Asking “Is America Possible?” in a Sacred Space 

Members of the King & Breaking Silence team joined other Elders and Youngers in an emotion-filled Easter weekend of creative conversation, networking, and community building. The site was New York’s historic Riverside Church where Dr. King delivered his revolutionary “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” address 59 years ago–on April 4, 1967. In a series of linked events organized by Aljosie Aldrich Harding and Rev. Lucas Johnson of the “On Being” team, this year’s anniversary of King’s speech became the ideal occasion to honor and explore the legacy of the remarkable man who drafted most of that speech and who first posed the question “Is America Possible?”–Dr. Vincent Harding, known to many who were present this past weekend as “Uncle Vincent.”

Without exception, participants felt that what made it all sacred was not our presence in the church so much as that we sanctified space by our willing to have honest and deep conversations about an extremely personal and difficult challenge: the need to be the change, to be the revolutionary love that King and Harding and James Lawson and Dorothy Cotton and Bernice Reagon and so many others whom we revere called us to be. Serena Bian, the Younger thinker and organizer who is co-hosting the NCOE/KBS Begin Again project–and who facilitated an especially rich intergenerational gathering for KBS on the morning of April 4 — framed our challenge this way: “It’s about how we need to be, not just what we need to do. We need to be asking what kind of repair is necessary in order to make a different America possible–and what we need to repair deep in ourselves in order for that transformation to happen.”

This approach to change–doing the inner work in order to do the outer work effectively–grows out of the recognition widely shared within the Council of Elders that the culture of violence is insidious and parasitic–that, in the words of Elder Kathy Sanchez, it eats away at our souls: even the souls of those who are deeply committed to revolutionary struggle. We cannot be healers without reckoning with the extent of our wounding.

The King & Breaking Silence team will be weaving filmed excerpts from Easter weekend’s events into the second webinar in the Begin Again series, now scheduled for Tuesday, April 28. Mark your calendars, as we connect across the nation to discuss the most urgent questions: not only whether America possible but where new possibility is emerging now–and how are people showing up differently to create that possibility.

– Peter Laarman