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Mystic activist: what is that?

From Curtiss Paul Deyoung

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So I started a study of social faith based social justice activists and over many years I looked at their lives, read their autobiographies, read the biographies written about them, and their writings and was trying to see what kind of connection there was between their faith on one hand and their activism on the other. And what I began to discover was that these activists that I was studying survived the work of activism because they had a reservoir of faith to pull from. And I began to also try to think of how do I talk about them. And I found this beautiful phrase, mystic activists, which comes from a description of the mystic Howard Thurman who was one of Martin Luther King's mentors. But I looked at rather than a mystic who is becoming an activist, I looked at activists who reached into mysticism to help them survive, give them vision in their work. And what I found, whatever faith tradition I looked at, there was these similarities in the way they lived their faith. And I just found that quite amazing. All three of these activists and most of the activists that I looked at come out of traditions that have sacred texts whether it be the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, etc. In these texts is one of the interesting things as you kind of look at text side by side, they all had passages of Scripture that called them to the work of justice. And that helped these activists have a vision for how they moved forward. So not only was their religious faith something that sustained them, it also directed them in this work of justice. And often, and if I can bring Gandhi in for a moment, Gandhi was quite a student of texts of all the different world religions and he was nurtured by that. Malcolm X as well was familiar with the Bible and Bonhoeffer was pretty much within the Jewish Christian tradition. But the Sermon on the mount was the motivator for him and again the Sermon on the mount is another one that you see kind of floating across traditions. Gandhi particularly was captured by the Sermon on the Mount.

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