"THE PARADES OF HOLY WEEK"

 “THE PARADES OF HOLY WEEK”

In the Biblical story in all four gospels, Holy Week begins with a parade into Jerusalem. It was a ragtag collection of the followers of Jesus, entering Jerusalem in the powerful and evocative time of Passover.  There were many ideas of the purpose of this parade.  Jesus chooses to do it in Passover as an “in your face” to the Roman and Jewish powers, similar to the crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge (should be the John Lewis Bridge) on the march from Selma. In his powerful play of Clarence Jordan’s “Cotton Parch Gospel,” Tom Key suggests that the followers of Jesus felt like they were going to the big time, leaving behind the tent revivals in small town Judea and heading for the capital.  

From the Roman point of view, it was a dangerous march, like the Alabama authorities felt on that Selma march in 1965.   Passover is a Jewish festival that remembered and celebrated political liberation from slavery and captivity in Egypt.  The Empire did not want the pesky Jews to get any ideas, so at about the same time that Jesus entered Jerusalem, so did Pontus Pilate, the Roman governor of the region.  Just in case the Israelites got any ideas about liberation, Pilate and Rome wanted everyone to remember who was in control. By the end of the week, Rome would execute Jesus as a threat to the empire, and that is the central event of Holy Week.  Whatever theological meaning we give to the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, Rome gave it this meaning – we reign supreme:  don’t mess with us.

In this sense, Holy Week is always contemporary, reminding us in every age that the powers of oppression and suppression are always knocking on the door, telling us to come out and identify ourselves, as to whether we are loyal to the oppressive powers or not.  In this year, we have witnessed several parades of oppressive powers coming into our lives, rivaling the parade of Jesus of Nazareth. There is the parade of racism and white supremacy, marching into our lives, singing “Blood and Soil,” killing Asian-American women, suppressing the vote (both events happening in my home state of Georgia, and there are powerful connections between these two.)

There is the coronavirus parade, reminding us that it does not care about our ideology or theology – it only wants our bodies to be sacrificed in order for it to thrive.  It is a plague right out of American history, similar in scope to the one 100 years ago and with a similar mismanaged political will which enabled it to kill at least 600,000 of us.  It also speaks clearly of our history – sacrificing many bodies to bring life to a virus of materialism and racism.

There is the Trumpdemic parade, seeking to make us cynical about everything, especially community and government, making us lose the capacity to tolerate and work with others, seeking to make us unwilling and even incapable of compassion, moving us close to nihilism and chaos.   

Holy Week comes into our lives where we live, as individuals and as a culture.  It reminds us of the tragedy that courses through our collective and individual histories.  The week begins in celebration of a new vision of compassion and justice and community, values that enable us to resist oppression.  Many of Jesus’ followers are shocked that Rome and Jerusalem are able to absorb this parade and even to crush its values.  The Cross reminds us that the powers are always resistant to God, are always resilient in their responses to God’s breakthroughs for justice and love, and are always threatening us with the cost of seeking justice and living lives based on love.  Holy Week is God’s final reminder to us of the cost of discipleship, a reminder thar asks us to consider our lives and the meaning of our lives.

Holy Week takes both the meaning of our lives and the cost of that meaning seriously.  To live out of justice and love means that we will be in danger of being run over by the other parades of our lives – Rome, racism, Covid-19, Trumpdemic.   We know that the story does not end here on the Cross, but the story does remind us of the cost of living lives based in justice and love.  In order to get to the true meaning of our lives, we must encounter the Cross and walk with Jesus through that valley of the shadow of death. Thank God, it is not the final word, but it is a powerful word, and yes, we were there when they hung him on the tree.  

"A KNOCK AT MIDNIGHT"

 “A KNOCK AT MIDNIGHT”

I have been watching the Georgia legislature (and other state legislatures) with some fear and anxiety over the past few weeks, as the Republican-controlled bodies try to limit and suppress the vote for future elections.  This effort comes after the stunning upsets in Georgia in the Presidential and Senatorial elections in recent months.  Though they learned from their 1890’s ancestors and never mentioned “race” in the proposed laws, it is clear that their intent is to limit the voting opportunities for Black and Brown people in Georgia and around the country.

I have had some fear about this, but I was also feeling better because I am aware of how skillful Stacey Abrams is, and how much of her approach she has taught to others.  There might be some vote suppression, but I was feeling some confidence that Stacey and her cohorts would handle it, would still turn out the vote.  Then the massacre of last week happened in Atlanta, and I was reminded of how the voter suppression happened in the South in the 1890’s.  Not surprisingly, it was known as “The Mississippi Plan,” and it combined seemingly benign election laws with overt violence to suppress and repress the Black vote in the 1890’s.  And it worked – there was a tremendous drop-off in voting by Black people between 1885 and 1900, so much so that it seemed that the 15th Amendment was completely forgotten and ignored.

I do not think that the killer in the massacre in Atlanta last week had voter suppression on his mind when he did the killing, but he certainly had racism and misogyny in his heart and in his mind.  It is not too many steps from this week’s killings to that connection, however.   We saw that connection on January 6, when the insurrectionists were using violence to attempt voter suppression of the most disturbing order.  The violence of this past week and that of January 6 were the order of the day and the year in the decade of Black voter suppression in the 1890’s.  Those of us who are classified as “white” in these days should see this as a wake-up call, if we have not already heard it.  White men intend to keep power in our hands, and our history indicates that we will use any means necessary to do that and to express that, whether it is voting laws that cut back on absentee ballots, or whether it is shooting Asian people down in their places of business, whether it is storming the Capitol, or lynching people.

    In the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Martin Luther King, Jr. received a threatening phone call about midnight, telling him to get his family out of the house, saying that they were coming to bomb his house.  It was not the first threatening call that he had received, and it would not be his  last.  He debated over whether to wake up Coretta and the children and leave the house, but he decided to sit down at the kitchen table because he was so exhausted.  He prayed to God to keep them safe, and he confessed to God that he was at the end of his rope.  As he prayed, he received an answer:  “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice!  Stand up for the truth.  And I will be with you to the end of the world.  I will never leave you alone.”  He was comforted, and he went back to bed.  The house was not bombed that night, but it was bombed a few nights later.  No one was hurt, and King persisted in his justice ministry for 12 more years until he was assassinated.

King later used this incident as the basis for his sermon “A Knock at Midnight, in which he exhorts us to stay strong, to stay vigilant,  to work for justice.  We are in such a time now.   We are hearing knocks at midnight all around us, and it is our turn to step up and step out for justice and equity.  We have not yet seen the concentration of violence that happened in the 1890’s to suppress the votes of Black, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous people, but we are hearing knocks at midnight about the possibilities of it.  Let us work on our legislatures, let us work on ourselves, let us work on society so that we may push back the repressive wave that seems to be coming.  It is a knock at midnight.

"OUGHTA BE A WOMAN"

“OUGHTA BE A WOMAN”

I first met her in songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  I remember one particular song that Bernice Johnson Reagon mentioned before they sang it.  “I asked June to write me a poem about my momma, and I think that she got it just about right.  Here’s the song:  “Oughta Be a Woman.”  The poem/song spoke about the burden of Black women as breadwinners/mommas/child care providers. Though it was written by and about Black women, it reminded me of my own mother and of all her sacrifices for me.  

The poet’s name was June Jordan, and I have read many of her works since encountering her in the Sweet Honey song.  She was born in Harlem in 1936, born to Jamaican immigrants.  Her father was demanding, but he kindled in her a love of literature.  He was not Black when he migrated to the States in the early part of the 20th century, but he automatically became Black in the eyes of the white cultural climate in the USA.  Her mother was a nurse, and her farther worked in the post office.   Her father also beat her and her mother.  She relates her story as a child in her book “Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood,” where she notes that she began writing poetry at age 7.  She entitled her book “Soldier,” because of a quote from her father:  There is a war in this country against colored people – I have to become a soldier in this war.”  He made June Jordan a soldier too.

Her essays and poetry are among the best that I have read. She was not only a soldier in the war against racism – she wrote and lived in the intersections between race, gender, and sexual orientation.  She wrote the best essay on Martin Luther King, Jr., that I have ever read:  “The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God: An Essay on the Life and Ideas of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”  She taught poetry and writing at many places:  her alma mater Barnard College, City College of NYC, Yale, Sarah Lawrence, and University of California Berkeley. Her final book was “Some of Us Did Not Die,” a collection of original essays and previously written essays, published after September 11, in which she wrote these words: “Once through the fires of September 11, it’s not easy to remember or recognize any power we continue to possess.  Understandably we shrivel and retreat into stricken consequences of that catastrophe. But, we have choices, and capitulation is only one of them.”  In re-reading that essay for this blog, it struck me how timely it is in today’s pandemic world, as we reach the first anniversary of that deadly plague.  

June Jordan died of breast cancer in 2002, but her powerful vision lives on in her words.  If you have not encountered her, go find her writing and be challenged and delighted and inspired by it.  Since it is Women’s History Month, I want to conclude with one of June Jordan’s poems about another powerful woman:  Fannie Lou Hamer, in which she catches Ms. Hamer’s life of hospitality and fearless activism:

1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer

You used to say, “June?

Honey when you come down here you

supposed to stay with me. Where

else?”

Meanin home

against the beer the shotguns and the

point of view of whitemen don’

never see Black anybodies without

some violent itch start up.

                                       The ones who   

said, “No Nigga’s Votin in This Town . . .

lessen it be feet first to the booth”   

Then jailed you   

beat you brutal   

bloody/battered/beat   

you blue beyond the feeling   

of the terrible

And failed to stop you.   

Only God could but He   

wouldn’t stop   

you

fortress from self-

pity

Humble as a woman anywhere   

I remember finding you inside the laundromat   

in Ruleville   

                  lion spine relaxed/hell   

                  what’s the point to courage   

                  when you washin clothes?   

But that took courage

                  just to sit there/target   

                  to the killers lookin   

                  for your singin face   

                  perspirey through the rinse   

                  and spin

and later   

you stood mighty in the door on James Street   

loud callin:

                  “BULLETS OR NO BULLETS!   

                  THE FOOD IS COOKED   

                  AN’ GETTIN COLD!”

We ate

A family tremulous but fortified

by turnips/okra/handpicked

like the lilies

filled to the very living   

full

one solid gospel

                        (sanctified)

one gospel

                (peace)

one full Black lily   

luminescent   

in a homemade field   

of love

 

"WAY UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR"

 “WAY UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR”

When I recently asked Caroline whom I should write about in Women’s History Month, her first suggestion was Mae Jemison.  I was surprised by that – I had heard of Jemison, but I didn’t know much about her.  After researching her a bit, I see why Caroline suggested her – she is a powerful woman!  She was born in 1956 in Decatur, Alabama, born to a roofer and an elementary school teacher in the town infamous for its KKK activity during that time.  Her birth year was at the start of the civil rights era taking off – Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56, Emmett Till lynched in 1955.  Her family would become one of the parts of the Great Migration wave – in 1959, they moved to Chicago to get away from the overt, deadly racism of neo-slavery days.

In Chicago, Mae Jemison bloomed out as an outstanding student.  Her uncle got her interested in science, especially astronomy and space.  She always dreamed as a girl of going into space, not to the moon, which happened when she was 10, but to Mars. Her main concern was whether or not the white, male astronaut world would accept a Black woman.  She was intrigued and inspired by “Star Trek,” and, in particular, African-American actress Nichelle Nichols’ portrayal of Lieutenant Uhura helped her to believe that it was possible.   She thought that it was essential that NASA did accept others because if those white males  in space encountered ETS, she would want the ETS to know that there were other humans besides white males.  

She loved all kinds of science and got a scholarship to attend Stanford University at age 16, where she had a double major of chemical engineering and African-American studies.  While she was at Stanford, she was the president of the Black Studies Union.  She actually wanted to study what we now call bio-medical engineering, but such a major did not exist at that time.  One of her professors urged her to go to medical school so that she could learn more about the human body and serve people in  many different ways.  She was accepted to Cornell University’s medical school and graduated from there in 1981.   She worked as a general practitioner for a bit, then signed up for the Peace Corps and worked as medical director for the Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

    When her duty was over, she applied to NASA to its astronaut training program, but it was the same year of the tragic Challenger explosion, and all applications were halted.  She re-applied, and in 1987 was one of 15 applicants out of 2,000 to be accepted into the NASA astronaut program, the first African-American female.  She became a science mission specialist and in 1992 boarded the Endeavor spacecraft to become the first African-American woman in space.  While in space, she performed experiments in space in material science, life science, and the effect of weightlessness on human beings.

    After leaving NASA, she taught at Dartmouth and Cornell and is still on the faculty at Cornell.  She currently lives in Houston, and is  at the helm of the 100 Year Starship, a groundbreaking effort seeking to pioneer transforming breakthrough science and technology to enhance the quality of life on Earth.  For all her talents and skills and interests, she still remembers what is central in life, as noted in this quote from her:  

“When people talk about the space program, they ask me, "Was it the toughest job I ever had; was it the most difficult," and it wasn't. Probably being a Peace Corps doctor was the most difficult job, because I was on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and I was responsible for people's lives and their health. I was the person that was there. Period. And it required a very wide range of skills, and learning how to keep my own health together, as well as paying attention to other folks.”  

    Not all of us are Mae Jemison, but we can all live by one of her most famous quotes:  “Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imaginations; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.”

"THE MOST BELLIGERENT NON-RESISTER"

 “THE MOST BELLIGERENT NON-RESISTER”

My most recent encounter with her was a couple of years ago when Caroline and I were traveling back from a trip to see Susan in Baltimore.  We drove the more “rural” route out of Frederick, Maryland, heading down Highway 340 towards Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. It was there that John Brown made his famous raid in 1859, where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers meet in a beautiful setting.  We visited the Charles Town Court House where Brown was tried and convicted.  In the halls of that courthouse was a drawing by Albert Berghaus of two women in a horse-drawn wagon in Charles Town.  The women were Mary Brown, wife of John Brown, and Lucretia Mott, who was accompanying her to make a visit to Brown.  Brown had not allowed his wife to come down for the trial, and she had stayed with Lucretia Mott and her family, until Brown finally relented right before his execution.  

Brown had written his wife from jail that he was glad she was with Lucretia Mott saying, "I remember the old lady well; but presume she has no recollection of me...I am glad to have you make the acquaintance of such old Pioneers in the Cause." Lucretia Mott was indeed a pioneer, and was in the middle of many justice movements.  She had been born in 1793 in Massachusetts into a Quaker family, raised in the anti-slavery sentiment of the Friends Society.  She married her father’s business partner in 1811, but in 1815, her father died, leaving a mountain of debts for her mother and the family.   Everybody went to work pay off the debts, keeping the family out of prison.  

Lucretia Mott also went to work against slavery.  She was a powerful orator, but faced harsh resistant to women’s leadership in the anti-slavery movement.  Rather than diminishing her work, the resistance intensified it.  She became devoted to both anti-slavery and women’s rights.  William Lloyd Garrison welcomed her into the American Anti-Slavery Society, and she became a speaker on that circuit, indeed a fiery speaker, so much so that African-American abolitionist Robert Purvis called  her “the most belligerent Non-Resistant I ever saw."  She did this while raising six children.

In 1840, Mott joined several other American women as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, but the males in charge of the Conference refused to seat the women as delegates.  There she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and they worked hard to overturn the ruling, but they were not able to do it.  They vowed that upon their return to the States, they would organize a gathering devoted to women’s rights, emphasizing that rights for women was not a competition for abolition but rather part of the same river of equality.  Upon their return, they began the work, and 1848 welcomed delegates to the first official women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York.  There they developed and passed the “Declaration of Sentiments” demanding equal rights for women.

Mott continued to work for both abolition and women’s rights.  In 1850 Congress  passed the heinous Fugitive Slave Act, which required people escaping slavery to be returned to the enslavers.  Mott and her husband assisted several people escaping slavery to get away from the “slave-catchers” who came north to retrieve human beings and return to the cruelty of slavery.  

After the Civil War, Mott re-dedicated herself to helping those who had been held as slaves and to rights for women.  She got involved in the fight over the 15th Amendment, which gave the explicit right to vote to Black men but not to women.  There was a fierce and nasty debate between allies over this Amendment and the refusal to include women in its granting of voting rights.  As often happens, the women were left out, and the Amendment passed.  It would be 50 years before women were finally included in voting rights in the 19th Amendment.  

Mott was also one of the founders of Swarthmore College.  She died in 1880, having left behind a powerful legacy of abolition, suffrage, equity and accompaniment.  The “Declaration of Sentiments” has not yet been fulfilled – we still await the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment after 173 years.  As we start this Women’s History Month, let us give thanks for this most belligerent witness named Lucretia Mott, and let us find our places in the path that she and many others have laid before us.