Angel Kyodo Williams : mackenzian

November 16, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

More on connecting values and action

Lately I’ve been meditating on the relationship between personal convictions and social action. Between Believe Out Loud mobilizing Christians and others to express their values during the electoral cycle and my other work with faith-based organizations, I’m not seeing any way to dodge the real-world impacts of our most closely-held values.

What we believe matters.

What we do because we believe, and how we allow what we do to reflect what we believe also matters. How we spend our voluntary time demonstrates our priorities. And who we choose to devote our working time to does as well.

It wouldn’t make much sense if our values, intentions, speech, and action are framed with clarity and awareness and our livelihood is out of sync… To be truly responsible, we must express our value of life with what we contribute to as much as with what we personally do and say.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

Building an ethically coherent life means each one of us paying attention to the people, groups, and causes that we support with our time, funds, or network connections. Wittingly or unwittingly, we’re fueling a world of some sort with all of these forms of energy, and it’s a world that we and those who follow us will have to live in.

When I evaluate my contributions to, say, my denomination, I simply want to know that what I bring to the table goes to good ends. I don’t want to participate in my own or others’ oppression. I don’t want to fund lobbying for the right to discriminate. I’m happy to give time to serve people in my community. I enjoy supporting my local church’s budget: a congregation that can afford to fix plumbing or paint multi-purpose rooms is going to be in a decent position to do what other good work it’s called to do.

And so these considerations affect the way I give, what I donate, and how I serve. That’s as it should be: there should be a connection between my motives and my actions, between my core values and my contributions.

It’s not about purity, though: as I’ve said before, there are no clean hands in this world where we’re all one or two or three degrees removed from each other. But it’s precisely because of our connectedness that we need to practice awareness of our relationships and entanglements.

A few weeks ago, Native people critiquing the Dakota Access Pipeline circulated articles about the banks funding the companies behind the project. “Send them a message,” the activists told us. “Put your money somewhere else.”

These banks are investing $3.8 billion in a vision of the world where continued oil dependence is not only necessary but something to be sought out.

Williams puts that dynamic in stark terms:

There are companies that dump toxic waste and sludge into our oceans or hide it beneath the ground in inner cities. That same ground may eventually be the site of buildings that some of our children will live in. How can we support and participate in the choking of our resources and a disregard for the health and well-being of poorer people?

… You have to think of what it means to work for [a company] that molests whole communities and the world by tearing down rain forests that provide balance for our ecosystems and nourish life.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

We may not work directly for companies like these, but we’re not otherwise that distant from them. We can’t escape our fundamental connectedness, even when we want to!

November 8, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

We leave no one behind

In the book Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, Angel Kyodo Williams explores spiritually grounded and grounding ways to live in a world where all is not well. Chapter 3 includes an analysis of the Three Pure Precepts: “to not create evil, to practice good, and to practice good for others.” These values imply, require, and inspire a generous approach to life, one that acknowledges our and others’ inherent dignity and worth.

I’m struck by the practical implications, especially today when many of my American friends are monitoring key state and local races or thinking about the work that lies “beyond the ballot.” There are, again, so many ways to participate in that work.

Generosity doesn’t only mean gifts and is not necessarily related to money or anything tangible. You can be generous with your time by making space to babysit for your brother’s kids. You can share the extra workload with a co-worker who is swamped instead of punching out at 5:00 on the nose. Give a stranger directions. Hold the door. Pick up a fallen jacket. Spend more time with your family and less with your TV or telephone. Help out at your church. Volunteer your time. Become a mentor. And, because it does still make the world go round, it is important that you support the work and ideals you believe in with money, too. Not just when it is ‘easy,’ because we can always find ways not to give. We can always decide that buying a new outfit is more necessary than giving our financial support to issues we care about, but if you want there to be a cure for the many black women living with AIDS, you have to support AIDS research. If you want the mayor that has been responsible for the unnecessary loss of black men’s lives to disappear into history, make a contribution to a more responsive candidate, then vote. If you want to have peace in your own life, support the effort toward peace in the whole world in any way you can.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

Investing in the entire world and not just my own micro-world of experience is one way for me to honor the fact that I will only flourish as the world flourishes: mine is an ecological existence! We can’t fully manifest our own well-being in a dysfunctional world. Williams continues:

There are many, many ways to serve others, and you will find a way that is most appropriate for you. You may be a firefighter that runs into burning buildings to save lives. Or, equally important, you may be a mother of four or five that tries to raise well-balanced children for the world to experience. The point is not what you do, but what your intention is in what you do. No one wants you to starve or deprive your loved ones of access to you so that you can stand on a soup-kitchen line. No matter what effort you put forth in the world toward enlightened being, it is only enlightened if it is balanced with care and regard for yourself. We have no use for a nation of martyrs. What we are creating [instead] is an endless army of energetic, compassionate warriors [who] understand how to use their gifts and skills to actualize and maintain a better world for themselves and for others. Awakening warriors understand that there are no enemies. Everyone belongs and has a right to happiness and living a life free of oppression and unnecessary suffering. We leave no one behind. Each of us goes forth in our own lives of enlightened being with the full and complete intention of bringing every single soul with us.” —Angel Kyodo Williams, emphasis added

We leave no one behind. We don’t even leave our nemeses and antagonists behind. I’ve noted before how Christian leaders and denominations opposed to the 20th Century movement’s purpose, timing, or persistence have still benefited from the 1964 Civil Rights Act that protected all religions’ rights to free expression and nondiscrimination. These leaders and denominations (including my own Adventist denomination) resisted the Civil Rights Movement but have spent the last 50 years taking refuge in the Civil Right Act’s Titles II and VII!

And that’s exactly what the activists these churches resisted were working for: that all would benefit. Some people may never help to bake the bread, but we bake more than enough anyway so that one day, should they wish to eat from the loaf, they will find food and a common table to eat at. When we do good for the world, we leave no one behind.

We don’t leave ourselves behind either. There are now thousands of resources on sustainable activism—change-making that doesn’t depend on the suffering of the activist. But the question of how to sustain oneself persists because our culture seems to take someone’s suffering for granted.

I love that Williams addresses this directly in her book, because, well, a new heaven and a new earth will be no good if we’re all too exhausted to enjoy it.

October 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

At the heart of community

Angel Kyodo Williams is a Zen Buddhist teacher who writes lucidly about the resources we have for staying grounded and gracious regardless of external circumstances. One of the resources she emphasizes in the book Being Black is community.

We have the power to choose not to let our beautiful diversity be a source of division amongst us. We have to see ourselves as having enormous strength because of the wealth of our resources. That wealth lies in our differences. We have so much to learn from each other based on our range of experiences. We can share our different perspectives as individuals to make the vision of the greater community wider and more inclusive. This naturally multiplies our possibilities.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

Community, more complex than unity, and definitely more than uniformity, is how Williams recognizes “those for whom we are responsible.” Being part of community is more than having an ideological tribe, and it’s more than the vehicle for peer control that some denominations use it as. Community is about shared experience and mutual responsibility, co-learning, and cooperative action.

This morning, two of my teachers shared their reflections on the power of human community and the wisdom of the collective. In her own reflection on community, Williams shares this quote from Martin Luther King, Jr:

No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the heart of community are those with whom we dream, those who share and nurture imagination with us.

We simply need to stay in relationships that are substantial enough to bear that wisdom, to allow us to share fluidly with each other, and to empower us to make from our wisdom a liveable world.