You can listen to this week’s Devotional here
Be the Light
Author: Nicole Speer
The wound is the place where the Light enters. ~Rumi
He heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds. ~ Psalm 147:3
The first time I heard this famous quote from the Persian poet, Rumi, was toward the end of 2018, watching Ava Duvernay’s movie adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wrinkle in Time. Setting aside the enormous gaps in the Americaan education system, that after 23 years of education I wasn’t familiar with one of the most important poets in Persian history, it brought me to tears.
2018 had been a hard year.
Our government stole 5,000 migrant children from their families. A gunman killed 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered by the Saudi government after being critical of their authoritarian policies. A new judge was appointed to the Supreme Court despite lacking qualifications, and numerous accusations of rape and sexual assault. The town of Paradise was 95% destroyed by the deadliest wildfire in California’s history.
We were so wounded, as a country, as a society, as a world. The idea that something good might enter the space left by our brokenness gave me hope.
Last week when I heard about the third death in our city in the span of 24 hours, my mind returned to Mindy Kaling’s Mrs. Who character saying, “The wound is the place where the Light enters.” I once again wept as I took in the breaks in our social structures that cause so much suffering and death.
This time, hope was harder to find. Just down the road in Aurora, police violence left another Black mother waking up to a world without her son. Trans families in Florida were fleeing their homes and communities because of anti-LGBTQ laws. Massive wildfires were creating unbreathable air in the Northeast. I just felt broken.
And then another voice emerged from my memory. Our former Associate Minister, Pedro Silva, preaching to us about Dr. King’s teachings on “maladjustment:”
…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.
The actions of a few and the inaction of many more leave our world so broken. But our faith, and Rumi, teach us that seeing our brokenness is the beginning, not the end.
Rev. Caldwell’s Pride Sunday sermon and Dr. King’s lecture on maladjustment remind us that it is never the people who are comfortable and safe in the status quo who move us closer to the Beloved Community. It is the people who see our brokenness, courageously embrace the heartache and discomfort, and bring their Light to the work of putting the pieces back together with more love, more justice, and more compassion.
Thank you to all the maladjusted people in our church community who continually organize us and use your time, money, and resources to show up in support of groups that are trying to make our communities and our planet whole, like the NAACP, 350 Colorado, Out Boulder County, and Moms Demand Action. I see your Light entering our community’s wounds, and I am grateful for it.
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. ~Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
May it be so. Amen.
