"SURGERY LOOMING - OPPORTUNITY AND ANXIETY"

 “SURGERY LOOMING – OPPORTUNITY AND ANXIETY”

Neither Caroline or I have had an overnight stay in the hospital since our daughter Susan was born in the early 80’s.  We are so grateful and blessed that our health has taken us this far without hospitalization.  We have both had outpatient surgeries that did not require an overnight stay, and we are grateful for the surgeons, nurses, support staff, and technology which enabled that.  

Caroline has been experiencing major back, leg, and hip pains since early last fall.  She has been consulting with Emory nurses and physicians and has received spinal steroid injections, which have provided temporary relief but have worn off quickly.  Her pain level has consistently remained at a 7 or 8 level for a long time, and with the advice of the surgeon, she is now scheduled to have major back surgery this Thursday, August 26 at the Emory Spine Hospital.  It had been scheduled for tomorrow, but we learned late this past week that a major surgical X-ray machine had broken down, so the surgery was moved to Thursday – we want the equipment to be working!  We’re hoping that the surge in Covid cases does not postpone the surgery again.  We should find out at her  pre-op this Tuesday.  If it is a go, we will give thanks and get ready for surgery, for the 2-3 day stay in the hospital, and the long recuperation at home.  As pastors, we have seen many people in the hospital, but this will be our first time in almost 40 years as a patient.

In this sense, we are turning a corner in our journey.  Caroline is longing for relief from the pain, so while she is dreading the surgery and recovery, she sees this as an opportunity for new possibilities with much less pain.  Since I am not experiencing the pain directly (though certainly indirectly) and given our different personalities, I am seeing this corner turn with anxiety.  Will she make it OK through the surgery?  Can I be an adequate caretaker for her over the six week recuperation period?  Please be lifting us both up in this turning the corner, especially Caroline who will be experiencing the roughest part of this turn.  We are grateful to many friends who will be assisting, and to North Decatur Presbyterian Church, which has set up a mealtrain for us.

We just had a great visit with both of our children, Susan and David (and granddaughter Zoe as a bonus!)  They were both reminding us of how grateful they are that the surgeons and surgical techniques are available for the procedure, which seems very likely to provide major pain relief for Caroline.  At this kind of corner turning, I am glad that in our rationed health care system, we are one of those who are given the care.  It reinforces our continued commitment to working for this kind of health care for everyone in our society.   

From my point of view, it is also turning a corner to acknowledge fully our aging and the limitations that come with that.  That is a hard awakening, but it is upon us. I am grateful to so many of you who have made that transition so well and who have  modeled it so well – with determination, with commitment to your own humanity and that of others, and with humor!  I am reminded of the closing lines of the Tennyson poem “Ulysses” that I learned in high school:  

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

I don’t know that Caroline and I moved earth and heaven, but we have been trailblazers in many ways.  And, though my heart doesn’t often feel heroic in these days, I do resonate with the poet’s image of continuing to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.   Please be lifting us up in this next big step in our journey.  I know that many of you have come through major surgery well, and your work and recovery and strength are inspiring to us.  In the days  of recovery, I’m not sure when my next weekly blog will be, but I will be posting updates on Caroline.  We give thanks for you and for your friendship and support and prayers.

"WORDS FROM GERMANY"

 “WORDS FROM GERMANY”

At the end of May, the Rev. Andreas Holzbauer asked me to lead one of his seminars for college students in Germany at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg.  The class was on “White Christianity,” with an emphasis on the rise of white supremacy in USA under the guise of Christianity.  Due to the time change, I had to be ready to talk on Zoom and lead about 30 students at 7 AM EDT.  I was honored to be asked to do it, so I jumped right in!  Andreas had asked me to share my story for the first part of the seminar.

I shared the usual parts of my background.  I had been raised by a loving, single mother in the racist South in the 1940’s and 1950’s.  I learned and accepted racism and patriarchy and homophobia and militarism and other demonic forces.  I had been taught these forces by people who loved me and whom I loved, and because of that, I believed that they were true.

I also shared some of the leverage points where I had begun to change my mind and my heart on these forces.  One was my mother – though captured by these forces herself, she worked in subtle ways to shape me in another view, ways such as not allowing me to say the “N-word” or call Black people by their first names.  I recalled hearing MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech and thinking that there were other realities out there, realities that I had not yet allowed myself to encounter.  I lifted up my college experiences, and I talked about the most powerful experience that changed me:  working for a summer at a church in Brooklyn, where for the first time in my life I experienced Black people as human beings like me.  I also shared how my time as pastor at Oakhurst Presbyterian Church had challenged my continuing captivity to racism, and how it had deepened my understanding of myself and others and of how demonic forces like white supremacy can take us over.

I concluded by discussing the rising tide of white supremacy in the Obama and Trump years, and how such forces seem to be a permanent part of our life together.  When I opened up the seminar for questions, I noticed that all of those who asked questions (about half the students) spoke fluently in English, and I remembered my own provincialism – I speak only English.  The first question threw me for a loop – “Do you think that there will be a civil war in the United States again soon?”

That question had been hanging around the corners of my mind ever since the January 6 insurrection and the inauguration of Joe Biden as president.  It had persisted because Trump promoted the “Big Lie,” and so many people seemed to believe it.  Still, I was taken aback by the question from a German student, until I remembered that Germans have such a better memory than we do on how democracy is undermined.  I had started re-reading David Potter’s excellent book on the prelude to the Civil War called “Impending Crisis 1848-1861,” published in 1976.  In it he names many steps that led to the Civil War, and he emphasized 4 main ones:  the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the horrible SCOTUS decision of 1857 when Dred and Harriet Scott were deemed not to be human beings because of their racial classification, and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

As I pondered the German student’s question, I tried to run through what similar steps might be in our time.  I came up with my four, and I invite you to think of your four.  My four steps are the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008 (triggering a huge surge in racism), the horrible SCOTUS decision in 2013 Shelby v. Holder which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, and the January 6 insurrection connected to the continuing “Big Lie.”  Added to these four steps is the Covid crisis which has put everyone on edge.

We live in crucial times – will there be a civil war in our time?  At this point, I do not think so, but we seem so divided and so volatile.  The US Census data released last week shows a drop in population for those classified as “white” for the first time since the census began in 1790.  That is not news, but it still gave me pause in these times.  Rather than celebrating this glorious vision of democracy and diversity in USA, I am afraid that my “white” siblings will see this as a time to act in order to preserve the “white” nature of the USA.  

Words from Germany are provocative at this time, and they leave me wondering. Yet they also make me more determined to work for justice and equity for all of us counted in the 2020 Census, while at the same time giving a loud “YES” to this growing, sprawling democracy, even as the forces of repression and oppression growl more loudly.  

"A MAN NAMED MOSES"

 “A MAN NAMED MOSES”

Amzie Moore was an African-American WWII veteran, living in Cleveland, Mississippi, in the late 1950’s.  After fighting for democracy in Europe, when he returned to his native Mississippi, he owned a gas station, but he was determined to work for democracy in his home state.  He began to work on getting African-Americans to vote, and it was a heavy slog.  He asked his friend, Ella Baker, part of SNCC, to find someone to send to him to help him work for voting rights in Mississippi.

In August, 1960, Ella Baker’s emissary knocked on Amzie Moore’s door.  Moore was astonished at the physical presence of the emissary, a young man named Bob Moses.  Moore later recalled that Moses was frail, wore glasses, and was soft-spoken.  Is this the man that Ella Baker sent?  How could he stand against the Pharoahs of Mississippi, with their armies of sheriffs and police and state patrols and white mobs?  Moore was not the first, nor the last, to be surprised by Bob Moses.  He and Moses would work together with others to change Mississippi and national history.

Bob Moses died last month at age 86, and though he had never sought it, he had reached legendary status as a civil rights organizer and later as the founder of the Algebra Project, which was designed to ensure that “minority” kids received the math skills and thinking that they needed.  He was born in Harlem in 1935, whose parents were a janitor and a domestic worker.  He was a brilliant student and got a scholarship in 1952 to almost-all-white Hamilton College.  There he was attracted to philosophy, math, and the Quaker philosophy of non-violence.  He later stated that he was convicted and inspired by the Black student sit-ins in 1960.  He was inspired that they were no longer being passive in an oppressive and racist system.  He decided to go into the belly of the beast to help secure human rights and voting rights.  And, as Nina Simone once sang, “Everybody knows bout Mississippi.”

He arrived there and began to organize people to seek to throw off the idea of the internalized oppression from the system of race, an oppression that told them that they were inferior and deserved inferior status.  He began organizing in McComb and was beaten up and shot at, because of these efforts.  He was also attracted to Sunflower County, where the poverty and fear were so great.  He organized there, and he ended up taking eighteen people to register to vote in the county seat of Ruleville.  One of those eighteen people was Fannie Lou Hamer.  They were not successful, but the fires were being lit.

After months of frustrating and dangerous activity, Moses made a fundamental decision, which would change the course of history and eventually end neo-slavery in the South.  Black friends had been beaten up and even killed for their efforts, with very little coverage from the media and no support from the federal government.  Moses decided to organize Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, with the express purpose of getting “white” young adults to come and work for justice.  He made the calculated decision that if white people (especially from the North) were beaten up in Mississippi, there would be a lot more coverage and attention paid to the Mississippi movement.  

In 1964, hundreds of white and Black volunteers streamed into Mississippi. And, tragically but not surprisingly, some were killed.  Two whites, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and one Black man, James Chaney were killed together in Neshoba County.  During the search for the bodies of these three men, many other Black bodies were discovered.  Moses’ non-violent, costly strategy had worked.  One year later, the Voting Rights Act would be enacted into law – it would end neo-slavery in the South.

Moses was also a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War.  He applied for conscientious objector status.  One of the most non-violent men of all, his application was denied – I still can’t believe that I was granted a CO, but he was not.  He moved to Canada and later to Africa, returning to the USA after President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty  in 1977 to those who had left the country in opposition to the war.  

Then, he began his next monumental work:  the Algebra Project, designed to make certain that poor kids, especially poor kids of color, would get the math skills and critical thinking that they needed.  He began the project in 1982 with a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and it is still going today.  Moses was a giant in so many ways, a non-violent but definitely not passive genius and organizer.  There is so much more to his life and witness, so if you don’t know his story, please look him up.  Like the Moses of the Hebrew Scriptures, he has shown us paths in the wilderness to find our home.