I'll Hold You in the Light

Our quantum entanglement offers possibility during this racial emergency.

George Floyd was my son.
Breonna Taylor was my daughter.
Ahmaud Arbery (2020).
Philando Castile (2016).
Sandra Bland (2015).
Tamir Rice (2014).
Eric Garner (2014).
Michael Brown (2014).

They were my children.

I’ll Hold You in the Light, point of power within one power, Christian Wiman, Kit Holmes

With all the passion of the mother I am, I suffer along with our human family a devastating anguish over their avoidable and unjust deaths. Friends say to me, “This must hit close to home.”

It does.

I am a white woman 41 years married to a Black man. We raised two children, now adults, and felt the thrill of our first grandbaby born early in 2020.

Rev. Linda Martella-Whitsett, quantum entanglement, point of power within one power, Christian Wiman

I am aware of my privilege, and I have known all along that I could not experience life in their skin. I could never see what they see.

Moving Beyond Our Shared Exhaustion

I have learned to be their witness and feel their feelings each time they sensed the presence of security guards following them through the grocery store. They were asked, “What are you doing here?” when seated on a park bench or on the elevator at my workplace when my husband Giles was meeting me for lunch.

I remember the time a police officer, seeing Giles get out of his minivan in a store parking lot, called for three backup police cars just to tell Giles his car registration was overdue.

When I hear people say they are tired of talking about violence against Blacks, I think: My family and I are tired of experiencing it.

The millions of microaggressions against my husband and children, and millions more experienced by our sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, build pressure and utterly exhaust us.

When I hear people say they are tired of talking about violence against Blacks, I think: My family and I are tired of experiencing it. For my family, and a host of others who have not been physically harmed, we live with unseen scars that bleed out sideways as an overreaction here or a self-destructive compulsion there.

The millions of aggressions dealt to millions of humans are becoming visible, witnessed on torturous video broadcast on media channels everywhere. What was emerging, slowly becoming apparent throughout the past century, has now become an emergency.

You Are Already Part of the Conversation

An emergency offers a fresh point of possibility. Something else wants to emerge, a new day wants to be born.

David Brooks of the New York Times wrote in a 2014 column about quantum entanglement and relativity, theories revealing our interconnectedness. He quoted poet Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss):

If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication …

The Unity message has promoted our interconnectedness since its beginning.

We are one. Therefore, we affect one another. Therefore, we feel one another’s feelings and sense one another’s presence. We are a point of power within one power.

What message will we broadcast? What kind of presence will we be? How will we foster the emergence of a lived unity and a world where the excluded become embraced as our own?

Throughout the past few days—and in moments of wakefulness during the night—the inspired message of singer/songwriter Kit Holmes, a Centers for Spiritual Living practitioner and friend, provides an essential refrain:

I’m gonna hold you in the light, hold you in the light.

Hold you ’til you know again that everything’s all right.

And I’ll remind you as you are you are enough.

I’m gonna hold you in the light of love.

I sing this song to our children who have died by violence: “I’m gonna hold you in the light of love.”

I’m gonna be the champion of your awakening spirit.

I’m gonna lift you into the light of love, the magnificent power of harmony and unity.

I’m gonna flood your spirit with the light of divine love so that you see now what you couldn’t see when running scared on earth—your worth.

Your value. Your magnificence.

And while I’m at it, I’m gonna sing this song to my own sore spirit, that I rise in hopefulness to be a living representation of the light of love.