First, a note of gratitude to you: I took two weeks off from writing this meditation in order to rest, to heal, to listen and to pray. I spent time reading books about antiracism, emergence theory, mysticism…and one trashy romance novel. I walked in the woods and took naps. I paused to listen to my body, listen to the stories of black bodies being broken, and listen to the grief wracking and wrecking us as a culture. Thank you for your generous patience. I’m back.
This week I had the wonderful opportunity to talk with Dr. Monica Sharma, a physician and epidemiologist, who worked for the United Nations for more than twenty years. She has dedicated much of her life to transformational leadership. In our conversation, she said, “In mathematics, the word radical means root of. It is a way of getting to the base, the root, of a number in its purest form. There is something about human beings, that when we awaken the root of our being, we are capable of creating enormous change.”
I’ve often talked about these days of deep transformation and dislocation as “The Great Unveiling.” It’s a time of stripping away what has not been working for some time and revealing what is broken in our culture. Dr. Sharma helped me see more clearly that when we get in touch with who we really are, what we value, what we fear, what we hope, then we are being radical. We are leading from our rootedness in the ground of Being.
These are essential days. They are undoing us. They are remaking us. They are full of loss. They are full of Awakening. They hurt, and they heal. The time we live in these days is messy. It’s unpredictable and hard to discern. But we are peeling away what is not essential so that we get to the root. We are on an odyssey of authenticity.
What I can offer as a fellow Sojourner is this: Trust the shedding. Trust the process of letting go. Trust that what we create from the ROOT of all of us holds the greatest hope for our shared future. A radical is one who gets to the root of the problem and dares to create alternatives to what is not working. We are radicalizing for the Common Good. I suppose this is what Jesus was dreaming of when us said, “Thy kindom come. Thy will be done. on Earth as in heaven.” My deepest prayer is that heaven comes to Earth…through us.
We are in this together,
Cameron