A Reflection: Interspiritual Luminary with Cindy S. Lee
4//7/2025
The following post is from SGTI student Susan Conrad. We are both delighted and honored that she was willing to share her reflections here.
Photo: Freedom Farm Mural (detail), East Oakland, CA, June 2022
Artists: Community Rejuvenation Project, Desi, Peskador
Interspiritual Luminary Cindy Lee recently offered a powerful call to spiritual directors – established and emerging – who are white bodied, such as myself. She encouraged those of us conditioned as white to engage and respond skillfully to the vast flows of white people’s grief, hurt, and anger that are weaponized to dehumanize BIPOC people and anyone deemed a dangerous “other”.
Cindy’s call reminded me of my meeting with a white bodied man some years ago, when I was a chaplain at a hospital in Boston. “Ted” was detoxing, having injured himself while under the influence of alcohol. The second time we met at his bedside, Ted shared with a heavy sigh, “I just have so much resentment.” Ted grew up in the Midwest in a family whose motto was the impossible maxim “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” His siblings became “successful doctors and lawyers,” he said, while he found himself in middle age working unhappily as a checkout clerk. He hadn’t been nurtured in the ways he had wanted, nor had he achieved the status or recognition he felt he deserved as a white bodied person in the U.S.
At some point, I asked Ted if he’d like to take some breaths to observe his thoughts and feelings, including his resentment. He was willing, he said, to try anything to reduce his internal suffering. We sat, we breathed, and Ted began to practice mindfulness, which he continued after his discharge from the hospital.
If I were to meet Ted today, I hope that in addition to supporting his mindfulness practice, I’d get more curious with him about what “success” meant, and how white folks have been taught to see ourselves as having more value – and deserving of more resources – than others in this country. I hope I’d get curious with him about how we as white people are taught and coerced to “trade in our humanity for power and privilege […and] the illusion of comfort” by participating in white supremacy.[i] As SGTI graduate Tema Okun has written, those of us impacted by white supremacy culture “are called to understand that we are all in this together. We are up against centuries of narratives designed to make us believe that our safety comes from the elimination of anything we consider ‘other’ or enemy.” As spiritual co-journeyers, we know true safety “comes from solidarity with all who yearn for a world centered on mutual care and concern.”[ii]
I wonder what new life is possible when white bodied spiritual directors engage the inner and outer work of racial justice as a spiritual practice that is foundational to our call. I wonder what is nourished when white spiritual directors share with one another our experiences of white supremacy, holding one another with love and grieving how white supremacy is toxic to us all. I wonder what new and generatively uncomfortable contexts we will put ourselves in, to skillfully hold the grief and fear of white people as they choose to say no to white supremacy.
Another Spiritual Luminary, Howard Thurman, shared these words:
“To love is to meet people where they are –
Mean, distorted, sometimes evil, sometimes vicious,
Full of hate sometimes –
And to deal with them there, so as
To free them, and you.”[iii]
In training as a spiritual guide, I have been moved by SGTI’s orientation to deep abundance and both/and thinking, which is a deep antidote to my white conditioning of scarcity, perfectionism, and attachment to “being an expert” – all of which keep me separated from shared humanity and mutuality.
How will we white bodied spiritual directors and trainees practice mutual liberation in these devastating times – with individual seekers, and groups? Cindy Lee has given us a challenging, and generous, invitation to emergent growth. She, along with Okun, Thurman, and so many other teachers, are showing us the way. I am energized to learn with and from this community. I can’t wait to see what our wild, wonderful, interconnected imaginations will dream up.
[i] Greg Elliott, https://afsc.org/news/10-ways-white-supremacy-wounds-white-people-tale-mutuality
[ii] https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/
[iii] “Conversations with Howard Thurman, Part 2” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPsZBS-2oeU