Mystic activist: what is that?

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So I started a study of social
faith based social justice activists

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and over many years
I looked at their lives,

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read their autobiographies,

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read the biographies written
about them, and their writings

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and was trying to see what
kind of connection there was

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between their faith on one hand
and their activism on the other.

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And what I began to discover
was that these activists

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that I was studying survived
the work of activism

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because they had a reservoir
of faith to pull from.

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And I began to also try to think
of how do I talk about them.

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And I found this beautiful phrase,

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mystic activists,

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which comes from a description
of the mystic Howard Thurman

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who was one of Martin
Luther King's mentors.

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But I looked at
rather than a mystic

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who is becoming an activist,
I looked at activists

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who reached into mysticism
to help them survive,

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give them vision in their work.

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And what I found, whatever
faith tradition I looked at,

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there was these similarities in
the way they lived their faith.

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And I just found
that quite amazing.

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All three of these activists
and most of the activists

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that I looked at come out of
traditions that have sacred texts

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whether it be the Bible, the Qur'an,
the Bhagavad Gita, etc.

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In these texts is one of
the interesting things

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as you kind of look at text
side by side, they all had

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passages of Scripture that called
them to the work of justice.

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And that helped these
activists have a vision

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for how they moved forward.

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So not only was their religious faith

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something that sustained them,

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it also directed them
in this work of justice.

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And often, and if I can bring
Gandhi in for a moment,

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Gandhi was quite a student of texts of

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all the different world religions
and he was nurtured by that.

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Malcolm X as well was
familiar with the Bible

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and Bonhoeffer was pretty
much within the Jewish

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Christian tradition.

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But the Sermon on the mount
was the motivator for him

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and again the Sermon on
the mount is another one

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that you see kind of floating
across traditions.

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Gandhi particularly was captured
by the Sermon on the Mount.