Charlottesville
And My Uncertain Ruminations
Written by my alter ego – the Panhandling Philosopher
There are times when full of myself I
have imagined I had the needed words of wisdom to address a subject. In early August I
attended the Glen Workshop. A friend had told me how Barry Moser had an impact
on his working to create art at a difficult time in his life. Moser is a warm
crusty sort of person. He is kind but is at war with presumptions of certainty
that go soften with claims of knowledge beyond the fragility of our humanity.
Reflecting on what I have perceived after the events in Charlottesville, I am
seeking to write as if Barry Moser is a reader. I feel like he would instantly
see through any claim of divine wisdom I might momentarily imagine I possess. I
will try to limit myself to the perceptions of a fragile human being given
occasionally to think on a subject matter.
One reality which I see reiterated
in the Charlottesville events is that if it is only with difficulty that we
change anything about ourselves, it is only with that much more difficulty that
we change our cultural habits. From my perspective as a Christian I have
learned to look at life through a filter that sees the beauty and richness of
our humanity created in God’s image. I have also learned to view our humanity
in the fragility of what theologians call the sin nature. That seems almost
clinical, cold, and casual. Perhaps St. Paul’s words speak more to the heart of
the matter when he said that what he desired to do, he found he failed to do.
Many of the faults I had before I became a Christian more than forty years ago
still pop up in my life. I curse. I am impatient, aloof, tend to be lazy,
self-centered, and easily discouraged and depressed. Growth in grace is more
easily loved in abstract than in the more difficult day in and day out
decisions requiring self-denial. We can pass laws requiring people to recognize
the equality of all citizens. Those laws do not automatically transform racists, nor
alleviate suspicions of racism.
Our American history is full of racist
tendencies. Our history in mistreating indigenous people and enslaving and then
segregating people of color is apparent enough to need no rehashing. As a white
person I know that most of what I feel pride in regarding my heritage becomes
easily distracted into the things we know need changed. Our greatest sins are
often our misguided attempts towards good labors. We Europeans who colonized
the New World were proud of our Christian traditions, our governments rooted in
law, our achievements in mastering the sciences, and our technological
achievements. In several areas that seemed important we had moved to the
forefront of accomplishment in those areas. There crept in to our
self-understanding an idea of our own superiority of race and culture. It
affected every relationship we had with other people, cultures, and races. We
could justify in our superior culture the enslavement of others. We could
justify the conquest of continents as if the others already in those lands did
not matter. We could even imagine we were doing the good, as part of what
Kipling described as “the white man’s burden.”
To this day we who are white and
Evangelical often have a view of mission or culture which makes us imagine we
ought to be the undisputed leaders. I saw someone comment how Evangelicals took
mission trips to poor nations, not to suburbs. The person noted that this
showed an equation of prosperous with blessed and of poverty with sin. I am not
sure how much that equation is true. I do tend to believe that the viewpoint of
Kipling’s “white man’s burden” explains much even if the continuation of it is
not necessarily conscious. I have been a member of white churches that dreamed
of a mission on the poor side of town where skin color was notably more brown
and black than white. We didn’t think it important to visit church leaders
already in the area to see what they were doing. We didn’t offer services to a
community which admittedly had needs. Instead we offered expertise on the basis
of our traditions. We presumed that nothing native to their churches and their communities
and their neighborhoods were as good as what we could offer. We have a
whiteness tradition which affects us both as individuals and in our generally
aloof white culture. I instinctively understood after Charlottesville that I
had little wisdom to speak to the situation. I was on the clueless side of
these issues separating America.
My Christian faith tells me that
each and every one of us have been created in God’s image. In our white pride
of our traditions, we have seldom listened to African Americans or others to
hear the words which reflect in their thoughts and cultures that they too have
been created in God’s image. In the days following Charlottesville I resisted
the temptation to write a blog. I instead shared on Facebook and Twitter two
articles I regarded as profound written by one young (compared to me) African
American woman, and by one Asian American woman.
At the same conference where I met
Barry Moser I heard Natasha Oladakun read two pieces of poetry she had written.
She wrote of her experience of life growing up in a scenic area of Virginia,
where she could love the beauty of the place but where often she was made to
feel as a stranger in the land where she has spent most of her life. Her poetry
was at once powerful, haunting, and melancholy. Her reading of the words she
had written was mesmerizing. Even if you did not understand fully her
perspective there was an undeniabe magnificence in words, reading, and
presence. She has lived in Charlottesville off and on for the last five years.
On Twitter her words reflected a broken heart as marchers came to her town of those who
would have liked to have seen her presence erased from the Virginia hill
country. You can let her speak to you through her words written here.
The second writing to which I would
like to draw your attention is by an Asian American, Ruthie Johnson. I
have never met her but after reading this
piece by her I value her insights regarding repentance. Repentance is that meeting place of humanity
created in God’s image with a broken humanity often seeking safety as far away from love as we can remove ourselves. Her poem is a repentance
prayer. She asks the Lord to recolor her eyes, so she can see what she has
missed. She concludes praying “Give me lament laced with strength.” Can there be a more poignant beautiful expression of repentance than “Give me
lament laced with strength?”
In America’s Twentieth Century the
struggle for equal rights was often described politically. When I read these
pieces by my African American sisters I have come to realize that what we
struggle for as Americans is bigger than mere politics. We struggle for the
wholeness of our humanity whether white, black, indigenous, Latino, Asian or
whatever. As I read these writings by Natasha Oladakun and Ruthie Johnson I had
a new vision of what we struggle for. We struggle for our being created in God’s
image. We struggle in being created in God’s image for the wholeness of that
creation in which God made us to desperately need one another in the fullness
of our humanity. Natasha asked, “If we are not here for each other, why are we
here?” Ruthie noted that the soil, the earth has already absorbed its fill of
blood, bones, and bodies and it groans for redemption. We battle not merely for some form of legal equality but for our own humanity, for our being created
in God's image desperately needing one another.
