The Way of the Heart 1

Adversarial politics widens the Us-Them chasm. It keeps people entrenched and petrified in their individual beliefs and positions, it continues cycles of psychological and/or physical violence from one generation to the next. While conventional forms of political action might succeed in changing regimes, they usually do poorly at moving hearts on either side of the political divide; they fail, altogether, to have any impact on the hearts of the brutalizer and the brutalized. The vanquished bide their time until they can dominate their oppressors.

Brutality brutalizes both the 'brutalizee' (by causing him/her to suffer brutality) AND the brutalizer (by causing him/her to forget his/her own humanity.) The secret to ending brutality is located in the heart. In moving the heart. The enormous task that awaits humanity, then, is to find a radical way to remind people of their own humanity: how the harm I do my neighbor destroys me as a human being; how the perception that my neighbor is somehow less of a human being shrinks my own heart, making it less compassionate, more monstrous than it needs to be. My neighbor's survival is in his humanity, my redemption is in mine.

The way of the heart is to find a way to reach the hearts of those whose hearts have not completely calcified. The way of the heart is through gaps and openings that still exist in each one of us.

How can I even conceive of entering your heart if mine is still closed to me?

Into your heart through mine.

To find the quiet path that disappears inside my heart only to meander out of yours ... is to unravel everything.

Only then.
Only then.
Might the world change.
Might the hatred cease.
And love spring.