-It's interesting to me that almost all the world's major religions have some kind of love neighbor, love self parallel in there.

So, in that dynamic, there's a you and an other.

So, I'm sorry, how are you going to love the other if you don't love you?

You just can't really do it.

I want to raise a people who know how to love themselves.

That's the work.

♪♪ ♪♪ -In everyone's life, childhood is a creator of character.

How would you describe your childhood and how it informed your character?

-My childhood had many facets to it.

I'm the oldest child in a family of five.

Later in our life, we ended up finding our half-brother, so that made me second.

There were lots of years when it was just me and my sister Wanda, living on Air Force bases with my parents, and there was this kind of idyllic evergreen spaces around the base, wild blueberry patches around the base, places to hide and seek, lots of beautiful quartz rocks that my sister and I would collect and play rock family with, you know, big, beautiful rocks, swinging on her swing set, watching Mom bake, listening to Dad scream at the football games.

This was the first chunk of life was just Wanda and Jacqui.

How much trouble could we get in without getting in big trouble?

Let's make coffee for Dad when he gets home from work, by putting water in the Maxwell House can and just stirring the water up and see what happens.

Let's -- Let's take the Avon samples and go decorate Mommy's bed and face with that.

Just mischievous girl stuff.

The second chunk of childhood was the entrance of the boys, three little brothers.

The first one was, um, just magical to me.

I was only 6, so I became a big sister, really, in that space.

And all through it is a lot of deep, fierce love from our parents.

Protective love, demanding love.

This is what Lewis kids do.

We're mannerable.

We mind our teachers, we study hard.

We're going to go to college.

Lots of expectations of excellence, quite frankly.

And lots of giggles and laughter and dancing.

-Lots of excellence was expected of you Almost, there's a certain perfectionistic quality that you had growing up.

You felt that you had to be perfect.

-Absolutely.

Yeah.

-That must have been very difficult.

-Oh, no, it really wasn't, because it's what you're supposed to do.

It's what you know.

We were -- we were... Your grades are posted on the refrigerator.

How did you do?

Um, how did you do in those exams?

Lots of celebration for the excellence.

So, I don't think it was a burden.

It was -- just was.

And you live into what you learn you're supposed to live into, so we did.

I mean, we've got Grammy Award-winning singers, Army general, top of the law class folks.

We really lived into the parents expectations.

And honestly, I have no regrets about that.

I don't.

-Tell me about what you learned in kindergarten and why it resonated so powerfully for you.

-I love that book.

"Everything I Learned in My Life I Learned in Kindergarten."

What I learned in kindergarten, in the idyllic place that was the Air Force base, was that I was the N-word.

It was the first time that someone ever said that word to me.

I was in kindergarten in my happy, well-adjusted little Air Force life with two friends -- Tommy Holly, Tommy Hollister, blonde, red-haired, great guys.

My buds.

And then Lisa came.

She moved from Mississippi to New Hampshire and brought with her her caste system and stage-whispered to one of the Tommys, "I don't know why you're sitting next to this nasty N-word.

And don't you know she gets chocolate milk from her mother's tits?"

Now, I had not heard the N-word and did not know that milk came from tits, so both of those were like ucky-yucky.

I felt really traumatized by that.

Went home and told my parents about that, and they had the most amazing reactions that shaped my personality.

My mother says, "Isn't it silly that people will think you're not as good as them because you're Black??

I think I was a Negro in those days.

I'm aging myself.

But isn't it silly that people will think you're not as good as them because you're a Negro?

Yeah, that is silly.

And she took me to prayer, like, we're going to pray about this.

So in the middle of the "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayers, we also prayed that -- I prayed that no matter how anyone looks, they'll know they're loved.

That is my core mission, right?

My dad was furious and went to the base commander and demanded an apology to him and to me.

Now this is 1963, and my dad is being an activist, a Black Lives Matter activist in 1963 in this all-white Air Force base.

I was totally turned on to you can speak the truth in love and you can challenge things and they can get better.

And I was totally turned on to prayer changes things.

-So, you're called the N-word.

Your parents explain it to you.

Your mother really sort of diffuses the power by saying, "That's so silly, that's so silly.

And let's go to prayer here."

And the high road is instantly taken.

There's no corresponding attack.

-Well, that's not entirely true.

I have to remember the story better, because when she called me the N-word, I said, "White cracker, white cracker.

You don't shine.

I'll bet you $5 I'll beat your behind."

I could not tell you where I learned that, how I knew that, how that bubbled up out of my body.

But it certainly did.

And in that talk with Mom, she goes, "And Jac, we don't call people's names.

We just don't do it."

So, there was still a high road right from them.

She -- Mommy was like, "You are not going to bend down into the behaviors of these people.

You are going to pray for them.

And Daddy was like, "These behaviors will get called out in the justice pool."

And that's how it went.

-And that was -- is that the first time you realized that prayer was something that you could turn to?

-That wasn't the first time that I had turned to prayer, in this moment.

It was an every night ritual.

Every night ritual with my mom.

As soon as I had a bed.

If you had a crib, she was ready.

So, at night by the bed, a prayer.

"Now I lay me down to sleep."

Or it started with um, "God, please love everybody."

And then the "Now I lay me down," which is a little scary prayer.

Uh, but then kind of learning that we could just image people, like, who shall we pray for?

So, she put that in our imagination.

The president, you know, my dear, our grandmother, Let's pray for Fluffy.

Like, we could pray for the cat, you know.

So it was early that she taught a conversation with God did not need, you know, big ritual.

It did not need to be in church.

It could be anywhere where you could call on God and chat a bit.

-In your book, you say that your journey has been one of making amends with yourself.

-Mm-hmm.

-What do you mean by that?

-Yeah, I have been on a journey most of my adult life to make amends to the little kid inside me.

The times where I didn't tend to her well enough.

Uh... If I didn't stand up for her on the playground, or if I didn't teach her that it was okay to swear, or if I didn't say, you know, everybody else is having sex and you don't have to be promiscuous, but you -- you might want to have sex right now.

That could be okay.

If I could give her more, um, freedom to explore... ...to explore the edges of what theologically she had been taught was right and wrong.

I think I would have loved to do that.

-And when you say her, you're really talking about you.

-I'm really talking about me.

Little Jacqui.

Um, you know, one of the ways that I think about human development as a psychologist of religion is that there is a kind of inner -- inner-family system.

Right?

So I'm not talking about multiple personality disorder, but I am saying at the different stages of my life.

Right?

That girl that got called the N-word at five, and the girl who didn't have any breasts when she was 12 and everybody else did.

You know the 22-year-old that made love for the first time and was like, "What is going on?

I don't know what I'm doing."

All of those Jacquis are here, and they keep moving and growing, and they show up and be like, "We're scared."

Or "Ah, that was hot."

Or, you know, let's do better.

So I-I think about, um, comforting, encouraging myself.

So many of us who've had childhood trauma... ...have a piece of ourselves, a piece of our inner life that is that wounded child, that is that hurt child.

And our job as adults is to protect that inner child, that wounded child, to put our arms around that child and help that child feel safe and cared for, and to help that grow -- that child grow up.

I've done that for myself.

I've cared for myself through therapy, with coaching so that the little one in me -- my therapist says the little one in me -- sometimes has a big thing to say.

Big voice.

So I listen to that, and I feel like there's wisdom in that that comes from my wounding and comes from also my growing up.

Every single experience that has happened to me has made me, me.

Therefore, though it hurt, though I wouldn't wish it, I claim it as part of my identity and it makes me strong.

-So wisdom comes from pain.

What wisdom would you say your pain has given you?

-How I've become wise from my personal pain is sometimes people are doing the best they can and they will just screw you up anyway.

They just will.

They don't have the resources.

They don't have the -- They don't have the wisdom.

They don't have the insight.

They experienced something that made them do it again to you.

Hurt people hurt people.

That's really important to me.

It takes my hurt, sorrow, anger, and puts a little compassion up in that pot to stir because that's what happens.

I think also, I can see in the world better the pain that's causing the behavior.

So a staff person might just be out of their mind on a Sunday and I think, ooh, hmm.

But because the pain as a teacher about wisdom, I then have a different set of questions about that behavior.

What has happened there?

Are they remembering their mother's death?

Are they feeling like they're not good enough today?

Last night, did they have a fight with their partner?

You just have a different interrogation if you let the pain, your pain, make you wise.

It helps you open your eyes to how other people's pain can be driving them.

-How did you become an activist?

-I was almost nine years old when Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

was killed.

I was on a field trip with my friends out in a nature center.

Mr.

Smith had us out on the road.

My gorgeous, chocolaty brown fourth grade teacher, and we got ready to go on the bus back to Chicago, and he was like crumpled and just crying.

And what is wrong?

"Dr.

King was killed today."

Oh, my God.

So we're on the way back to Chicago, which is erupting in violence.

My mom and dad are crying.

Everyone's destroyed.

The city is on fire.

I mean, I don't know yet why people loot when someone gets killed that they love, but they did.

And it was dangerous in our neighborhood and the guns were being shot.

My sister and I were hiding under our bed and we were crying.

And I promise, almost like a voice, "This is going to be your job."

I felt like the trauma of that assassination -- Killing love is how it felt in my body.

Like somebody that good can get killed?

Traumatized me and activated me at the same time.

I found myself thinking, "I'm going to be a drum major for peace now."

That might be one phrase that I had heard in the world about Dr.

King's speeches, but a drum major for peace sounded like the job description I was signing up for, and I don't know how I communicated that to my family or my church, but they got it and they started setting the table for me like, let's go, you know, on the March for Dimes, let's go buy a cow from the Heifer Project for the kids in Africa.

Let's support Cesar Chavez.

I was like 11 years old sending checks to Cesar Chavez, right?

It was incredible to feel this calling inside me and then have this flame fanned by the people around me that they were like, "We see you, we see you."

This ubuntu idea that I love, like I was seen by my family and my Sunday school teacher and my teachers as a girl who was going to be an activist and was an activist, and they just started throwing activist stuff in front of me.

There was a lady named Eve Valeria Murphy.

Was the oldest -- I didn't think people could live to be that old when I was nine.

She was this old, old, old, beautifully wrinkled Black lady who decided to take me with her to meetings around the state of Illinois.

Let's go down here and talk about the indigenous thing.

What?

Let's go over here and talk about labor unions.

It was crazy.

I don't know what she saw, but she's part of why I'm a clergy now.

And this last year I got to speak at a thing honoring her.

She's dead now, but, like, she saw that in a world where a lot of the church says women can't speak in church and shouldn't be preachers.

She saw my inner "let's make it better" and -- pssh!

-- gave a lot of energy toward it.

-How would you describe that inner person, that inner you, that "I'm going to be part of the world and make it better"?

-I think inside all of us is something that we're supposed to become imprinted on us, inside us, stamped in us.

I'm not saying it's static.

I'm not saying it's only one thing, but I almost feel like it's part of the -- what gets formed in the womb.

I don't know, it feels that way to me.

My inner forming toward activism and justice happens because of my birth order.

How can I take care of my little sister?

We're only 21 months apart, but if she gets sick in the bed, I'm like, "I got to take care of her."

If she wants to put a penny in her mouth, I'm like, "Get the -- Get that penny out of your mouth."

Like, I was her guardian.

Like, you were not gonna hurt yourself.

And that same kind of dynamic with my little brothers and then being my mother's helper in the kitchen, my dad's helper outside with the car.

There was a kind of helping.

And literally we become the thing we're affirmed being.

I got so celebrated for being helpful, for having eyes that could see.

So then your -- your eyesight gets keen.

Oh, let me see what else I can see.

And that thing inside me that feels... ...heartbroken when things go wrong for people, like a real -- I have real antenna empathy for people.

But also what got celebrated and nurtured was I know how to do it, so I know how to stand in the gap, I know how to write a letter to the president when I'm a kid, I know how to save my money in a bank and send it to a charity, I know how to advocate for the person.

"Don't do that.

That's -- You're going to hurt her."

Like, I know how to advocate for the vulnerable because of my family system.

-Why do we need activists?

What role do you think they play in moving our society forward?

-For as long as there's been humans, there's conflict because wherever two or more people exist, there's different opinions.

And I think our default position, sadly, sometimes as humans under stress, under pressure, we get tribal.

We back ourselves into a corner.

We stick with our own kind.

We fuel our own self-interest.

This is what's going to make me and mine okay.

And in that dynamic, somebody has to say, "But that's not okay enough for everybody."

Like, there's a whole world of us that are connected to each other.

I'm inextricably connected to you and you to me.

My destiny is tied up in your destiny.

So someone who just raises up a mirror and goes, "Um, no, that's not good enough.

Women should be able to vote, too.

Women should be able to have property.

Um, yeah.

Queer people ought to be able to live a life of love and get married.

Uh, yeah.

No.

Leave no child behind."

It's a kind of a vision for a healed world that is planted in most of us that can get blindfolded when we feel under stress and pressure and we don't think there's enough.

We think about scarcity.

But someone reminds you that there's enough for all of us.

Someone reminds you that we can all flourish.

Someone reminds you what justice looks like.

Activists agitate to make the world that we all dream of come true.

-Good trouble.

-Good trouble, holy trouble.

Yeah.

Sometimes in a quiet voice and sometimes screaming with their fists in the air.

Sometimes with a pen making a poem, sometimes writing a song, sometimes preaching a sermon.

Sometimes laying our bodies down on the ground and saying, "Black lives matter" or "I can't breathe."

Sometimes getting arrested.

Oftentimes getting arrested.

-You write, "Unless you do the work to understand the places where you hurt, where rejection and judgment have caused you pain, you can take childhood wounds into adulthood."

Can you tell me what that work looks like?

-Sure.

You know, it's interesting to me that almost all the world's major religions have some kind of love neighbor, love self, uh, parallel in there.

Uh, Islam says, don't withhold from someone that which you want for yourself.

Judaism says, love the stranger because you were once strangers in a strange land.

Christianity says, love your neighbor as yourself or do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

So in that dynamic, there's a you and a other.

So I'm sorry.

How are you going to love the other if you don't love you?

You just can't really do it.

It could be infatuation.

It might even be tolerance.

But I think true love, um, the -- the non-possessive delight in the unique particularity of the other is how I like to think about that.

My professor defined it that way -- the non-possessive delight in the unique particularity of the other.

I want to raise a people who know how to love themselves.

That's the work.

Like the work of love yourself unconditionally to delight in your particularity, even if you're weird that morning.

Because you are.

I am.

Like, how can I just receive myself as a gift to myself?

I am tired today.

Therefore I'm cranky, you know, not today, but yesterday.

I am feeling hurt, I am sad, I am joyful, I am delighted, I'm insecure, the vicissitudes of our human experience.

If we just...relax and receive and love that about ourselves, that's the best rehearsal for that kind of love for the neighbor.

So the work is look at your stuff.

Don't pretend.

Be candid.

Get jiggy with your truth.

This is me.

Here's how I'd like to be better.

I'm going to work on that.

But don't pretend about you.

You can't love your own facade, you know.

So the work is real, truth telling.

Excavating our story with a therapist or a coach or a good pastor or friend.

Child, let me tell you about this part.

Um, being curious about yourself.

Not narcissistic.

That's not what that is.

But like, this is how I got to be a me.

And that kind of curiosity grows our muscle of having the same kind of curiosity for the so-called other.

Loder used to say, "We're in search of the face that will never leave us."

I love that.

I see you.

I see you into existence, this ubuntu theory.

I see you and you become.

Everybody wants to be seen.

But we also I think as human beings develop shame early.

I wish that wasn't true, but we haven't had enough distance from the generations of shamers where shame is an education tool or a training tool so that it's in us, right?

Did you drop that cookie jar?

You know?

You learn early also that someone's gonna see your poops [laughs] and someone's gonna see your mistakes and someone's gonna see your -- your, um, flaws and they're going to deride you.

Oh, I want to hide from that.

I think the work we want to do and the culture in which we live is to make seeing people as they really are a celebration to learn to affirm that.

You've got little kids in school.

How was your friend Bobby today?

He was -- seemed down.

What did you notice about him?

How was he dressed?

Had he eaten enough food?

Like, we curate.

Eyes that learn how to see and not judge.

Just see.

-What is fierce love?

-Fierce love.

I've been in search of a word to describe my feeling for the world, my feeling for God, for almost all my life.

And I've found the way to describe it.

It's this fierce love that is bold, brazen, risk taking, never say no, willing to put down your stuff for somebody else's stuff.

Vulnerable, rule-breaking love.

And I've experienced it.

I experienced it when I had a car accident in Canada and I was -- totaled the car, my boy, my beau, my husband-type human being was being in the hospital and I wasn't.

I had no money.

I had no car.

I had nothing, nothing except my tears and my fear.

And this nice white lady sees an Afro-wearing Black kid clearly out of place, bloody jacket, glass in the hair, crying, and she walks toward me in a lobby with all kinds of people.

She's the only one and says, "What's going on?"

And man, that's right here again, just the "what's going on?"

The bold approach that I'm going to just come to you.

I'm going to cross the borders to get to you, to give you what you need.

And she did.

She took me to the drugstore to get toothpaste and shampoo, and she took me to get food.

She checked me into a hotel and paid the bill.

She picked me up the next morning and took me to the hospital to get my lover.

Like, what?

Who are you?

But she did that.

That's fierce love.

-What did that impress upon you?

What did you learn from that?

-Human to human, our hearts are linked.

She -- My tears awakened her compassion.

She was fearless and relentless and courageous about taking care of me.

It unlocked in me my own capacity... ...to reach out to the stranger, to make friends with the one who doesn't have a friend, to donate beyond my comfort level to make sure that people can recover from storms, to go to Louisiana and pull out moldy plasterboard, to rebuild houses, to go to the border and deal with the immigration issue.

Her... ...rule-breaking kindness and her ferocious courage became, for me, maybe the most theologically grounding event of my entire life, that I learned more about that than I did in seminary, about this kind of love that is the fount of all blessings.

-So that's fierce love.

Fierce love is having the courage to -- to cross lines, to -- to break rules, to -- to have extraordinary connecting compassion.

-Absolutely.

I mean, you know, my book, "Fierce Love," subtitle, "Ferocious Courage."

Ferocious courage is, um, Linda Sarsour inviting Sharon Brous to speak at the Women's March, right?

Palestinian Muslim activist invites Zionist rabbi woman.

That's -- That's fierce love.

Fierce love is, um, I'm white, but I'm marching down the street for Black Lives Matter and willing to get pummeled, right, in that -- in that protest.

To -- To die in Charlottesville because I'm just standing up for the other person.

Fierce love is the women in Iran rising up because one young woman is murdered because she doesn't have her hijab on right.

And those women walking in the street with their hijabs off, taking pictures with their hair shorn, that's fierce love -- not just on behalf of me and mine but on behalf of all of the humans on the planet, I'm going to stand in the breach and demand justice and love.

-How did you decide you were going to become a person of the cloth?

-[ Laughing ] I'm sorry.

Um, I did not decide to be a person of the cloth.

I don't know what happened.

I... I was eight years old, and I took Communion for the first time, which is called Eucharist in some traditions, but, like, the bread and the cup, which is a Christian appropriation of the Sabbath meal, but that's cool.

I took it for the first time, and my mother was sitting next to me on the pew and said, "Jacqui, when you take this bread, it means God will always love you."

And it was like that sweet, yummy bread, that Hawaiian bread.

Drink this cup.

This cup means God will never leave you.

God will always love you and God will never leave you.

I was like, I'm hooked.

So I was hooked on God.

And then I think -- I think I was haunted by God.

I don't... Why would I want to be a clergy?

I mean, that's hard work.

But I did feel early that I was supposed to be a drum major for peace, that I was supposed to work to heal the world.

And I thought I'd be a lawyer.

But this other thing kept pulling, and the pulling was a feeling of, um, to be honest, a feeling beyond myself, a beyond-myself pull to join other people in this kind of march for justice.

And being a clergy felt like the best way to do it.

-You write that, "We're the ones we've been waiting for to write a new American story, to find a way to build fierce love in the world."

What are our own, individually and collectively, next best steps forward?

-I love that June Jordan quote -- "We are the ones we've been waiting for" -- she wrote in a poem after some South African women were doing some resistance.

It stays with me always.

My friend Titus Burgess wrote a song about it.

"We are the ones we've been waiting for" feels to me like a reminder that everybody's got a job to do.

Everybody's got a job to do.

So what are our next steps for healing a world?

One is to be conscious of the way your fate and other folks' fates are intertwined.

You are not on an island.

You are -- We are our brothers' and sisters' keepers.

If we're gonna go down, we're all gonna go down.

And I think the only way the boats are gonna rise if we all rise together.

So you understand that you're inextricably connected.

That means when you go to the polls, you're not just voting for you.

You're voting for that person's auntie, that person's uncle, that child's childcare, that person's 401k that's disappearing in the stock market.

You're voting for Mama Earth.

All of the choices that you make belong to all of us.

Wow.

That's a lot.

But it's important.

And that then, three, sends us into, like, issue -- uh, issue investigation or just learning, right?

Like, get in the world and read the books written by the people -- the books that have been banned -- read the books from the others.

Listen to the music from the others.

Listen to the radio from the others.

Open your mind past your tribe.

Open your heart past your tribe.

And you're like, "Oh, man, that's why this policy matters.

That's why I need to take a stand over here."

That's our next step.

Um, I am not alone.

My fate is connected to other folks' fates.

Therefore, I need to understand their point of view.

-In your own story, at this particular point in your life.

I want you to repeat and finish this sentence.

"You know what I learned from my life so far?

The big lessons I've learned, the real wisdom for me?"

-You know what I've learned in my life so far?

The big wisdom for me, the big lesson for me?

I have so much power to make a difference.

I cannot believe it.

How you treat somebody in the grocery store line.

What you decide to send or not send in an e-mail.

The way you pick up strangers on the street or on the subway.

"Girl, those shoes are fierce."

People love being connected with.

The power I have to change the weather -- my friends call me "Storm" -- to change the weather by what I decide to do and say is beyond my imagination.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪