Fasting as Soul Force
The Rev. Noelle Damico, Associate for Fair Food, Presbyterian Hunger Program
Scripture
“’Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ And the second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31).
Reflection
Since 2007, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has invited the leaders of Publix to sit down at the table with them and negotiate a fair food agreement. Through letters, phone calls, post cards, emails, petitions, marches, rallies and prayers, CIW and its allies (especially churches) have laid out the conditions in the fields, the power of a collective model to address these conditions, and the broad-based support for the Fair Food Program.
Publix has refused to meet with the CIW. The company has refused to dialogue with them. After years of this refusal and the public statements that Publix has made, the farmworkers determined that they would undertake a fast. Together with their allies, they wanted to demonstrate the urgent moral call for Publix to put its support behind the dramatic improvements in human rights and social responsibility that have been growing through the Fair Food Program.
In choosing a fast, the farmworkers reached for what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “soul force;” that non-violent power of love that is able to face injustice and violence squarely in the face and through sacrifice and hope, overcome it. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King captures why farmworkers and their allies have chosen such a nonviolent direct action. Here Dr. King explains the direct action of the civil rights movement in Birmingham to white pastors with concerns.
You may well ask: ‘Why direct action?’ Why sits, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path? You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue so that it can no longer be ignored…
Nonviolent action brings to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured…
Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes from the tireless efforts of men [sic.] willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes and ally in the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.
For generations there was a “negative peace” in the fields of Florida; where farmworkers, though grievously exploited, did not lift their voice in protest. For generations men and women and children bore this pain, violence and abuse alone. But in the early 1990s men and women gathered together to form the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and work as one community to bring about necessary changes. It took speaking with one another and with consumers outside of Immokalee. It took marching, fasting, rallies and yes, negotiations. For these conditions were not going to just pass away on their own. To confront and transform them requires a positive force, a soul force as Dr. King describes it, of justice, peace and kinship. Through these efforts was born the Fair Food Program, a collaborative effort between farmworkers, growers and corporations that is ending abuses and creating a new day in Florida agriculture.
Through this fast, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and allies from the faith, student and sustainable food communities, renew their invitation to Publix to come and sit at the table with the CIW, to come and be part of that new day in Florida agriculture, to come and bring its experience and knowledge and enormous resources to repair what is broken, to lift up what has been trod down, and to ensure the human rights of the men and women who harvest its tomatoes.
Question for reflection
How have you seen soul force transform situations of intransigence into opportunities for understanding?
Prayer (The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol6/5July-6Sept1953Prayers.pdf )
Our loving Father, from Thy hand have come all the days of the past. To thee we look for whatever good the future holds. We are not satisfied with the world as we have found it. It is too little the Kingdom of God as yet. Grant us the priviledge of a part in its regeneration. We are looking for a new earth, in which dwells righteousness. It is our prayer that we may be children of light, the kind of people for whose coming and ministry, the world is waiting. Amen.
