On Saturday morning, after what felt like a fairly crummy week, I looked at my Beloved’s picture and saw something different. I saw a look that said, “You’ve got this.” Obviously, her picture hasn’t changed. What has changed is something inside me.

The memory of her reassurance and confidence was followed by the nudge that it was time for me to put up a new post. Substack’s algorithm suggested what follows, and I am pleased to see that a post written three years ago still works.

There are still lots of things that I don’t know. I don’t know whether I will continue the “Camino” or Sermon Starts. But it is definitely time for a new post.

Two other things: Yesterday morning, before church, I read the March 24 edition of the marginalian entitled “Love Anyway.” It is a beautiful meditation on how we handle the impossible contradictions of life, love and death. (Spoiler alert: “love anyway.”) I recommend it.

Most importantly, thank you to all who have reached out to me in the past two months with cards, calls, emails, walks, encouragement, presence, patience and prayers. You are in my prayers of gratitude, under the heading of “ministering angels.”

What follows was originally posted in 2021.

Peace.

Early Christianity was not about personal salvation or the promise of life after death.  It was about the struggle to restore paradise in this world – a more complex place than Genesis’ two-personed garden with animals --  by living justly, ethically, generously and joyously.

It was the call of the prophets to restore paradise by doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with God.  It was Jesus’ mission to restore paradise. It was paradise he referred to when he spoke of “the realm of God” and “the realm of heaven.”  His miracles, healings and teachings are all about restoring paradise by resisting the injustice and abusive power of his age – the Roman Empire. 

Even the Passion narratives are about restoring paradise.  They are read twice during Holy Week. Contemporary Christianity speaks so much about Jesus’ death that we might assume that the Passion narratives are about that too – his death. But they are not.

The Passion narratives are about Jesus’ life and the choices he made when he was personally threatened by the power of Rome.  As Rome did its best to terrorize him into silence and betrayal, Jesus chose to speak truthfully and courageously.  The Passion narratives are about how Jesus lived until he died.

The gospels do not gruesomely dwell on his death.  In fact, according to the gospels, Jesus had no broken bones. His body was removed from the cross intact, soon after his death, and he was given a proper religious burial. None of that was typically done for what was left of the bodies of crucified persons.

The purpose of the Passion narratives was not to celebrate Jesus’ death or valorize his suffering. It was to remind the early Christians listening to the narratives that Pilate would not have the last word. That soon there would be a great sign of paradise restored. And that in the meantime, they needed to get on with Jesus’ mission by healing the sick, loving neighbors, liberating captives, resisting evil, practicing nonviolence, blessing enemies and giving thanks for all that is good.

NB: If you are looking for Easter season reading, consider Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire.

Katherine M. Clarke was born October 29, 1953 in Vancouver, B.C. Canada.  She celebrated her upcoming 70^th birthday with family and friends over a glorious weekend this summer in her Marlborough home at the foot of Mt. Monadnock. She died on January 15, 2024 at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene, N.H. attended by family and a cherished friend.

Katherine is survived by her spouse Lily DeYoung, her sister Nora Clarke, her sister-in-law Sherry Mackoff, her niece Shayna and nephew Peter, a brand new grandnephew, and many longtime friends, both Canadian and American.  She was predeceased by her parents Richard Alexander and Nancy Clarke and her brother Steven.

Katherine studied psychology at the University of British Columbia (BA, 1975; MA,1977) and earned her doctorate from Loyola University of Chicago (1981.)  She was Director of the Pastoral Counseling Program at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Canada (1983-1989) and later Director of the St. Paul University Counseling Center (1989-1992). Taking a sabbatical year in 1987-88, she spent a year in Cambridge, MA. as a Clinical Fellow in Psychology and Religion at Harvard Medical School and came to love lingering in Harvard Square’s Au Bon Pain.

In 1992 she became Associate Professor of Pastoral Counseling at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, MA. and became Chair of the Department in 1997. After earning an MBA at Simmons School of Management (Boston) in 1998, she became Weston’s VP of Finance and Administration.

Moving to San Francisco in 2002, Katherine served as VP of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty for Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. She returned to New England in 2005 where she was appointed Chair of the Department of Applied Psychology of Antioch University of New England. She was later appointed as VP for Academic Affairs. She retired in 2015.

Her teaching interests included organizational change, leadership, counseling theory, psychology and spirituality. Her research interests included meaning-making (decades before it was a thing) and spiritual resilience in persons living with disabilities. She was a generous mentor, gifted at helping people hear their own inner voice and strength.  She had quick and dry sense of humor, was unbeatable at Scrabble and forgave without taking hostages.

In retirement, Katherine served as Chair of the Board of the Monadnock Humane Society before moving to Sarasota, Florida to explore retired life without snow. After run-ins with hurricanes and alligators, she and Lily decided snow was not so bad and they moved back to their home in Marlborough.  By then, Katherine had begun studying and writing poetry.  Her work was published in Breath and Shadow, Wordgathering, Northern New England Review and Touchstone. She won the Amy Lowell Award in 2021 from the New England Poetry Club.

In 2020 she began teaching Poetry at Keene State’s Cheshire Academy for Lifelong Learning, working with retired women and men who were beginning or continuing their own poetry practice. She taught for three years and looked forward to every single class.

Katherine lived her entire life with multiple disabilities due to a genetic condition called Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT.) From a young age, she was fierce about being independent. She maintained her own home for years. She drove and walked until she was 60. For the last ten years, pain and weakness were constant and intrusive realities, but she refused to let them slow her down. She did the exercises prescribed by the physical therapist, and then designed her own because “if you can move a muscle, you can strengthen it.” She kept up a meditation practice and learned self-hypnosis.

She did not complain much about her problems, except that she was pretty fed up with the barriers which exclude people with disabilities. She was known to point out that in the battle for civil rights, persons with disabilities are just about the last group of people to be noticed.

Katherine was a lifelong Anglican who knew much of the BCP by heart. She also embraced the Buddhist prayer of Lovingkindness (metta) as it is taught by Sharon Salzberg. One prays for (offers, wishes) three things first for onesself and then for all sentient beings. “May I be safe. May I be happy. May I live with ease (or without struggle or in peace.)” I think she would commend that prayer to us in these days.

A friend of hers wrote that it is hard to imagine the world without her. That’s true. I find it painfully hard. But it is also true that the world is now a better place, because so many people, including me, are better people because of her.

Camino is on pause this week as my Beloved needed a few days in the hospital. I’ll be glad when she’s home which we think will be in the next day or two.

Thank goodness for hospitals. And thank goodness for discharge day!

See you next week.

Photo by Christopher Boswell on Unsplash

After learning the truth about America’s racist past, white Christians speak of feeling paralyzed by a sense of guilt and grief.  The guilt is sincere. What to do about it is unclear.  Small wonder that anti-racism programs are often “one and done.”

I have been wondering about the Christian experience of feeling paralyzed by guilt. Surely, I thought, Christianity has theological resources to deal with guilt. Right?

Maybe, but the first good theological resource I have found is the 12th century Jewish scholar Maimonides and the 21st century Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg who has written about Maimonides in her book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World. She studied Maimonides’ The Ways of Repentance, and explains its vitality and relevance. Her book is a pleasure to read, rich with examples and accessible even if you have never heard of Maimonides. If the concept of repentance is any part of your religious and philosophical worldview, I think you’ll really appreciate this book.

Ruttenberg explains and illustrates Maimonides’ five-step process of repentance. She also says that while repentance is a deeply personal process, it has an essential communal dimension as well. That made sense to me. The wrong which I do rarely, if ever, only harms one person. And the repentance process Ruttenberg describes cannot be done by one person alone. Because for a perpetrator, the repentance process is about personal transformation, and we can’t do personal transformation alone. We need community: guides, support, advisors, helpers.

I think some versions of Christianity miss the communal dimension of repentance and imagine that a perpetrator need only privately feel sorry for her sins, ask God for forgiveness and poof. All better. Except that that version of “repentance” never really makes anything or anyone better. Somewhere along the way, it seems that Christianity bailed on the belief that repentance must include the social and communal work of repair and personal transformation[1]. That’s too bad.

In the gospel reading for this Sunday, I hope that John the Baptist was not offering a “poof” style forgiveness-of-sins baptism. I hope he was offering people a chance to mark the beginning of their repentance journey towards personal transformation and tikkun olam -- the acts of repair and amends intended to heal and improve the world. That’s something I can imagine Jesus being drawn to.

Repentance is not a magical solution and it doesn’t erase what has been harmed or broken. As Rabbi Ruttenberg writes: “[We] can never unbreak what [we] have broken. But with the sincere and deep work of transformation, acts of repair have the potential to make something new.”[1]

In a country broken by racism, that is exactly what we need – the potential to make something new.

[1] On Repentance and Repair, 45.

Photo: Statue of Maimonides in Cordoba, Spain

In Chaos Theory, the first property of a system is “sensitivity to initial conditions.” The tiniest change in the initial condition of a system will cause a new and unpredictable chain of events. It is often called “the butterfly effect.” It’s a good image for the hope I feel after reading Jones’ book. 

Jones studied three different communities each of which had a history of racial violence.[1] Each community wanted to work towards racial healing.

He saw three phases common to their journeys.[2] In each of the three phases, ordinary individuals took on projects which were modest and local. Someone did research. Someone got a highway renamed for a lynching victim. Someone took the time to say “I’m sorry” in a personal and believable way.

Any number of people were at work in each of the three phases, carrying forward a project that made sense to them. Even if the project was not successful in the way they had planned it, the effort itself changed things giving rise to new and unpredictable chains of events. It happened over and over again in the three featured communities. [3]

We can never say that we’re not doing anti-racism work because the problem is too big and our efforts would be too small. Physics says otherwise. The tiniest change in the initial condition of a system will cause a new and unpredictable chain of events. And we are all a part of the system.

In this Sunday’s gospel: John the Baptist was doing what made sense to him — baptizing people with water outside the city walls.  A modest, local and somewhat odd little project. He wasn’t claiming to be “the Messiah, or Elijah or the prophet.” Whether things happened the way John had planned them or not is unclear. But things happened. Things changed.

All of which is to say that in anti-racism work as in physics, small things matter. The things we do and don’t do. The things we say and don’t say. They matter. They affect other people and other things which in turn affect other people and other things, in unpredictable ways.

Best wishes to you and yours for happy, healthy and safe holidays. I am taking two weeks off and will see you again (if we’re spared) on January 5, 2024.

[1] The Mississippi Delta, where Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered in 1955, Duluth, Minnesota where three black men were lynched by a white mob in 1920, and Tulsa, Oklahoma where the black neighborhood of Greenwood was attacked by a white militarized mob killing as many as 300 people and burning down 1,250 homes and businesses in 1921.

[2] The three phases are Truth-telling, Commemoration and Repair. They follow long periods of silence. Immediately after the racial violence – the riot, lynching or murder -- no one talks about what happened. Over time memories fade and eye-witnesses die. In some cases, official records are destroyed. There were thirty years of silence in Mississippi. Fifty years of silence in Duluth followed by another twenty years. There were fifty years of silence in Tulsa.

[3] Most of the book reviews I read seemed uninterested in the stories Jones tells about the people who played a part in the project of racial healing. Reviewers were more interested in his explanation of the connection between the Doctrine of Discovery and the doctrine of white supremacy. It is an important connection. Thanks to the Episcopal Church’s Sacred Ground program, I already knew something about the Doctrine of Discovery. That helped me see Jones’ argument quickly and move on to what I think were more important aspects of the book — the stories about ordinary people who changed things! As I said last week, I think the book is brilliant.

Butterfly Photo by Arturo Sreev on Unsplash

Greens Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

This week my Beloved and I spent alot of time waiting: for docs, for nurses, for deliveries, for relief, for comfort, for rest. Everyone is home safe and sound and on the mend. But I did not find time to write a proper post.

I did finish reading Jones’ book. My one-word review is that the book is “brilliant.” Next week, I’ll explain why.

White supremacy is a not just a southern thing. I started Part II of Jones’ book this week. It takes place in and around Duluth, Minnesota and begins with a long account of decades of racist violence. If you decide to read this book, be prepared to weep when you read about the enormity of suffering white people have happily and without scruples visited on Native American and Black people.

I’ve been on my Becoming Anti-Racist camino for six months. Along the way, I have read so many stories like this that I can no longer believe that they are exceptions to the rule of American goodness.  I am beginning to think that white supremacy is a more important American value than democracy or “liberty and justice for all.”  All of which is to say that my perspective is changing.

Being “woke” is about perspective. Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, (a.k.a. Lead Belly,) told Black people to “stay woke” in a 1938 recording about the Scottsboro Boys.1 He was saying that to stay safe, Black people needed to keep the right perspective: the awareness that white people could be wildly dangerous and deadly. The need for that perspective has not changed.

Perhaps the “woke” perspective for a white person is being willing to see what the white world looks like from the perspective of those who are not-white, not-privileged, not trusted, not valued, and frankly just not wanted. Maybe it means understanding that America’s deepest value is upholding the systems and institutions which protect white supremacy.

In Duluth, there were white people who tried to interrupt the racial violence. They tried to put their words and their bodies between the mob and its innocent victims. The problem was there weren’t enough woke white people trying to do that.

In this Sunday’s gospel, Jesus says “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come…” He was right, then and now.

We do not know when or where the next killing mob will arise. But we can work on getting woke now. There are always early signs of trouble. We need to know how to spot them, and understand that they will grow if they are not challenged and thwarted. And we need to know who we can call on for support, because one person, alone, is not enough.

Photo by Danny Burke on Unsplash

I got to the hopeful part.

Robert Jones’ first account of a community attempting to deal with its white supremacist past is set in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. That’s where the fourteen year old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in 1955 when he was abducted in the middle of the night and lynched. Two local white men were tried for his murder but an all-white jury acquitted them. A year later, the two men sold their story to Look Magazine for the 2022 equivalent of $43,000.1 In the interview, they admitted to torturing and killing Emmett.  Double-jeopardy prevented them from being re-tried.

Fifty years later, neither whites nor blacks in Tallahatchie County knew about Emmett Till or the trial. No one had talked about it all for years. One man -- Jerome G. Little -- grew up in the county where it happened. He only learned about it while he was in Europe serving as a Marine. He came home feeling “something was just in me to make sure that everybody in this county… everybody in this nation understands what happened and why.”2

Little was elected to the Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors and became its first black President of the Board in 2005. The next year he began forming the Emmett Till Memorial Commission. The black and white members of the ETMC have now been working together for nearly twenty years. Together they built the Emmett Till Interpretive Center which “exists to tell the story of the Emmett Till tragedy and to point a way towards racial healing.”

This week, I have learned at least two things.

First, the truth needs to be told. Names need to be remembered. If we don’t continue to “say their names,” their stories will be forgotten. Emmett Till’s nearly was.  

I have a new appreciation for organizations which commit to tell the truth, and “say their names,” like the church I attend which says this in its weekly bulletin: “[We] acknowledge that we gather on the unceded and ancestral land of the Abenaki, Pennacook and Wabanaki Peoples…”

Second, the route to racial reconciliation will probably not run in a straight line from any one person’s inspiration to its realization. Racial reconciliation is not one person’s work. Individual initiative is necessary, but then it takes a village and living in a village means making room for different perspectives, strengths, limitations and visions.  

What if we are just an individual. What if we haven’t found a village yet. What do we do?  The advice I hear in this Sunday’s gospel is, “the next right thing.”  Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, visit the prisoner. 

While we’re we doing those “next right things,” we can also imagine a better, closer-to-redeemed world.  As the members of Tallahatchie’s ETMC said, (and I love this): “Imagination lets us smell the flowers in the seeds we plant.”3

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I started reading The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy because reviews said it was a hopeful book. I haven’t gotten to the hopeful part yet.

The book tells the real history of three places in America (Tallahatchie County in Mississippi, Duluth, Minnesota and Tulsa, Oklahoma) and then describes what the people there did “to repair the downstream damage and build a shared future.” The Hidden Roots at 24.

I look forward to the hopeful part because the part that comes before it — the real history — is devastating to read. It’s the sort of thing that makes me doubt the possibility of redemption, and once again I am feeling despair, guilt and shame.

It’s one thing to talk about those emotions. It’s another thing to feel them. It’s very unpleasant. I am hoping to figure out how we “metabolize” these feelings1, but I don’t know how to do that yet. For now, all I can do is mentally look away. Just for a bit. Just to take a break.

There is a difference between taking a break and being a denier.

Deniers tell us that nothing bad actually happened.  American enslavement had a bright side. The holocaust was a made-up story. Trump won the election.

A variation of denialism is that something bad may have happened but it was done by bad people and we’re better than that now, so it won’t happen again. When it comes to white supremacy, that doesn’t work. White supremacy is so baked into culture and white self-understanding that white people can barely see it. Without vigilant awareness and suspicion of our own intentions and the system, the events of the history which we can barely bring ourselves to read WILL happen again.  

I hope it is okay to look away from the real history once in a while. Just for a moment. Just long enough to take in a bit of beauty or sing a hymn that says people are redeemable. Taking care of heart and mind so that we will be able to look at the real history again. Because the willingness to know the real history is the necessary first step to take to keep it from happening again.

I hope you have a good Thanksgiving Week. Please know that I am thankful for each of you who reads this newsletter. 

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

When I was writing sermons, I had a process.  After I had looked at the readings and figured out what interested me, I started “reading around.”  I might look at a biblical or theological journal, but just as often I would read a little history or science or Buddhism or business. Or something else.  I was testing a guess or insight and looking for confirmation, depth or correction. Sometimes my guess was way off base and unusable.  Other times I got lucky and realized I had a good idea to work with. Lucky or not, by the time I had finished “reading around,” I was clearer about what was going on in my own heart and mind and how the week’s readings had spoken to me.

This week, I was feeling a bit lost on my “Becoming Anti-Racist” camino.  The book I was reading was good, but it wasn’t teaching me anything new. I wanted to move on but I didn’t know what to read next.  I spent a few days “reading around.”

I dipped in and out of several different aspects of the problem of racism, but I kept coming back to books about racism and the church. I realized that my heart and mind was still looking for an answer to the question I asked in my September 29 post: How can the church help us white people with the guilt we keep running from?   

So far, the church hasn’t had much to suggest.[1] It admits the problem of racism. And the Episcopal Church does a good job teaching the history of American racism. Good first steps. But we need more steps.

During my “read around” I found a doctoral dissertation on the subject of how to cultivate white allies among college students. Apparently, before college students can start acting like white allies, they need to feel some basic confidence that they’re doing the right thing.  If they believe they are powerless to act as good white allies they won’t try. If they believe their efforts will be meaningful, they are more likely to take the risk of acting in a new way.  The dissertation described a laborious and time-intensive way to increase that kind of confidence in people. Not quick or easy, but a step in the right direction.

We white people and our churches are only beginning to understand the kind of work we’ll need to do to help deconstruct unjust systems and effect racial reconciliation. I want to learn more about that kind of work and think about how those next steps might fit in the life of a practicing Christian.

I’ve started reading The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future by Robert P. Jones. It has great reviews and is said to have a hopeful perspective.

Hopeful. Good.

[1] It’s hard to know why. Maybe the American church has trouble seeing the systemic nature of American racism it has been enmeshed in it for so long. Or maybe it’s because moral theologians (and many other Christians) find the notion of “systemic racism” problematic. They would prefer that we only be morally responsible for personal acts, not for injuries caused by impersonal social structures.

Photo by Ev on Unsplash

Trick-or-treaters had to work for their Halloween treat at our house because my Dad liked to ask questions before he gave out candy.  “Who are you supposed to be?” “Why did you chose that costume?” And finally, “who are you really?”

That last question made me roll my eyes because my Dad knew every kid in the neighborhood, and every kid’s brother and sister and parents and pets. I have no doubt he knew exactly who was wearing every costume.

It was charming for my father to pretend he didn’t know the local trick-or-treaters. It is not charming for us to pretend we don’t know who is parading before our eyes on the TV screen or wherever we find our news. Like the current Speaker of the House. He dresses like a prep school student-body president and calls himself a “conservative” and a “Bible-believing Christian.”  But he has embraced the Great Replacement Theory[1] which is about as racist as you can get.

No one wants to be known as a racist, so MAGA Republicans call themselves “conservative.” It’s a costume, a mask. Inquire into the details of their “conservative” values and you will find the racist world-view.[2]  It is the same chum Trump loves to throw in the water: stoking fear in white Americans that people of color are out to take what we have, and “poison the blood of our country.”^[3]

The liberal media is pretending too. It likes to say that the upcoming elections are about preservation of  democracy. But that’s because even white liberals don’t want to hear about “white supremacy” or deal with the fact that the reason our democracy is no longer a sacred value to the GOP is because the GOP  believes too many Black and brown people are being allowed to vote.

It’s about white supremacy.

We ought not pretend that we don’t know who these people are and what they are about.  

[1] Last summer (May 23, 2023) he was talking about the need for immigration reform and said that Democrats supported an open border (they do not) because they hope to turn all immigrants into Democratic party voters. FWIW, before an immigrant can vote, he or she needs to become a citizen. That takes about ten years.

[2] I am reading Tim Wise’ Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights Books, 2020.) In an essay called “You May Not Be Racist But Your Ideology Is: Why modern conservatism is racist.” He parses the conservative values and points to the racism which underlies them.

[3] Imagery straight out of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and used by Trump in a 9/27/2023 interview. Trump Escalates Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric With ‘Poisoning the Blood’ Comment, NYT 10/7/93.

Photo by Conner Baker on Unsplash

By my count, 38 of the 53 players on the Patriots’ active roster are black. A few more probably identify as people of color. So I don’t think these two Patriot logos make sense.

I’m guessing that these logos don’t make sense either.

The first team to sign a Black player was the LA Rams in 1946. The last team to integrate was the Washington Commanders (then known as the Washington Redskins) in 1962. Today, about 56 percent of the players in the NFL are black.  71 percent identify as people of color or non-white. [Source: NBC News citing a report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.]

Most NFL teams have dropped racialized imagery in favor of initials, animals or inanimate objects like stars, a lightning flash or a horseshoe. I think that’s a good thing.  But here’s a thought experiment: how would a logo featuring the image of Black man would be received?

* I offer no interpretation of this week’s gospel or paying taxes. I just enjoyed hearing Jesus’s question “Whose image is on this coin?” on the weekend I am asking “whose image is on NFL helmet?”

Next weekend, sadly, we will be attending a Memorial Service for a dear and admired friend. That weekend we will also be celebrating my Beloved’s 70^th birthday.  That’s a big one! So my “Becoming Anti-racist” camino is paused for the week. But I’ll be back the week after, on Friday November 3.

Thanks for reading.

I am reading Tim Wise’s book, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights Books, 2020.) Cornel West calls Wise “a vanilla brother in the tradition of (abolitionist) John Brown.” I think that qualifies him as a “white ally.”

Dispatches is a collection of short essays.  “Killing One Monster, Unleashing Another” is a meditation on the revelry and partying which followed the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Wise agreed that killing bin Laden was necessary, but he was disturbed by the raucous, beer-fueled, nationalistic celebrations which followed. Wise says that killing is always a somber deed, even when it seems to be necessary or justified.

Last Tuesday, President Biden spoke about the Hamas massacre. He said:

[T]here are moments in this life — and I mean this literally — when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world. The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend.  The bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas — a group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.  This was an act of sheer evil.

Remarks by President Biden on the Terrorist Attacks in Israel, October 10, 2023.

He said that acts were evil.  Not people. Evil is in the dehumanization that enables one person to humiliate, terrorize, torture or kill another. It is essential to racism and genocide, and it begins with language: Accusations, name-calling, scapegoating and mockery. The language of Hamas dehumanizes Jews.

We need to take care that our language does not dehumanize, which is why Biden also called on Israel to abide by the rules of war. The rules of war insist on the humanity of all civilians and even enemy combatants.

I can remember hearing this week’s gospel reading years ago when I was a little girl. I was bothered because my mother said I always had to wear a dress to church. I didn’t like dressing up. I did not like this Bible story because it seemed to say that a good Christian should be wearing Sunday clothes ALL THE TIME.

Of course, the story is not about clothes. It is about our values and whether we are willing to be faithful to them all the time. It’s about not laughing at the racist joke even though we are among white friends. It’s about not packing a picnic lunch for a lynching just because everyone else on the block does. And it is about not giving in to the understandable temptation to demonize an entire people for the reprehensible and evil acts of a few.

Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

It’s been a hectic week, and I found my mind still working out the implications of last week’s post. I wondered if maybe I should not try to write a new post. But I remembered that this is a camino. One walks as far as one can. If I need to “walk” a shorter distance this week, that’s okay.

I was able to read James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” It was published in 1963. Two convergences held my attention as I read: one was about history, the other was about the gospel reading in this week’s Revised Common Lectionary.

First, the history. In May of 1963, after the book was published, Time Magazine put Baldwin on the cover and ran an article entitled “The Root of the Negro Problem.”  Four months later, on Sunday, September 15, white men bombed Birmingham’s 16^th Street Baptist Church killing four young black girls.

Second, I kept hearing a passage from Matthew’s gospel.

The Fire Next Time consists of two essays. The first was a letter which Baldwin wrote to his nephew. He said:

You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being…  [T]he details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.

The Fire Next Time, Vintage International Books, 1993 Kindle edition at 7-8.  Emphasis added.

In the second essay Baldwin argued that the success or failure of the American experiment depended upon its willingness or refusal to deal with its racist past and present.

[I]f we persist in thinking of ourselves as [a white nation], we condemn ourselves… to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in this country, and the America future is precisely as bright or as dark as his.

The Fire Next Time, Vintage International Books, 1993 Kindle edition at 94.

And the gospel passage I kept hearing was this:

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

Matthew 21:42

In his memoir, James Cone remembers reading a James Baldwin passage to his graduate students. It was a text which, as Cone said, made us (Black Americans), “mad at what white people did to our grandparents and continue to do to us today. When I read that passage… the black students, staring at the white students in their midst, found it difficult to restrain their anger and seemed ready to fight, while the white students, heads down, grew silent and ready to bolt the room.”[2]

I know those feelings: head down, silent, ready to bolt. They are feelings white people often have. And we flee from cities to suburbs and then to gated communities. We get guns. We ban books and shut down history classes. We want to avoid being called to account for the crimes committed by our forebearers – the crimes that established the power, wealth and privilege that eases our lives.

Last week I was wondering what the task of white theology might be. Now, I think the task may be to help white people stop running from the guilt we fear. As Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands) would say, we need to “metabolize” our guilt, to transform it. First, honestly see our complicity in the sin of racism – personal and systemic, but then undertake a repentance that will lead to “newness of life.” (BCP 393) For that, you might think that Christianity would have something we could just pull off the shelf. Evidently, not yet.

Cone quotes James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time:

“People who cannot suffer can never grow up… ”

It is a difficult thing, even a suffering thing to be seen or heard in our sinfulness, diminishment, fear or weakness. If we cannot bear it, we cannot grow up. And we probably cannot bear it alone. Probably the only way to bear it is to share it, and let the suffering become a bridge and connection to other people. That connectedness – Baldwin again – opens up a world in which suffering is borne, and there is survival, joy and hope. Newness of life. A worthy task for white people and white theology.

^[1] In Memoriam: Dr. James Hal Cone, Union Theological Seminary, NYC. 2018.

[2] Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody:The Making of a Black Theologian, James H. Cone, Orbis Books, Kindle edition at 162.

Photo by Lucas Favre on Unsplash

In August 2017, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, VA. to protest the removal of a statue honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The protest turned violent. A counter-protester was killed and many others were injured. A day or two later, then-President Trump was asked if he would denounce white supremacists.  He waffled and said there were “very fine people on both sides.”

There was outrage about that. People wanted a clear judgment and denunciation. And yet, I’d bet that Trump’s answer is what a lot of people would expect to hear from God. Not judgment or denunciation. A kinder, gentler approach. A finding that there are “very fine people on both sides.”

This week I am reading James Cone’s  memoir: Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody. I had read his second book, A Black Theology of Liberation, forty years ago in 1983 when I was a newly minted lawyer. I had found the book in the town’s used book store.  I didn’t know who James Cone was. I knew a little bit about “liberation theology” (it was Latin American thing), and I knew nothing about the European theologians Cone mentioned. Fortunately for me, sometimes Cone wrote simple, declarative statements. When he did, I understood what he was saying. No one else I knew was saying it, and I agreed with him.  

For example, he wrote this:

In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors... The meaning of this for our contemporary situation is clear: the God of the oppressed takes sides with the black community... Either God is for blacks in their fight for liberation from white oppressors, or God is not. God cannot be both for us and for white oppressors at the same time.” [1]

A clear judgment and denunciation.

I am enjoying Cone’s memoir. He explains what motivated him to write his books, his writing process and how his thinking developed over the years. He doesn’t talk much about the European theologians. He talks about making the decision to leave them behind, to listen to his experience, his history and often the students he taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Over the years, he broadened his perspective.

I am glad to see that as strident as his early books were – and they were strident – he never backed off his fundamental thesis: That the gospel is about liberation. If we want to be where God is at work in the world, we must be with the oppressed.  In America, people are oppressed simply because they are black, so in America, Christian theology can only be Black Theology.

He is not saying that we should mention Black Theology, include Black Theology, privilege it or even make it a  preferential option. No. In America, Christian theology must be Black Theology.

Where does that leave white people?[2] For the most part it leaves us with white theology, which Cone sees as a racist, theological justification of the status quo. Very good people on both sides. The  antithesis of what Jesus says in this Sunday’s gospel: “The last will be first, and the first will be last.”

The question I am left with is, if Christian theology is Black Theology, where do I fit as a white-skinned person? I want to keep thinking about that as I finish reading Dr. Cones’ memoir this week.

[1] A Black Theology of Liberation, 40^th Anniversary Edition, (Orbis Books 2010.) Kindle edition at 21-22. There is now a Fiftieth Anniversary edition.

[2]  For Cone “whiteness” is not just about skin color. It is about our fundamental outlook on the world.  Cone found that white-skinned people usually prefer their status-quo loving and oppressive outlook. Remember the spiritual, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen?” Cone says he grew up assuming that “the trouble” in that verse referred to white folk. With good reason.

Most of the anti-racism group work I have done has been in nearly all-white New Hampshire or (via zoom) the tri-state area (NH, Vermont, Maine.)  I have often heard white people say they can’t do anti-racism work because they don’t know any black people.

It’s difficult to convince people that racism is a problem for white people to work on with other white people. Menakem is insistent on that point and good at explaining what the work is.

He says, “Your white body was not something you chose, but the imaginary construct of whiteness is something you can change.” How?

1.       Understand that your privilege is not benign: it comes at a cost to someone else. Become aware of your privilege and how it functions.

2.       Name it when you see it or hear it. Do not cooperate with it. Whether it is a behavior, a dog-whistle or euphemism  or a racial myth, challenge it. Confront it.

3.       When you confront the privilege, notice what happens in your body. Notice your physical discomfort. Learn to calm or settle yourself so that what you do next can come from your best self and not from (what Menakem likes to call) your “lizard brain.”

4.       Take responsibility for short circuiting white privilege and look for ways to share your privilege with others.

Change the meaning of whiteness from “oblivious and fragile” to “responsible and resilient.”

Can we do this work in mixed black and white groups?  Menakem says, “No, not yet.” To try is to set everyone up for failure because until we have done the work we need to do in our own groups — white and black — we will just keep triggering the trauma in each other’s bodies.  Ultimately, Menakem hopes that white and black people, working in their own groups, will give rise to new cultures which systematically teach and celebrate the rejection of white supremacy. “Change culture” Menakem says “and you change lives.”  

I am grateful for this book. After three rounds of “Me and White Supremacy” and one of “Sacred Ground,” I was feeling at a bit of a dead end. This book helps me see a way forward. Perhaps another “Me and White Supremacy” group with an equal emphasis on “My Grandmother’s Hands” for its open-ended positive approach and do-able body-work exercises. We’ll see.

Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. Mtt.18:20

Sometimes people share our values. Other times, as Jesus says, we just need to let them and ourselves move on. Or as Jesus says elsewhere, “shake the dust.” (Mtt.10:14.) Not to be mean or judgmental, but because we are looking for people who see what we see.

For the casual stuff, casual friends are enough. But for the challenging work, we need the support of people who share our vision and hope. Find two or three people like that and we’re good to go!

Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash

I’m stepping aside from the camino for a week. See you on September 22!

Menakem starts Chapter 16 of his book with a reflection on lynching and lynching postcards. From 1882 to 1968 there were 4,783 lynchings in the U.S.¹  Often the scenes were photographed and made into postcards. It was a big business. 

If you can bear to look at a lynching postcard you will see a group of white men posing as happy hunters around the mutilated body of a black man. Nearby there will be a crowd of white women, children and family members smiling and relaxing. Would you identify with anyone in that picture?

The “anti-woke” movement assures white people that they need not identify with anyone in that photo. No one today need feel “guilt, anguish or other form of psychological distress”² on account of what somebody else did 50 or 150 years ago, whether it was enslavement or lynching.

Here’s the problem.  As a white person, I am shaped by many of the same influences and forces that moved those other white people. Like them, I have white privilege. Like them, I live in a culture powered and sustained by white privilege.³ And like the white people in the lynching postcard, I am susceptible to the dynamics of anti-black racism and crowd psychology.

It is no answer to say that “such a thing could never happen now.” Such things do happen now.  Ahmaud Arbery.  Nine members of the Bible study at Mother Emmanuel. Ten shoppers at Tops Friendly Market, in Buffalo.  Residents of Flint, Michigan. The persistent racial wealth gap. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. If there had been picture taken of me as I was walking on the sidewalk near George Floyd, pinned down with a police knee on his neck, what would I be doing in the picture? I am not sure, and that worries me.

Not all feelings of guilt, anguish or fear should be avoided. The knowledge giving rise to those feelings can help us, like the learned instinct that keeps us from touching a hot stove again. Knowing that white people in a racist culture can reflexively fear a black person for reasons that have nothing to do with that person is a good thing to know. Knowing that white people can hunt down and kill or injure a black person believing they have the right to do so is a good thing to know.  The dynamics of anti-black racism,  white supremacy and the power of crowd psychology are important things to know. Uncomfortable. Psychologically distressing. Maybe even guilt-inducing if we have seen those things at work in ourselves. But they are necessary things to know if we are going to try to make those things different. Uncomfortable feelings will come with that knowledge. And we will need to bear them.

There will inevitably be talk of crosses this Sunday. Perhaps we can use the gospel reading as an opportunity to reflect on where the crosses and lynching trees are in our world. If we imagine a photo being taken of a modern-day cross/lynching scene, where would we be in the photo? If we are still feeling uncomfortable about our answer, then maybe the next question is what do we need to do now to prepare our white selves for a different result?

¹Source: NAACP

²Language from Florida’s 2022 Stop W.O.K.E. Act.

³As Menakem says, progressive white people benefit from the structural inequities of white supremacy just like white conservatives and white supremacists. My Grandmother’s Hands at 167.

Photo by Bailey Alexander on Unsplash

Menakem begins Part II of My Grandmothers’ Hands talking about the “soul nerve.[1]” He calls it the “unifying organ of the entire nervous system…” which reaches almost everywhere in the body except for the thinking brain. The soul nerve does not think. It reacts and is involved in any feeling you can imagine: love, fear, dread, hope, empathy, anxiety and of course the urges to fight, flee or freeze.

Menakem provides exercises in “soul nerve training” in order to help us be aware of and learn to settle our bodies.  The goal is not to reduce or avoid stress, but to increase our ability to handle stress and manage our reactivity so that we are free to choose our response.

Some of the settling exercises were familiar to me from Insight Meditation. I have used them to get distance from stress.  Menakem’s purpose is different. He wants us to remain present to stress. [2]

I had a chance to try it out a couple of days ago during a frustrating phone conversation with a company that had made a mistake with our order.  After saying “I would like to speak with your supervisor” I had about 15 minutes to wait before the supervisor came on the line. While waiting, I noticed the tension in my body. It was in my gut, my shoulders and even in my forehead. I did the two exercises I knew best (body scan and belly-breathing) and within minutes I felt settled. I wasn’t enraged or relaxed. I wasn’t distant or detached. I was present and free to think about what to do or say next. I was managing my stress. It was not managing me. Menakem’s exercises worked.

I remember what it’s like be in a group in which some well-meaning white person claims that they already know all about racism. There was a time when I thought the same thing. The anxiety behind the defensiveness understandable. No one welcomes the fear, anger and guilt that a sentient white person is likely to feel when learning the truth about anti-black racism in America.  

But there are ways to manage that stress. Ways that work.  Learning to focus on our own bodies and soul nerves is one of them and might help us open ourselves anew to the work of anti-racism.

A quick thought about this week’s gospel reading. Peter’s answer to the question of Jesus’ identity or significance feels a little odd. Jesus himself observes that Peter’s answer seems to come out of nowhere. Peter’s answer may have been a good one, but there was truth in the other disciples’ answers too.

The story is written to dismiss the other disciples’ answers as less worthy. I think that’s unfortunate.  A uniquely inspired Peter might be a good model for hierarchical church leadership, but it’s a lousy model for the kind of group or community work that values each of the members for the insights which arise from their own experiences, hearts and bodies.

[1] Others call it the vagus nerve.

[2] If we can remain present, we can become aware of how the stress manifests in our body and then develop the ability to calm the body while still in the presence of the stress.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Jesus said… It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.  Mt. 15:10-11.

Last week I read Part I of “My Grandmother’s Hands.” It included twelve “Body Practice” exercises which Menakem said should be done as they arise in the text.  Last week, I didn’t do the exercises. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the extra time. This week, I went back and did the exercises.

Some began with Body Scans in which you notice how your body is feeling. And there were more challenging exercises. One asked me to remember things I had said or done which would have been micro-aggressions or “exclusionary behaviors.”[1]

That brought up very unwelcome memories: things I have said or done which were race-based and wrong. Not excusable as “well-intentioned” or ignorant. Just race-based and wrong.  These were memories which I have ignored, denied or “forgotten” until now.[2]  Revisiting them made me feel very uncomfortable, mentally and physically.

Here are three things I know after doing the exercises in Part I.

1.      I was “raised to know better,” but I grew up in a culture which was infused with white privilege and all of the ways in which white privilege disguises and protects itself. My first language is English. My second is white supremacy.

2.      As an adult, I had opportunities to learn about the need to dismantle racism and white supremacy.  

3.      Despite those opportunities, there were times when my words or my actions were racially exclusionary. Sometimes I was well-intentioned and sometimes I did speak in ignorance. But not always. Sometimes I was just too comfortable in my own privilege to be bothered. And sometimes I was just a coward. Menakem’s Body Practices helped me know where these memories live: they reside very uncomfortably in my mind and my body.  

I think Menakem will say that these kinds of memories should not to be ignored, denied or forgotten. I think he will say that they need to be “metabolized” — processed — transformed into a different energy or way of being. I’m not sure how that happens. Maybe he will explain in Part II. I will keep reading.

“Becoming Anti-Racist” started because I was inspired by a friend’s Camino-experience of — as they say — having the Camino speak to her. This week, my camino spoke to me. It didn’t tell me what to do about the unpleasant memories of things I wish I had not said or done. But it did suggest that from here on in when I pray, I should ask for courage.

[1] Journalist and “inclusion strategist” Ruchika Tulshyan says that the term “microaggressions” is inadequate to describe the injury done by the “subtle, everyday putdowns, insults, or offensive remarks from well-meaning white peers…” We Need to Retire the Term “Microaggressions,” Ruchika Tulshyan, Harvard Business Review, March 8, 2022. She says that there is nothing “micro” or small about those injuries, and she prefers the term “exclusionary behaviors.”

[2] Most of them actually came up while I was working through Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy, (Sourcebooks 2020, 2023.) It remains the single best book for white people ready to work on their racism that I know of. Like My Grandmother’s Hands, in order to “get it” you need to “do it:” do the exercises in writing and reflect in a group or journal.

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash