“OMG, she’s disappearing!”

“You mean Kwan-yin, Aussie?”

“Compassion has lost its legs. Just look at her, stuck in all that snow. Are you going to shovel her out?”

“Not that soon, Aussie. First we have to shovel a long path towards the back steps and the birdfeeders. Lori’s doing a lot of work out front and the snowplow has yet to come back and plow a second time because the driveway is a mess.”

“That’s the end of life as we know it. Miss Compassion is stuck in place, the world’s in trouble.”

Not quite. Lately I’ve been moved and energized by how many dharma teachers and centers are getting engaged in supporting the people of Minnesota and Maine in their struggle against ICE agents.

This is nothing to take for granted. Forty, even 30 years ago, you’d still hear a majority of teachers saying that this kind of work is not Zen practice, that our job as practitioners is to realize the emptiness of all phenomena and never, ever take a stand. That reflected many things, including, I now believe, that we took a lot for granted, such as a continuation of certain liberal, democratic values.

Maybe our luck has run out, one Zen teacher said yesterday. I hear almost no one speaking against engagement now. Teachers and priests join other faith leaders in traveling to Minnesota, post activities and appeals for support, participate in local demonstrations, and even do memorial services for those killed there. We no longer stand away. We’ve joined the world, we do something.

And we’re still confused. I hear people say: “We can’t take a position, that’s dualistic thinking.” More palatably, we hear: “We have to think and act in a way that is beyond us vs. them.”

First, re taking a position: Martin Luther King was a great spiritual leader who believed in loving one’s enemies—and he had a position: he wanted Black Americans to have equal rights with whites. Later in his life he took public positions against poverty and the Vietnam War., which got him into even more trouble with our government.

His mentor, the Indian Gandhi, radically believed in nonviolence—and he had a position. He wanted the British to get out of India. He was against the partition of India into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Most of all, he wanted his countrymen/women to have a spiritual awakening and not do unto others what the British had done to them.

Moses had a position. So did Muhammad. And in case you think Jesus didn’t, have another read of the Sermon of the Mount. He fell squarely on the side of the most vulnerable—the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed. The old Prophets, God’s spokesmen, railed endlessly about the need to take care of the widow and the orphan, and of course, the mitzvah most frequently mentioned in the Old Testament: take care of the migrant “because you were once foreigners and slaves in ancient Egypt.” The Prophets were close to God, close to the Absolute—and they took a position.

As a European Zen teacher reminded us this morning: Even not taking a position is taking a position. If you’re not standing for something, what are you doing? Lying down? Sitting? Kneeling? Or maybe, as so often happens in these situations, you’re not here nor there, not stable on your feet, easy to dislodge? Or rigid on your cushion, afraid to move right or left?

We’re all the One Body. My writing this, your reading this—it’s all the One Body. We’re not fighting the system because we are the system. Changes in me and changes in you are all changes in the system. Seeing that enables us to act in a way that is beyond us and them—and it still means standing up to those who would hurt us and others.

“We work in the cracks,” Bernie liked to say. The One Body is both cracked and whole, much as my heart is broken and whole at the same time. And we all know who fall into the cracks, just as the Old Prophets and Jesus knew: those left uncared for, those despised, those with no place to go. So, here’s my position: Help those in the cracks. Like Alex Pretti, who didn’t turn to the gun he had but turned to help the woman down on the ground and reached for the phone, perhaps to document what he was seeing.

“We’re not fighting against, we’re fighting for,” someone reminded me today. What is that?