See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

by Valarie Kaur

If you remember how to wonder, you already have what you need to love.

Love is dangerous business, Papa Ji explained. If you choose to see no stranger, then you must love people, even when they do not love you. You must wonder about them even when they refuse to wonder about you. You must even protect them when they are in harm’s way.

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.

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.

We know how to grieve. We just have to remember it.

I had absorbed the lie that love requires us to rush to tend to our opponents’ wounds before we tend to our own.

“People who want to kill others because they are not righteous enough actually want to kill something inside themselves,” Sanjeev said when he came to my room to console me. “There must be something inside Roshan that he absolutely hates.

there is no such thing as monsters in this world. There are only human beings who are wounded.

I could not see the wound in them until I tended to the wound inside me. And that required me to access my rage.

The aim of divine rage is not vengeance but to reorder the world.

“Anger is loaded with information and energy,” says Audre Lorde. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” Lorde asks us to tend to the rage within us as a symphony, “to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.”

How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed? —bell hooks

I do not owe my opponents my affection, warmth, or regard. But I do owe myself a chance to live in this world without the burden of hate.

The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person.

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.

My most vigilant spiritual practice is finding the seconds of solitude to get quiet enough to hear the Wise Woman in me.

Ritual can take many different forms. It does not require being part of a faith or spiritual tradition. It requires an act of imagination and co-creation.

Who have we not yet tried to love?

Forgiveness is not forgetting: Forgiveness is freedom from hate.