At 8:30 this morning, more than 50 Charleston-area surfers held a memorial "paddle out" in honor of the nine killed at the city's Emanuel AME Church. A beautiful tradition usually held to honor fellow surfers, today's flower-bearing participants gathered in a floating circle beyond the breakers to remember people they had most likely never met.
It is yet another poignant example of just how little the person who took the lives of the Charleston Nine understood about our shared humanity. He hoped to incite and divide and he failed, spectacularly.
Such a simple gesture, a floating remembrance circle. But it speaks volumes and encapsulates exactly what Obama meant when he said that through an act of despicable evil, our country has been given "A roadway toward a better world."
Reverend Pinckney once said, "Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history -- we haven't always had a deep appreciation of each other's history." What is true in the South is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That my liberty depends on you being free, too. That history can't be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past -- how to break the cycle. A roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind -- but, more importantly, an open heart.
That's what I've felt this week -- an open heart. That, more than any particular policy or analysis, is what's called upon right now, I think -- what a friend of mine, the writer Marilyn Robinson, calls "that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things."
That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.