Before we can move into a new ar-rangement, we must first
go through a period of de-rangement.
The opening words are from artist M.C. Richards. Poet, potter, mystic, who taught at the University of Creation Spirituality where Dr. Dorsey Blake was in leadership positions, as well as, on the faculty and I was a student. She was, in my mind, the embodiment of creativity…of curiosity in living. She understood and lived deeply the knowledge that it is our creativity that is our strength…our creativity that can bring us to wholeness…as persons, as a society, as a world.
Richards’ words seem to resonate with our current experience of life on Earth at this time. We are clearly in need of a new ar-rangement! And we are clearly experiencing a profound period of de-rangement! We are in need of new, creative solutions to profound challenges in our world. Yet, we seem to be intrinsically well-equipped to handle profound challenges in a creative way…with curiosity and reverence…with a deep appreciation for the possibilities of the current moment. I was once told that creativity is any act, the next step of which is unknown…a mystery.
Martin Luther King called this faith. He said, You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step. Of course, this is an ancient wisdom that we can also trace to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu who said, The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And history tells us that we are a creative species. When adversity loomed, we used our creative powers to survive. Brian Swimme relates the story of our ancestors who started out on this journey of a thousand miles after discovering fire over a million years ago. He describes the profound challenge of adapting to life when, after arriving in the more northern regions they were confronted with the ice age. Instead of just giving up, they put their imaginations to work finding creative ways to adapt to this new situation. They did not (at least some of them didn’t) succumb to the new arrangement around them. Of course, we know that this is only one example of the ability of humanity as a whole and especially oppressed segments of humanity to use their creativity to overcome hardship and trauma. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrestled with bringing this reality into the present when he spoke of creative maladjustment. In a speech at a gathering of the American Psychological Society in 1967, King said:
…it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.
He went on to use examples of creatively maladjusted individuals such as, the prophet Amos, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. Of course, we can add here Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, to name a few. King knew what they knew…that:
…there are some things in our society, some things in our world,
to which we should never be adjusted.
There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted
if we are to be people of good will.
We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation.
We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry.
We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.
We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism,
and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.
King had a lot of hope…he had a vision of a future where we internalized the truth that Richards spoke of. He concluded his consideration of this creative maladjustment in this way:
And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.
Wow, now that is hope! I think many of us are not there. We are not able to believe this is possible. I think this reality has something to teach us at this juncture (as MC talked about), this crossroads in time. She wrote:
I know of no trouble in life which does not stand as a counterpart to some positive capacity. Let us rejoice in our sufferings, knowing them to be symptoms of our potential health. Pain is a script, and as we learn to read it, we grow in self-knowledge.
Many of you know that I work as a psycho-therapist. I experience this de-rangement on both a personal and more societal or global level. I am confronted each day with reports of suffering so deep that I have to regularly find ways to prepare myself to work with people. Now, I am not saying that there is something wrong with people. Instead, it is that our society and world is facing a trauma so deep that it is affecting everyone, to some degree, even those who have traditionally held privilege. Richards is saying that this de-rangement is normal and natural. In her field of art, it is the chaos that is experienced before a work of art comes together. It is, I think, part of every creative process. The difficulty arises when, in an effort to avoid this chaos…this suffering, we suffer even more. Alice Walker knew about this. She wrote:
In blocking off what hurts us, we think we are walling ourselves off from pain. But in the long run, the wall, which prevents growth, hurts us more than the pain which, if we will only bear it, soon passes over us. Washes over us and is gone. Long will we remember pain, but the pain itself, as it was at the point of intensity that made us feel as if we must die of it, eventually vanishes. Our memory of it becomes only a trace. Walls remain. They grow moss. They are difficult barriers to cross, to get to others, to get to closed-down parts of ourselves.
This is a wonderful description of the healing process…of the process of de-rangement that must precede the ar-rangement and something that I personally struggle with on a daily basis. But, to be clear, if I am able to zoom out (or zoom in), I realize that I have lived a life filled with privilege and with very little suffering. Like most white people, I have not had to struggle to express myself in a society that devalues my humanity. I have been able to walk around in a society where, for the most part, I have belonged. This is something that King spoke about to the psychologists back in 1967. He said:
White America is seeking to keep the walls of segregation substantially intact while the evolution of society and the Negro's desperation is causing them to crumble. The white majority, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change, is resisting and producing chaos while complaining that if there were no chaos orderly change would come.
Well, the time of reckoning that Martin and Malcom foresaw is at hand…of course it is way overdue. Never before has the time been so ripe for change. It is imperative, then, that we understand this truth expressed by Alice Walker. We must not wall off our pain…we must experience it. This is not news to many spiritually and psychologically aware human beings…this is not news to those who have had to adapt to hardship…to a new or continuing ar-rangement. In this time of de-rangement, it is time to change, not only ourselves, but our “toxic” structures…those walls that we have built, upon which moss is growing.
May we unite in our moment in time…unite to embrace the hope of our transformation through our powers of creativity…as individuals and as a community in the felt presence of the compassionate embrace of that Great Mystery.
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