The Heart of the Matter
“Listen to me, all of you, and understand, there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
Today, somewhere between real late and real early, I woke up hoot owl wide eyed. Stuff was swirling between my ears, making me feel edgy all over.
Like many of you, the question stirs and bewilders me, what are we to make of and do about the ongoing flood of shootings...most recently in Gilroy, California; El Paso; Dayton; and 4-year-old Jurnee in Birmingham. The almost daily increasing count of ‘mass’ murders this year numbers 248, 900+ shot, near 250 killed.
I am still (rightly!) unsettled, disturbed from last week going to the Equal Justice Initiative Memorial and Museum in Montgomery with Dianne and our family members/friends Lynn and Dick L’Eplattenier.
It was a mix of being reminded of what I knew and learning what I didn’t. I recalled 4,400+ black people were lynched (shot, burned, drowned, bludgeoned, hung) in the US between 1877 and 1950. These persons named and unknown are listed on the suspended red-brown 800 monuments for each county in which lynching happened. In addition, 24 after 1950, including a 14-year-old for the crime of smiling at, maybe whistling at or speaking to, a white woman.
I did not know about the huge Montgomery Slave Market of the 1850’s: thousands of slaves boated in/trained out, warehoused, families regularly separated forever...all facilitated by some 164 licensed slave traders.
Inside the museum, I watched grainy black & white 1950’s/60’s videos of George Wallace, Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi (if possible even more charmless than Wallace), and others intone the virtues of segregation and superiority of whites over blacks. There was a clip of a radio/TV preacher of the times teaching how the Bible clearly mandates segregation and subjection of black people in Genesis 9.
It also kabonged in my late/early ruminations that the year Dianne and I married – anniversary soon! – Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were shot and George Wallace began his national presidential campaign extending the ever-popular political power practice of making people feel good about their bigotry/righteous about their racism.
Well, enough. No way I could turn over and go back to sleep. So, here I am keyboard taping with it still dark outside.
Nothing simple about the roots of human meanness to other humans and for sure nothing simple about how we humans challenge/overcome such meanness in our day as others did in their time.
Still, though there are all sorts of systemic results, meanness starts in the fear of our hearts: our un-sureness about our worth, adequacy...our dis-ease over whether we are good, strong, smart, secure enough in whom we are and what we have. There is the fateful move to bolster our uncertainty about ourselves, to feel superior, with the guaranteed inferiority of ‘other’ people.
Different skin color, gender, sexuality, religion, economic status, country of origin, political party or football team...whatever, fill in our own blank for whatever fills that insecure hole in our heart.
Lying on my desk is a piece from Richard Rohr I printed out a few days ago. He is talking about Christian mysticism...the God given capacity to see the unity of God’s gift of life and love to all of us that has the power to overcome our proclivity to bifurcate the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’.
“A ‘better’ world is one in which we recognize that all people possess an incomparable value that we are obliged to respect. But this runs up against our inherited instincts of self-protection...sense of insufficient and insecure being.... In talking with one another, teaching and encouraging one another... we are helping one another know that we are deeply related.... With freedom from devaluing others comes a great release of energy. What has been invested in protection of ourselves is now available for and rejoicing in others.” (Daily Devotion, August 4)
The love of the God we experience in Jesus also starts in our hearts to overcome those fears we generate there. It takes us reminding and encouraging one another when we forget or are tempted to give in to cynicism and compassion fatigue. It means with non-self-righteous courage calling people’s hands when they bolster bigotry and ride racism to promote themselves. Simple to say - Tough to do.
God give us courage aka hearts to speak, act, to be intolerant of intolerance, to use proper pressure to influence leaders, to find ways to live the change you make possible for us.
Hmmm. It’s early light outside now.