Down with that sort of thing
In a recent service at Cheltenham, Cressida invited the congregation to take to the streets and be heard on an issue that matters to us. It was a good message until it became apparent that she meant that we should do it immediately. TODAY. Inspiration turned to perspiration because this wasn’t Selma in 1965 or even the London anti-war marches of 2003. This was Cheltenham in 2015 and people might see.
In the course of the service we had explored that great idea of being the change you want to see in the world. Cressida’s point was that good deeds emerge not so much of their own volition but out of our ‘being.’ I thought of Martin Luther King and the non-violent philosophy through which demonstrators were not only supposed to submit to the violence of those who oppressed them, even when they were physically beaten, but confront evil with the power of love. Non-violence was not just about restraining your fists but training your mind and spirit in the ways of complete compassion. Being led to doing.
In Cheltenham, my being let me down pretty quickly. Cressida had produced a makeshift poster to campaign on behalf of migrants, following the terrible Mediterranean ship tragedy in which up to 900 people died. As we walked out of the church and into the street I worried not about getting the message across but whether the font size on my placard was big enough or whether passers-by would think we were barking mad. A few of us started talking about that Father Ted scene in which the two priests campaign outside a cinema with placards that read ‘down with that sort of thing’ and ‘careful now’. Would people think we were like them? Worse still, would we be regarded as a strange cult, bent on brainwashing the vulnerable? Would the latte-sippers of Cheltenham consider a street campaign vulgar and out of keeping with the character of the town (I’m not saying Cheltenham is posh but some refer to the local gym as James)?
Such concerns caused most of us to be pretty ineffectual street-campaigners. Ludicrously, our first move was to attempt to set up shop as far from any people as we could because we didn’t want to be a nuisance or get in the way of anyone’s day. Dorothy, our oldest member and a street protest veteran, was having none of it and insisted we move to the middle of the shops AND speak to people as they passed by. We stood sheepishly in a row, like freshly-coiffured teenagers terrified that a hair might be out of place even though for some of us that hair left the premises long ago.
“We need to talk to people,” said Dorothy so we started saying hello and some people ignored us, and a few said hello back and then look bewildered when we didn’t try to sell them anything. After a while, Dorothy started chanting, “Migrants matter! Migrants matter!” We joined in (still sheepishly) and I wondered if the message didn’t need to be unpacked a little more to be meaningful but I couldn’t see how that would work (which roughly translated means I felt a bit of a berk shouting the same two words over and over). Eventually, I made myself raise the volume a little. “Migrants matter!” I bellowed and someone shouted back “Do they?” and a thought went through my mind that you wouldn’t hear in Sunday School and which was hopelessly out of tune with the ways of complete compassion practiced by Martin Luther King and Gandhi before him.
After a few minutes we started to relax. At one point a young man stopped to talk to us about our cause and when he left he asked for a leaflet about the Unitarians because he thought we sounded like an interesting organisation. This was a far greater shock to us than we were to anyone who passed us in the street.
Our street experiment ended because Dorothy’s bus came and we still need her expertise to make us better at this sort of thing. Several weeks later I’m still thinking about the relationship between ‘being’ and ‘doing’ especially as experienced that day. Sometimes the people we know encourage us to do things we wouldn’t otherwise do and those shared activities can transform us, however gradually into better states of ‘being’. It’s not a one way street.
The plan is to take to the streets again, next time a little more removed from our embarrassment and a little more focused on the cause. Thousands of migrants are dehumanized, stripped of their dignity, exploited and condemned to injustice because they conveniently pass under the political radar. Shouldn’t I be prepared to risk a little of my dignity in support of theirs? And in the end, what is more dignified than to stand in solidarity with those who are oppressed?
I am reminded of the simple but profound words of Mother Pollard, a famous activist in the long and ultimately successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, a campaign in which the dignity of African Americans was such a central theme. “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”
Like her, may you be the change you want to see in the world and may your feet be tired and your soul rested.
For more on the Migrants Matter campaign go to:
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