All is Well

In 1972, a time of political and personal crisis, Julius Lester returned to the South, to his roots, and to the legacy his slave great-grandparents had left him:

I had to go back home, for it was in the South that I learned something of virtue from the old ones who never knew a day of ease, who accepted the indignities and atrocities inflicted upon them, but were never resigned to them. That was crucial, for they knew that ‘to wait upon the Lord’ was not to sit on the porch and rock passively. ‘To wait’ also means to serve, and serving God means refusing to hate the perpetrators of evil, because to hate the evildoers is to wait upon them. The old ones accepted their living hell, but did not serve it and were redeemed by their suffering.

All Is Well is a significant personal, spiritual, and political autobiography. It is not a comfortable book, because Julius Lester has led an uncomfortable life. It is a book graced by integrity and faithfulness, the story of a black man who is an artist, a revolutionary, and a critic. It is the story of how that man remains faithful to an adolescent call to be a monk, and the discovery, for Julius Lester, that his monastery is the world. More and more, he is in the world, but not of it.

I have come to consider Julius Lester one of the finer articulators of a theology and an ethic of nonviolence, a nonviolence he has come to, not through ethereal speculation, but through a commitment to violent revolution, and a later rejection of what he saw happen to himself and others as a result of that commitment. His is a commitment, not to a nonviolence of tactic, but to a nonviolence deeply informed by his contemplative vision.