On Loving America

In light of the news of Republican Arizona Senator John McCain deciding not to seek further treatment for his brain cancer, I shared that even though I did not agree with his politics, of one thing I was (and am) sure: He loves America.

The statement got some immediate push-back, with people reminding me of his political record: he was a hawk, he opposed the Affordable Care Act, and most recently, he cast a vote for the president’s tax reform bill, a measure which in my opinion helps only the very wealthy.

I know all of that. But what sticks in my mind is that John McCain has stuck to his beliefs and principles, even when they have been unpopular with his base and with this president. And I will forever respect him for shutting down the ugly lies about his opponent, then-Senator Barack Obama, as whites shared that they were afraid of him and their belief that he was an Arab, or, more specifically, a Muslim.

McCain shut it down – and said that Obama was a good, decent man, which was and is true.

It takes courage to stand up and say what you believe, even when it means you may pay a great cost. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the book, The Cost of Discipleship, which I refer to quite a bit, and Christians should remember that Jesus the Christ says in the Gospels that whoever wants to be his disciple must deny him/herself, pick up their crosses daily, and follow him.

In defending the character of Obama, when it cost him votes and must criticism, McCain was living that scripture.

We are not supposed to hate those with whom we disagree. We can dislike their beliefs, but at the end of the day, that is actually kind of juvenile. There is no one way to look at the world. If there were, this world would be a much better place. I will never forget reading the account of a Southern senator who believed in segregation. He was asked if he didn’t know the scripture about how one should love his neighbor, and this senator said, “Of course I know. But I get to choose my neighbor!”

Not so. Our neighbors are those with whom we agree and those with whom we disagree. In the frenzy to get and keep political power, most politicians cave to cultural demands. They will do what they need to do and say what they need to say in order to get elected and to stay in office.

McCain sought the presidency twice and lost both times. That had to have been horribly difficult to bear. I was not unhappy that he lost because I didn’t believe in his politics and believed that if president, he would pass laws and enact policies that would hurt “the least of these,” especially black, brown and poor people. I was angry with him for picking Sarah Palin as a running mate, in an attempt, I suppose, to appeal to angry white people; I was glad their ticket lost.

But the senator held his ground. He, unlike the majority of this current Congress, had the courage to speak out against the current president, a man who seems hell-bent on leading America away from democracy and toward fascism. While others in Congress have become sycophants, many to a sickening degree, McCain has held fast.

He endured the disgusting insult hurled at him by the current president, who downplayed his being a war hero, criticizing him because he had been caught and was a prisoner of war. This, from a man who never served a day in the military, burned me to my soul. Yet, McCain didn’t meet him on his ground or at his level, but held his own and worked to serve his country in the way he saw fit.

That McCain, a wealthy white man, and myself, a struggling African American woman, do not see and have never seen eye-to-eye is not the issue here. What is the issue is that this wealthy white man stayed true to what he was, regardless of what it cost him. And that is something I will always respect, especially now as the executive and legislative branches of our government seem to be hell-bent on creating an autocracy in which most of us will suffer greatly.

A candid observation …

When Death Comes

Damn death. Aretha is gone. Anthony Bourdain is gone. Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon is gone. Rev.Dr. James Cone is gone. My mother and father and sister are gone. Someone’s child or children are gone, or someone’s husband or wife or grandmother or brother or best friend …is gone.

Death be damned as well as the diseases and situations that cause death. That sentiment is known and adhered to by many. But it’s not healthy.

We all know that death is a part of life, just as failure is a necessary component of success, but when death comes it is woefully unconcerned with how we will feel as our loved one is snatched from us.

It is little wonder that the poet John Donne wrote his classic “Death Be Not Proud,” known as Holy Sonnet 10. He no doubt had borne his share of sorrow, thanks to the intrusion of Death in his daily life. His poem argues against the power of Death, which apparently thinks more highly of itself than Donne thinks it should. He writes:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones and souls’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell,

And poppy’or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou, then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

And so Donne attempts to take the sting out of death by relying on the Christian belief in eternal life. Death does not win.

But regardless of one’s religious beliefs and the capacity to visualize the loved one who has died being in heaven, the fact of the matter is that when Death comes, we who are left behind are frazzled. The hole left in our lives when a loved one – someone in our family, a close friend, or a public figure who has impacted us- is immense. And the hole gets deeper as time goes on, allowing the side effects of death – loneliness, anger, confusion, anguish – to get worse before we get the capacity to cope without falling apart.

In the last few months, people who I have known personally have died, and a couple of public figures to whom I had an attachment …” went to be with the Lord,” as we say in the Black Church. Today the country and the world are coping with the death of Aretha Franklin, an immensely talented woman who gave the world beautiful music for decades. Last week, for me, it was a female scholar and theologian and a couple of months before her it was a male theologian and scholar whose work has impacted the lives of “the least of these” since the 1970s. Before then it was CNN personality Anthony Bourdain and for some, the death of Charlotte Rae knocked the air out of their lungs.

Those are recent deaths, but the gaping hole comes anytime someone to whom we are close is taken by Death from beyond our reach. Some people find themselves trapped by the pain caused by death for literally years. We “grow accustomed” to having people around; we get used to their presence, their ways, their voices, their smiles, and even the things, in the cases of personal loss, the habits of theirs that we found irritating.

“The hole” is like a giant pot which holds our memories, sights, sounds, words and laughter of the ones who have gone, and while our grief is raw ,we are not comforted. Death does not have power over the one who has passed on, but Death wreaks havoc in ourpersonal spaces. It has no regard for our feelings; it remains an uninvited guest in our spirits until it is ready to leave.

As a pastor, I have stood beside anguished family members as they have watched their loved one transition from the temporal to the spiritual realm. I have told them to continue to talk to their loved one as he or she slips further and further away from them toward a spirit-life to which we have not yet been called. I have told them to talk to them (the sense of hearing is supposedly the last of our senses to go), and to touch them, and to tell them how much they are loved. It will make it easier for the one who is dying to let go, I have shared, if they have the feeling that those who are being left behind will be all right.

We work hard to do that, but we frequently do not succeed. We are not all right when Death swoops into our spaces. We struggle to hold onto our loved one for as long as we can because the thought of the emptiness that will be ours is unbearable to think about. Death’s main character- Grief – is like a pesky fly, but one which not only flies and buzzes in our ears, but which bites as well. Memories catch us unaware; we grow worried if, after death, we find that we cannot visualize the face of the one who has gone on. We can be “all right” one second and then pass a place which was a favorite for ourselves and the one that passed, or we can hear someone talking whose voice is eerily like the one of our deceased loved one, and we go careening down into that hole, again and again and again.

I write this today because someone knows exactly what I am talking about. I write it because a fair number of people are deeply sad because of the death of Aretha Franklin. I write it because someone lost his or her mother or father, and I write it because parents who have lost children are groping to find sunshine in days which always seem overcast because their child or children are gone.

I write this because a whole lot of people are in holes of sadness caused by the death of someone important to them. I know about those holes; my mother, father and sister died from cancer. The holes left by their passing are now not as deep as they once were, but they are still there.

Death has no power over the one who has gone; that’s what the religion of many says, but death wields its power over us who are left behind with abandon. Death does not care if our hearts feel like they will burst from the pain. Death gets an easy chair and plops it right in the middle of our grieving spirits.

Death loses its sting after a while, but it leaves permanent scars. There is no way around it. Some of us are still deeply pained by someone we lost years ago. Death invades our peace and shatters the normalcy of life we have known.

Death is a part of life. The prayers we utter should not be for those who have passed on; as Donne says, “one short sleep past, we wake eternally.” For the one who has passed, there is peace, but for those of us left behind, Death reminds us that it has taken up residence in places to which it had not been invited…and as we protest and writhe with pain, Death ignores us.

We are blessed to be able to “connect” with our lost loved ones via pictures and videos and even old voicemails. In so doing, we neutralize some of the sting of Death’s bite into our souls.

But Death tempts us to fall into despair and to stay there. To our credit, we fight back. The power of death’s grip is lessened, and we go on, limping and bruised but going on nonetheless, able to give thanks for the time we had with the one who has gone on. That thanksgiving is the antidote to the pain caused by the raw pain of Death, and when we get to that point, we at least neutralize Death’s presence and reality.

We force a tie in a battle we never wanted to fight. It is then that we can smile, even as we continue to sometimes find ourselves in tears, because the power of remembering the one who has passed is greater than the lure of Death’s helpers for us to stay enmeshed in raw sorrow.

We learn, in the words of the hymn ‘Come Ye Disconsolate” that “earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal,” and when we internalize that truth, Death is relegated to the closet of “life experiences” that are a part of the lives of all of us.

A candid observation …

The Impotency of Silence, White Supremacy and Lessons from My Mother

One of the best and most powerful lessons my mother taught me was the lesson of “guilt by association.”

“If you’re with someone who’s doing something wrong and the police come, you’re going to get arrested too, even if you haven’t done anything.”

She told all five us that at a very early age, and it stuck to me, on me and in me like white on rice. So when, for example, I was in Berkeley, California one summer and was out shopping with someone I considered a friend – and she urged me to put a swimsuit I liked into my bag, I panicked. She had lifted several swimsuits and wanted me to “join the fun.”

My mother’s words stung me like a swarm of angry bees; I pretended to go along with her, saying I was going to go back in the fitting room and try on a couple more and would meet her in a few minutes outside.

I did nothing of the sort. I went into the dressing room and stayed long enough to see her going away from where we had been and I made a beeline to another door out of the store, got on a bus and headed back to my aunt’s home.

That was in the middle ages; there were no cell phones back then, nor the internet. She called my aunt’s home several times but I never talked with her again. I didn’t tell on her, but I just stayed away.

I thought about that lesson as I was thinking about the rabid racial hatred that is swirling around us in the present time, and I was thinking about the silence of so many white people in light of all that is going on, making them as guilty of racist behavior as the most vocal racist.

Audre Lord, an African American, Lesbian, feminist writer and poet, wrote, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” She also said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Silence is a tool appreciated and exploited by the system of white supremacy; the thought seems to be on the part of many “progressive” whites that if racism isn’t talked about, then it doesn’t exist. The use of silence also seems to be an insurance policy for some whites who appear to think that if they are silent they cannot be condemned for being a participant in an evil system which knows no boundaries to its quest to control, manipulate and destroy the lives of black people.

At the heart of white supremacist thought is the innate belief that black people are inferior. “The white race” as a construct cannot figure out why black people even exist; in the 19^thcentury, some scientists and white theologians posited that there could not be one god, but there were, in fact, many gods, a slap in the face of the principle of monotheism. Black people had been created by another god, and, that being the case, it was OK to subjugate, oppress and discriminate against them. Their white god didn’t see anything wrong with and would not condemn those who were full of racist hatred and who participated in and sometimes initiated acts of violence against blacks. They could easily lynch someone on a Saturday night and go to church the next morning to sing hymns, hear a stirring sermon and maybe even receive or pass out Holy Communion.

There have been a fair number of whites who say they hate racism, but they do not say much about it. They rest in the comfort of whiteness, protected by their silence; their whiteness is like a tree which provides shade on the hottest of days. They get offended if called a racist and are annoyed when the word “racism” is used in relation to some of the oppression which goes on, but internally, they know that the talk about racism and the harm it causes is not superfluous, but is damaging many, many lives.

The fear of speaking out is understandable. In our history, those whites who spoke against racism were called “n”-lovers. They were ostracized and suffered in ways that ought not to have been the case. Silence was easier. But silence is complicity. Those who have shied away from actively helping to end racism are like friends of a person who is shoplifting. They are equally as guilty.

The current administration is bold with its belief in and practice of racism; the code words and phrases used have endeared the president to white supremacists, whose desire to “make America great again” is really a push to “make America white again.” Blacks, they believe, must know their place and stay there, and those whites who disagree dare not say too much for fear of the fallout.

People in this country have bowed to the petulant South, which has never gotten over its defeat in the Civil War, but the defeat did not mean the end of the war; it just meant that the war would be fought in a different way. The tools would be Jim Crow, lynching and other violent acts (which is none less than domestic terrorism), voter suppression, discrimination in housing, employment and finances. The war goes on; the troops of the South ever increase, while the metaphorical “Union,” i.e., progressive whites, have laid their weapons down and have basically let those who believe in racism have their way.

But the silence of progressive whites is toxic and, in the end,, will not save them. Even as the policies and practices of white people in power continue to compromise the lives of black people and other non-white, non-Christian people, the wounds caused by this metastatic condition will not heal. The poison which is the foundation of white supremacy will continue to seep out and infect everyone. As long as white supremacy is alive and well, nobody is safe.

And no, your silence will not protect you.

That day in the store, once I realized my “friend” was shoplifting, I ran. I may have saved myself from being arrested but I often wonder if I should have “squealed” on my friend. I wonder sometimes if she kept doing that. But it didn’t matter; what I realized was that I had my own demons that I hadn’t corrected and being silent about them has not healed me or saved me. I, too, have found myself in situations where I chose to be silent rather than to speak up.

We cannot successfully run from evil; we have to face it and it is in the facing that we begin to weaken it. Too many of us are afraid to publicly come out against racism; the cost, we fear, is too great.

I would posit a different thought: that not confronting racism, calling it out, cutting it off at its knees, will result in chaos that will rage out of control. Our silence is not helping us; it is leading this country to a bad, bad place.

A candid observation …

The Day of America’s Fall

In Psalm 137:7, the psalmist writes, “Remember, O Lord, the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem’s fall.” The words are those of Israelites who have been cast out of their homeland; they sit on the bank of a river in Babylon and mourn their exile from Jerusalem. They remember how things “used to be” in Jerusalem, and how things are now that they have been captured by the Babylonians. They are in shock. They were God’s people, but God, tired of the people’s constant rejection of God’s rules and laws, used the Babylonians, their enemies, to bring them down.

The Israelites are angry. They plea to God to “remember the Edomites,” who joined the Babylonians in the attack on Jerusalem. The Edomites had been vicious, saying to their soldiers to “tear it down,” meaning Jerusalem. In the psalm, the beleaguered Israelites, in essence, curse the Babylonians, and vow vengeance, “Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!” The psalm concludes with the Israelites saying, “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.”

They are angry and hurt and lost; they had a good thing in Jerusalem, they now realize, as they sit under the rule of foreigners who laugh at them and beg them to “sing one of the songs of Zion.” They balk, insulted, one might guess, and ask, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

In 2001, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, then the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, preached a sermon entitled, “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” quoting this psalm and prophesying that America was in trouble. It was shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11. The nation was reeling and angry; Wright, the prophetic preacher, recalled in the sermon how those who had gone against the will of God had been forced into exile …by God.

Nebuchadnezzar II was the king of Babylon in 597 BCE and he fought against the Pharaoh Necho in the Battle of Carchemish and then went on to invade Judah. The king of Judah at the time, Jehoiakim, resisted Nebuchadnezzar but lost. Jerusalem fell, and the Israelites mourned the loss of all they had ever known and treasured.

Today the president of this nation sided with a modern-day Babylonian king, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and on international television, put his own country down in obeisance to one of America’s arch enemies. It was stunning to watch. Today we watched the “day of America’s fall.”

It has been coming for some time, though nobody could have predicted that the man elected to be the president of this nation would hand it over to Russia. It has been shocking to watch the president cow-tow to Putin, putting this country’s systems down and insulting its institutions, and it has been noticeable that this president, who has put down almost everyone in this government, has not said one negative word about Putin.

Not even today.

This president has put the country he swore to protect – and its institutions and constitution – in real jeopardy, leaving the way clear for our present-day Babylonians – aka Russia, to have its way.

He has not done this alone. The Republican-led House and Senate have been partners in the undoing of America. The rabid fear of the browning of America, along with other social changes that Conservatives have hated, has been paralyzing even as it has been motivating for these primarily white men to resort to base instincts which have led them to make moves and create policies that will have repercussions for generations. They are afraid to stand up to him and to oppose him, a fear which has encouraged him to do what he did today: give the America we have known since its birth – to an arch-enemy.

The American democracy was far from perfect, but it was better than many governments. This country was known, even in somewhat mythical proportions, as the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” People had confidence in what America claimed to be.

Not anymore.

The world has watched this president destroy the progress that has been made over five decades; it has watched as the president has trashed allies and praised and supported autocrats. Already, so much damage has been done that it will take at least a generation to repair what has been destroyed – if, in fact, it can be repaired.

Americans have not believed that its democracy could be destroyed. We have been like Germans, who when Hitler was grabbing power, never believed it would get as bad as it did. The truth is, in most countries where democracies die, the leaders of the destruction have been voted into office by the people.

When Jeremiah Wright preached that infamous sermon in 2001, he was bombarded by critics who called him everything from racist to anti-American. He preached that America was being paid back and would be paid back for what it had done over the years in its quest for power, and he reminded listeners of some of America’s history.

It was not pretty.

In the name of God, he preached that we should be reminded that God sees what both individuals and countries do and that there is a price to pay when God’s people stray from God’s requirements.

God directed the fall of Jerusalem.

And God is in this, the day of America’s fall. We, too, may find ourselves looking back at what we had, taunted and insulted, asked to “sing a song of Zion,” and we, like the over-confident Israelites, may find our voices quieted, our spirits wounded, because we did not believe that this country would ever see the day when its president threw it under the bus.

(To listen to Wright’s sermon, visit (http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ed-put-trump-online-letters-20180716-story.html)

Getting Up All Over Again

This has been a difficult week for Americans who have been fighting for their civil and human rights in this country.

The United States Supreme Court upheld the president’s travel ban and also ruled against unions collecting dues from non-union employees.

Then, US Supreme Court Justice announced his retirement, effective July 31 of this year, giving the current president the opportunity to name yet another person to the high court. Undoubtedly, that person will be a social conservative and will pull the court further to the right.

The gains made by Americans who have been fighting for their voice will be pushed back – again.

The Rev. Dr. William Barber, the creator of the Moral Mondays movement and most recently the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, wrote that this nation has historically fought back when too many gains have been made by marginalized groups, most specifically by African Americans. The “first Reconstruction” came after the Civil War; the “second Reconstruction” came after the Civil Rights Movement, and this, the “third Reconstruction” is on the heels of the presidency of Barack Obama.

In each of these “setback eras,” as I view them, angry whites have done all they can, politically and socially to undo the gains that African Americans have made. During the First Reconstruction, they did all they could to suppress the newly gained right of African Americans to vote. Voter suppression was the hallmark of the Second Reconstruction, with social conservatives working to undo the rights afforded blacks by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

And now we sit in the midst of the Third Reconstruction, where voting rights are again under attack, along with rights gained by the LGBTQ community. There is a fear as well that with the nation’s high court getting another right-leaning justice, Roe v Wade will be overturned, making it illegal for women to get abortions. Immigrants and their rights are being attacked and eroded; unions stand to up to a third of their members and funding.

Because of the domination of all three branches of government by Republicans who claim their position to be that of social conservatives, many people and groups will slip back into places from which they have been fighting to get out of for decades.

I am looking for an adjective that I am satisfied with when describing social conservatives. A working definition of a social conservative is someone who holds onto tradition and the way things have been. Social conservatives fight change in the social makeup of a country or government. In America, the granting of rights to what they would call “marginalized” groups has gone over the top. Voting rights, gay marriage, the right of women to choose their options for pregnancy, protection for transgender individuals and continuation of protecting immigrants who come from Mexico, Central and South America have eroded the America in which social conservatives trust has been too much. Author Karen Armstrong has said that when there is too much change in a society or culture, there is a backlash, which includes the rise of fundamentalism. People pull harder to the right to protect what they know, an action which comes off as being racist, sexist, Xenophobic and more and they often use their understanding of God and of the Christian Bible to justify their views and their actions.

Their determination to put everyone back into their place is unrelenting, and once they have successfully wielded their power which is theirs primarily because of their race, gender and wealth, they fall back into the rhythm with which they are comfortable. The “undesirables” have been controlled, and all is well.

People in this world who are not white, male, heterosexual and wealthy will always have to fight for full American citizenship. They interpret the Constitution as a document which demands parity amongst individuals, which it does not. The Constitution was at its inception a document which made a way an protected wealthy, white, male, Protestant landowners. In actuality, the Founding Fathers desired to create a country for white people, even as they imported Africans to this country to help them build this nation’s wealth. That they did not think through what their greed would ultimately do – i.e., establish the African American population of this country – shows their arrogance. Because they did not look at African Americans (or Native Americans, or women, for that matter) as human beings, they did not include those groups as groups worthy of full American citizenship. As the country grew, and African Americans, as well as women, began demanding their rights, the social conservatives worked – and continue to work – to make government protect their rights while chipping away and outright denying those same rights to groups whom they felt were not human and therefore not worthy of equal treatment and status.

Human beings, however, will not stay under a rock and acquiesce to injustice; within all humans is the desire to be free in the fullest sense of the word. Every time the government has worked to reduce their rights, these groups have fought back. The groups of people in this country whose rights are being eroded or which stand a big chance of being eroded will be knocked down, but they will get up. Every time the social conservatives try to stop the movement toward the dignity of different groups, those groups become more resolute to fight for what they know they deserve.

While social conservatives appear to live in and be guided by fear – fear that they will lose their property, their jobs, their dreams and their status – the ‘marginalized” live in hope – the hope that they will ultimately win.

Step by painful step, they will. Evil is a strong force in this world, but hope is stronger. Hope has made the marginalized fight for justice for thousands of years, and hope will be the fuel that gives them the power and strength to get up all over again and continue that fight.

A candid observation …