A few weeks ago there was divinity in my inbox, in my Daily Om. The title was ‘The Heart of Unknowing.” I was in. The topic was a little different than what I expected, though: it was the question of who we are.
In one Hindu tradition, I learned, repeating the question “Who am I?” can act like a mantra, leading us “inevitably into the heart of the divine.” Divinity was then officially on my mind.
Then a few days ago I heard Cory Booker speaking on the Commonwealth Club– yes, as usual in the car, on the radio. Listen here. This is part of his book tour for United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing.
I have been a fan of Booker since our Jersey days, he is a politician who really, truly seems to walk the walk. He comes from a privileged background: he grew up in Jersey (his parents were among the first black executives at IBM), played football at Stanford, Rhodes scholar, Yale Law, golden.
He was on a path of serial graduate degrees when a conversation with his mother hit reset. Like most twenty-somethings he didn’t like her queries about his future and had sort of flipped her off, saying he’d figure it out, he just wanted to serve others. She asked him to first define, are you acting out of fear, or out of faith?
Then, what would you do if you knew you could not fail? Why not live your life that way?
Booker went to Newark and got elected councilman, then mayor, living in the projects. The projects in Newark, bad. Serious mojo. He now is the junior U.S. Senator from New Jersey.
But when he showed up, a hotshot Yale Law grad thinking he was there to save Newark from itself, he was taught a few lessons, many by a longtime resident leader, five-foot tall Virginia Jones. Her own son was murdered in the lobby of one of the projects; she did not leave.
She was ready to dismiss Booker when he showed up all cocky on her doorstep, and failed her first test: She took him to the middle of Martin Luther King Bd. and told him to describe what he saw. Dilapidation. Crack houses. Graffiti. She began to walk away. You can’t help me, she told him. Boy, don’t you know, the world you see outside of you, is a reflection of what’s inside you. He stayed, humbler, and worked for her.
This is a woman, he says, who was the personification of love, and with eyes wide open saw the divinity in all.
Outtakes. Hope is a response to despair, it does not exist in a vacuum. Outside of any religious context, the power, in the darkest moments, of the words stay faithful. And a lesson from his father, the huge aggregate power of small acts of kindness and love.
He speaks of how he has experienced grace, how it is not earned, it is given, despite ourselves; it is an aspect of pure love. Moments of grace in the most broken moments in the most broken people in the most broken places.
And that it’s not tolerance we need to cultivate in this country– that’s a cynical or lazy form of being for Booker, that rather we should move on, aspire to, cultivate, love.
Listen if you can, while you’re driving, while you’re choring. In this crazy election cycle we are in, these words, these ideas are like a long cool drink of water in the desert. Love, grace, the divinity within; radical.