3 Game-Changing Women Talk Revolutionary Love—and Why This Moment Calls For It

What role do you want to play in this moment in history?

How do you want to be brave with your life?

What do you need to labor with love?

These are just some of the questions Valarie Kaur is asking on her Revolutionary Love Bus Tour, what she calls a healing odyssey across the U.S. calling people to courage, humanity, and love at a time when we need it most.

When Kaur—a civil rights leader, lawyer, award-winning filmmaker, and best-selling author—stopped in Denver, Colorado, she introduced two special guests to her audience: Mirabai Starr, award-winning author and inter-spiritual teacher and Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic Sister, lawyer, and social justice advocate.  

The Sunday Paper was in the room for their inspiring conversation, which you can read or watch below. 

VALARIE KAUR, MIRABAI STARR, AND SISTER SIMONE CAMPBELL IN CONVERSATION

Valarie Kaur: Mirabai, as you’ve been out in the world talking about your new book, Ordinary Mysticism, what have you found about people’s hunger for it?

Mirabai Starr: You can only do what you’re invited to do within your sphere, and that is enough. And we can and must listen to what is ours to do right here and right now. And we can. We have so many tools in this in this age, we’re no longer isolated in our faith traditions or in our philosophical or ideological silos.

If you have the grace, as you do, of having such a beautiful, ancient tradition to rest in, then God bless you and rest in that and root in that. But many of us consider ourselves to be spiritual but not religious. I grew up in a non-religious Jewish family, and I draw uncertain ancestral traditions in my heritage. But not all of them. And so, we get to be discerning, and we get to use our holy imagination, and we get to listen in to what is ours to do to step up. We can draw on the global human family as we’ve never been able to do before—spiritually, politically, artistically, philosophically.

Mirabai Starr: I want to ask you, Valerie, how you navigate this deep rootedness in your ancestral tradition with this new vision of spirit and community. And you too, Sister Simone— how do you rest in your deep love and connectedness to your tradition and open yourself to the whole world in the way that you do?

Sister Simone Campbell: Too often, I’m tempted to think that the tradition is prescriptive. And the tradition is a path. And you can’t be fenced in on a path. And so, what I’ve come to know in my tradition—I’m a Catholic sister—is that first of all hope is a communal virtue, and it’s only in relationship that we can have hope. Hope requires a willingness to go out of ourselves. And what nourishes me in that is a contemplative practice of being open and breathing.

Those of you who have meditation practices know how boring it is. But the challenge of letting go, the challenge of breathing in, and risking breathing out—because that’s losing control—the heart of this practice is radical acceptance.

Too often in a progressive space we push back against. The problem with pushing back against is that you get stuck pushing back—because then they’re going to push back, and you have to push more, and you’re stuck.

Where my contemplative practice led me, is rather than pushing back, we’re called to fight for a vision. That’s what you’re doing, Valerie: Out of your Sikh tradition comes a vision of what’s possible, where all are connected. If you stand shoulder to shoulder and look out together, there’s a much greater chance of being able to shift, move, and change.

That’s where my meditation practice has taken me—a willingness to be open to welcoming another perspective that can shape the kaleidoscope just a little bit. And I learn something new and see something more. 

Valarie Kaur: Mirabai, I know you lost your daughter when she was young, and you have modeled a way to be intimate with one’s grief and rage and harness that energy to insist on love about all. What’s the secret?

Mirabai Starr: No secret. However, I will say that a great, shattering loss or any profound sorrow has this magical ability, or carries some kind of tincture, to dissolve our separateness and land us in the human condition where we belong to each other.

I always thought I was really special. I was on a spiritual path at a young age, a poet. And losing a child was an experience of connectedness, even at the same time that it was an unbearable loss. It sealed my membership in the human family and activated me politically, socially, and in the realm of grief activism more than anything ever could have. I wasn’t special anymore. And what a relief.

Valarie Kaur: Mirabai, you came with a letter that you wrote. The prompt: When has an act of revolutionary love changed everything for you?

Mirabai Starr: I remember a time when a bereaved mother asked me to sit in on a restorative justice session as part of the sentencing of the young man who ran over her teenage daughter in parking lot during a fight and killed her.

He was the girl’s boyfriend. I was there to support the mom, being a bereaved mother myself.

Then something surprising happened. After everyone involved spoke about the impact of this incident on them, during which time the young man’s face remained stony and he refused to make eye contact, the mother shared what she was carrying. She spoke clearly and without recrimination. She said she might visit him in prison, knowing that he too had lost someone he loved—the same person, the young woman.

And then she asked permission to hug him. The guards consented.

The mother and her daughter’s killer, boyfriend, held each other for a long time and wept together.

Because of that act of love, we were all transformed. His family. Hers. The DA and his staff. Me. The fabric of community was rewoven before our eyes. 

I want you to know that I have no illusions that this moment redeemed the death of this mother’s beloved child. But the way she bravely shared the truth of her heartbreak and did not condemn him, but rather acknowledged his loss too, showed us all that love is the only true thing. That love can heal the broken hearts, not only of individuals, but of whole communities.

Of all the spiritual experiences of my life—rituals, ceremonies, blessings, and there have been many—this was the most powerful. A room full of my neighbors very different from me in their ethnicity, education, socioeconomic standing, and religious identity, becoming my family as we wept together and forgave.

Valarie Kaur is a renowned civil rights leader, lawyer, award-winning filmmaker, educator, innovator, and best-selling author of See No Stranger and Sage Warrior. She is the founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, where she leads a movement to reclaim love as a force for justice.

Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author, contemporary translator of sacred literature, international speaker, and world-renowned teacher of contemplative practice and inter-spiritual dialog. She is the author of Wild Mercy and most recently, Ordinary Mysticism.

Sister Simone Campbell is a religious leader, attorney and poet with extensive experience in public policy and advocacy for systemic change. She has led six cross-country “Nuns on the Bus” trips, focused on tax justice, healthcare, economic justice, comprehensive immigration reform, voter turnout, bridging divides in politics and society, and mending the gaps in wealth and access in our nation.