By Arden Ryan
In an annual remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr. and his perpetual message of peace and empathy, Carnegie Mellon community members gathered in Rangos on Friday morning to share a meal with faith leaders and reflect on what it means to “be love.”
This event, drawing inspiration from Dr. King’s passion for creating community, aimed to bring together students, faculty, and Pittsburghers of all backgrounds “in celebration of interfaith connection and positive change,” said Angie Lusk, program director for wellness initiatives at Carnegie Mellon.
“I invest a lot of my time and energy in helping to build a mindfulness movement here at CMU,” Lusk said. She invited the guests to engage in “creating space for inner exploration,” drawing on the King Center’s “Be Love” pledge as a framework for that exploration.
The King Center for Nonviolent Social Change is an Atlanta-based educational organization for peaceful justice, founded by the civil rights activist Coretta Scott King.
The King Center launched the “Be Love” pledge in 2021, a “growing movement of courageous acts to achieve justice,” according to the Center’s website.
After Lusk’s introduction, Carnegie Mellon students Senam Anaglate and Lucia Fang opened the event by sharing words from the King Center’s “Be Love” communal pledge. The affirmation acknowledges every individual’s responsibility to stand up for a more equitable and peaceful world, to share love in the face of injustice and oppression, and to share compassion against division and hate.
Next, M. Shernell Smith, who serves as executive director for the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion, delivered an invocation for the gathered crowd. She called for a “renewed commitment to justice and peace through cooperation and love,” urging attendees to take Dr. King’s example as an inspiration. “See in one another, sisters and brothers, neighbors and friends, with a common origin and destiny,” Smith said.
“We live in times of deep division, mistrust, false narratives and violence,” she continued. “It is always a privilege to be in space with one another.”
Smith’s invocation was followed by three Pittsburgh community faith leaders who shared examples of how they create community and the importance of “being love” to each of them. Rev. Dr. B. De Neice Welch, senior pastor at the Bidwell Street United Presbyterian Church, began by reflecting on the most crucial aspects of making public engagement work.
“The question posed to us was, ‘How do we show up as love in the community?’” Welch said. For her, the first thing to think about is having a meeting with oneself, remembering to take a meditative breath, and letting go of heavy self-expectations and fears.
“We all breathe the same air. It is the thing that connects us, the thing that makes us the same,” Welch said. “With that breath, that loving breath that discarded what I look like on the outside — the color of my skin, the ways other people see me and expect me to be — I can ‘be love’ because I show up loving me first.”
The next speaker, Melanie Siaw, works with Friends Peace Teams, a Quaker organization supporting communities in conflict worldwide. She continued with the pastor’s theme and encouraged the audience to take a moment to breathe.
“Look around you, who’s sitting beside you, in front of you,” Siaw said, “notice this breath coming in and out. It’s a gift of life.” For her, breathing is one tool “to stop and let go of tension,” helping her “choose to love even without words.”
While being in the moment and controlling her response, Siaw said she can “be present to the distress and pain and suffering of the world,” in space with others in that instant. “It’s our cooperative agreement to practice peace,” Siaw said, not “when I feel like it” but “all the time.”
Faryn Ash with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship closed the faith leader presentations by sharing what the “Be Love” pledge means to her.
“To ‘be love’ starts with being okay with exactly who you are, not trying to be or compare yourself to someone else,” Ash said. “The world needs you, exactly as you are.”
To her it means “showing up as best as I can as a non-anxious presence,” she said, making “space for others, creating an ease in the room so that others know it’s okay” to be themselves.
“To ‘be love’ is to be in a space where you have no fear,” Ash concluded. To “be love” is to be comfortable with yourself, “to show up in and for your and our communities, our families, friends, loved ones, strangers and everybody in between, in the same way.”
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