9. A Graceful Heart: John Lewis and the Power of Soul-Force

Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

In a time of cruelty and lies, when the heart can so easily turn toward outrage or despair, what can we learn from John Lewis and what he called “the graceful heart”? How did he and the other civil rights workers find the strength to “hold no malice” toward those who inflicted harm? This week we dig deeper into nonviolence, beyond its connotations of absence of violence. We follow the civil rights pioneers as they practiced cultivating compassionate hearts, inspired by Gandhi and his idea of satyagraha, or “truth-force.” And we explore the power behind what John Lewis called “soul-force,” the power—of imagination, of persistence, of decisive action—that is unleashed by digging deep to find the wellsprings of love.

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