I’ve been to the mountain top,” preached Dr. King just before he was killed. “I may not get there with you, but I can tell that, as a people, we will get to the Promised Land.” “I’ve been to the mountain top.”

Moses was always going to the mountaintop…that is where he saw the burning bush, where he received the 10 Commandments and where he went to look out over Jordan and learn that he would not cross over into the Promised Land with the people he had led through the wilderness.

If you are in the business of liberation, you go to the mountaintop to get a broader view…a longer view…

I know that many of us go to the mountains for renewal and that broader, longer view…

a view beyond the current challenges of the day…a view without the blinders of conventional wisdom.

And there always seems to be a longer walk to be taken toward liberation…one more river to cross…one more mountain to crest.

The statement of aspiration does not complete the work. The casting of vision is not “one and done.” “Revelation is not sealed” is our religious language for this truth.

There is always more truth being revealed.

But this is also true of our individual living. Liberation…and living a good life…is always a work in process.

You need to be able to know that truth… to see it.

Annie Dillard writes: “The secret of seeing, then, is the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.”

We need to be able to see the truth.

It can be so easy to focus just on what is right before our face. And let me be clear that the urgent problems of living need to be addressed. The courage and the stamina to make it through the week…that is no small thing.

You need to “take care of business” as my own mother often said to me.

But, in the work of liberation, we also need to get perspective.

Portia Nelson, in what she calls “There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk, An Autobiography in Five Short Chapters,” makes the case:

“Chapter One

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the

Sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost…I am helpless.

It isn’t my fault.

It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the

Sidewalk.

I pretend that I don’t see it.

I fall in again.

I can’t believe I am in this same

Place.

But it isn’t my fault.

I still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter Three

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the

Sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in…it’s a habit now…but my

Eyes are open.

I know where I am.

It is my fault.

I get out immediately.

Chapter Four

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the

Sidewalk.

I walk around it.

Chapter Five

I walk down a different street.”

It is our own habits, our own ways of seeing things, that often…so often…make liberation hard to achieve.

And I understand why…don’t you? We develop survival strategies…ways of managing even the most oppressive circumstances…even the deepest of those holes in the sidewalk…

We develop survival strategies…that is what we do.

And we do not want to let go of those strategies. Even when they do not serve us well. Even when they harm us.

They are survival strategies, after all. If you give up your survival strategy…Well, then you are in danger of not surviving.

I “get it” why it is so hard to take that mountain top view…to go down a different street. I know it in my own life.

Remember from last week the idea that practice can be a source of liberation, that we can, in fact, discipline ourselves to see and know more of the truth? Remember that?

What is the practice, the discipline that can help…if our goal is to avoid those holes in the sidewalk? If our goal is liberation?

Another story:

Vanessa Southern writes about her cousin who was taking the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to work in San Francisco. It was rush hour and there was a blind man also on the platform. The man was weaving and stumbling along. He’d apparently been drinking.

Vanessa writes:

“…the man took a tumble right off the platform and onto the tracks. This was particularly bad timing since…a train was due in just a couple of minutes. People started yelling at the man, telling him what to do and where to go, all the while ignoring his screams. ‘Where is my pole?’ he was yelling. ‘I need my pole!’ he cried out as the crowd became more and more frantic.”

“This was when my cousin became a hero,” Vanessa writes: “…he jumped onto the tracks, grabbed the man’s pole, handed it to him, and jumped back onto the platform. The man immediately calmed down, felt for the tracks, oriented himself, reached for the platform, and started to struggle up. With others reaching under his arms to help him, he scrambled onto the platform just as the train arrived.”

“My cousin did what so few of us do…He shut off his own sense of what the man needed or should do and instead listened to what the blind man…said he needed.”

“The man, even though he was drunk and could not see, knew himself and his inner resources better than anyone else in that station. With his pole in hand, he was able to start to dig himself out of danger…”

Vanessa’s cousin, the hero in the story, said later: “All I did was trust that the guy knew what he needed and try and get it to him.”

Trust that the guy knew what he needed.

Liberation is about empowerment. And empowerment has a critical internal dimension. Our ability to take a mountain top view of ourselves, to recognize that we keep walking down that same street and falling into that same hole in the sidewalk…our ability to see ourselves as liberated even from those survival techniques we have relied on…

That internal ability to see ourselves liberated and free is critical.

There is often even a role for friends and those we love us to help us see ourselves more clearly: “Haven’t you fallen into that hole before? Don’t you fall into it every time you go down that street?

How we are seen also matters. And how we are heard.

Too many people, especially our young people are telling us that the rigid gender binary that sees male and female as the only and unchangeable identities…they are telling us that that vision cannot hold the truth of their lives. They are telling us what they need to be saved. We have to listen to them.

Being heard matters in our personal lives and it matters in this world we live in.

The “Me Too” movement is saying “Listen to us. Believe us.”

I blogged about the Black Mammas Matter Alliance  just this week…highlighting the persistent inequality in maternal mortality…based on race…

Black Lives Matter is telling this society what we need. …Stop the oppression. Stop the violence.

Environmental justice advocates are telling all of us that we have refused to see, refused to know the damage we have been doing. We’ve messed up for too long. Listen to the truth.

Even those “fly over” communities in the American heartland, when they voted in 2016, where saying  “This isn’t working for us.

Listen to us.”

Listen. See without the blinders of the conventional wisdom. Get to the mountain top. See how far we have come but also how far we have to go. See how your survival techniques may be holding you back.

It was Gandhi, in the midst of the Indian struggle for liberation from British rule, who said: “There go my people. I must follow them. For I am their leader.”

Trust that people know what they need.

There is an attitude of curiosity…of listening and learning first… that, it seems to me, must come before commitment.

The habit of listening and learning, first, that can be an antidote to despair.

The commitment must come…let’s be clear…but first the listening…to ourselves and to those who are yelling for our attention and our assistance. The voices are there. You have to work hard to shut them out.

That means that this practice of liberation…this discipline is do-able. We have all we need. People are telling us…we are telling each other…what we need.

We only have to trust what we know. And then find the courage of commitment.

This is a message worth delivering on this day when we celebrate parenthood, when we give thanks for all those who have parented us and commit ourselves to parent and companion our children and their children.

This is a message worth delivering on this day, because so many of the voices telling us what they need are the voices of those we care about most.

Listening, and trusting what we hear, can be one of the best gifts to share across the generations.

Hearing those voices can start us on that journey up the mountain to see how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.

You are the bows from which

          Your children as living arrows

          Are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path

Of the infinite, and bends you with might

That the arrows may go swift and far.

          Let your bending in the

          Archer’s hand be for gladness.

May our bending in the archer’s hand, help to liberate us all.

Topics: Liberation