Another Glimpse of Interbeing

Have you ever had one of those moments when your linear sense of time as past, present and future collapses into one? 

I have.

Similar to the new television show on NBC called “This Is Us” in which the past is seamlessly moving in and out of the present (or maybe it is the future that is seamlessly moving in and out of the present?), I have these moments in which time feels more fluid than fixed, more dynamic than static, more cyclical than linear.

The beauty and mystery of which can be an intersecting mosaic of causes and conditions that is constantly shuffling--and then reshuffling again—of what we know to be “true.”

Lately, I’m wondering if this experience is another glimpse of Interbeing, a term coined by Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh regarding the exquisitely interdependent nature of all phenomena.

Like this past Sunday for example.

It was the day before Martin Luther King Day (which in the United States is celebrated on the 3^rd Monday of January every year), and I was at church with my 7 year-old son.

In the service, the ministers reminded our Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregation about a moment in history in which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke at a Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in Hollywood, Florida.

The year was 1966, two years before Dr. King’s assassination, and the already famous Reverend and Civil Rights Leader was invited to speak at the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists. 

The title of his speech was: Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution.

He framed the talk around a little known fact about the story of Rip Van Winkle.

For those of you who don’t know, Rip Van Winkle is a character in a story of same name, and in the story the character sleeps for twenty years.

However, the fact that Dr. King drew out to his undoubtedly primarily white UU audience, was that ol’ Rip slept through the entire American Revolution.  Yup, he missed the whole thing! 

Dr. King then drew the parallel possibility that the UU church might “sleep” through the entire Civil Rights revolution; of course to which he offered the alternative solution that the UU church “wake up” and participate in the revolution instead.

He said:

One of the great misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.

He then added:

Victor Hugo once said that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. The idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity, and so all over the world we see something of freedom explosion, and this reveals to us that we are in the midst of revolutionary times. An older order is passing away and a new order is coming into being.

Now I ask you, my dear sister or brother who is reading these words 51 years later, is Dr. King’s message any less relevant today than it was over half a century ago? Is it any less urgent than Mahatma Ghandi’s Indian Independence movement some 87 years ago upon which Dr. King modeled his non-violent liberation methodology?

When we find ourselves in a moment in history in which dozens of Congress men and women are boycotting the U.S. Presidential Inauguration on Friday and over 200,000 protesters are expected to rally on Saturday in the Women’s March on Washington with the mission statement:

We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us,

one cannot but marvel at the truth of Dr. King’s moral vision for our world which he also stated in that 1966 speech:

we will 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.

Sitting there in the pew last Sunday, with my arm wrapped around my next generation son, listening to this story of intersection between my UU faith and Dr. King on the eve of a historical transition of political power, I felt a deep sense of kinship with Dr. King’s message of “waking up” that felt nearly palpable.  And for me, time collapsed into one.

I think the reality of interbeing, is what allows for awareness of such moments.

In the same speech delivered to the UUA General Assembly, Dr. King commented on this very topic:

All I'm saying is this: that all life is inter-related, and somehow we are all tied together. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality…This realization is absolutely necessary if we are to remain awake in this revolution.

Hearing this message again in 2017, I can’t help but wonder: could this profound truth actually be transcendent of time itself creating further evidence for the need to not just accept but rather embrace interbeing? 

I believe so.

If we can allow past, present and future to collapse into one by internalizing this seed of inter-being that was planted (again) some 51 years ago on a spring day in 1966, while we swear in the 45^th President of the United States, what would that mean for our intricately interdependent state of union?

Think about it.

I will.