CxD Thanksgiving Special🥧: The Most Important Book of the Year

I finished reading a book that, with its ceaseless inquiries into harmful systems, cost me the length of a full pencil with all the underlining I was doing. It kept me up at night, thinking, doubting, and revising what I thought I knew.

On the surface it is about Covid and vaccination policies and the political warfare we’ve been fighting for three years; but it’s really about the ways we get so inextricably caught in our own views and then dehumanize others with contempt in the name of the Holy that we’ve been conditioned to stop questioning. It’s about the messiness of being human and how we can do so much better if we could only pause, reflect, create some space and think ecologically, holistically, in communion and coherence rather than out of certainty and arrogance.

As an antidote to our crises of mind, its pages include a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, urging us to remember:

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

It is the wisest of books and heretical. Perhaps no small part of its wisdom source is the heresey? A professor I had in graduate school gifted me a book titled The Heretical Imperative so here we are, at long last.

Most people can’t handle that which doesn’t conform with their established fixed views because the pain of saying “I don’t know” or “I was wrong” is one of the most unbearable forms of pain humans have the privilege of suffering. And yet, to not ask the deep questions in the face of harm is even more unbearable, if we take a view that goes beyond, say, the next day.

If you’re curious about the author, I think he has one of the most thoughtful “about” pages I’ve encountered.

I hope you all are brave enough to read this book—there is much to discuss in response.

Surrender does not mean capitulation to the other side. It is to stop seeing in terms of sides and framing issues in terms of who wins. It is to serve truth rather than victory. The lie behind judgment is “If I were you in the totality of your situation, I would have done differently.” Do you ever really know that though? Or is that judgment based on a lie to yourself about what you think you know?

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Peter Yang @petergyang

👏👏👏 to whoever made this lol