I saw the movie Gandhi when it first came out. It is still my favorite movie all these decades later because it changed my life. I saw it in a Chicago theater on a very busy crowded street. I remember when I stumbled out of the dark theater and the meditatively paced 3 hour movie, feeling overwhelmed and bombarded by the cacophony of traffic noises and neon flashing lights and commercial advertising.
Raised Quaker I had of course always been raised to admire Gandhi as a powerful non-violent activist who had freed his whole country through non-violent resistance. But I did not at that point know very many details of his life or his struggle. It certainly also helped to have the beauty of India on a gigantic screen to make his life seem very three dimensional to me. I felt a deep peacefulness as I watched the movie. The same peacefulness I experienced if I was in a Gathered Meeting for worship.
But what I was really struck by first was how the campaigns that he lead against the British had so much moral power. Since the movie is long I had time to reflect on how it was that he picked just the right thing, how he made hard choices to fast or to risk arrest or assault? Slowly it dawned on me as scene after scene showed him in meditation, or prayer, or spinning prayer, that he was not "figuring it out", that he was listening to God and he was as Quakers believe, receiving answers.
As I walked down that raucous street afterwards, Gandhi taught me something about being Quaker. I was in my earlier 20's. Until that time going to Meeting was something which I did on Sunday. It was almost like God lived there in the Meeting house and I went to visit, and then went home for the rest of the week and lived the rest of my life. It suddenly dawned on me as I reflected on the movie that there was this possibility to live my life from that deep centered place from whence the direction of the Divine came from. I was awe struck by the Majesty and Possibility that was there if one lived ones whole life, every minute in faithfulness - not just Sundays. I immediately decided that that was the life I really wanted.
I wish I could say that I have in fact successfully done that. But of course few of us are Gandhi or Mother Theresa. However, it has never left me that that is in fact my goal and my horizon line and I think that changed my whole life. I will often become aware that it has been a long time since I stopped to really hear God's voice or to center, and then I am pulled back to that effort because I do know it is the only true North on the compass.
When I had my daughter, I for practical reasons, took an almost 15 year break from activism...but as I started to wade back into it I simply began to do the activism that I had been taught before Gandhi. The kind where you think of strategies and implement them. Where you make allies and work with them. And sadly where you enumerate the reasons to be angry with your "opponent" and act on those. However, a series of events cast me out of that way of doing things and reminded me that there is another way of doing things that involves being faithful in our quest for justice and following that Inner Compass for direction and that is what I am trying to do now. I think it is a closer walk with Gandhi.
