Tired and Brave

— Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Founder and Director

I love a good front porch story. I Imagine people in rocking chairs,  sitting on stoops, leaning on rails sharing a laugh or the serious stuff of life.  I love how that kind of story can capture a nugget of insight that becomes, in the telling, enduring light.

Activist, attorney and writer Bryan Stevenson often tells that kind of story, like the time Johnnie Carr invited him onto her porch with her friend Rosa Parks.  Carr and Parks were two of the driving forces behind the Montgomery Bus boycott, followed by decades of unstinting work for civil rights and justice. 

Stevenson was quite a bit younger than the women he called Miss Carr and Miss Parks, and was in the midst of founding the Equal Justice Initiative, at the time of the story he tells.  Stevenson says Johnnie Carr was clear that he’d been invited to listen, so he sat quietly while the two women spoke not of what they had accomplished in the past, but what they planned to get done in the future.

Then Rosa Parks turned to him to ask what he hoped to accomplish. Stevenson doesn’t say where he sat on that porch, but I imagine him on the top step, looking up earnestly at those two women, each slight of stature and huge in history, telling them his intentions to end the death penalty, advocate for people on death row,  challenge conditions of incarceration, and to help children, people who are poor, or who struggle with mental illness.

 “When I finished,” Stevenson says, “Miss Parks looked at me and said, ‘Mm-mm-mm. That’s going to make you tired, tired, tired.’ Then Miss Carr leaned forward, and said, ‘That’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave.’ ”

There it is -- a story transforming to light.

It is hard, very hard, to know what to do, let alone go ahead and try, in the face of unimaginable, relentless violence, destruction and disregard for humanity. Those three people on that front porch did it anyway.

Truly beholding the ills of the world can easily lead to despair, but really it calls for courage, the kind Stevenson says must “acknowledge the wrongfulness of those things, so that we can then embrace what’s right, what’s corrective, what’s redemptive, what’s restorative.”

Before courage, though, comes necessary grief at unconscionable loss of life and unthinkable loss of compassion. After grief comes anger, even rage. Next to anger lives fear, and fear doesn’t stand down easily.

I have been feeling all of these things – grief, rage, and fear. I am of course not alone, and I’m sharply aware that many of those who embody the reasons I’m sad, mad and fearful feel the same way about me.

All of that can stop me in my tracks, but it doesn’t have to.  If I sit compassionately with my grief, rage and fear, if I let them move through me rather than stop me or drive me to acts that inflame others’ fears -- If I can do that, then I can move on to courage.

Without doubt, these are scary, sad times, but throughout the course of history human beings have conjured courage from fear, rage and grief and have persisted beyond exhaustion.

In those acts of persistence, in acts of courage both small and tremendous, human beings have also found hope.  Bryan Stevenson calls hope a superpower, and I agree.  Hope makes way for new ideas; new ideas make way for new paths to peace and liberation. 

I am afraid for myself and mostly for others in this time of so much unconscionable inhumanity.  And I am safe in my home, have plenty to eat, am well. I’m surrounded by loving colleagues, friends and family.  Still, I get tired. Most certainly, I am called to be brave.

So I pull myself up and do what I can.  In so doing, hope returns; courage strengthens.

Like an endless river of something like light, the human capacity for hope and courage endures. It has always driven liberating change. I’m convinced that it always will.

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 Learn about the Equal Justice Initiative here.