Charlottesville Ruminations

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.