See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

by Valarie Kaur

Your breathlessness is a sign of your bravery. It means you are awake to what’s happening right now: The world is in transition.

Revolutionary love is the call of our times. If you cringe when people say that love is the answer, I do, too. I am not talking about sentimentality or civility or thoughts and prayers. I am talking about love as labor, a conscious embodied practice.

Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.

“Revolutionary love” is the choice to labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. It begins with wonder: You are a part of me I do not yet know. It is not a formal code or prescription but an orientation to life that is personal and political, sustained by joy. Loving only ourselves is escapism; loving only our opponents is self-loathing; loving only others is ineffective. All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.

Part One: See No Stranger is about learning how to love others.

Part Two: Tend the Wound is about learning how to love even our opponents.

Part Three: Breathe and Push is about learning how to love our-selves, how to breathe amidst labor, push ourselves to go deeper, and summon our wisest selves in times of transition.

In the United States, white supremacy is intertwined with Christian supremacy, one an extension of the other. Any theology that teaches that God will torture the people in front of you in the afterlife creates the imaginative space for you to do so yourself on earth. The

Stitched into the canopy was the first utterance in our scriptures: —Ik Onkar, Oneness.

Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. Grieving is an act of surrender.

When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.