Brian Allain's Blog

From “We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other in Worlds That Demand Our Silence” by David Dark

We demonize people when we feel powerless. We demonize when we don’t know what to do with our own despair. But mad, we noted, is ever a form of sad, and our channels for engaging despair thoughtfully can’t be controlled by nor are they dependent upon any elected official. We can make our own moments of pause together with others whenever we like. We resolved not to let the more-than-daily outbursts of that most famously insecure man dictate our emotional lives or the way we would address one another. Trump’s mental chaos, his best-selling toxic understanding of himself and others, need not, we noted, become our own because we get to choose what we take in. And as we have to do with anyone who would try to reduce the whole world to the size of their own fear, we can respond with thoughtfulness at every turn. We can make of our own speech, our actions, and our thinking a neighborhood expression of care.

From “The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing” by Yolanda Pierce

Here is what we rarely admit. We desperately want to remove the crimes of the impoverished and disenfranchised from our sight because of our own vulnerability and shame. We are ashamed to face the fact that many of us are only a paycheck away from being uninsured or facing homelessness or facing tough choices for how to survive. And we fervently want to identify with those of wealth and high status, wishing that we had the financial means to shield us from the consequences of our sins and bad decisions.

We are living in a delusion. We will not be a safer nation because we allow state-sanctioned murders via the death penalty. We will not be made safer by a multibillion dollar prison industrial complex. We will not be a safer nation because we routinely stop and frisk Black and Brown people without just cause. We certainly will not be a safer nation because we prosecute the ten-dollar theft and leave the million-dollar theft untouched.

From “Walk with Me: A Journey through the Landscape of Trauma” by Ellen Corcella

My mother’s resentment brewed under this facade of success, and parties reminded her of those stifled ambitions. Required by social convention to sit in the same room with their wives, husbands sat in the stately rooms to talk about their professions, careers, and the weighty matters of the world. With her children in elementary school and her nursing career deserted, she drank to fill her loneliness.

When my mother’s wrath boiled over, my father left. He did not tell us where he was going or how we could reach him – he just left, abandoning us in the very hell he, a trained psychiatrist, could not tolerate. Maureen, James, and I were confined in our beautiful home with our raging mother whose ire did not diminish because her husband left the house. My father had returned by the time we woke up in the morning, starting the charade over again: breakfast on the table, my father off to work, and the children gone to school. He never asked whether we, his children, were okay.

From “The Soulwork of Justice: Four Movements for Contemplative Action” by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson.

Your True Self dwells in an intimate and expansive connection to God’s love. Through that sacred portal you can be present in solidarity to all that God loves, and to the pain, brokenness, and suffering of all that seeks to resist the redemptive power of that love in the world. This is what it means to be “in Christ. The intersection of the divine and human, of the spiritual and material, fully revealed in the incarnation, is the place where your identity is discovered, where your life is beckoned, and where your belonging is secure. Your True Self dwells in connection to this Life.

However, it’s no small task to discover this sacred connection amid the hectic normalcy of your everyday life. The cracks in your facade are easily repressed when you’re convinced that you are doing good work, even critical work. Like saving the planet, confronting racism, and stopping war. Unswerving, indefatigable commitment to a cause, with prophetic urgency, is the catalyst for social change. But if you allow such a cause to smother attention to inner motives, vulnerabilities, and ego needs, you will pay a personal price. In the end, the cause itself can be tarnished. As Richard Rohr says, “It’s possible to do the right things for the wrong reasons!”

From “Recovering Racists: Dismantling White Supremacy and Reclaiming Our Humanity” by Idelette McVicker

Imagine that we, as white people, are in the caterpillar stage of comfortable whiteness. In her powerful poem “The Point. The Center. The Norm,” Kimberly James highlights who white people are used to being centered, being the norm, being in a place of power. Whiteness – and the status quo it’s created – has been comfortable for white people. But it also set in motion the slow erosion of our humanity. It is time to move into the cocoon of transformation where we wrestle for liberation for all, as well as for our full humanity. 

In his book Falling Upward, Richard Rohr writes, “Transformation is often more about unlearning than learning.” There is much for us to unlearn – greed, theft, dominance, abusive power, fear, scarcity, exceptionalism, to name a few things. But if we commit to the process, we will become transformed.

The beautiful part is that with every small act of resistance, every step toward transformation, we are also contributing to the transformation of the whole. We are not doing this work only for ourselves; we are doing this for a more whole, beautiful, and just humanity.

From “The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life” by Lisa Miller, PhD

An awakened brain is available to all of us, right here in our neural circuitry. But we have to choose to engage it. It’s a muscle we can learn to strengthen, or let atrophy. I’ve come to see the problems we have in leadership, education, social justice, the environment, and mental health as different emanations of the same problem: unawakened awareness. A universal, healing capacity that has not been engaged or cultivated, that’s been left to die on the vine. The problem is within. And so is the solution.

Each one of us has the ability to fully develop our innate capacity to live through an awareness of love, interconnection, and appreciation of life’s unfolding. Beyond belief, beyond a cognitive story we tell ourselves, the awakened brain is the inner lens through which we access the truest and most expansive reality: that all of life is sacred, that we never walk alone. Our brains are wired to perceive and receive that which uplifts, illuminates, and heals.

From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza

Like many white Americans, for a long time I believed it was possible to support Black people’s struggle for equality and work to heal the nation’s wounds while rejecting the very idea of reparations as both impractical and a distraction from the real work of racial justice and democratic engagement. Rebirth of a Nation details why I was wrong.

From “We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other in Worlds That Demand Our Silence” by David Dark

Little inaccuracies deployed to relieve tension add up into inauthentic environments and unsafe spaces. Patti Smith, like other poets and prophets, is practiced in the work of not relieving tension but instead dwelling within it, holding space and seeing what might come of not trying to explain it away. This is the art of creative noncompliance. For Smith, “this thing,” these things, are on. She’s going to play human and see what happens – no matter what. With her singular voice, she holds and conjures a space in which everyone is invited to artfulness, to new, unexpected, and impromptu forms of play. By being so consistently and relentlessly her most creative self, she invites us to use our voices too.

People, it turns out, have the moral power to wrest a vibe, a scene, a neighborhood, a city back from the abusive strategies of reactive and poised-to-please people. What’s more, with persistence and long pauses, with the right story, song, analogy, or joke, a reactive person can become a responsive person. As one who occasionally freaks out at intersections, I undertake this transformation many times a day. Without artfulness, well, I’ll be damned. Transformative possibilities are my only hope. With any luck, I’ll remain awake and alive to them in the days remaining to me. Is this thing on?

From “Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World–and How to Repair It All” by Lisa Sharon Harper

We have been deeply shaped by the stories we’ve told ourselves about God. We have also been shaped by the stories we’ve told ourselves about ourselves. The victor wrote our history. Celebrating the heroes of our nation’s founding, the crafters of our national story marked its progression through a timeline of military conquests and economic exploits. The stories of the conquered and exploited have rarely risen to a height to be heard or seen beyond family and local community. These marginalized narratives must be pushed to the center. We must see them. We must reckon with them. These stories unearth the details of how and why and where racial hierarchy was built and protected. These stories raise a primal scream that cuts to the bone and reveals the depths and contours of our shattered national soul.

From “Black and White: Disrupting Racism One Friendship At A Time” by Teesha Hadra and John Hambrick

Some are tempted to argue that slavery and segregation have ended, so racism is no longer a reality. This is just not the case. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program in 2016, law enforcement agencies reported the occurrence of 6,121 hate crimes. Of these crimes, 57.5 percent involved bias due to race, ethnicity, or ancestry. Statistics can make the problem of racism seem abstract, but behind each and every figure is a real person who experienced the all too real pain of racism.