"MOVING INTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD"

 “MOVING INTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD”

When I was growing up and celebrating Christmas, I would often get depressed on Christmas afternoon when all the presents were opened and Christmas dinner was over.  My mother often compounded that sense by insisting that we take down the Christmas tree the day after Christmas – it was over and done.  I loved Christmas  presents and the decorations, and for all the religious atmosphere which permeated my consciousness as a child,  it became clear that the spiritual power of the holiday was tied to the secular ideas about Christmas – presents, pretty lights, and decorations.    

Over the years (and especially in this crazy year of 2020), I’ve thought a lot about the Story that undergirds this season, a Story that often gets lost in sentimentality and a sea of materialism.  As I think about this process, the verse that comes to heart and mind is John’s Gospel 1:14:  “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  Translated more literally, it is the Word pitched His tent among us, but the most helpful translation to me is “the Word moved into our neighborhood.”  I like that one because it emphasizes the power of the idea of the Incarnation, but also because it brings me the warm fuzzies of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.   The spiritual power of Christmas is that it makes an astonishing assertion – the center of all that is, God (by whatever name we call Her) has committed Herself to us in a way that is new and different.  This idea also assumes that we believe in God, which many of us do on some level.  

The Christmas Story offers us the opportunity to consider the meaning of our lives – who are we?  Whose are we?  What centers our lives?  What fires our lives?  Whatever the answer may be, we are asked to consider that love and justice are at the center of life and of our lives.  What would it mean to try to live in the neighborhood with those twin values at the heart of individual and corporate life?  For all the warm fuzzies of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, that production still was permeated by a radical and demanding idea:  each of us is loved, and all of us are loved.  In Christian language, we would say that each of us and all of us are children of God.

That sounds simple on one level, but we have all found that concept difficult to live out.  Three movies that I’ve seen recently have helped to provoke these thoughts.  First there is Pixar’s “Soul” which asks these very questions in a way that was surprising to me.  Who are you?  What is the meaning of your life?  How do you learn to live for others, especially when that life conflicts with your view of yourself and your needs?  All of this is wrapped in the life and permutations of jazz.  The second movie is “Wonder Woman 1984,” which was a disappointment in that it seemed to drop the theme of the powerful women.  It did, however, dramatically share the theme of materialism and power run amok, with only a slightly veiled portrayal of the villain as a snake-oil salesman named Donald Trump.  The rage and deep hostility of King Herod in the Christmas Story is displayed for all of us to see.  

The third movie, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” struck me the most deeply.  It is an adaptation of one of August Wilson’s plays – part of a series of his plays that are being produced by Denzel Washington as movies (the first was “Fences”).  It is set in the 1920’s in Chicago, and it focuses on an historical character named Ma Rainey, who was one of the driving forces behind the development of the blues.  Powerful actors, including Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman (in one of his last performances), drive a tense and provocative script.  The scene that stays with me in connection with the Christmas Story is one in which Boseman’s character Levee rails and curses and wrestles with God, because God refused to intervene when Levee’s mother was raped repeatedly by white men, when he was a boy.  

These movies and that scene remind us of the problem with saying that God has moved into the neighborhood with us.  If She has, where is She?  Why these 330,000+ people dead from Covid?  Why the continuing power of racism and white supremacy?  Why the continuing oppression of women?  These questions are always with us and with this Christmas Story.  Yet, as John put it in another verse, “The Light of the World was coming among us, and the confusion and craziness of human life has not extinguished it.”  That is our hope and our dilemma.  Where do we center ourselves?  This Christmas Story asks us to consider these questions once again and to find our places in the Story.  That’s the work of Christmas.  

"MY SIN"

 “MY SIN”

Thanks to Barbara Jung’s leadership, there is a good poetry group at North Decatur Presbyterian Church, which  I joined it earlier this year.  Since I am a member, there are obviously no high qualifications to get in, though there are people in it who write fine poetry.  Barbara asks us to share poems twice a month or so – we can write our own, or we can share poems from others, famous and not-so-famous.  Earlier this month, she asked us to share poems related to the Advent and Christmas seasons, and I remembered one by Ann Weems, a Presbyterian elder whose poems Caroline and I often used at St. Columba and Oakhurst churches.  This one is not a religious poem, but it carries religious weight for me.  Here it is – it is “Giving” by Ann Weems:

"GIVING"

I gave my mother Evening in Paris,

   sixty-five cents at the five-and-dime,

        A Christmas Special.

Everybody knew ----in the second grade----

    that ladies longed for perfume.

I wanted to give her something special.....

     no Christmas chocolates she'd share with the others,

     no crayoned creation to hang in the kitchen, 

     no photo of me with a snaggled-tooth grin, 

     but a gift that on one else would use,

          a present just for my mother.

I wrapped it in tissue

          adorned with red reindeer

     and wrote "I LOVE YOU!"

          and signed it in cursive.

I thought that it was the grandest gift anybody could give.

She thought so, too."

When I engaged this poem many years ago, it seemed so close to my experience with my own mother.  Mother loved all things Christmas.  When I was an infant, we had moved in with her great aunt (whom I called “Gran”), who had a strong puritanical streak.  Gran loved cooking a big meal for Christmas, but she did not permit any Christmas decorations in the house because she felt that it was un-Christian to be so “secular” about Christmas.   Mother’s infectious attitude about Christmas, however, eventually won Gran over, and the whole house was decorated.

  We  had very little money for Christmas, but my mother scrimped and saved all year in order to provide decorations and presents.  She also asked her beauty shop customers to give me presents rather than give them to her.  So, I was often showered with presents at Christmas – a great time for me!  Mother’s attitude also permeated my consciousness – unlike many men, I like Christmas!  As a boy, I would also save up my meager monies (that I wasn’t spending for comic books and movies during the year) in order to buy presents for Mother.  I got her many trinkets, but her main desire every year was My Sin dusting powder  by Lanvin.  To my regret, it was much more expensive than “regular” dusting powder, and on one occasion I bought a less expensive brand for her for Christmas.  While she said she like the less expensive brand when she opened the present, I could tell that she was disappointed.  After that, it was always “My Sin” for me and for her!  Indeed, she wanted “My Sin” dusting powder until she was in her late 70’s, and it became very hard to find.

When I first engaged “Giving” by Ann Weems, it brought back a rush of memories for me, and when I re-engaged it this year, it did the same.  I generally have pleasant memories of Christmas, though two memorable ones pop out that are unpleasant.  One was in 1969 when my fiancé broke off our engagement.  The other was in 1993 when my mother almost lost her life in a terrible auto accident.  Whatever you think of Christmas and the commercialization of the season and the emphasis on presents, remember the love that flows underneath and through the Christmas season.  Whether you believe in the God or in the biblical versions of the Christmas stories – there is an emphasis on love that undergirds our lives. It is the fire that warms us all, even in the midst of “My Sin.”

"STAYING CLOSE TO THE FIRE"

 “STAYING CLOSE TO THE FIRE”

When I was growing up in small town Arkansas, our house did not have central heating.  The house was heated by a big gas space heater in the living room/dining room area.  It was located where the coal chute and coal fired heater previously was.  It heated the house unevenly, and on cold winter days and nights, we would back up to the heater to get enough warmth built up in order to go into the other parts of the house.  To this day, I still feel much warmer when I can back up to a source of heat.

I sometimes think of the Christmas season as this metaphor of fire and heat for our lives.  It is a story of a central location of love in our lives, and during this time, we are invited to come close to the fire of God’s love, so that we can get warmed up enough in order to go through the remainder of the year, seeking to live with love at the center of our lives.  As the calendar year goes on, and life gets complicated, we long to get back close to the source of the fire.  The idea of Christmas as a time of renewal takes root here.

There is another part of the metaphor of fire that burns in these Christmas stories:  John the Baptizer.  Luke’s version of the birth of Jesus begins not with Jesus but with the backstory for the birth of John the Baptizer.  John’s conception is not quite as stunning as Jesus’ conception, but it is miraculous nonetheless.  The mothers of John and Jesus are cousins, and they become cousins, some scholars arguing that Jesus becomes a disciple of John the Baptizer.  Other Gospel accounts, like John’s, portray them as rivals, but whatever their relationship, all four Gospels see John as the precursor for Jesus, as one who prepares the way for Jesus.

John the Baptizer was a man on fire.  He took the warmth of the love of God and channeled it into a burning call for repentance and justice and equity.  He challenged the Temple as a site of renewal and religious sanctity.  He offered the idea of baptism in the river as a source of renewal and repentance.  By “repentance,” he didn’t mean only the ceasing of doing bad things – he meant a complete re-orientation of our will and imaginations, a re-orientation towards God and not towards the powers of the world.  It was here, in this idea of death and rebirth that is part of the ritual of baptism, that people could find the fire to renew their lives.

John not only used fire as image of renewal – he used it also as an image of consequences and punishment.  His sermon went like this in Luke 3, as he chastised the religious leaders who came out to hear him:  “You children of snakes!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?......Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees;  every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  When the leaders and the people asked him what they could do to escape this kind of fire, he told them to share food and clothes with the poor, to refrain from cheating people and to stop robbing people.  For John, the warmth of God’s love was a fire that burned for justice and for equity.

    Later on in his own ministry, Jesus would pick up this image of John’s fire, as seen in Luke 12: “I came to set the earth on fire, and would that it were already burning.”  John is remembered as being more fiery than Jesus, but both of them were executed by the state, though they burned for justice in different ways.  

    “Stay close to the fire” is a central meaning of Christmas.  One of its meanings is what we saw at the beginning, like that space heater of my youth:  radiating God’s love to sustain us through the coldness of the year.  A second meaning, however, mitigates against our tendency to make Christmas s sentimental and sweet season, when we forget all the troubles of the world and seek to make nice for awhile.  This second meaning reminds us that Christmas is a fire that burns for justice, that the story itself is offensive in so many ways:  a teenager pregnant before marriage, subject to the death penalty;  a male asked to move from the center of life to the margins; a baby born on the streets; the Holy Family forced to flee as refugees to another country in order to escape political persecution and execution.  

    As we gather (even remotely) for this Christmas holiday, let us remember these aspects of the Christmas fire:  warmth and burning for justice.  As I write this, I am waiting for the results of the Electoral College vote, and that political weight tempts me to move towards the warmth of the Christmas fire.  Yet, this very political day reminds me of the need to stay close to the fiery nature of the Christmas fire, to Mary’s Magnificat.  As Rory Cooney put it in the words to the great Christmas song “Canticle of the Turning”:  “My heart shall sing of the day you bring, let the fires of your justice burn.  Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn.”  Stay close to the Christmas fire.  

"LOOKING FOR VISIONS"

 “LOOKING FOR VISIONS”

We are in an extraordinary time, with the nation groaning under a King Lear like President who refuses to acknowledge that he was defeated in the November election.  I’m feeling good that he will be out, but I’ll be glad to get past the Electoral College vote on December 14.  I am surprised but gratified that the relevant Republican leaders in Georgia are thus far standing up to King Lear, and I hope that it will hold.  For those who remember their Shakespeare, the raging of King Lear and others leads to great suffering for all.  I fear this the most about the raging of Trump.  In his last 44 days, he will seek to make all of us pay for not re-electing him, and it gives me pause as I think about what such a price may entail.

And, that brings me to the Advent/Christmas season.  My mind immediately goes to the raging King Herod, who sends the troops to execute the baby boys of Bethlehem in order to eliminate the threat of a rival.  That is the end of the Christmas story in Matthew’s Gospel, but we are at the beginning, so I want to pivot to the beginning to seek to find some hope in these crazy days.  It begins in Luke’s gospel with a young peasant woman, engaged to be married, having a vision of God calling her to serve.  This vision will put her in a very dangerous place – as a woman pregnant before marriage, pregnant by someone other than her fiancé.  As a woman, she is already marginalized as property of her father until she marries, and then she is property of her husband.  

The angel Gabriel asks Mary to allow herself to become pregnant with God’s Chosen One, pregnant not by having intercourse with her fiancé Joseph but rather by the Holy Spirit.  To say ‘yes” will put Mary in danger of the death penalty, so it is no small ask from Gabriel.  Mary is both afraid and skeptical – she knows if she says “yes,” it likely will mean an end to the engagement to Joseph, and it could mean a severe punishment.  Yet, she is a courageous visionary, and she says “Yes.”  Her first move after that is to go to visit her cousin Elizabeth, whom she has heard is also miraculously pregnant.  It is in this community of women that Mary finds the strength to continue in the vision and indeed to sing the stunning song that we heard in last week’s blog.  We give thanks for her vision and for her willingness to say “Yes.”

Joseph faces the same kind of decision.  There may be extra-biblical books that have the conversation when Mary tells Joseph that she will become pregnant by someone else – that “someone else’ will be God.  We can imagine Joseph’s reaction – “Wow, I’ve heard a lot of stories, but getting pregnant by God is a new one.”  We can also imagine Joseph’s anger and hurt when he hears this news.  He is a liberal, though, so Matthew’s gospel tells us that he is thinking of a way to end the engagement without causing Mary too much pain.  He too is a visionary, though, and he receives his own vision from God, telling him to get with the plan and to support Mary in this crazy venture.  Again, we can imagine the consternation that his vision causes him – he will have to move to the margins of life with Mary.  Indeed, he will have to support her at the margins. 

     Joseph decides to say “Yes” to the vision – he joins his scandalous fiancé in seeing a new way, in being willing to move to the margins in order to carry out God’s vision.  And, at the margins he will be – he is forced to the streets of Bethlehem, with his child born on those same streets.  He will become a political refugee, an immigrant fleeing Herod’s rage and murdering soldiers.  And, as a male at the center of things, he moves to the margins – we never hear him speak in the Bible.  Mary, the one who should be silenced in patriarchy, becomes the one who speaks for the family.  

In these crazy times, let us recall these stories and the visions and courage of Mary and Joseph.  There are visionaries all around us in our time, and one of our callings is to seek to hear and see God’s voice in those visions.  And, wow, think of it -we too can have visions from God!  The murderous rages are all around us, but we give thanks that God is on the move in our time too – let us keep our hearts open for the visions of God.

"THE ORIGINAL CHRISTMAS CAROL"

 “THE ORIGINAL CHRISTMAS CAROL”

Yes, Advent is here, arriving yesterday on the First Sunday in Advent.  It begins a run of 37 days until the 12th day of Christmas ends on the date of the Georgia run-off election for control of the U.S. Senate, January 5.  The next day, January 6, begins the season of Epiphany, when the U.S. Congress gathers to certify that the Biden/Harris ticket won the presidential election.  For those who think that I am being too political here, please note how the Gospel of Luke begins his version of the Christmas story:  “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.  This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria” (2:1-2).

The Christmas story is filled with political intrigue as God’s work to restructure our imaginations begins at the margins of life, not in the halls of power.  In Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, King Herod is infuriated that a perceived threat to his power comes not from the elite of Jerusalem but from the hick town of Bethlehem. Herod knows how the world works, so he sends soldiers to Bethlehem to kill all the baby boys two and under.  

     “How odd of God” is a phrase attributed to several poets, including Ogden Nash, but it is definitely appropriate here in the Christmas story.  God begins not in the courts of Jerusalem or in the council of the High Priest, but rather in the Gentile-laden, Gallilean town of Nazareth.  Here She calls on another female, a young woman named Mary, to start the new chapter in God’s work with bringing a new vision of life, justice and love to the world.  Mary is engaged to be married, and when the angel Gabriel asks her to become pregnant with the child of God, it not only scandalizes her but also threatens her life.  Her fiancé Joseph could have her stoned to death for infidelity.  That law was rarely enforced at that time, but it was still on the books, so who knows what a Brett Kavanaugh or an Amy Coney Barrett would do if it came before them?

    There is a reason that God chose a woman as the bearer of this great good news, and a reason that She chose this particular woman.  The unmarried, soon-to-be-pregnant-before-marriage (and in danger of the death penalty) Gallilean named Mary – she says “Yes.”  It will begin a huge and dangerous and heart-breaking and yet exciting adventure for this young woman from Galilee.  Though it was unlikely that she realized all the implications of her decision, she did realize the radicality of this movement by God.  She sang this song in response to her decision to accept God’s request, a song inspired by the song of Hannah in First Samuel 2.  Here is what she sang:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior,

For God has taken note of my marginalized status,

From now on all generations will call me blessed,

For God is mighty has done great things for me, Holy is Her name,

God’s mercy will be on those who honor Her from one generation to

      another,

God has stretched out Her mighty arm and has scattered the proud with

      All their plans,

God has brought down the mighty from their seats of power and has

     Exalted those on the margins.

God has filled the hungry with good things

And has sent the rich away with empty pockets and hands.

God has kept the promise made to our ancestors and has come to our help,

God has remembered to show mercy to Abraham and Sarah 

And to their descendants forever.”

    This is the original Christmas carol, so take it in and lift it up! In this crazy time. In this time of Covid and Trumpdemic and the surging power of racism, let us recall these Advent and Christmas stories, and let us make room for them in our hearts.  This is not a sweet, sentimental story.  This is the story of our lives and our times, with all the violence and danger and despair and anxiety. It is always contemporary, and let us set aside some time in this season to allow both the radicality and the Good News of this story sink in.  Because we know the power of Herod so well in these days, we desperately need the courage of Mary, the visions of Joseph, the ecstasy of the shepherds and the dedication of the Magi.  Let us open our hearts to receive these gifts of the season.

"GIVING THANKS"

 “GIVING THANKS”

In this national week of Thanksgiving, I am feeling anxious and fatigued, with four main sources.  A good friend of ours died last month, and that has brough home the question of mortality to me.  Another good friend of ours has been seriously ill over the last month, and she is currently back in the hospital.  Third, the raging of the Covid-19 pandemic has all of us afraid and worn out.  And fourth, the Trumpdemic continues – like a three year old throwing a tantrum, he refuses to go away.

I am hoping that Michigan and Pennsylvania will certify their election results this week, showing that the Biden/Harris ticket won their state elections. I am giving thanks that Brad Raffensberger, the conservative Republican secretary of state of Georgia, held the line on the vote in Georgia and certified that Biden/Harris won Georgia.  I believe that Pennsylvania will hold the line, but I’m not so sure about Michigan, where two Republicans hold the key to an early certification.   I have teased our family in Michigan that their state may turn out to be more Trump-captured than Georgia!  I’d be glad to have to eat my words on that one.  We’ll know after 1 PM on Monday.

As we approach Thanksgiving, however, I want to focus on gratitude.  One more word on politics, and then I’ll stop – congratulations to our daughter-in-law Erin Graham who won election to a first term on the Ingham County Commission in Michigan, which includes the capitol city of Lansing.  She has been chair of the East Lansing school board, and she is a fine politician, in the best sense of that word.  Because of Covid-19, none of our family will be with us for Thanksgiving, but we give thanks for the gifts of life and love.

In this time of national chaos on so many levels, I am grateful for the idea of “equality” that continues to flow throughout the American experiment.  It is a powerful and dangerous idea – the idea that all people are created with equal dignity continues to drive all kinds of movements for justice and equity.  Part of the Trumpdemic backlash is a reaction to this flowing of the idea of equality and an attempt to stem its flow.  History is not progressive, so there is no guarantee that this idea of equality will not be stemmed.  Yet, I am grateful to all the 80,000,000 who turned out to vote for the idea of equality, in the middle of a deadly disease and in the middle of voter suppression.  I’m also grateful to all the people who have worked and who continue to work in this dangerous transition period to sustain this idea.

I give thanks for Caroline, for our health, for our kids David and Susan, for Erin and granddaughters Emma and Zoe, and for a whole host of friends who sustain and who continue to nurture us.  I am working on a memoir on my mother and me and her raising me as a single mom in the 1940’s and 50’s.  As I do this, I am meeting many ghosts and spirits, but I have also been deepened in my gratitude to her for her determined love and dedication to me.  As I remember stories and themes, and as I process them for this memoir, my amazement and admiration for her has grown.  I don’t want to make her into Superwoman, but I do want to recognize what she did and what she accomplished in her life.  She was a woman and a single mom of agency is a time when women, and especially single working moms, were seen as inferior beings.  I celebrate her agency and her tenacity in the face of such patriarchy.

I’m also aware of so many women of color, especially Black women, who have been single working moms for many decades because systemic racism has taken the men from their homes.  Many of them have educated me and deepened me and continue to do so.  So much to be grateful for, so much to be afraid of – may the attitude of gratitude prevail in my heart and in all our hearts in these crazy days.  I recommend that we all take to heart the short prayer from the mystic Meister Eckhardt from the 13th century:  “If the only prayer you ever say in your life is ‘Thank You,’ that would be enough.”

"UNIVERSAL SOLDIER"

 “UNIVERSAL SOLDIER”

We’ve made an oval walking path in our woodsy backyard – twenty times around will give you a mile walk.  In these beautiful fall days, amidst our towering pines and the oaks and maples and poplars, I am thinking of all the people who have walked in these areas, especially the Muscogee Creek people who were driven from the land on the Trail of Tears.  

As I was walking on Saturday and thinking about the Creeks, I thought of Buffy Sainte-Marie, who is a Cree Canadian-American singer and songwriter, pacifist and activist.  Creek and Cree are not the same tribe – the Creek were of the southeast, and the Cree were in Canada – but to my Anglo mind, the sounds are similar and brought her to mind.  She was born on the Piapot Reserve in Canada in 1941, and raised by an adopted Indigenous family in the States.  She taught herself guitar and piano and has written very powerful songs, including a lament for all that Indigenous peoples have lost to Anglo imperialism, called “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone.”  

I first encountered her in the 1960’s when she wrote an amazing song about the impulse for war and death that seems to reside in the human heart, but most especially in the European drive to conquer and dominate.  As Sweet Honey in the Rock later put it: “your hunger for war is nothing new, cowboy.”  The song  is called “The Universal Soldier,” and it is a poem/song that seems to apply to any age and to all people, as she writes.  Here it is:

He's five feet two and he's six feet four

He fights with missiles and with spears

He's all of 31 and he's only 17

He's been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an athiest, a Jain,

a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew

and he knows he shouldn't kill

and he knows he always will

kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada,

he's fighting for France,

he's fighting for the USA,

and he's fighting for the Russians

and he's fighting for Japan,

and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way

And he's fighting for Democracy

and fighting for the Reds

He says it's for the peace of all

He's the one who must decide

who's to live and who's to die

and he never sees the writing on the walls

But without him how would Hitler have

condemned him at Dachau

Without him Caesar would have stood alone

He's the one who gives his body

as a weapon to a war

and without him all this killing can't go on

He's the universal soldier and he

really is to blame

His orders come from far away no more

They come from him, and you, and me

and brothers can't you see

this is not the way we put an end to war

if you want to hear her singing it, here is the link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6imjvgJFvM

    As we think about Native American Heritage Month, let us remember the power and strength of Native Americans who have endured and who have persevered and survived, all the while holding on to a vision of creation that we so desperately need in our time:  the earth and all beings on it and in it are inter-related, including us human beings.  Let us align our lives to reflect this interdependence, or we’ll all perish as fools, as MLK so aptly put it.

"STACEY AND AZZIE"

 “STACEY AND AZZIE”

I give thanks that Sue Thompson, an Oakhurst member,  who now lives in Florida, invited Stacey Abrams to worship at  Oakhurst.  She wanted Oakhurst members to meet Stacey because she was running for state representative.   It was on that Sunday that Stacey engaged one of the all-time great elders of Oakhurst, Azzie Preston.  Azzie began to grill her about her political motivations and ambitions. Later that year, Azzie asked me to invite  Stacey to preach at Oakhurst.  

    We invited Stacey to preach, and she delivered a powerful sermon on the grace and call of God,  a call that emphasized God’s love for humanity and our call to serve humanity in God’s name.  Stacey would speak several more times at Oakhurst, and she said that if her parents weren’t United Methodist ministers, she would join Oakhurst.  I know that she probably said that to all the churches, but it felt good to hear it at the time.  

     The presentation by Stacey that I remember the most was when she spoke at Azzie’s funeral in March, 2009, in the sanctuary of Oakhurst.  She talked about going over to Azzie’s house to discuss the campaign. Stacey indicated that Azzie then began to “school” her on canvassing Azzie’s neighborhood, but not only Azzie’s neighborhood bur many other neighborhoods.  Azzie had great insight into the elections process, but she had even more insight into motivating people to register and to vote.  Stacey told us that it was nothing new for Azzie – as a young adult, Azzie had organized a busload of people to travel to Washington, DC to be part of the historic 1963 March on Washington.  And Stacey paid a great tribute to Azzie:  “She helped bring me home on this process.  She taught me that people can be motivated to register and to vote – they simply want to know that their votes count.”

    We have seen the fruits of that relationship between Stacey and Azzie unfold in this past week.  I did not think that Joe Biden had a chance to beat the Trumpdemic in Georgia, but Stacey had learned her lessons well, and along with many others, she helped to organize the extraordinary turnout in Georgia, a turnout that looks to have won Georgia for Joe Biden.  I was thinking about this relationship and this story as President-Elect Joe Biden spoke on Saturday night and credited Black women with being the foundation of the Democratic party.

    Stacey stayed in touch with Oakhurst, and I was humbled and honored to have her speak at my retirement celebration.  She also wrote the powerful foreword for the book that Catherine Meeks and wrote "Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Time."  Caroline was one of the central organizers of a Decatur event for Stacey at Agnes Scott in 2018 during her governor’s race.  We expect to see her soon in the Governor’s house.  In her sermon at Oakhurst, she told an incredible story about her first trip to the Governor’s house.  She was valedictorian of Avondale High school in the Atlanta area, and at that time the Governor of Georgia invited all the valedictorians to attend an event at the Governor’s house to celebrate their singular achievements.  Stacey’s parents were poor seminary students and did not have a car, so they rode the bus to the Governor’s house.  When they arrived, the guard would not let them in because he could not believe that a high school valedictorian would be riding the bus.  Stacey’s parents finally prevailed on the guard to let them in, and from that moment on, Stacey vowed that when she got to be Governor, the Governor’s house would be open to all.

    That is the vision that Stacey and Azzie and so many others fought for, and it is the vision that Stacey continues to lead in us, as we celebrate the great victory for Joe Biden in defeating Donald Trump in the presidential election last week.  We know that the Trumpdemic will not go gracefully, partly because it is not in his nature, but mainly because he is a manifestation of white, male supremacy, a force that never goes gracefully or quietly.  The fact that the Trumpdemic got the second most votes in the history of presidential elections tells us that the forces of racism and sexism and materialism and homophobia remain strong and powerful.  Let us  give thanks for the Stacey Abrams and Azzie Prestons of this world,  and let us step into our places in the parade of witnesses for truth, justice and equity.   Start registering more people to vote in the Georgia senatorial run-offs in January – deadline for registration is December 7.  Vote early too – the runoff is January 5!

"THE BIG WEEK"

 “THE BIG WEEK”

Caroline and I were grateful to be among the hundreds of Zoom participants on Saturday for the memorial service for Murphy Davis, as we celebrated her gifts and her ministry.  We mourned her untimely passing after a courageous fight with cancer over 25 years.  Murphy’s work was to point us the way to justice and equity and mercy for all of us.  She was such a powerful witness – what a life!  She finished her book “Surely Goodness and Mercy” shortly before she went into hospice.  It is the story of her battle with cancer, both individually and institutionally.  If you’d like a copy, let me know, and we’ll be sure to get one to you.  

I’m thinking of Murphy as we come to the end of the voting period for national and local elections on Tuesday.  It is a day and a time that many of us have been anticipating and dreading for a long time.  The current Trumpdemic is antithetical to Murphy’s work and to the values of justice and equity and compassion, for which so many of us have worked.  Whereas Biden is not the ideal candidate, his life story and moderate values stand in stark contrast to the narcissistic and bullying values of Trump’s story and presidency.  Biden’s election means that we will get a chance to deepen some of the values of justice and equity.  Trump’s election means a continued policy of seeking to eradicate the values of justice and equity.

This election of 2020 reminds me of the watershed elections of 1860 and 1932, when the course of American history would be altered by whoever won the election.  Lincoln’s race against John Breckenridge, John Bell and Stephen Douglas was centered on the issue of slavery and preserving the Union.  The 1850’s had seen the second Fugitive Slave Act, requiring all American citizens to assist in capturing people escaping from slavery, and the Dred and Harriet Scott SCOTUS decision in which Black people were declared not to be worthy of American citizenship.  In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt challenged incumbent president Herbert Hoover, who had downplayed  the Great Depression.  FDR won in convincing fashion and began a long journey to move us back towards the values of justice and equity.

We face a similar choice now, and I am assuming that all readers of this blog have voted or will vote on Tuesday.  Please make sure that all of your friends, neighbors and colleagues do the same.  This is a watershed election, and we hope that the water will flow in the correct direction after all the votes are counted.  I do believe (and I fervently hope) that Joe Biden will win the election and will be inaugurated in January as the 46th president of the United Sates.  I also believed that Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in 2016, so my predicting powers are not great.  Yet, I believe that Trump’s leadership has been so egregious, especially in regard to Covid-19, that American voters will turn him out, as we did in 1932 with Herbert Hoover.  If that is not the case, then God help us all. And, indeed, if Trump wins again, we will deserve what we get.  

     I was quoted in an Atlanta Constitution column by Bill Torpy last week concerning whether God had sent Trump to be president.  Torpy and I talked on the phone, and he was puzzled as to why white evangelicals supported Trump so strongly, since his behavior was so abhorrent to them.   We talked about Trump being seen as King Cyrus of Persia, who was praised in the Bible, even though he was a pagan.  Cyrus was praised because he had allowed the Israelites to return to Israel, after their exile in Babylon.  In his column, Torpy quoted his many conversations with white evangelicals, but he closed with part of our conversation:  “So, if God sent Trump to be president and gives him another term, what does that say?”  My reply was: “If that’s the case – and I don’t agree with this – then God is saying ‘The American experiment of equality and equity is over, and I’ll send the man to end it.”

This is a scary and dangerous week(s) ahead of us.  My fervent hope is that Biden will crush Trump as FDR did with Hoover, so that there will be no real debate about whether Trump was cheated or not.  I’m sure that Trump will contest the results if he loses, but if Biden’s margin of victory is strong enough, such challenges will not go anywhere.  Our daughter Susan has cautioned me not to jinx the election with such speculations about a Biden/Harris victory, and I hear her loudly and clearly.  But, I just can’t abide the thought of 4 more years of Trump.  I also recognize that in many ways, this is an exercise in white privilege, that Indigenous and Black people have lived under these issues for hundreds of years, but for us to have any chance of moving towards justice and equality, we must have a new president.  Please lift up your prayers and cast your votes.

 

"EVERYBODY WELCOME AT THE SCIENCE TABLE"

 ”EVERYBODY AT THE SCIENCE TABLE!”

Caroline and I have been gifted with two great children, David and Susan.  They have moved in different directions vocationally, with David teaching science education at Michigan State and Susan teaching theater at UMBC and doing  theater in Baltimore.  There is more overlap, however, than one might imagine.  David prefers the acronym “STEAM” to “STEM” (“Science, technology, engineering, ART and math” instead of “Science, technology, engineering, and math), and Susan is quite the engineer!

Today I’m featuring David’s new book of essays on teacher preparation for science educators.  He was the main editor for the book “Preparing Science Teachers Through Practice-Based Teacher Education.”  It will be published by Harvard Education Press on November 10.  When I asked him what he would like me to say about it, he replied: “If we want teachers to enact equitable instruction, we can’t just hope they will figure it out.  We know what will happen if White teachers are not disrupted in how they think about Black and Brown students, as well as the purpose of school.

    As people who help teachers learn, we have to provide opportunities for them to rehearse equitable teaching, and to receive support as they keep learning.  The book is an example of the community effort needed to do good work.  America is a place that emphasizes individual competition, but that’s not how we will improve teaching and learning.  All of the chapter authors talk to each other, learn from each other, and try out teaching together.”

    David learned these great ideas from us (modesty aside), from the Oakhurst Presbyterian community, and from his own development.  He began his career as a teacher of middle school science in a very diverse school in Houston, and he was greatly angered and discouraged by the total lack of science equipment and the lack of commitment of the school and the school system to teaching the marginalized kids about the gifts and possibilities of science.  During that first year, he made a commitment to himself and to the world that he would find a way to ensure that all kids, no matter their racial or class or gender classification, would have access to a high quality public school education.  That has been his life work ever since, whether it was in getting his master’s degree at University of Houston or his doctorate degree at University of Washington, or his getting tenure at Michigan State.    

    He and a colleague (Niral Shah) were recently on a panel on STEM inequity for diverse students, sponsored by the US Department of Education (yes, that one, headed up by Betsy DeVos).  Despite "The Leader’s" recent order to not discuss crucial race theories or other justice-oriented work, David and Niral found ways around that order to talk about teacher education practices to excite students of all racial classifications, but especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students about STEM and about all of learning.

    In typical David style, this book grew out of a proposal that was rejected for a workshop at a conference. David and his colleagues were determined to get these ideas before the pubic, so they went to a higher and broader authority.  The authors of the essays are all colleagues and friends, so it truly is a village-based work.  It calls leaders in education, but indeed all of us, to make a commitment that we have never really made in the history of our country: to show our intentionality to provide high quality education to all of our children.  We are so proud of David and his great work – we look forward to reading his new book, and you can do so too.  Here’s the link to ordering it 

https://www.hepg.org/.../preparing-science-teachers....  

"INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' DAY"

 “INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ DAY”

Last Sunday Caroline and I went down to the Decatur City Square to join in an Indigenous People’s Day Celebration and Call to Protest.  It was the day before “Columbus Day,” and it was sponsored by the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights.  The Alliance is seeking to build a coalition of groups who have been oppressed and exploited by the continuing white supremacy of our history and our time.   The gathering was primarily driven by the passion and vision of Decatur High School students, a great sign!  We were standing on land previously occupied by Muscogee Creek people, and the city square at Decatur had previously served as an informal boundary and trading place between the Cherokees to the north and the Creek in Decatur and to the south.  We were gathered to celebrate the heritage of the Creek nation and the heritage of Indigenous People in general.

We were also gathered to protest the continuing presence of a monument in Decatur Square, a monument  to the killing and oppression of the Creek people.  It is a cannon on top of a small monument, put there in 1906 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, remembering the “Indian Wars of 1836.” These were not really wars at all – they were the genocide and removal of Indigenous People from the Southeast.    Over 21 million acres of Creek land had already been taken by the US government in 1814 to seek to open land for those classified as “white” to come in to get the land at little or no cost.  This past summer the Alliance had been instrumental in getting Dekalb County and the City of Decatur to remove the huge obelisk memorial to the Confederacy by the UDC in 19098, but the cannon celebrating the “Indian Wars” still remains. We were there that day to ask the City of Decatur and Dekalb County to remove it, as they had previously moved the Confederate monument.

We heard in Native American songs and stories a different kind of relationship to the land, to the earth, and to one another.  We heard about a reverence for the land, the air, the water, the living creatures (including human beings)which inhabit all of these areas.  We heard a sense of the power of the idea that the ancestors are inhabiting a different sphere of all of these areas.  Thus, the modern Anglo idea of pouring deadly chemicals into the air and land and water in order to get more “stuff” seemed to be the foreign and deadly process that we all now know it to be.  In these days of rapid climate change, it is vital to all of us that we recover and hear the truth of these Native American visions of our life together.

We also heard from John Winterhawk, a Muscogee Creek whose ancestors had been forced off the land in Georgia and forced to go on the “southern” leg of the Trail of Tears.  He is now a potter and a storyteller.  He noted the great suffering of that journey to Oklahoma, where the lands promised to the Creek and other Indigenous Peoples were dry and hostile to the agricultural life that the Creek had developed in Georgia and Alabama.  Some of the Creek made their way back to Alabama and Georgia, and his ancestors were among them.  He urged us work for justice for Indigenous Peoples and for all those who have been oppressed by the machinations of white supremacy.  He also gave thanks for those traditions and insights from Indigenous Peoples which continue to give us visions for a way out of the current destructive cycle that Anglo domination has imposed all of us.  

     The primary difficulty, of course, is our captivity to white supremacy, and especially for those of us classified as “white.”  We simply do not want to acknowledge or even imagine the truths that we heard on this day in Decatur Square.   A recent example may help us to understand the depth of our captivity.  I gave a lecture at Princeton Seminary in the summer of 2018 at the Karl Barth Pastors Conference.  In that lecture, I suggested that Barth had needed to emphasize the power of the neighbor as one of the primary sources of revelation from God.  I used my story and the power of race in my life and in the life of American culture as primary examples of God’s sending the neighbor to us to help us understand the depth of our captivity to sin as human beings.  

After the lecture a middle-aged white man from Canada came up to talk with me.  He indicated that he did not grow up in the white, racist culture of the American South, and because of that,  he was not sure that my examples applied to him or to Canadians.  I responded that some of the best writings and descriptions of encounters with race that I had heard came from First Nations peoples of Canada.  He then proceeded to tell me that one of his best friends was a person of native origin, and their friendship was evidence that he himself was not captured by race.  I replied that I had heard such disclaimers all of my adult life in America, whenever a white person was confronted by the power of race in our lives. 

 I then asked about the issues of the land in Canada and the need for reparations there.  He replied again that he thought that was a complicated issue, but that in the end, “God owns the land.”  I asked him if he had deeds to some of the land, and he replied that he did.  I said, “If God owns the land, why not give your deed to the church or some non-profit mission group to be used for God’s work?”  His reply was:  “I’m tired of feeling guilty about this kind of stuff.”  I urged him: “Then open your eyes and your heart to recognize your captivity and see where God takes you on this.”  He went away after that, but I hope that he begins to have the stuff of recognition.  Indeed, I hope that we all do.

'THE REST OF THE STORY - 50 YEARS OUT"

 

“THE REST OF THE STORY – 50 YEARS OUT”

I dropped out of Vanderbilt Divinity School at the end of May, 1970, and I joined the faculty of the Roses Creek Folk School, near LaFollette, Tennessee, for the summer.  It was an experimental idea based on the Danish model of folk schools, where people with formal education joined with locally educated people to develop one another and learn from one another.  In this case, it was college and graduate students joining with Appalachian Mountain people.  During the summer, I continued to wrestle with my options:  conscientious objector (CO), prison, or flight to Canada.  None of them were good options.  I did not think that I would survive prison, and my Southern rootedness would not allow me to imagine life in Canada, uprooted forever from my family and community.  So, I decided to seek CO status and serve the country in that capacity rather than going to kill people in Vietnam.

In September, 1970, I joined with my long-time Helena friend, David Billings, also in seminary, and several other seminarians, in informing our draft boards that we were giving up our 4-F draft exemptions and would seek alternative service as COs.  As I indicated last week, we were hoping to challenge the draft exemptions of ministers and seminary students – in doing so we had hoped to get churches to rise up against the war.  We learned, however, that not enough of us were doing these actions, and that the draft boards were only too glad to add more fodder to the grist mill of young men sent over to fight in an immoral war.  David and I both applied for CO status with our local draft board in Helena, Arkansas.  

I moved back to Helena to live with my mother, while I began to look for alternative service positions.  I had heard from CO counselors that it would be much better for me to find a position rather than allowing the draft board to assign me somewhere.  The draft board would still have to approve it, but I was told that they usually did because they already had their hands full with meeting quotas to send young men to fight in the war.   I checked into several places in Arkansas, but they were based in rural areas, and although I grew up in a small town, I could not see myself serving in such areas, especially given the hostility that I knew that I would find there with my CO status.  

I got a call from Don Beisswenger in late September, telling me that he had been talking with Father Jim Zralek in Nashville.  Jim was a Catholic priest in east Nashville, and he was very interested in prison ministry.  He wanted to start a halfway house in Nashville for men getting out of state prisons, and he was looking for a staff person who could direct such a venture at a cheap cost.  Don had recommended me for the job, and he wanted to know if I were interested in it.  My first reaction was that while I had rejected going to prison as an alternative to serving in the war, now I would be going in and out of prisons.  I said “yes,” and called Father Zralek, and he hired me over the phone.  I went to Nashville to start working there at Opportunity House as its first director.  I was waiting on the Helena draft board to respond to my request for the CO status.  

In the meantime, I was ordered to report for the physical for service in the army, but since I had applied for the CO status, I skipped it.  My mother called me to tell me that I had made the local paper with this headline:  “Two are sought,” and the article read in part:  “One man failed to show up yesterday at the local Draft Board to go to Memphis for induction, and another failed to appear for his pre-induction exams….Failing to report was Gibson Stroupe.  Both are asked to contact the Draft Board at once.”   I contacted the draft board to let them know that I would go to the Nashville draft board, but I never did it.  I wondered if the MP’s were coming for me, but I figured that they had bigger fish to fry.  

In late October, I heard from the draft board that my application for service as a CO had been approved and that my work at Opportunity House had also been approved.  My good friend David Billings was turned down by the draft board, however.  Much later I found out why from one of my mother’s friends, who had been on that draft board.  He indicated that all of them knew that I was always going to be a minister, so it was within the bounds that I would be a CO.  David, however, had a bad reputation in high school, so the friend indicated that they knew that he was just trying to get out of the draft.  As we all scrambled to assist him, he was almost drafted, but in the meantime, he was convicted of “malicious mischief” on trumped up charges (that word “trumped” has added meaning now) related to racial justice issues.  He was given probation and exiled from Mississippi for 5 years.  But, it was a felony, and his status as a felon made him ineligible for the draft!  I have written about this case in previous blog (June 11, 2018 – check it out if you want to know more of his story), but it made me think how arbitrary the draft was, and how many young men had been sent to their deaths because of such capriciousness – some of them who were killed were my friends.

The work at Opportunity House changed my life.  I got a first hand look at another system that ground up people:  the prison system, based on arresting and convicting and incarcerating people with no financial resources, especially people of color.  It was not quite the prison-industrial complex that it has become today, but the same root issues were there – poorer people and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) used as fodder  to make us all feel better and to keep control over those who feel the weight of injustice and inequity all their lives.  In my two years at Opportunity House, we never had anyone come through who had any material resources – those kinds of folk never made it into the state prison. From then on, I had a different view of race and of prisons, and I’ve tried to live out of that calling for justice and equity ever since.     

"CHANGING MY LIFE - 50 YEARS OUT"

 “CHANGING MY LIFE – 50 YEARS OUT”

This month marks the 50th anniversary of my becoming a conscientious objector (CO) to the Vietnam War.  I grew up in what John Hope Franklin called “the militant South,” the violent culture that emerged from white supremacy in order to maintain slavery and neo-slavery.  So, I had a winding path to travel, so I want to take a bit of time to get there.  

    Those were tumultuous days in 1970, a time similar to now.  The human rights gains of the 1960’s had been repudiated by the election of Richard Nixon as President in 1968.  Nixon had designed the “Southern Strategy,” by which the white supremacists had discerned that they could no longer use overt racist language to win elections.  So, he decided to use covert signals on race, using what are now called “dog whistles” to let those classified as “white” know that he was their man on race.  It is a strategy that the Republicans have continued to use on a covert level since then, until 2016 when Donald Trump made it much more overt that he was the white supremacist candidate.  

       Nixon had inherited a war begun secretly under President Kennedy, which had been significantly expanded in a huge act of hubris by President Johnson.  Nixon further expanded it, but the Vietnam War generated a huge protest in the country and around the world.  It became a lightning rod that divided the country, and many of us searched for ways to protest it and to end it.  

    I began to think about it on a personal level at a conference for seminarians in New Hampshire in the summer of 1969.  I had just completed my first year at Vanderbilt Divinity School, with the intentions of either going for a PHD in theology or becoming a minister.  As a seminary student, I was automatically exempt from the draft which fed the Vietnam War.  Seminarians and ministers were exempt by the nature of our calling.  Every man in my age bracket will have their own story of relating to the draft at that time. There was no way around it, because the war machine was eating young men up, especially poor men and men of color.  And, when I say ‘men,” I mean ‘males,” because women were not allowed as fighters in the military at that time and were not eligible for the draft.

      The leaders of the conference in New Hampshire challenged all of us to think about giving up our draft exempt status and challenging all ministers in religious bodies to do the same.  The idea was that if all ministers and seminarians could be drafted to fight the war, then the religious bodies such as churches and synagogues would rise up in opposition to the war and end it. Mosques were not yet on that radar, though there were certainly many of them, and some of the strongest opposition to the war came from them (e.g. Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali).  It sounded like good strategy to many of us, but few of us were willing to risk it.  If we gave up our draft exemptions, there were few options to keep us from going to try to kill Vietnamese in the war: a high lottery number for the draft, a conscientious objector status, a medical exemption, fleeing the country, or going to prison.  Of course, that was the point.  Would there be enough people willing to go into that risky status in order to end the war?  I was not one of them.

    My life changed, however, in early 1970 when my fiancée broke off our planned summer wedding and ended our relationship.  It shattered my world and made me think of suicide – thanks to my mother and to my housemate David Kidd, I entered the mental health unit on Vanderbilt’s campus for a two week stay.   My mother always gave thanks for David (who was in his last year of VDS), and so do I.  He is now a retired minister in Nashville.  

    I returned to Vanderbilt classes, but my heart was not in it.  I was uprooted, and I was deeply troubled by the Vietnam War.  The call from the 1969 conference began to resonate in me, and I began to consider the alternatives:  I had a low draft number, so a CO or prison or flight were the only options if I gave up my draft exemption.  I am so grateful to Don Beisswenger on the faculty at Vanderbilt and to Ed Loring, who was finishing up his PHD in American church history at Vanderbilt at that time.  Both of them were friends and counselors and assisted me in working out my thoughts.  The CO seemed to me to be only an “educated” man’s exemption, but they helped me find a rich tradition in American history, and I began to think about it.  Could I give up my draft exemption?  Did I have the courage and stamina to do it?

    Then, another set of events – the USA officially bombed and invaded Laos and Cambodia in May, 1970, and National Guard troops killed protesting students on Jackson State campus in Mississippi and Kent State campus in Ohio.  Those events did it for me and for other seminarians.  At a mass protest in DC (in which I joined others in being tear-gassed), some of us formed a pact and agreed to give up our draft exemption and to challenge the Vietnam War head on.  I had made my move.  

    I will pick up the rest of the story next week, and while I recognize that this may not be a cliffhanger, forming it and sharing it has been very helpful to me – thank you!  

 

“A BITTERNESS”

I must admit that I had mixed feelings when I saw the helicopter lift President Trump off to Walter Reed Hospital on Friday, as the President suffered from symptoms caused by Covid-19.  I was sad for him and for Melania Trump, for his family, for the institution of the Presidency and for us as a people.  It has been a rough week for him – the disaster at the debate, the release of his taxes, and now to be publicly humiliated by being taken to the hospital by the very virus that he named as a hoax and which has now caused the death of almost 210,000 Americans.  

But, on another level, there is cosmic justice here.  The leader who could have saved so many lives, spared so much sickness and despair, but made a calculated, political decision not to do so – he has now been taken down by that very virus, which is obviously no respecter of ideology or political preference:  a host is a host is a host.  I don’t know how Trump will react to this devastating event in his life.  Perhaps he will “macho” up and proclaim that he has beaten it – why couldn’t everyone else do it?  Perhaps he will be converted and see himself and his life in a different way. 

As I pondered these things, I recalled a powerful poem by Mary Oliver entitled “A Bitterness.”  It helps to explain the loss of humanity of Donald Trump, and it helps me to have some bit of sympathy for him, which I recognize is always exceedingly dangerous with despots like him.  But, here is the poem. 

“A Bitterness”

I believe you did not have a happy life.

I believe you were cheated. 

I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.

I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.

I believe joy was a game that you could never play without stumbling.

I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.

I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.

I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as

     your bitterness.

I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and

     unassuaged.

 Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful

     flowers of the hillsides.

This poem helps explain to me the Donald Trump phenomenon.  He has bitterness as a deeply held core value, wound so tightly around his heart, that he has no room to grow, to use the great Grinch image.  Whether this explains Trump or not, the real question remains for us:  why did we elect such a man to be president?  The answer is that he was a white man – his only qualification – and that he projected a bullying, macho-heavy hand that would re-establish white, male supremacy in our land after we had the temerity to elect a Black man as President. The bitterness of race is similarly wound so deeply and tightly in us as a people and as a nation, that we would risk everything on a white man as bitter as Donald Trump.

I hope that we are in the death throes of white, male supremacy.  There are signs that we are, but this remains a very dangerous time.  Like Donald Trump’s life, the great experiment of the idea of equality – an idea which has fired so many people in so many ways – now hangs in the balance.  As John Lewis put it so well, voting is the only non-violent option for change in a democracy.  Let us exercise that right while we still can and seek to put us back on that path to a vision of equality and justice for all.

"GREAT TREES SOMETIMES FALL"

    In times like these, with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (among many giants who have left us this year - Gay Wilmore, John Prine, Joseph Lowery, CT Vivian, John Lewis, and now the notorious RBG), I think that the only words I can say are from a powerful poem from Maya Angelou that I encountered when John Lewis died, so here it is.

"WHEN GREAT TREES FALL" by MAYA ANGELOU

When great trees fall, 

rocks on distant hills shudder, 

lions hunker down 

in tall grasses,

and even elephants lumber after safety.

When great trees fall in forests,

small things recoil into silence,

their senses

eroded beyond repair.

When great souls die,

the air around us becomes

light, rare, sterile.

We breathe, briefly.

Our eyes, briefly,

see with a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened,

examines,

gnaws on kind words, unsaid,

promised walks never taken.

Great souls die and 

our reality, bound to

them, takes leave of us.

Our souls, dependent upon their nurture,

now shrink, wizened.

Our minds, formed 

and informed by their radiance,

fall away.

We are not so much maddened

as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of 

dark, cold caves.

And, when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly.  Spaces fill

with a kind of

soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never

to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed.  They existed.

We can be. Be and be

better. For they existed. 

“MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA”

 “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA”

 

             This week begins the month of celebrating the heritage of the diaspora of people from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean, who are now in the USA.  Some have been here for centuries, predating the Anglo arrival, some arrived as recently as today.  The month is sandwiched between famous battles for independence by Latinx or Hispanic peoples from European colonial powers, and the dates are September 15-October 15. 

 

            The recognition began under President Johnson and was originally called Hispanic Heritage Week.  It has expanded into a month, and in line with the arbitrary nature of the American system of race, it is ever evolving.  “Hispanic” was the earliest term because it is a word derived from the Latin word for the Iberian Peninsula of Spain and Portugal (Hispana).  

 

            The word “Hispanic” began to fall out of favor, however, because it does not cover all the language groups in the brown Americas.  “Latino” has begun to develop as an alternative, and it is a strange term because no one speaks Latin in the brown Americas except priests and some scholars.  Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle infamously noted that he would have to learn “Latin” before he visited Latin America.  Why did a word referring to a “dead” language from Italy become the definer for people from the brown Americas?  Because Latin is the basis for what were called the “Romance” languages when I was growing up:  Spanish, Portuguese, and French, which became the dominant European languages in the brown Americas.  “Latinx” has begun to replace the masculine “Latino” as a word of choice to include all  people. 

 

            Whether one prefers “Hispanic” or “Latino” or “Latina” or “Latinx,” all of them still define people from the brown Americas by the history of the European domination of the region in the colonial era.  This crunching of experience is further squeezed by the American system of race, which demands to know who should be classified as “white” and who should not.  This demand, born out of the struggle between slavery and equality in American history, means that everyone must be assigned their place in the system of race, obliterating cultural and language differences, so that those classified as “white” may know where to assign the goodies of American racial capitalism.  One of the great things about “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA” is that we hope that it will lead to peoples of the Americas helping to break down the oppressive system of race.  We will be hoping and looking for more accurate and just terms and descriptions to emerge.

 

            I got my first real insight into this system of classifying brown Americans in 1994 when I was a commissioner to our denomination’s annual General Assembly in Wichita.  I was assigned to the deadening (but really Presbyterian) Committee on Assembly Rules and Procedures.  For the most part, it was a deadening time, but we all perked up when a light-skinned woman commissioner came to meet with us.  She was an elder in her Hispanic church in Texas, and she came to ask us to consider changing the wording on the form which churches use annually to report the racial composition of their membership.  At that time the form had these categories:  “White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American.”  She wanted to divide the “Hispanic” category into two sub-groups: “Hispanic-white” and “Hispanic-black.” 

 

Few of us had heard of this at that time, and we asked her why her church was recommending this.  She was unusually frank with us about race, which was then (and still is) highly unusually.  She noted her light skin, and she indicated that most of the Hispanic members in her church looked like her.  They had perceived how the system of race works in America: “white is right; black get back; brown stand down.”  So, she wanted to keep her Hispanic heritage but also receive the goodies of being classified as “white.”  Some of us appreciated her candor; some of us were shocked (and offended) at it.  A few of us argued to make the change because it would help to expose the hypocrisy of race in America, but the majority opposed the change precisely for the same reason:  though they never voiced it, they simply did not want to admit that the dynamics of race worked in that way. 

 

Almost thirty years later, we know that it does indeed work that way, and the advocate who met with us has prevailed, with all kinds of permutations evolving out of the attempt to lump all brown peoples of the Americas into one category.  The “white” fear of the growing presence of “brown” people in the United States  is one of the foundations of the Presidency of Donald Trump.  Joining with the historical white fear and dread and exploitation of those classified as “black,” we face a fundamental divide in November.  May “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA” help us move towards the inclusion of all in a different system of the classification and celebrations of all cultures and all people.

 

"CELEBRATING SUSAN"

CELEBRATING SUSAN”

 

            This week brings our daughter Susan’s birthday, and I want to give thanks for her and for her life and witness and power in our lives and in the lives of so many.  So, today’s blog is dedicated to her!  She was born in Nashville, and she was ready to come out of Caroline’s womb.  Two hours after we arrived at Vanderbilt Hospital’s birthing room, Caroline said that she did not think that she could birth this baby without some drugs.  I went to get the nurse, and the nurse looked at the situation and said “No wonder you’re in distress – the head is crowning – hold on, Dr. Betty Neff wants to be here for this first birth in her solo practice!”  Somehow, Caroline held on, and out came baby Susan!

 

            We moved to Oakhurst Church and Decatur when Susan was six months old, so Decatur was her home until she left for college.  She was very shy as a young girl, and indeed the rumor spread in the church that she had some sort of impediment because she would not talk at church.  Her big brother, David, was incredulous and defended her, saying “She can talk – she talks all the time at home!”  Her verbal debut at the church came while Dr. Lawrence Bottoms and I were officiating at the wedding of Christine Johnson and Charlie Callier – she called out from the pew: “Da-da, Da-da!”  When people turned and looked at her, Caroline replied:  “Well, at least you know that she can talk!”

 

            It was perhaps the beginning of her drama career, which she continued to develop.  In the first grade, she was given the lead part of a young granddaughter in the elementary school play, and she had many lines to memorize.  We went to her wonderful teacher, Debbie Miller and expressed our concern for someone so young having so much to learn.  Ms. Miller replied:  “Are you kidding?  She not only has her own part down – she has memorized the entire play, everyone’s part – she gives cues to her fellow actors!”  So began her directorial career also.

 

            She joined Oakhurst as a member and became part of the youth group, and she began to move theatrically during one of our famous Christmas pageants.   Under Caroline’s leadership, we had begun to develop themes for the Advent season.  The theme that year was “Legends of Christmas,” and we had emphasized both plants and animals involved in the tradition.  Susan’s middle school group was asked to portray the plants, which they dutifully did.  After the pageant, Susan complained that having to act as a plant was boring.  Our reply was that if she thought that this year’s pageant was boring, maybe she and the youth should write the one for the next year.  She said:  “That sounds fine,” and it began a 25 year tradition of the youth writing and producing the Christmas pageant every year. 

 

            David went off to college after her first year in high school, and she thought that it would be great to get a bigger room and to have her big brother out of her hair for awhile.  What she didn’t reckon with was the fact that now both parents would be focusing on her rather than on her and David.  So, she got her driver’s license as soon as she could, and from then on, we would have “Susan sightings” at our house.  But, she used her time so wisely and creatively – with Lauren Gunderson, she co-founded “Life Is Sacred Campaign” seeking to limit the accessibility to guns.  For this work, they won the Metro Christian Council’s  Andrew Young Award for Faith and Public Policy and got to meet Andy Young himself.   By the time that she graduated from Decatur High, she won the AJC Cup, awarded to the most outstanding senior in each high school in the metro area.

 

            She received many scholarships for college, and we tried to get her to go to my alma mater Rhodes or to Guilford.  But, she had had enough of the South (it is always with us and in us) with its overt racism and sexism and general repressive approach to life.  She headed up to cold Minnesota for Macalester College, where she learned theater in a deep and powerful way and saw more snow in her four years there than she will probably see for the rest of her life!  But, she blossomed into a great human being!

 

            Since then, she has become our teacher on many levels.  She has vastly expanded our limited theatrical horizon, including her work in Americorps in Albuquerque where she was a drama teacher for developmentally disabled adults.  After getting her MFA in theater at Towson, she has settled in Baltimore, where she is a partner in an immersive theater company called “Submersive Productions.”  As an artist in America, she has to work other jobs to support herself, but fortunately she has found work in theater-related areas, teaching part-time in various colleges and working with drama teachers in high schools and middle schools.  She also joined Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, and to no one’s surprise, she is now chairing their worship committee, as they seek more inclusive and welcoming worship for people of all cultures and backgrounds.  She sings in their choir too!

 

            I could obviously go on and on about our great daughter, but for now, it’s “Thank you, Susan,” and “Happy Birthday!”  You are such a powerful gift to us and to so many others! 

"WASHERWOMAN'S STRIKE, 1881"

 “WASHERWOMAN’S STRIKE, 1881”

 

            As we approach Labor Day in an acrimonious time, I want to note a little-known labor action in Atlanta in the early union days of 1881.  I’ll be using a condensed version of an article that I wrote for Hospitality – the longer version is found at  http://opendoorcommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/July-2020-web.pdf.  After the Civil War ended, many rural Black women in the South, previously held as slaves, moved to the urban areas to seek employment and to seek to get away from the neo-slavery that was rapidly redeveloping.

 

Many of these newly arrived black women took in laundry as a way to make money.  Known as “laundresses” or “washerwomen,” more black women did this kind of work in 1881 in the South than in any other occupation.  It was back-breaking work, with long hours and very low pay.  Picking up dirty clothes at white peoples’ homes on Monday, making their own soap from lye, hauling water from wells or pumps to washtubs made from old beer barrels, scrubbing the clothes on washboards, wringing out the clothes, then hanging or draping them to dry, then ironing the clothes with hot, heavy irons, then delivering the clothes on Saturday -  all for the pay of $4-8 a month.  Still, the women were glad that their “domestic” work enabled them to stay home, rather than have to move to the white peoples’ homes as “almost slaves.” As Sarah Hill put it: “I could clean my hearth good and nice and set my irons in front of the fire and iron all day without stopping…I cooked and ironed at the same time.”  They made a way out of no way. 

 

Making a way out of no way did not mean, however, that they were content with it.  In 1881, some 20 of these washerwomen began to meet and to organize to seek better wages.  They also went door to door in their neighborhoods, seeking other washerwomen to support the effort and join in the strike.  Their efforts built on the efforts of others, but it was still early in the labor union movement.  The first labor union in the state of Mississippi was a washerwoman’s union in 1866 in Jackson.  The Knights of Labor was formed in 1869, but the American Federation of Labor was not formed until 1886, so these washerwomen were in the forefront of this developing movement to support workers in their demands for better wages and working conditions.

 

The washerwomen of Atlanta named themselves “The Washing Society,” and we have the names of six of them:   Matilda Crawford, Sallie Bell, Carrie Jones, Dora Jones, Orphelia Turner, and Sarah Collier.   They began to organize, and soon their numbers had grown from 20 to 3,000.  They went on strike in late July, 1881, letting their white employers know that unless their wages were raised, no more laundry would be done.  It caused a furor in the white community.  The Atlanta Constitution (AJC) covered the strike almost daily, and its coverage – which is the only written records that we have of the strike – was filled with both contempt and amazement at the temerity of these black washerwomen.  The AC called them the “Washing Amazons,” and in using what it deemed a derisive term, it revealed the fear which these women struck in the heart of privileged, white society.  The idea of “Amazons” originated in ancient Greece and referred to a fierce band of women warriors – indeed “Diana” of the recent movie “Wonder Woman” was living among and trained by Amazons. 

 

The AJC had these words about the Washing Society:  “The laundry ladies’ efforts to control the prices for washing are still prevalent and no small amount of talk is occasioned hereby.  The women have a thoroughly organized association and additions to the membership are being made each day……The washerwomen of Atlanta having ‘struck’ for very unreasonably high prices.”   Even more ominous for white society was that talk began among other domestic workers about going on strike.  As the Washing Society strike held out, the City Council went into action to end the strike.  Strikers were arrested for disorderly conduct ; white businessmen proposed building an expensive steam laundry to end the black women’s “monopoly,” and the Council levied an exorbitant tax of $25 on each Washing Society member.  In response to the tax, the Washing Society met at Wheat Street Baptist Church and voted to send this letter to the Mayor – they are the only words that we have from the Washing Society:

 

“We the members of our society, are determined to stand to our pledge and make extra charges for washing, and we have agreed, and are willing to pay $25 or $50 for licenses as a protection, so that we can control the washing for the city.  We can afford to pay these licenses, and will do it before we will be defeated, and then we will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices.  Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council meeting Tuesday morning.  We mean business this week or no washing.”

 

            The city council voted to rescind its action, and the strike proceeded.  Yet, we do not know the resolution of the strike.  The articles in the Constitution eventually faded out, and since we have no other sources, the conclusion of historians is that the Washing Society only got a few of its demands.

 

But, as we approach Labor Day,  it reminds us that the struggle for justice and equity is long and difficult, but so essential.  The economic forces that shaped racism and slavery are deep and powerful, and the only way to bend the arc of history towards justice is to engage in the struggle for such bending.  We are now in a crucial period.  Significant changes will be made in these times.  Let us be inspired by the Washing Society, and let us take up their dirty but cleansing work in order to bend these times toward justice.

 

'CELEBRATE THE PASSAGE, FIGHT FOR THE PROMISE"

 Since she is Tennessee born and bred,  today’s blog is written by my partner and co-pastor, the Rev. Caroline Leach, who was the 21^st woman ordained to the ministry in the former Presbyterian Church US.

 

“CELEBRATE THE PASSAGE, FIGHT FOR THE PROMISE”

 

            On August 17, 1920, Seth Walker, the Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, left his position and went down to the floor to speak in favor of tabling the motion to ratify the 19^th Amendment, which would give women the right to vote.  Tennessee was one of the last chances for the Amendment to be ratified – if it did so, it would be the 36^th state to do so, and it would push the amendment over the line for ratification to amend the Constitution.  If it failed to do so, the Amendment was likely dead. 

 

The vote on passage in Tennessee would be exceedingly close, and thus the Speaker took the unusual step of going to the floor to speak on defeating it.  In his speech Walker got to the heart of the matter.  He was against giving the right to vote to women, and his reasoning boiled down to one fundamental reason:  “This is a white man’s country.”  He spoke this to a legislature full of white men, called into special session by Gov. A. H. Roberts in sweltering August heat in Nashville.  They came into Nashville – all white, all male – ready to put women into their place once and for all.  Most would have preferred to have been sitting on the porch with a cool drink or swimming in a creek or lake that dot the hills and hollers and flatlands, but here they were. 

 

So, the women of Tennessee had ridden the trains, hired drivers (because they weren’t allowed to drive), and walked dusty roads and trails to talk with each of Tennessee’s legislators, seeking to get a signature for a “yes” vote.  There were plenty of women and men opposed to the 19^th Amendment, and there was heavy opposition funding from the railroads and the liquor lobby.  There is a great book about Tennessee’s journey on this, called “The Woman’s Hour”, by Elaine Weiss – it will take your breath away.

 

After he made his “white man” speech, Speaker Walker received a dismaying surprise later that day when Banks Turner changed his mind and voted against tabling the motion, thus freeing it for an “up or down” vote the next day.   And, that day brought another surprise.  Although he had voted to table the motion the previous day, Harry Burn - the youngest member of the legislature – had received a letter that night from his widowed mother Phoebe “Febb” Burn, urging him to vote for the 19^th Amendment.  He had been vacillating over what action to take all during the session, but his momma’s words convinced him.  He voted “aye” on the 19^th Amendment, shocking everyone, and a tumult followed on the floor of the Tennessee House.   The 19^th Amendment, certifying the right to vote for women, would now become the law of the land.

 

The final vote was 49-48 – ONE VOTE determined the fate of voting for women – ONE VOTE!  Having broken through this wall only led to confronting more walls – despite the 15^th Amendment, many Black men and women were denied the right to vote.  Native Americans, Asian-Americans, LatinX Americans had to claw and scrape their way to the vote, finally achieved in the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Or, so we thought – that act was eviscerated by the Supreme Court in 2013, so we are back, way back, in the parade. 

 

The fight for voting rights for everyone continues today.  We see it now in the voter suppression for 2020, so make a plan to vote and to get others registered and voting.  Following the 19^th Amendment, we have heard so often that “woman’s place is in the home,” but we have added “and in the House!”  It was clear then, and it is clear now that there were (and are) many roadblocks to voting.  When the 19^th Amendment passed in 1920, there were 10 weeks left until the presidential election of that year – about the same amount for us 100 years later.  The roadblocks remain – let us be like those dedicated women in Tennessee and hit the streets to make certain that the community votes.  It is as crucial as that vote on the hot August day in Tennessee in 1920.  Let us celebrate the passage of the 19^th Amendment, and let us now fight for its promise.