Coffee with Chuck

Song: A Love Supreme, PT. III- Pursuance (1965)

Artist: John Coltrane

Album: A Love Supreme

Thoughts: “Love is an action. Never simply a feeling” (bell hooks). Yesterday, I was boarding a flight to head back to Pullman from Seattle. As I was boarding I looked at Twitter and I saw the news of Monterey Park. My heart broke. How could this happen again? Why does it keep happening? Why does this senseless and racist violence continue? Man, can it just stop? How do we move forward? How do we stop this shit? To these questions, I am not gonna sit here and say I have the answers. Nor do I believe anyone has the capacity to answer all these questions fully. There is no explaining such evilness. This behavior is truly devilish and the foulest practice against any sort of a social contract. Acts like this give me little faith in humanity. So what do we do? Now, I am a man of love, but I ain’t talking about loving your enemy, and turning the other cheek. I am off that because there is no sense in loving someone who does not see your humanity. Who do we love then? We love ourselves because when we love ourselves I find it easier to love the world. We also must love those who have been disenfranchised of love. And right now I am extending my love to the victims, their families, and the community of Monterey Park. Love is not just a hollow or merely a feeling, but it is an intentional act. Love is the way you move through the world. When I think about love I think about this song. Pursuance means carrying out a plan. John Coltrane enacted love to the world with just his breath. We have to be instruments of love.

“O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.”