"ANNIVERSARIES"

 “ANNIVERSARIES”

This is a big week in American history, with May 14 being the date in 1607 when Anglo colonists landed in Jamestown, Virginia, starting the European dominion and bringing enslaved African people to this land.  On May 18, 1896, SCOTUS ruled 8-1 that “separate but equal” was the law of land in Plessy v. Ferguson.  That ruling was reversed 58 years later on May 18, 1954 in a unanimous SCOTUS decision in Brown v. Board of Education. On May 15, 1947 the new nation of Israel began to expel Palestinians from their homes, beginning a grim anniversary known as “Nakba,” meaning “disaster” or “catastrophe.”

But, May 18 is also an important date for Caroline and me – it is our 49th wedding anniversary!  We got married in Ed Loring’s back yard in Decatur in 1974 with Ed and Sandy Winter officiating.  Neither one of us changed our names, and that confounded many folks, including the Dekalb County office, which initially refused to give us a marriage license.  When we got our first call to a church in Norfolk, Virginia, we interviewed in March, 1975, with the Norfolk Presbytery Committee to see if they would approve our coming to be co-pastors of St. Columba Presbyterian Church there.  Noticing that we had different last names, and wondering if we were really married, they asked early on: “Are you two living together?”  We both replied: “Yes,” and we let it sit there for a few seconds before we added “but we are living together because we are married.”  They called us to be the co-pastors of St. Columba, and we were the first clergy couple to serve in a local church in the former southern Presbyterian Church (PCUS).

Last week we were up in Chattanooga to say good-bye to our friends Collin and Vienna Cornell, who are moving to Houston this week, where Collin will be on the faculty at Fuller Seminary there.  We also visited with Caroline’s brother Steve and his spouse Babs, and we were giving thanks that this June will mark their 50th wedding anniversary.  They got married in Babs’ home church in Knoxville, and Caroline was part of the wedding ensemble.  While Caroline was in Knoxville for the wedding in 1973, she was interviewed by the Knoxville News Sentinel for the “Women’s News and Feature Section.”  The title of the article was “New Pulpit Image,” and it has a photo of Caroline in the wedding party clothes and another photo of her in “regular” clothes.  

The author of the article was a woman and clearly was amazed that Caroline was a woman minister – she was then a campus minister at Georgia Tech.  Early on in the article, the author writes:  “The locks are long, brown and wavy.  The figure curvy.  Marital status, single.  Sex FEMALE (in caps so we wouldn’t miss the point). The name Caroline Leach.” The article continues to relate Caroline’s story as an ordained minister.

The author cannot resist asking Caroline about her relationship to men, especially any men that she might be dating.  She asks Caroline how her status as an ordained minister set with “eligible, datable men.”  Caroline replies:  “Well, it takes a special kind of man.  If he is one who can handle the fact that you are a professional (like a woman doctor, lawyer, business executive, etc.) then there’s no problem.  If he sees the ministerial robes before he sees you, forget it!”

I would come along a couple of months later, and we would start dating – I was one of the men who saw Caroline first rather than her ministerial robes.  Indeed her already being ordained as a Presbyterian minister was intriguing  to me.  The wavy, long brown hair and the curvy figure didn’t hurt either!  I was mostly interested in her intellect and grit and determination in grinding out her calling when most people and institutions said “No.”  I was glad that she seemed interested in me, too!  

After 49 years, we have made a life together, with many ups and downs, and we were blessed to serve 5+ years in Norfolk as copastors, then later 30+ years as copastors at Oakhurst Presbyterian in Decatur.  And we were also blessed to have two wonderful children, David and Susan.  We’re still rolling, and we give thanks to God for it!

"MOTHER'S DAY"

 “MOTHER’S DAY”

    As I have noted before, I was raised by a single mom, Mary Armour Stroupe, and we lived with my great-great aunt Bernice Higgins (I called her “Gran.”) My father abandoned my mother and me for another woman when I was an infant, and I never met him again until I was 23 – he never contacted me or ever came to see me. 

    Though we lived in a patriarchal world in Helena, Arkansas,  my mother escaped much of it because she worked as a beautician at Ted’s Beauty Shop in downtown Helena at the other end of Porter Street, about a mile from our house.  I don’t know how or when Mother started that job at Ted’s – she was there when my memories began.  In my younger days, I thought that it was owned by a man named “Ted,” but Mother let me know that it was named after the woman who owned it – Ted Bostick.  I can remember nothing else about Ted, but as I write this, I am just realizing that such female ownership reinforced the sense that beauty shops in the 1950’s were a woman’s domain, whether one was classified as white or Black.  No males, except salesman, were to be found in those beauty shops.  

    Ted’s was located in the Cleburne Hotel, which had been opened in 1905 and named after Confederate General Patrick Cleburne.  It had a colonial revival style with huge columns in the front, facing Cherry Street, the main downtown street.  In its youth, it was quite a grand place, near the railroad depot for travelers to stay, housing barber and beauty shops and other stores. I would often stop by Ted’s Beauty Shop on my way home from school.  It was a fascinating place to me – a woman’s world!  All women beauty operators, and all kinds of white women there, getting their hair done, getting pampered, getting listened to, getting a chance to share their stories and local gossip, getting a chance to exhale and be accepted without the censoring or lustful eyes of men to put them in their places.  

    It was a refuge from patriarchy, even though they were often getting their hair done and having themselves made up for their men (and other women).  When I would enter Ted’s, there was an intriguing set of smells wafting through the air, a mixture of perfume, shampoo, dyes, chemicals, hair spray, and cigarette smoke.  As a young boy, the women there - both operators and customers – would fawn over me, and I loved the attention.  Part of it was my relationship to Mother, and part of it was that in my childhood, I was still in my innocent youth, a young male fascinated by being allowed to enter this women’s world, not yet so tainted by the crushing patriarchy (and sexuality) that awaited them outside the confines of the beauty shop. 

    I remember when I was about 6 years old, waiting on our front porch for Mother to come home from work.  We had no car, and she had to walk a mile home from Ted’s after being on her feet all day.  I was waiting with great anticipation because I wanted her to play catch with me, to toss the baseball around with me.  I remember feeling excited when I saw her - in her white beautician’s uniform and heavy white shoes - climb the big hill on Porter Street, now only about a block from our house.  I would run up to her and say, “Mama, let’s play catch!  I’ve been waiting a long time.”  I do not ever remember her saying to me: “Nibs, I’m just too tired. Let’s do it another day.”  My memory of her is that she always said “Yes, Nibs, let’s do that – let me change out of my uniform, and we’ll throw the ball around.”  

    I never realized what I was asking of her until I had my own kids – how tired she must have been, how stressed out she was with our tenuous financial situation, how she likely longed to sit down for a while and put her feet up.  Later in her life, I asked her if she ever said “No” to me when I asked her to play catch right after work, and she said: “Of course – often I was just too tired.”  I am intrigued that I do not remember those times – my memories are focused on the “Yes,” not the “No.”

       And, that’s how I remember my mother – the one who stayed, the one who loved me, the one who gave me life.  I know that some people have trouble with the idea of Mother’s Day – bad relations with their mothers, the sentimentalism and commercialization of Mother’s Day, those women unable to have children – but for me, it is an opportunity to say “Thank you” to my mother, to Gran, and to all the other women who provided mothering love to me.  It is also a reminder that all of us, regardless of our gender identity, are called to share that mothering love with one another – comforting, enduring, challenging, nurturing.  Let us be mothers one to the other.

"TILL"

 “TILL”

The death of Carolyn Bryant Donham last week revived memories of a horrible lynching in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 – a teenage boy named Emmett Till was jerked from his uncle’s home and tortured and murdered because of false allegations that Carolyn Bryant had made against the Black teenager from Chicago, who was visiting his family down South for the summer.  Bryant’s husband and brother-in-law kidnapped young Till in the middle of the night, tortured him and then killed him, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River.  This story was depicted well in the movie “Till,” which came out late last year.  The movie centered on Mamie Till Mobley, whose deep grief and then searing anger at the murder of her son, turned what was an “ordinary” and horrible event in the South, into a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

I grew up in this era, on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta.  I lived 75 miles from Money, Mississippi, where these gruesome events happened, but I had no idea about them.  95% of those of us in the white South at this time were so captured by the racism and white supremacy of our culture that these kinds of events would seem “ordinary,” a terrible but true thing to say.  I checked with my good and long-time friend David Billings, who grew up with me in Arkansas, and he indicated that he also had no knowledge of these events at the time.  The depressing and disturbing part of our journey as young, white Southerners, is that even if we had knowledge of the lynching of Emmett Till, it would have not made any difference.  We might have winced a bit at Till’s young age, but we would have agreed that the order of white supremacy must be kept intact.

Because of Mamie Till Mobley’s courage and tenacity, however, the murder of her son became one of the sparks that ignited the civil rights movement.  She would not allow this lynching to be seen as “ordinary,” as part of the price that Black people must pay in the South.  She wanted to name this murder for what it was, and she wanted the world to know that it was barbaric.  She came down to Mississippi to get her son’s body, and she made the courageous but difficult decision to have the casket open at his funeral in Chicago.  She defied everyone to do this, because she wanted all to see how brutally her son had been tortured before he was killed.  

    Her decision became a powerful symbol for Black people of that and later generations.  Emmett Till’s body lay in state for 3 days, and over 50,000 people came to see it.  David Jackson, a photographer for Jet Magazine, got permission to publish photos of Emmett Till’s tortured body.   Those photos in Jet galvanized Black people all over the country, and Emmett Till became a symbol of the kind of life that Black people would no longer tolerate.  Later that year, Rosa Parks would say his name to herself, as she sat and waited for the police to come and arrest her in Montgomery.  In 1962 in the Albany Campaign led by Martin Luther King, Jr and SCLC, Reverend Samuel Wells called out to the crowd in a speech there:

 “My name is being called on the road to freedom.  I can hear the blood of Emmett Till as it calls from the ground….When shall we go? Not tomorrow! Not at high noon! Now!” They became known as the “Emmett Till generation.”

    The lynching of Emmett Till became one of four key events that re-ignited the civil rights movement in the 1950’s, joining the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board which unanimously ruled in 1954 that legal segregation was unconstitutional; the Montgomery bus boycott started by Rosa Parks in Montgomery in 1955; and the Little Rock school crisis in 1957, in which President Eisenhower reluctantly sent federal troops to Little Rock to enable 9 Black kids to go to public school at Central High School there.  The famous series “Eyes on the Prize” led off with the lynching of Emmett Till.

    In 1956, Look Magazine (remember that one?) paid a hefty sum of $10,000 to William Bradford Huie to write a story about the Till case, including interviews with Roy Bryant and JT Milam, who had kidnapped, tortured and murdered Emmett Till. They admitted that they had killed Till, and they did so because they had already been tried and acquitted for the murder.  In a 2017 interview with Timothy Tyson, Carolyn Bryant admitted that she had not told the truth about her encounter with Emmett Till in that store in August, 1955, that indeed she had made most of it up.  The Leflore County district attorney had tried to indict her after that admission, but the grand jury refused to return an indictment.  The FBI also reopened the case that year but later closed it, with no action.  

    Not much changes in relation to race – Black folk and other people of color know how the system is structured.  Those of us classified as “white” refuse to acknowledge that the system works like this – indeed, Trump and others are building a case based on white grievance, the same base that executed Emmett Till.  May we hear his name in the way that Reverend Samuel Wells did in 1962 – it’s time now to act for justice and equity.

"EARTH DAY"

 ‘EARTH DAY’

On this Earth Day weekend, I am up in cold and gray weather in northern Michigan, near the shore of Lake Michigan.  We came up to hear our granddaughter Zoe perform in a concert at Interlocken Academy for the Arts, where she is spending her first academic year.  Susan also came over, so we have also enjoyed the mini-family reunion.

Perhaps it is the “winter” weather up here at the end of April that makes me think of a very familiar yet still powerful poem by Mary Oliver: “The Summer Day.” It has also come to mind and heart because Earth Day, officially started in 1970, calls to us loudly about the climate crisis.  Oliver’s poem speaks to us about the attitude that we must seek to develop in our hearts about our relationship to nature and the earth, if we want to take on the climate crisis in earnest – which obviously we must do if we want our grandchildren like Zoe and Emma to have a life.  Find yourself in Oliver’s poem and then decide what you will do with your one wild and precious life.

“The Summer Day”

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

“House of Light”, 1990

"LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL"

 “LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL”

Sixty years ago this month, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Ralph Abernathy, and others were arrested in Birmingham.  They were leading protests in Birmingham in April, 1963.  City leaders obtained a state court injunction telling King and Abernathy and others not to continue their demonstrations and protests for basic human rights in Birmingham.  King responded to the court injunction with these words:  “ We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction, which is an unjust, undemocratic, and unconstitutional misuse of the legal process.”  Complicating this situation was the fact that SCLC was out of bail funds, and they could not guarantee bail funds for themselves or for anyone else who was arrested in the cause.  King was one of their main fundraisers, and if he went to jail, funding might dry up.  Harry Belafonte, Stanley Levison, and others went to work to raise the funds.

After much internal and external debate, King and Abernathy decided to demonstrate and to get arrested.  They were arrested on Good Friday, April 12, 1963, and King was placed into solitary confinement.  While he was there, he read a letter from eight moderate white pastors in Birmingham, sent to him and the other leaders of SCLC.  It was published in the Birmingham News, and it urged King and SCLC to stand down from the demonstrations, in order to give the moderate white leaders time to work things out and to move Birmingham in a more progressive direction.  During his time in jail, King responded with “The Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” He wrote it on the edges of the very Birmingham News newspaper in which the letter asking him to stand down had been published.  

King’s “Letter” has become a classic of American documents and of Christian documents worldwide.  If you have not read it lately, please take time to do it this week, the week of its being written 60 years ago.  It was first published in Jet Magazine in May, 1963, and it began to set the moderate and liberal white world on fire.  

Here are the opening paragraph of his Letter, and a quote from it midway through.  They should whet your appetite to read the entire Letter.

“While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities ‘unwise and untimely.”  Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas…..But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will, and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement……

“My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.  History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.  Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor;  it must be demanded by the oppressed.  Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was “well-timed,” according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.  For years now, I have heard the word “Wait!”  It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity.  This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.”

Is this Letter only a relic from 60 years ago, dusted off as a testimony to the great work of the past?  Is this Letter only a reminder of how complicit people classified as “white” were in the development and sustenance of neo-slavery?  This Letter qualifies as both of those, but it is also a letter addressed to those of us classified as “white” in the 21st century in 2023.  In these crazy days, it is also a reminder of the growing number of Black “white supremacists” who become apologists for the rising tide of racism that is crying out for a return to a time when everyone agreed that white supremacy is God’s way and nature’s way. 

     If you have not read it in 2023, please do so this week and ask yourself:  what would Dr. King say today to those of us who are classified as “white?”  What is he saying to me in this letter?  Let us find ourselves in this Letter, and in this anniversary month of both King’s Letter and his assassination 5 years later.  Let us pledge ourselves to the streets and to the courthouses and statehouses to work for human rights, as this Letter so powerfully calls us to do.

"RESURRECTION"

 “RESURRECTION”

We are now in Eastertide, the season of the Resurrection.  Most of us are not sure what to do with the doctrine of the Resurrection, because it seems so supernatural, and at most it applies only to what happens to us when we die as individuals.  We like Easter and its springtime arrays of new life surging forth, but we are not certain about the idea of Resurrection.

In that reluctance, we join a long list of witnesses who are not sure what to do with the Resurrection.  The primary witnesses to the Resurrection in the Bible were not considered trustworthy by their culture – they were women.  In that culture (and in ours), we are not sure that women are trustworthy.  The male disciples did not believe the women’s testimony about a risen Jesus, and indeed Thomas says that he won’t believe anyone’s testimony about the Resurrection until he can put his fingers into the wounds of the crucified Jesus.

But the women disciples themselves struggle with the Resurrection.  In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene cannot recognize the risen Jesus, even when he stands right in front of her, talking to her.  And, the earliest Gospel account of the Resurrection in Mark finds the women running from the empty tomb, saying nothing to anyone.  Indeed the Gospel of Mark ends on an incomplete sentence, with most scholars believing that the original ending has been lost.  But, what if the author of Mark wants it that way, leaving it up to us, the future readers, to complete the incomplete ending?  What if part of the power of Resurrection is that it requires us to complete it?  We know that the women eventually told the story of the empty tomb and of the Resurrection, and what if that is our calling in response to the Easter story?  

I grew up believing that the doctrine of the Resurrection was about what happens to us when we die.  Over the years I’ve come to shift my understanding of the Resurrection.  Its meaning is not to tell us what happens to us when we die.  Its meaning is to tell us what is happening to us while we’re living.  I’ve had many resurrections in my life – on racial classification, on gender identity, on weapons, on the power of economic class, and on many others.  

In this season of the Resurrection in 2023, perhaps its central power is where it leads us into new life in this life, not in the life to come.  May we be able to see the risen Jesus standing right in front of us – if we cannot, may we listen to the witnesses who tell us about the risen Jesus.  It will change our lives – I know that it did mine, and it continues to do so.  

In his fine essay on the Resurrection called “He Is Risen,” Thomas Merton put it this way in 1975:   “We are called not only to believe that Christ once rose from the dead, thereby proving that he was God. We are called to experience that Resurrection in our own lives by entering into this dynamic movement, by following Christ who lives in us.” In a time of the killing of children, of the indictment of an ex-President, of the expulsion of two Black members of the Tennessee legislature, these words of Resurrection from Merton and others are, indeed, words to live by:

    “We are called not only to believe that Christ once rose from the dead, thereby proving that he was God. We are called to experience that Resurrection in our own lives by entering into this dynamic movement, by following Christ who lives in us.”

"LONGING FOR LOVE, BUT BELIEVING IN DEATH"

 “LONGING FOR LOVE, BUT BELIEVING IN DEATH”

On Palm Sunday, 1865 (April 9 that year), General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, and the Civil War, which began in April of 1861, came to a close.  There was relief and celebration in DC and in the North (and to some in the South), but by Good Friday, that relief would turn to shock and horror when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated – he would die the next day.  It was a stunning Holy Week that year.

The biblical Holy Week begins on a note of triumph and expectation.  Jesus of Nazareth, the great healer and wise teacher, is entering Jerusalem during Passover in a politically charged atmosphere.  His followers celebrate him – they have experienced love and healing and a new vision of what life can be.  They are fired up, and who can blame them?  Can this be the time that Jesus will overthrow Rome and reform the Temple?  

    The Roman governor Pontus Pilate has left his comfort in the villa on the Mediterranean Sea and has paraded into Jerusalem with his imperial army – coming  to quell any thoughts of seeking liberation by Jewish folk during the Festival of Passover.  These two leaders of very different parades do not know each other, when Jesus enters Jerusalem on the first day of the week.  Their paths will intersect soon, however, and things have never been the same since their engagement with one another.

    These early days of April seem to justify why T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month – so many assassinations and executions.  Jesus, killed on Good Friday.  Abraham Lincoln, shot on Good Friday and dying the next day.  Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated 55 years ago on April 4.  Young children shot down in school in Nashville last week.  The death that closes out Holy Week seems to abide in all places and in all ages.  The followers of Jesus enter Jerusalem longing for love, believing in love, but finding death.  Jesus executed, Lincoln shot down, MLK shot down, children shot down, women disappeared.  Holy Week begins in excitement and anticipation but ends in death, despair and flight – the world indeed seems dominated by death.

    Holy Week shows us the drama of our lives – we long for love, but we believe in death.  We want to believe in this Jesus of Nazareth, but the world seems so much with us, a world dominated by corrupt and egotistical leaders, a world that believes in the power of violence and death.  Holy Week walks us squarely into the midst of this struggle – no fading away here, no sentimentality allowed.  Holy Week looks squarely at one of the most difficult truths of our lives:  we long for love, but we believe in death.  Holy Week asks us to sit with this uncomfortable truth this week – to think about our visions lost or diminished, about our hopes being dashed, to think about our compromises that make us gradually lose hold of our dreams and hopes.  Holy Week asks us to stay with that process in our own lives and in the life of the world.

    This belief in death, this yielding to death is so powerful, and it even enters into the incredible story of God with us.  Holy Week asks us to remember that process, to acknowledge it even now.  This power of death is not the end of the story, but it is a central pivoting point of The Story and of our story.  We won’t be left wailing at the Cross, but we are asked to acknowledge that we are, indeed, there when they give Jesus the death penalty.