This week’s podcast comes from a live recording studio in Atlanta, GA! (Wink, wink!) Holly is on the road, which is fitting for the story we will reference this Sunday about Saul’s conversion on his way to Damascus in which he is blinded, rendered silent, and descended into nothingness. Coupled with a poem in the Meister Eckhart Book of Secrets about seeing “the nothing that was God” we are inspired to embrace the paradox of looking for everything in the nothingness.
Saul’s story is also an inquiry into our own “blindness,” what it is that we need to learn to see, which is most often something about our interiority, our True Self. As we travel this road, our own blindspots are revealed. A conversion moment is around every corner, in big and small ways. Every decision made impacts the journey, both for ourselves and future generations.
Today I walked a road filled with ghosts of our past with my sons, a road from the lapping shores of the Alabama River to Market Square down Commerce Street. Where a fountain stands today once stood an auction block that showcased, separated, and sold human beings during the height of the domestic slave trade. Many of the buildings, including the hotel we are staying in, reveal bricks worn with layers of paint, edged with moss and water stains in places. They once warehoused enslaved people alongside cattle before and after they were sold. The mind plays tricks on you here. In the silent “nothingness” you can almost hear the shouting, the wails, the cries that surely must have filled these streets. If you allow it, it is an exercise in activating the imagination. Where might I have stood, who might I have been in 1821 Montgomery, Alabama, a city known for its stronghold in the slave trade as well as for birthing the Civil Rights Movement?
To drop you in the scene on the way to Damascus is part of what we hope to do on Sunday. Every single one of us has an aspect of Saul and an aspect of Paul within. In this one person the whole of human history is revealed: we are capable of such tender wisdom and beauty as well as such horror and brutality. Which aspect will shape our future?
Thanks for joining us on the road.
Brick wall of a former warehouse that held enslaved people, now home of the Equal Justice Initiative