It Bears Repeating
Jacob Blake.
I have to say his name somewhere other than my own head, my own heart, my own home. I have to write today even though I don’t know what I’m going to say, even though I don’t know if anyone will read this and I’m pretty sure it will matter very little to anyone but me. I’ve been reading and listening of late rather than talking and writing. But I have to write today because I have to say out loud that silence is no longer my stance. This is not a temporary decision. It has to be indefinite. That “middle ground,” that “neutral space” in which I used to stand never was such a thing. It doesn’t exist. These things bear repeating.
This week as I moved within the confines of my pandemic-flavored domestic life, I couldn’t shake the phrase “I helped to build this world.” My own culpability in perpetuating the plague of racism is painfully near these days. For the past month, I’ve been reading Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise with a group of folks from my local parish in a class about racial justice. About every week, we’ve been led in a discussion about our experience with the reading. And about every week, I’ve signed off from that call with my heart heavy and my head in my hands, trying to recover some hope in my heart and breath in my lungs. The reality of this situation—not just in our country, but deep in church history—is a weighty grief and it’s time for me to feel it. But God, it hurts.
No one is off the hook, I keep realizing as I read an account of one missed opportunity after another when the Gospel could have brought transformation, but the Church chose compliance and comfort instead. No one is off the hook. Not even me. It’s worth recognizing that this wound of grief from which I’m suffering is not a new affliction. I always bore it in my body, as we all do when the body of humanity has been hurt. But the society I live in, that I have helped to build, has allowed me to avoid it: at the same time, this same system has daily dug into the wound of my brothers and sisters of color.
This week has been particularly difficult as I process anti-racist reading, the shooting and paralyzation of Jacob Blake, and my own failure as a parent. Some of my consolation in this season has been in my power to affect my own family—to raise my children to be better people than I am and have been. As I have blatantly and repeatedly failed them this week—losing patience, nursing selfishness, yelling, yelling, recognizing my sin and yelling again anyway—I have realized with overwhelming pain and fear this paradox: how can a broken and sinful person who can’t even make herself better manage to build something better than herself?
These are the realities of my world and my life at the moment. There still is no justice for Breonna Taylor or Elijah McClain and even as people protest in the streets for Jacob Blake, my heart has no hope for him, either. These names are in my heart and head all the time, and I long to send them away. I don’t want to feel the desperate rage and grief of justice denied. And so I have to write today. Even though I have nothing new to say. Even though my voice reaches such an insignificant perimeter of exposure. I have to hold their stories in my body especially because I don’t want to be near them. I want to drift back into my privileged “peace” and “equilibrium" of recent past--it is always available to me, and yet never available to Black and Brown lives. I have to say these things out loud to myself: No. Never again. It bears repeating.
“Thinking of a day
I won’t see a face on another t-shirt
I know it’s bad, but it hurts
Same day, new face
Old pain, rerun
Headline, heartbreak
Pray to God that peace will find me
Peace find me
Pray to God that he falls like lightening
Pray to God that he falls like lightening
Silence from the ones who know better
Quiet is the riot of the oppressor
Devil’s plan is we hate each other
Even better if we say nothing”
(“Lightening,” Pat Barrett and Harolddd)
In the face of scarce hope, I find myself hungering to hear from the experts of hope: Christians of Color. I thank God for Jemar Tisby, for Austin Channing-Brown, for Rev. Esau McCaulley, for Lecrae, for Dr. King—for countless other voices that are so readily discounted and silenced, and yet have continued to speak. I have so much to learn from them, and I am thankful beyond words that they have not allowed oppression, racism, hatred to shut their hearts or mouths. It feels impossible to find hope in the face of such evidence to the contrary, but there is a vibrant legacy of just such a hope that I have been unaware of for so long. I am desperate to learn, now.
Even as I hate the hurt, the pain, the struggle against despair, I pray that I can stay in the fight, that I won’t again be lulled to sleep by the voice of comfort. That I will come to love the tension where healing can happen.
“But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth” (“Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. King).
