"A SONG OF MYSELF"

 “A SONG OF MYSELF”

Today is my 77th birthday, having been born in the Methodist Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, which was the capital of eastern Arkansas and northern Mississippi at that time. I was born to Mary Elizabeth Armour Stroupe and Gibson Preston Stroupe.  Soon, she would be a single, working mom, raising me in a patriarchal world.  So, on this day, I am grateful for my life and for my mother, who persevered in raising me after my father abandoned our family.  I am grateful to Caroline, who has put up with me almost 50 years now, and to David and Susan, who have had to endure my jokes all of their lives!

I also give thanks that Wipf and Stock Publishing Company has agreed to publish my memoir on my mother and me, in her raising me as a single working mom in a man’s world.  Wipf and Stock is the same company who published my book of sermons “Deeper Waters” in 2017.  I am grateful also to Collin Cornell who helped facilitate “Deeper Waters” and is helping on this manuscript, which I hope will be ready to publish in 2024.  I also want to thank John Blake, who pushed me to think about and to write this book.  I have two tentative titles for it: “Mother and Me: A Southern Story of Agency, Race, and Gender,” or “A Single Mom in a Man’s World: A Southern Story of Agency, Race, and Gender.”  Let me know which title sounds best to you.

I’m also starting work on another book ( my 7th!).  Caroline has finally agreed to work with me on writing a manuscript on our pioneering ministry as a clergy couple.  We were the first clergy couple to work in a local church in the former PCUS Southern Presbyterian Church.  I’m just starting out on it, but the tentative title is “Pioneers and Partners in Ministry”.  Let me know your thoughts on that too.  And, if you have any stories or insights on our ministry as a clergy couple or individually, share them with us as we build this manuscript.  

I’m grateful to our longtime friend and colleague Inez Giles, who has given me a birthday party every year (except the Covid year of 2020) since 1996, when I turned 50.  We used to do the Electric Slide at my birthday party, but lately we have been subbing Stevie Wonder’s version of “Happy Birthday.”  Last year in my birthday blog , I shared part of a Walt Whitman poem, “Song of Myself,” which I still love as the name of one’s birthday.  This year I want to share the familiar but ever powerful poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.

“Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees 

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mind.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees, 

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

The world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, “Dream Work,” 1986

"SIXTY YEARS AGO"

 “SIXTY YEARS AGO”

I entered my segregated high school as a freshman in 1960.  We were required to take civics in that year, and our teacher Ms. Frizzell had a creative assignment for us.  It was a presidential election year, and the two main candidates were Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat John F. Kennedy.  Ms. Frizzell’s assignment was for each of us to do our research, then use that research to choose which candidate we would vote for, if we could vote.  The assignment was due about November 1 of that year.  I did my due diligence, and I decided that I would vote for Richard Nixon, if I could have voted.  I chose Nixon because I liked Ike, the previous Republican president, because Kennedy was Catholic (would he obey the pope or be loyal to the USA?), and because Kennedy seemed to lean towards social justice too much (after all, I was still in deep captivity to white supremacy).

Three years later in 1963, I began my senior year, and things were in flux in my heart and mind.  The March on Washington had occurred in August, and in mid September, my white supremacist culture answered MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech by blowing up Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls in Sunday school:  Addie Mae Collins,  Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley.  Even in my continuing deep captivity to racism, I was appalled by this senseless killing.  

On Friday, November 22 of that year, several of us were changing classes at Central High School, and our janitor Mr. Ellis, whom we called “Dude” (before the advent of The Big Lebowski), came up to us in the hall to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.  Dude was always joking and pulling pranks on us, so at first we thought that he was joking on this too.  Only a few minutes later, the intercom came on to announce that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was not expected to live.  We later got the news that he had indeed died.  We were all in shock.  Though few of us liked him because of his work on civil rights, we simply could not believe that anyone would shoot the President of the United States.  Kennedy was not our favorite President, but we took it personally that someone had the temerity and the arrogance to shoot the President. They were striking a blow at the nation itself.

School let out early that day, and the nation began a three day mourning period, and it seemed to me that the earth itself had changed – Kennedy’s assassination was that kind of shock.  School was out on Monday, November 25, for the funeral and memorial services for President Kennedy.  I stayed home to watch the service, and Miss Martha, a Black woman who cleaned the beauty shop for Mother, was with me, doing some ironing for Mother one day a week.  She and I both watched the service together on TV, and my racism showed itself to me that day.  As the caisson made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue with the President’s body, we both ended up crying.  I noticed Miss Martha’s crying, and I said to myself:  “Wow, she is crying like me.  Can Black people actually be like us?”  I am ashamed to admit that now, but it was one of many revelations to me about my captivity to white supremacy and about the humanity of people classified as Black.

It is hard to overestimate the impact that the assassination of President Kennedy had on me and on so many others of my generation.  Though the civil rights movement was hitting its stride, that had not yet reached our consciousness, as it would just a few years later.  The assassination of Kennedy was a jarring blow that told us that the calmness and stability (and repression) of the 1950’s was over.  What we thought was a stable order and a stable world had been shattered in Dallas.  For me, the 1960’s would be the beginning of a powerful force calling me and many others out, calling us to seek a more just and equitable world.  I still feel a bit of sadness when I watch that caisson – it was a great loss for the Kennedys, for me, and for all of us.

I still don’t know who killed President Kennedy – I don’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  Yet, to borrow from a fine song by John Prine - “we lost Davey in the Korean War, still don’t know what for, don’t matter any more,” – it don’t matter any more.  All of our lives were changed on that November day in 1963, much in the same way that 9/11 changed us and so many lives.  The assassination shattered any naivete that we had about the stability of life, and part of the chaos that ensued in the 1960’s was, for me, a direct result of those consciousness-shattering events of that day in 1963.  It was as if the earth had broken open, and new revelations were coming.  In many ways, we are still living out that impact on American culture – will we be able to go back to the 1950’s when everyone knew that white males should reign supreme, or will we affirm that tectonic shift that seeks a more inclusive, welcoming society, that seeks to live out the ideals that President Kennedy outlined in his famous inaugural speech in 1961?  

"HARRIET TUBMAN"

 “HARRIET TUBMAN”

In finishing up this Veterans Day weekend, I want to remember Harriet Tubman as one of most distinguished yet least recognized veterans.  She was a Union spy during the Civil War and led the Union Army in a raid of the Combahee Ferry in South Carolina in 1863, freeing more than 700 people who were enslaved. She had put out the word to those who were enslaved that a raid was coming, letting the people know to be ready.  She gave the signal, and hundreds of enslaved people came out of the woods to the waiting Union Army in boats.  When the Confederate army chased the enslaved people, there were greeted with hundreds of Union soldiers, some of whom were Black.  The Confederate soldiers shrank back into the woods.

Tubman worked for years to get her pension as a soldier in the Union Army, finally receiving $20 per month in 1899.  This past summer we started our human rights tour in Auburn, New York, where Tubman established her home with assistance from Martha Wright Coffman (sister of Lucretia Mott) and Frances Miller Seward.  Her home served as a base for people escaping slavery, on their way to Canada.  She also brought her parents and much of her family up out of slavery to Auburn and on to Canada.  We were grateful to see the land and geography where she did her work against slavery, work for rights for women, and work for establishing a home for aged people on her property in Auburn. 

Through our daughter Susan’s locations in Westfield, New York and in Baltimore, we have been blessed to touch and be nurtured by the witness of Harriet Tubman.  We have visited her birthing grounds on the eastern shore of Maryland, a place where she learned the ins and outs of the countryside, so that she could become comfortable enough to make the many raids that she made by herself to free people who were enslaved in the South.  She began that career early on, when she prevented a slaveholder from catching a person running away from being punished.  She herself was punished for that deed by receiving a hard blow to her head, which almost killed her.  Even that, however, led to grace for her.  It led to visions from God for Tubman, visions telling her to seek freedom for herself and for many others.  It began a pattern of mysticism for Tubman, in which she always consulted God before going on a trip South and also in the middle of trips where she was confused or trapped.

We also visited her home and her church in St. Catherine’s, Canada, on one of our trips with Susan to Niagara Falls.  Then, finally this summer we were able to visit her American home in Auburn, a home centered in justice, compassion and fire.  Her home for aged people has been restored, and there is work being done by the AME Zion church to restore Tubman’s personal home.  We were grateful to have a passionate AME Zion pastor and his spouse as our guides on the Harriet Tubman grounds.  I learned there that Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells met at the National Association for Colored Women in DC in 1896 – talking about intersectionality – wow!  Tubman lived a simple life, but her life was rich and complex.  We were also privileged to visit her grave in the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, and we brought home pine cones from her grave.  

Harriet Tubman was a veteran who did not sit around talking about the past and what she had done way back when.  She kept her fires for justice burning, and she kept walking and working so that all might know the power of the idea that all people are created with equal dignity before God.

"WHEREAS"

 “WHEREAS”

During Native American Heritage Month, I am sharing some of the work of Layli Long Soldier in response to an apology issued by the US government in 2009, an apology not only weak in content but almost secretive in publicity.  Long Soldier wrote a book of poetry/prose called “Whereas” in response.  I am repeating my other introduction to her from my blog of October 9.

{The following are short excerpts from a much longer work of poetry and prose by Layli Long Soldier from her book “Whereas,” drawing on the official US government language of the Resolution and Apology.  She is a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Native Artist Fellowship, and a Whiting Award.  She lives in Santa Fe. She is a member of Oglala Lakota. I was introduced to her work by one of her poems in worship at North Decatur Presbyterian Church.  As I write this, Israel and Hamas are at war, and I am thinking of the many parallels of the white treatment of Native Americans and the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people.}

WHEREAS I shy. Away from the cliché my friend an artist”emotes” at my table. I shy. Away too I worry and second-guess.  Cliché’s what’s list its original effect and power

Through overuse over-reliance I wash the dishes.  I smell the citrus scented.  In ordinary tasks I can’t help the thoughts that lead me elsewhere.  We chat while I rinse our cups then I bubble my hands into a pigeonhole.  I remember the summer I armed myself with yellow rubber gloves and a bucket of bleach to scrub an abandoned pigeon nest on our porch.  My eyes stung raw with my fear of mites. Crawling in molten feathers layers of droppings hardened cakes of white.  Whereas a pigeonhole is aka a white hole the dictionary says. A white hole’s known as the white     space          between    words   set     too     far     apart     in    letterpress

printing       a term synonymous with pigeonhole we don’t want it.  Ever to say we 

suffer the assignment of a stagnant place in the system my friend avoids this as an artist.  She convinces me.  I definitely don’t want it either the stigma of a place I shy.

Away from admitting to her what’s in my work:  this location.  Where I must be firmly positioned to receive an apology the spot from which to answer.  Standing here I regard an index finger popping up pointing out a reminder:

Whereas in the infancy of the United States,

The founders of the Republic expressed their de-

sire for a just relationship with the Indian tribes,

as evidenced by the Northwest Ordinance en-

acted by Congress in 1787, which begins with 

the phrase, “The utmost good faith must always

be observed towards the Indians”;

Because when unconvinced           from this pigeonhole and no other            I can

  bleach and scrub           forehead sweat                 rubber arms        physical effort

mental force     art and shape        muscle my back    languageness     a list of moves 

            to loosen the hold         yes I can            shake my head wag      my finger too

     at that good faith       white cake             in a white           hole

                        that stained            refusal to come                     clean.   

"ALL SAINTS DAY: MARY STROUPE, BERNICE HIGGINS, JAMES JEFFERSON"

 “ALL SAINTS DAY – MARY STROUPE, BERNICE HIGGINS, JAMES JEFFERSON”

We are at the time of the year when we remember the dead – the saints, the sinners, people who have had profound effects on our lives, as individuals and as communities.  We have two days in a row for engaging the dead – Halloween (derived from All Hallows Eve) and All Saints Day on November 1, also known as

“Day of the Dead” or “Dia de los Muertos” in Mexico.  The Mexican approach is much communicative and celebrative, whereas ours is often more horrifying and puzzling.  As the old saying put it, “The Victorians repressed sex and were obsessed with death, whereas we in the modern world repress death and obsess with sex.”

Whatever your approach to these subjects, I hope that you will take time this week to give thanks for those who have nurtured you, who have nurtured your family, and have nurtured your community.  Make a list and give thanks for them, and if you are not already doing it, seek to live those attributes that you admire in them.  I’m giving a sample list for me today.  The first saint in today’s list (and in every list that I will ever produce) is my mother Mary Armour Stroupe.  I’m so grateful that Wipf and Stock has agreed to publish my memoir on her and me – it should come out sometime next year.  It’s tentative title is “Mother and Me: A Southern Story of Agency, Race and Gender.”

    Mother was born in Byhalia, Mississippi in 1919 and was valedictorian of her high school class.  She had hoped to go to college, but her family had no money for it, especially in the grips of the Great Depression.  She scraped up enough money to go to beauty school (now cosmetology school), and she worked in that profession until her retirement in 1986.  During the last 10 years of her work life, she was the lead instructor at the school of cosmetology at Phillips County Community College.  There she worked with many women – and a few men – seeking to become cosmetologists, helping them to navigate that journey but also assisting them on managing their life journeys.  But, for me, her sainthood lies in her raising me in a patriarchal world as a single, working mother after my father abandoned her and me.  She dedicated so much energy and time and love to me, and I will ever be grateful to her for all the gifts that she shared with me.  She died on October 28, 2004.

The second person on my list is the other woman who helped to raise me in the patriarchal world, my great-great aunt, Bernice Higgins.  My mother and I moved in with her in her smaller house in Helena, Arkansas, in 1947, when I was a year old.  “Gran,” as I called her, was my great-grandmother’s sister, and she was a formidable force in our lives until her death in 1959.  For all intents and purposes, she was a grandmother for me. She was born in 1880 in Cayce, Mississippi, and she often regaled me with tales from her mother, Mrs. Brown, about Civil War days.  She cooked supper for us on weeknights, and she was there at home for me when I came home from school.  She was a conservative Presbyterian and sometimes refused to take the Lord’s Supper (served 4 times a year in my childhood church) because she did not think that she had lived a life worthy of the sacrament that quarter.  I was sitting with her at the breakfast table when she died of a thundering heart attack on May 20 at age 79.  

The third saint for me this year is an African-American Oakhurst member named James Jefferson, part of the foundational Jefferson family at Oakhurst – last year I featured his sister Azzie Preston.  “Jeff,” as he was called, was a retired Air Force veteran and worked at Lockheed.  Though he was conservative, he was a great leader for us as we sought to make the transition from a white church with Black members to a multicultural church, where power was shared.  He was elected as an elder on the Session (our governing body), and he helped us to navigate tricky waters.  We brought a recommendation to the Session in 1989 that we change the color of the stained glass Jesus from white to Black, and he was a strong supporter of that. We brought a recommendation in 1990 to the Session about openly welcoming LGBTQ+ members, and I was afraid of a difficult discussion ahead because the culture had not yet changed on this issue.  Jeff spoke up first and said: “I just think that we should welcome anyone whom God sends to us, no matter what their classification is.  We’re in the saving business, not the judging business.”  His statement ended the discussion, and we began to advertise that we welcomed all people, including LGBTQ+ people.  Unfortunately for all of us, Jeff died of a rare blood disease in 1991, but he left his mark, including the fact the Fellowship Hall at Oakhurst is named after him.  

So, it’s All Saints Week, All Hallows Eve, and Day of the Dead.  Find time this week to name and remember those saints who have helped to give you life and vision.  

"CONGRESS AND THE WILDCAT GROWL"

 “CONGRESS AND THE WILDCAT GROWL”

In 1995 Georgian Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House after the Republicans had taken control of the House in the 1994 elections for the first time in 40 years.  He drove the second nail in the coffin of American democracy, the first having been driven by the Reagan Revolution in 1980.  Gingrich had been a back-bencher in Congress, but he came to understand the power of the media (CSPAN) and the growing anxiety and anger of white men who felt that they were being replaced and being pushed out.  Gingrich was not so much interested in governing as he was in airing white grievances.  He lasted as Speaker only 3 years and was replaced by his own party in 1998.

Gingrich’s pattern of complaining and whining became a part of American culture, and Fox News and other news outlets latched onto that method – there was money to be made and votes to be had in this approach.  That led to the third nail in the coffin of American democracy – the election of the ultimate grifter, Donald Trump, to be President in 2016.  The two-term presidency of Barack Obama and the possibility of Hilary Clinton as the first woman president sent chills into the hearts of white men, especially white supremacists.  The election of Trump by a slim Electoral College margin (though he lost the popular vote) led us into the wilderness in which we now find ourselves.  Trump, like Gingrich, had no interest in governing or in the common good of the country – as he has continued to demonstrate, he only cares about himself and the grift that has been his approach to all of his life.  

The current chaos in the Republicans seeking to find a new Speaker is directly related to this whining and complaining culture established by white men, who feel like our entitlement is slipping. Kevin McCarthy was part of this, and it is a sad reflection of where we are, that now we wish that McCarthy were still the Speaker.   As his record indicates, Jim Jordan was not interested in governing, just dictating, modeled by his hero and mentor Donald Trump.  I don’t know if Tom Emmer will be able to gather the votes this week or not to become Speaker, but he at least knows something about governance.  Perhaps the Republicans will see a light and will work with Democrats to craft a somewhat coalition government, but in our age of juvenile white males running around proclaiming about blowing everything up, that does not seem likely.  All we seem to be getting is the “wildcat growl,” as Bob Dylan put it in his song “All Along the Watchtower.”

All of this makes 2024 seem like a really scary year.  Joe Biden has been a good President, but his age is showing, and his ego is showing – he can’t turn loose of the power to a younger leader.  Biden’s fragility and vulnerability gives life to Donald Trump’s bid for election for another term as President.  Again, perhaps the Republicans will come to their senses and nominate someone who is not so thoroughly corrupt and narcissistic as Trump.  At this juncture, that does not seem likely, though I do find some solace in Sidney Powell and Ken Chesebro pleading out here in Georgia rather than going to trial next week.  Perhaps Trump’s criminal liabilities will bring him down after all – that wildcat is growling too.

As many have said, if Trump is elected president again, we can kiss democracy good-bye, because he intends to be dictator this time.  Our white supremacist culture has coupled our complaints and fears with a narcissist who intends to rule his own way, not to govern in a democracy.  I indicated a few years ago that the 2020 election was crucial, and it was.  Now the 2024 election seems even more crucial.  We all have work to do.  Yet, I can’t let the moment pass without sharing the lyrics of that powerful Dylan song, written in 1968, that includes the wildcat growl.  It is entitled “All Along the Watchtower,” and it was given a great cover by Jimi Hendrix, but for me, no one gets the essence of this song like Bob Dylan – go listen to it.  

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief

“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth

None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke

“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view

While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl

"THOUGHTS ON THE MIDDLE EAST"

 “THOUGHTS ON THE MIDDLE EAST”

In the spring of 1967, my college friend Sidney Cassell and I decided to  take an extended summer tour of the West.  He was from Tunica, Mississippi, and he had attended the University of Michigan, but his mom got seriously ill, so he transferred to Southwestern (now Rhodes) for a year.  During that time, we became friends, and I learned that his was the only Jewish family in Tunica.  His parents ran the Tunica Motel.  On June 5, the Six Day War broke out between Israel and Egypt, eventually drawing Jordan and Syria into it.

    We had planned to leave for our trip on June 6, but on June 5, Sidney called me from Tunica to tell me that he might not make the trip because he might have to go to Israel to defend what he called “the homeland.”  We delayed our trip for a week to see what would happen, and as it is called, it only took 6 days for Israel to defend itself and secure its borders.  I did not realize then that this was a second “Nakba,” or “catastrophe” for the Palestinians (the first being in 1948) when they were forcibly removed to form the state of Israel).

    We then went on our trip out West for two months. I was impressed with Sidney’s dedication to Israel – it was at a level that I did not have for my country.  Ironically enough, I would have to make the same decision 3 years later during the Vietnam War, and I became a conscientious objector and did two years alternative service.

    Because of my enlightening friendship with Sidney and because of the Jewish connections that my Mother and I had in my hometown, I have always leaned towards Israel in any Mid East conflicts.  But, over the last few years, Israel has gradually turned into an apartheid nation, and that has given me great pause.  Having grown up in a land where the original residents were either killed or dispossessed of their land by my ancestors and then that same land was worked by people who were enslaved, I have trouble keeping the same level of support for Israel, which dispossessed the original Palestine peoples without compensation.  The “Palestinian problem” continues to plague the nation of Israel, and it led directly to the horrible and brutal attack on Israel by Hamas on October 8.  Here are a few of my thoughts, as I try to take in the depth of the attack and Israel’s response to it, which is ongoing as I write this blog.

    First, Israel became a modern  nation in 1948 in some of its original territories as a result of lobbying by Jewish leaders, but most of all because of the horrors of the Holocaust, horrors which were a culmination of centuries of mostly Christian oppression and brutal policies toward Jewish people.  The problem is that there were people already living in those lands, and for the most part they were removed.  They have become known as the Palestinians.  Since Israel took their lands 75 years ago, no adequate provision has been made for the Palestinians.  They have been squeezed into the West Bank and into Gaza, much like the Native Americans were squeezed into “reservations” in our country.  There does not seem to be a viable solution to this issue.  The “two state” theory has long since been dropped, and Israel continues its repressive policies towards the Palestinians – Jewish settlers continue to move into Palestinian areas.  

    Even those who support the Palestinians were shocked by the brutal, terroristic nature of the attacks by Hamas on October 8.  It is hard to justify the killing of so many civilians at a music concert, and nothing justifies the killing of babies.  Yet we must also recognize the level of desperation and rage that was at the heart of those attacks.  That level does not come because the attackers are savages, as the mainstream Western media is calling them.  That level is reached because of a deep and continued wounding of the human heart, a wounding so deep that it makes the attacker willing and able to do inhuman acts.

    I am not justifying the Hamas attacks, but I put their rage on the same level that Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and John Brown had in their attacks on the institution of slavery.   Until there is adequate compensation and justice for the Palestinians, these attacks will continue to rise.  At least two things must happen in the Middle East for any semblance of peace with justice to arise.  First, the nation of Israel must be recognized as a legitimate state – many Palestinians still see Israel as an occupying force over these 75 years.  Those who attacked Israel on October 7 did it as a liberating act against the occupying oppressor.  That can no longer be the rubric of the Middle East.

    Second, justice must be found and established for the Palestinian people.  I don’t know what that would look like at this point, but Israel and the West must make a strong commitment to it.  I have not seen such commitment from the leadership of Israel since Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in November, 1995.  Yet, that commitment must be renewed, or the war that is now playing out in Israel and Gaza will be repeated many times.  

There is deep hatred, anxiety, and fear now in the Middle East.  May God raise up the justice and peacemakers, and may we all listen to them.  If not, hell awaits us.