US REP. JOHN LEWIS (D-GA), MY DOPPELGANGER
March 31, 2013
On this
Easter Morning, listening to Krista Tippett’s interview with US Rep. John
Lewis, who in the early sixties was leader of SNCC, the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee, for the very first time in my life, I heard my
doppelganger. Soon after Mr. Lewis began
the hour saying that he was born a person of faith in being love, I began
answering the host’s questions in the precise words Mr. Lewis would use in is
answer. At the end of the interview, he
even said loving others meant being honest and open. He spoke of how his love extended to loving
animals, beginning with the chickens he raised and cried over at the dinner
table. He talked about how easily he
cried at moments of enjoyment of love.
He stressed patience and persistence, that our role was to carry on the
struggle, in the faith that in generations to come, humanity as a whole would
be integrated into a loving community.
When asked how he and others in SNCC trained for nonviolent satyagraha
(failure to cooperate with segregation), he spoke of studying principles of
nonviolence as written by the likes of Gandhi and Thoreau, and when confronting
those who would be one’s enemies as later in Selma (where Lewis was beaten
unconscious), to maintain eye contact and try to smile to disarm one’s
opponents. I regularly find what I know
as the force of love, and what I call peacemaking as a way of life, a way of
being in all one’s relations. But I have
never before heard someone use the same words at the same moment I find myself
using them to convey the faith that embodies both our lives. If anyone has bothered trying to understand
what I mean by peacemaking, check out what Mr. Lewis says about his
praxis. He talks of his thinking and speech
evolving with age, and so the words he used in this week’s “On Being” program,
like the words I am using to describe peacemaking, are not what they were and
will probably keep changing, as each of us tries to use the language of our
audiences of the moment. For now, this
is probably the only time in my life that I will ever feel comfortable saying
that this person might as well be speaking for me too. Happy Easter.
Love and peace--hal
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