Love and Justice Will Bridge the Breach:
A Proclamation of the Body and Spirit
We in California and this country are in the fight of our lives. We are traveling through a harrowing time full of uncertainty, fear and pain. Blood and tears are being shed over the questions: “Who matters?” “Who belongs?” “How shall we live?” Therefore, we intentionally, methodically, and collaboratively build power, with love, from family to family, from church to mosque to synagogue, from city to city, from county to county and from State to State. We will act relationally and deliberately, be animated by our sacred traditions, and elevate the leadership of women and people of color in order to breathe new life into California and this nation.
We are people of faith, guided by a shared moral narrative that breathes life and love into our very bones, compelling us to embrace the radical hope of what can become. The Divine, God, Creator, the Source of Life, the All Merciful, the Breath of Creation who goes by many names, calls us to be courageously compassionate, guardians of the profound worth of every human, and stewards of the earth’s precious resources. We are in the midst of a generational and powerful social upheaval.
Reckoning and Repairing
This is a time of reckoning when the chains of injustice that shackle people rattle in the light of day—racial injustice, police violence, economic disparity, the lack of decent health care for all, and segregated and under-resourced schools. This system, which is rooted in the same white supremacist ideology that brutalizes, incarcerates, and murders our Black and Brown family members, weaponizes that same ideology to lock children in cages, tear apart and deport immigrant families, ignore oppressed Asian-and-Pacific Islander Americans, erase Native people and their lands, and inflame anti-Blackness, anti-Semitism, anti-LGBTQ+, Islamophobia, and seeks to turn us against one another to protect the power and wealth of a few.
We are compelled by the Spirit of God to rebuke, repent, and make reparations for past violence against Native and Black communities. Their wisdom and their bodies were the life force of our nation’s founding wealth. Their dignity subjugated with unrelenting violence and corrupt theologies. That violence is in the blood of all Americans, none are spared, and in that sense we are all diminished, deprived by our collective complicity from becoming our fullest and most holy selves. We do not fear the truth, only the hiding of the truth. We seek to encounter this pain with true curiosity, to reveal what has been ignored and covered over, and acknowledge the devastation wrought by subjugation to Native and Black communities for centuries. Only through repair and reparation will healing occur.
COVID-19 has brought into sharp relief that we share one breath. The pandemic has revealed to ALL that we can only breathe freely if we ALL breathe freely. Once again, we are awakening to the truth that our lives depend on one another. We are guided by a narrative of inter-dependency and connectedness that speaks to the dream of a new social and economic order based on radical love and a hope that transforms us and our society for future generations.
Sacred Roots
Our sacred scriptures and oral traditions tell us stories of creation and freedom, liberation and love. We stand on holy ground, we come from sacred lands, and we live in the memory of generations of ancestors. This sacred history is a story full of hope and promise. California itself has often been seen as a kind of ‘promised land’, a land of opportunity and dreams, a land of creativity and abundance. But sacred stories are sacred because they are rooted in truth. And the truth is that the promise of California has not been fulfilled; we are not yet a state of belonging. Generation after generation have found the promises broken and dreams deferred. We commit ourselves to writing the next chapter of this story grounded in the truth: the truth of our history, the truth of our hope. The truth of our loving into being the land our Creator wants for us all.
Fuel is Love
Our calling in this chapter of the American narrative is clear: assert a bold vision for California and a country that reckons with its past, reconciles and erases the gap between the richest and the poorest, and elevates the dignity of our most vulnerable siblings to ensure they share in the beauty of what is the best of the American dream; a dream in need of being re-imagined, re-articulated, and re-applied to include all those who reside on this holy ground. We believe, along with our beloved late congressman John Lewis, that we have a spiritual destiny as a nation. Politics and legislation are a means to a spiritual end, and that end is the building of the beloved community.
We will vote out of a deep love for our neighbors and their well-being. We must vote for a fundamental restructuring of how public safety works to save Black and Brown lives. We must vote for a repurposing of public funds into housing, education, health, and family-sustaining jobs. We must vote for a new immigration system that welcomes, protects, and promotes our migrant and refugee siblings. We must vote for the protection of essential workers.
We are determined, driven by our love and our hunger for a different world, to build enough power to remove the knee of white supremacy resting on the neck of our Black and Brown family members, as it corrupts the conscience and souls of those who seek to identify as white. We will keep marching, keep showing up, to build the kind of liberating power that can free, once and for all, the crushing knee on the neck of Black people in this country. It is a knee that, despite the cries for breath and life, will not release its pressure. We commit ourselves to the sacred act of emancipation, which demands that we build more power to unify across differences, to be peaceful and non-violent, and to work tirelessly to dismantle the systems that deal only death and destruction.
The knee on the neck of our Black siblings won’t let us breathe until we can breathe together. We cannot be fully free until anti-black racism and all forms of exclusion are removed from every vestige of society. We cannot be fully free until everyone has the agency of self-determination and live free from the fear of being harmed because of the melanin in their skin.
Urgency of Now
We see this moment as one for us to seize the fierce urgency of now, to reimagine and build anew, to build and build and build, through the darkness, as an act of faith and hope that California can lead the country in becoming, in the words of James Baldwin, a more human dwelling place.
We have the opportunity to leverage this moment to open more hearts and widen the circle of human concern. We can vote for Schools & Communities First. We can vote to dismantle mass incarceration.
Together we can take big steps in the direction of eradicating white supremacy so that our communities, and our world, become more human dwelling places. We do this because we see a nation which possesses the spiritual abundance to acknowledge and confess our racist history, and to repair that history with a narrative of a new American dream accessible to all – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and, dignity for all.
This piece is the result of a collective project of statewide faith leaders and tribal elders from California.