“Staying Firm”–Daily Metta

May 31:

“Worship or prayer is not to be performed with the lips but with the heart.”

–Gandhi (The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 78)

Worship, Gandhi might add, is not to be performed by the heart if it is not followed by the hands and feet, even if it means staying firm, being unmoved. And when it comes to this, I think of the courageous story that nonviolent activist Nirmala Deshpande told of women in the Gujarat state of India during the 1992 riots–a politically driven, bloody “divide and rule” scenario seeking to further destroy the ties between Hindus and Muslims.

When a “Hindu” mob came into the Gujarati village one hot afternoon the village women decided to hide Muslim families in their homes. Well, hide as much as you can when your home is one room. The mob, Deshpande recounted, came to the first door. “We think you’re hiding a Muslim in here and we want him out!” Angered, but not moved, a courageous village woman replied: “I am.” This startled them. But she didn’t stop there: “And if you want him out, you have to kill me first.” Now they really didn’t know what to do!

Guess what? They left.

Deshpande said that this woman’s story was not a one-off, either. It happened in house after house, in village after village.

As a note of caution to the rest of us, she began her talk in San Francisco where she recounted this amazing story with the simple words of wisdom, “Don’t believe everything you hear in the media.”

Experiment in Nonviolence:
Try to explain in your own words how such an act of courage could change the “mob psychology.”