Reflect

The late U.S. Congressman John Lewis talked about the Civil Rights Movement as a work of love, as love in action. He reminded us that love is the essential ground on which care for the collective good and positive social change can flourish. We’re not talking here about a sentimental kind of love, but a love, as Maya Angelou writes, “that heals and liberates.” Outrage about ongoing forms of oppression and violence yields justifiable and even necessary anger, but Congressman Lewis’s words — and the way he lived his life — are profound reminders that we can choose to act on that anger from a place of love or from a place of hatred. In our private conversations and around our dinner tables, in our work places and in the public sphere, in our language and our behavior, love in action holds a kind of promise and possibility that hatred in action can never deliver. Acting from love is, in and of itself, an act of resistance in a fractured world.