Between the World and Me....

I love America more than any other country

in this world, and, exactly for this reason,

I insist on the right to criticize her

perpetually.

- James Baldwin, Collected Essays

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me is an modern classic, a distillation of a singular African-American life relayed in breathtaking prose and indelible images ... and (too often for my taste) just f--cking depressing.  In part it's depressing because of its author's seemingly relentless chronicling of the impact of race on his life.  (As in, it's true that he's a Black Man in Modern America but it seems that his life has been almost exclusively defined by this and that the times when this was not the primary shaper of his experience were few at best and clearly far between.)  And it's depressing in part because it's so true, so real, so pathetically profound and so absolutely and outrageously unknown to far too many of our fellow citizens, especially those who "think that they are" or "consider themselves white."  (In a very beneficial way, perhaps this book's status as a New York Times best seller will address this latter reality.)

And, whether he likes it or not, he is very much a spiritual successor to Baldwin (if not the one...).  Both use the English language so beautifully and provocatively that, at times, the reader is breathless and disoriented.  I found myself re-reading whole passages because I couldn't believe how exquisitely Coates had turned a phrase or captured a feeling or moment, just as I often did with Mr. Baldwin's writing when I delved into it seriously a decade ago or more.  I'm still healing from finishing this book two weeks ago - and I know that a number of its most powerful images and/or passages will never leave me - but I am thankful for this legacy: despite the pain, the experience was exquisite, if for no other reason than I was reminded of how powerful and beautiful the written word could be ... even as I was reminded of how harrowing life can be as a Black Man in Modern America....

With greater detail and consideration, I've written a review on Goodreads.com
(https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1340424520), so I won't recap that here.  I'd rather explore a few of the lessons that I've learned as a result of this book, albeit briefly....

The first thing that I would say is that I've been more fortunate, apparently, than Mr. Coates because, even as a fellow Black Man in Modern America, I've enjoyed the luxury of having less of my life experience affected - and, seemingly, proscribed and defined - by race.  In other words, it seems that I've had more meaningful experiences and moments in life in which I was simply another human being transfixed by the transcendence of life.  To wit, though I nod knowingly at virtually all of the 'bitter fruit' experiences Coates relates - as in I, too, have experienced Driving While Black police stops with guns drawn (for absolutely no reason, of course) and the bewilderingly paternalistic racism both of those who have meant well and those who have not, etc. - I have not allowed them to dominate my worldview as they seemingly do his.  Oh, yes, I know that I'm Black - senior corporate executive though I may have been for most of my adult life, none of my white colleagues have ever been asked to be served by a guest at a function that they're hosting or been told ni--er jokes over the phone by a business associate (who had yet to meet me in person), or been asked to take their golf clubs to the first tee, etc. - it's just that this is not all that I am, or, alternatively stated, this informs but does not rule my world as much as it seems to do for Mr. Coates.

And I am thankful for this, truly, truly thankful ... 'cause bein' a Black Man in Modern America is a burden to be sure, whether one suffers its afflictions as a victim of the pre-school-to-prison pipeline or the less life-threatening assaults of being "the only one in the room" for most of one's adult life (as I have been).  And I was prepared for this life by my parents, especially my forward-looking teacher-mother, who worked overtime to pay for my private school tuition and exposed me to 'non-traditional' (read = mainstream white American) activities like skiing and the orchestra and the theater and....

In fact, I have spent my adult life swimming in the (upper) American Mainstream, valuing my Blackness because it both made me special and because it never let me forget that I was different and thus get too comfortable and 'forget my place.'  Because of this, it has not defined me as often, so it has been less of a burden for me than for all but a few.  And therein lies the huge value of Mr. Coates' book: it doesn't let any of us - African-Americans or our white counterparts - forget this difference, either.  Even though it has defined my life less than his, I have still been Black my entire life and everywhere that I've gone, Persian-carpeted though those places may have been of late.  And there have always been subtle reminders for and to me lest I be tempted to forget (which is something that I have rarely done).  This is the Black Burden that Mr. Coates chronicles so movingly ... and its absence is the White Privilege that so many of its beneficiaries dispute and/or deny....

I am further thankful that when I have written letters to my children over the years, while they have been necessarily parentally prescriptive, they have not been overly dominated by race.  My children, too, have grown up in the (upper) American Mainstream, so their experience of race is both different than mine (having grown up in the African-American enclave of inner-city Detroit in the '60s and '70s) and, truth be told, less than mine.  So, too, with Mr. Coates' son (to whom this book is ostensibly addressed).  His son's experience is not of growing up in Black inner-city Baltimore in the '80s, but in cosmopolitan New York City, which, though it's still a dangerous place, is much less so than the Charm City of his father's youth.  So my letters to my children don't read as depressingly as Mr. Coates' ... and I'm thankful for that, too.

Not that I haven't had to have 'The Talk' with my two African-American teenage sons (numerous times), imploring them to exercise extra (and, truthfully, deserved but unearned) caution when dealing with members of law enforcement, or had to explain to my eldest what his (white) classmate (whose father worked at Goldman Sachs) meant by using the word "ni--er" when he was in first grade, or....  But the good news is that these incidents, unfortunate though they may be, have been the exception and not the rule, a privilege that I have been sure to illuminate repeatedly and at length for them especially since so few members of their peer group enjoy it.

So while I appreciate Mr. Coates for calling out his true experience of being a Black Man in Modern America, I hope that we can appreciate that his is a representative though not defining one.  If I may critique the book at all, this is one of its few faults in my view: that despite a brief acknowledgement that his son's experience of being Black will be different than his own, he lapses back into being that 'lecturing geezer' whom we all waved off when we were young.  Not that what the elder said didn't make sense - it did, even then - just that we were too busy living our better, freer lives to be constrained (and, conceptually, informed) by his worse, warped one.

I wish that Mr. Coates could have spent a little more time 'doing the translation' in the sense of helping his son (and us other readers) understand how to apply his lessons in this slowly and irregularly improving world in which we all live and in which our own children are growing up.  My sons have grown up in Montclair, New Jersey, not inner-city Detroit when it was known as the "Murder Capital of the World."  Accordingly, my lessons to them are informed by my experience as a youth of their age, but focused on the world in which they live.  Were they not framed in this way, I doubt that they would be heeded as much as they are - which, I'll admit, is not as much as I'd like - and, I fear, lacking this, too many young people who read Mr. Coates' fine book may not heed his wisdom and warnings either.

Further, given that Mr. Coates is now an esteemed member of the mainstream intelligentsia, it's likely that his son's experience will reflect this, too.  Should this prove to be the case, while it is a triumphant gift to chronicle the past, wouldn't it be even better to encourage his son to envision a different - and ostensibly better - future?  Instead, Mr. Coates cautions against the very hope that his own life and experience represent.  While it's true that his son will have to continue The Struggle - given the realities of our world, it's unlikely that racism (or any of our other -isms) will disappear any time soon (or, at least, in his son's lifetime) - it's also true that he will likely be less defined by it, both by inclination and by experience.  I suspect that Mr. Coates values his success in some meaningful part precisely because it affords his son a different and likely better experience, so his prescription against hope strikes me as unnecessarily nihilistic.

This being said, I accept that we are all to some extent prisoners of our own experiences and pasts.  I will forever be more conscious of my Blackness than my sons are or will be because it has been a much larger part - and, earlier in my life, a more defining part - of my experience.  I'm happy that my struggles and (modest) contributions to The Struggle have helped it to be so, at least in the sense that Blackness is less of a burden for more of us, the fortunate few.  And The Struggle now mostly revolves around making this the case for the majority of us.

And Mr. Coates' book will help greatly to educate those who read it, especially those who are not African-American, and thus to help them understand the realities of the (structural) inequity that remains.  No, they won't find innovative policy prescriptions in its pages - it's a memoir after all - but they will find an undeniable recounting of the reality of being a Black Man in Modern America ... which is actually the story of one of the few and most fortunate of them.  Simply put, if it's this hard for one of the fortunate few like Mr. Coates, imagine how hard it is for an average (likely inner-city) African-American....

And yet, in an unexpected way, the book gives me hope, that thing against which its author counsels.  The greatest source thereof is in the writing, as it is truly a tour de force and a work of art.  Few I've read have moved me as much as Mr. Coates, as his gift for and use of the English language are often breathtaking in their effect and, for this reason, inspiring.  After reading Mr. Coates, it's hard not to be inspired by his soaring prose, damning though it may be in content.

For example, in commemorating and mourning his slain college friend he observes,

There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live

in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they

lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place become a wound.

Further reflecting on his friend's loved ones' grief, he continues,

Prince Jones was the superlative of all of my fears.  And if he, good

Christian, scion of the striving class, patron saint of the twice as good,

could be forever bound,who then could not?  And the plunder was not just

of Prince alone.  Think of all the love poured into him. ...

And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and

all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to earth.

And then he both personalizes and universalizes the insight:

Black people love their children with a kind of obsession.

You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.

I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you

killed by the streets that America made.  That is a philosophy of

the disembodied, of a people who control nothing,

who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the

criminals among them but the police who lord over them

with all the moral authority of a protection racket.

It was only after you that I understood this love,

that I understood the grip of my mother's hand.

She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that

all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy

spilled upon the curb like bum wine.  And no one would be

brought to account for this destruction, because my death

would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some

unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an

innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. ...

This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned

in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire

for the rest of my days.  I still had journalism.

My response was, in this moment, to write.

And write he has....

His guidance to his teenage son rings true, even to us suburban African-American dads:

The price of error is higher for you than it is for your

countrymen. and so that America might justify itself,

the story of a black body's destruction must always

begin with his or her error, real or imagined. ...

History is not solely in our hands.  And still you are

called to struggle, not because it assures you victory

but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.

That this comes in response to his re-consideration of his own behavior in a situation in which his young son was pushed by a (white) adult adds to the pathos.  One can't help but feel for both father and son ... and, if you're African-American, understand that this could happen to you, too....

And we are also moved by his shared realization that,

You are going into consciousness, and my wish for you

is that you feel no need to constrict yourself

to make other people comfortable. ...

I would have you be a conscious citizen

of this terrible and beautiful world.

We all want our children to become who they truly are, to find what makes them unique in all the world and live this truth and the life that it engenders to their fullest.  And, as African-American fathers, we want our young men to be aware, aware that they are different, aware that, though some of them have been sheltered from many if not most risks, this protective cocoon can evaporate in a heartbeat ... as it did for Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis and so/too many others.

Truth be told, my white friends will never quite understand the 'extra anguish' that African-American parents feel every time our young people leave the house for the evening to hang out with friends or go to a party.  All parents share a fear of the tragic vagaries of fate like a car accident or some other most unfortunate event.  Those of us of the darker hue have an added anxiety for our children, especially our young men: an interaction - no matter how innocently engendered - with the police.  "Why?" my white friends may be tempted to ask, in their earnest lack of awareness or temporary amnesia.  And then when the names of Trayvon and Jordan and Eric and Walter and... are cited, they fall into a knowing, empathetic and sad silence....

This, too, is part of the still vibrant and potentially lethal burden of being Black in Modern America: that our children are not safe, either from the mean streets of our largely abandoned and crumbling major cities or from the random risks of supposedly safer climes.  To be a Black parent today is to hope more than your counterparts because you have to....

My parents have been gone for years now, but I never told them of my worst experience with The Burden because I didn't want them to worry thereafter.  As too many of these potential tragedies do, it all started innocently: back in the early 1980s, my summer roommates and I rented a car to drive from New York City to Long Island to attend a cookout hosted by friends from college.  Just a few blocks from our rented apartment, the four of us drove under an elevated train pass and soon thereafter saw the flash of lights and heard a blaring siren and a stern command to "Stop the car!"  Of course, we pulled over right away and waited for the officers to approach us and explain why they had done so.  A minute later, one of them walked to the driver's side window and began to question us with an air of officious seriousness.  So far, we were calm and, anticipating the fun to be had at the cookout, jovial.

This all changed fifteen seconds later when the second officer got out of the squad car and approached our vehicle.  One of my friends turned his head and noticed something that he whispered immediately and softly yet forcefully enough for us to comprehend: the second officer had his gun drawn and was pointing it at us!?!  Suddenly, a routine traffic stop had turned potentially lethal.  Our good humor turned to adrenaline, dread and the early pangs of fear.  Why on earth would were we being detained at gunpoint?!?

To make a long and harrowing story short, we were eventually released by the officers after we were given a ticket for running a red light.  (To this day, I'll tell you that this wasn't true - the light, though partially obscured by the overpass, was indeed green - but, of course, this fact meant precious little in the moment or now.)  Yet three things have never left me since:

First, I will never forget the arrogance with which the first officer treated us.  He was the very stereotype of a white NYC cop drunk on his power.  To say that he was dismissive would be too kind; he was a true jackass and a purposely menacing and threatening one at that.  If he were convinced that we had actually run a red light, why were we threatened with arrest, with the search and seizure of the car "because you probably have drugs on you," etc.?  Because he held the power and we were just four scared Black dudes pulled over on an almost empty block in Harlem, that's why....

Second, I will never forget the youth and fear of the second officer, the one pointing the gun at us.  After the situation was diffused, we studied him carefully: he was probably our age or, possibly, a year or two our junior.  Further, it's hard to believe that he felt threatened enough to draw and aim his gun without permission and/or direction from his partner.  And, we concluded, he appeared to be Hispanic, a cruel irony that we processed angrily thereafter.  We could very well have been his cousins or friends or classmates from high school....

Third, I will never forget how very randomly Black I felt at that moment.  I was just one of four "Black youths" in a car in Spanish Harlem, I could hear the news reports saying.  Never mind that we were four Ivy Leaguers, the least educated of whom - a Harvard junior - was me: one of my friends had just graduated from Yale and would receive both his MBA and law degrees from Harvard a few years thereafter before becoming a successful private equity investor (and whose early-career mentor was Michael Bloomberg ... yes, that Michael Bloomberg); another of our number had also just graduated from Yale and was entering Howard University's dental school en route to a distinguished career as an orthodontist; and the driver was a rising senior at Harvard who would go on to win a Rhodes scholarship later that academic year and study at Oxford before going on to graduate from Boalt Law School and enjoy a distinguished career in business and the law.  Between us, we would eventually earn seven Ivy League degrees ... but that evening we were just four potential suspects on the side of the road (or, to put it more bluntly and accurately as one of our group did, "four ni--ers chosen at random who fit the profile").

Suffice it to say that we were shaken by our brush with fate (and, possibly, death), so much so that we rehashed the incomprehensible incident over and over and over again as we drove to our cookout, at which we arrived sufficiently subdued to elicit a hearty "What the hell's wrong with you guys?" from our as yet unsuspecting host (who spent the rest of the evening consoling us and assuring us that this wouldn't recur).

Though everyone now sees me as a pillar and leader of the community and a successful executive and family man, I've been that ni--er by the side of the road ... and I pray every time that my sons go out for the evening that they never will be....

This is The (continuing) Burden.  This is the (continuing) reason for The Struggle.  This is the reality of being a Black Man in Modern America.  This is Ta-Nehisi Coates' fear for his son (as it was James Baldwin's for his nephew a half-century before) ... and it is also mine.  This is what is Between the World and Me, too....

This must seem strange to you.  We live in a "goal-

oriented" era.  Our media vocabulary is full of hot

takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything.

But some time ago I rejected magic in all of its forms.

This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who

never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and

were skeptical of preordained American glory.  In

accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my

total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wish to

live - specifically, how do I live free in this black body?

It is a profound question because America understands

itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the

clearest evidence that America is the work of men.

Staying Christian....

The last thing we discover in composing a work

is what to put down first.

 

- Blaise Pascal

So much has happened since I last wrote ... and I'm still not quite sure why I haven't written.  The topics were fertile ground, ranging from the weird and yet significant (Rachel Dolezal) to the truly historic (the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality) to the heartrending (Emanuel AME) to the inspiring (the demise of the Confederate flag at the South Carolina State Capitol) ... and yet I still haven't written.  Along the way my eldest graduated from high school, a joyous occasion if there ever was one ... and yet I didn't write.  Hmmm....

Some of this not writing, I suspect, has to do with fatigue: I've been working exceedingly hard at my new job for over a month now, which has taught me, among other things, that I'm human: apparently I no longer have endless supplies of energy and focus.  (Is it true that crossing the half-century mark really changes things or am I just out of practice relative to driving so hard for so long that it'll come back to me, kinda like riding a bicycle?  BTW, for those of you who haven't ridden a bicycle in a while, a warning: it doesn't just come back to you and you could really hurt yourself....)

And I've had a full complement of kids - actually, mostly, young adults - around, so this, too, can inspire observations and assessments ... and yet, no prose....

I suspect, too, that some of my not writing has to do with being more circumspect, wanting to experience and live life fully without the need to reflect upon it or record it ... but this runs counter to the reality that in the recording the living is appreciated anew....

So why haven't I written?

Because writing is hard sometimes, just like life.  Because getting it just right in print is a sometimes arduous and seemingly impossible though loving task.  Because I'm often so emotionally and spiritually drained by the sickness in our world that I don't want to deal with it anymore, especially by having to assess it closely, peer beyond it and try to make sense of it so that I can keep going forward.  Because I know what I want to say but often find myself without the energy to say it (as distraught as I often am at the mess that we've made of our world and as partially restored as I am in those moments of serendipitous, eternal beauty that heal and steel the soul and beckon me forward...).

Because, because, because....

And yet life enjoins me again (and again and again and....) ... so I write....

 

Since I began that last sentence, my computer decided to do a forced reboot and I had my 'not writing but trying to write' vibe disturbed.  ("Thanks, HP!", I say completely facetiously.)  And yet perhaps this involuntary interlude is a blessing.  During this interim, I picked up the tome that my reading group - The Spiritual Explorers Book Club - is enjoying this month, the excellent, powerful and provocative The Politics of Jesus by the Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks and began to appreciate it anew.  And so now I've found my topic: the Lord/the Universe/Life truly does work in mysterious ways, doesn't He/She/It?

 

It so happens that I'm early in the book - re-reading it for a fourth time, as it's one of my all-time favorites - when Professor Hendricks is elucidating the Hebrew people's adherence to the principle of malkuth shamayim, or the "sole sovereignty of God," to explain their desire during the period of the judges for temporary rather than permanent leadership (i.e., judges vs. a king).  Centuries later, as we know, under increased pressure from powerful external enemies, the Jewish people asked for a king, and the results thereafter were mixed (to put it kindly).  What struck me, though, were three realities that Professor Hendricks illumines: first, that the original leadership ethos of we Christians' founding belief system was egalitarian rather than hierarchical; second, that the term messiah, meaning "anointed leader" really referred more to an earthly ruler than a spiritual one; and third, that, as Rev. Dr. Hendricks puts it,

 

The Gospels portray malkuth shamayim, rendered in its Greek forms basileia ton ournanon ("kingdom of heaven") and basileia tou Theou ("kingdom of God"), as Jesus' central proclamation. ... In fact, the vast majority of Jesus' pronouncements in the Gospels characterize the kingdom of God as an entirely earthly reality.

 

Taking on the first of these insights, it strikes me how far we're strayed from our roots, so to speak.  True, we don't have kings anymore - at least, in effect, in the western world - but we do have an unnerving reverence for imbuing our leaders with messianic responsibilities (especially, in this country, if they're white and male).  In essence, we seem to want them to save us from ourselves, so we look to them to project an invincibility that belies our declining state (both within our society and with respect to our standing in the world at large) and we urge them to draw the lines clearly between 'us' and 'them' and to 'protect' us from them (as if other fellow human beings are not worthy of becoming/being 'real Americans').

 

Religiously, many Protestant Christians, particularly those of the fundamentalist and/or evangelical stripe, seem abjectly opposed to the principle of "radical egalitarianism" noted by Professor Hendricks.  They seem dedicated to a support of the powerful and a vilification of the oppressed/the dispossessed/the Other/etc. (which stands in clear contradiction to their ostensible Patron's example).  How else can one explain the rampant and defiant opposition to the recent SCOTUS ruling on marriage equality being disproportionately resonant in supposedly Christian communities of faith?

 

With respect to the term 'messiah,' Professor Hendricks' trenchant observations brought home a startling reality that is, it seems, widely underappreciated in modern Christianity: Jesus was a disappointment as a messiah (or, perhaps more correctly put, as the Messiah).  The Jews expected and had long hoped for a King David-like ruler, a powerful military, et. al., leader who would raise them from their subjugation.  Jesus, by contrast, was meek and seemingly unconcerned with formal titles, roles and rules.  Jesus didn't seek to start an overt rebellion against temporal (Roman and Jewish religious) authority - even though He was crucified for just this crime - but to help His followers learn to live differently in the here and now so that they could find liberation within the structures of that oppression, so that they could find God's still-myriad blessings amidst their challenging circumstances, so that they could experience life eternal amidst the crushing temporal.

 

And after He died, the Jews were still subjugated, still the dispossessed of their time, still suffering ... though a few of them and a bunch of Gentiles continued to explore "the Way" and adhere to the spiritual messiah that they believe that they had found in the Nazarene.  So, Jesus didn't liberate the Jews or the Christ-followers physically as they had hoped the Messiah would ... or, for that matter, as the Book of Revelations claims that he would (or will) some day.  Instead, He did so spiritually, as He taught them how to live differently, more abundantly, in a more timeless way during their time-bound lives ... and that lesson seemed largely lost on them then and seems especially lost on us today....

 

As for the third of Rev. Dr. Hendricks' piercing insights - that Jesus' pronouncements suggest that He conceived of the Kingdom of God as a present rather than future reality - as a way to be/live rather than a place to go (i.e., heaven) - this lesson is all but lost in modern Christianity, and to our collective detriment.

 

Were we to try to be Followers of Jesus (to use Professor Hendricks' term) and emulate His example, we would live in a radically different way: we would be collective in focus vs. individually so; we would be loving, kind and generous with others vs. wary, standoffish and selfish; we would be peaceful vs. militaristic; we would be socialistic vs. capitalistic; we would be focused on our higher selves and supporting others in accessing theirs vs. gripped tightly to who we think we are and what we think we want and therefore to who and how others should be and what they should want; etc.  In other words, were we to become true Followers of Jesus, we wouldn't be Christians in the sense that so many understand the term - especially with its fundamental and evangelical overtones - today.

 

And we wouldn't be waiting - patiently or impatiently - for a better next world, but would be advocating fiercely (and yet peacefully and lovingly) for a more abundant, equitable and inclusive one right now.  If Jesus really did conceive of the Kingdom as a present reality, this would have to change our focus and behavior dramatically ... because the world that we live in now is unjust, too, but too many so-called Christians are fighting to perpetuate this inequity and injustice rather than to ameliorate it.

 

In sum, following Professor Hendricks' insights, I'd say that too many Christians have their religion wrong, both in terms of how they conceive it (i.e., focused primarily on heaven and less on this earth) and how they live it (i.e., focused primarily on the individual versus on the communal).  So perhaps Jesus isn't the best patron to follow because His values don't align with those of (too) many who claim to be His followers.  Or perhaps we need to change radically and become true Followers of Jesus ... which, frankly, is so(/too) hard that I suspect that we'll just stay Christians....

 

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor,

either we have to pretend that Jesus was as selfish as we are,

or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us

to love the poor and serve the needy without condition

and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

 

- Stephen Colbert 





 

Well Done, Grasshopper....

To thine own self be true,

and it must follow, as the night the day,

thou canst not then be false to any man.

 

- Polonius, in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare

 



In the past two days, I've experienced quite a bit of the timeless sacred in the midst of the temporal secular.  Specifically, I've attended the Ordination and first Mass of the (now) Rev. Gerard "Jerry" Racioppi at my church, St. Luke's Episcopal in Montclair.  More profound and important than this, however, is that I've seen (read = experienced) the presence of God in a most humbling and yet elevating way.

 

Jerry Racioppi has served as Seminarian and Deacon - effectively, Priest-in-Training - at St. Luke's for a while now and, in his own understated but effective way has contributed much to the life of our diverse, rambunctious and growing faith community.  (And he followed in the footsteps of another legend, the Rev. Diana Wilcox, who, just a few years ago in our midst, went from Seminarian to Deacon to Priest and Assistant to the Rector before being called to her own parish, Christ Episcopal, just a few miles down the road.)  And now, having been ordained and, today, leading his first official service as a priest, Jerry, too, moves on.  In his case, this means to the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit just over the hill in his hometown of Verona, where he actually started as Rector just shy of a month ago.

 

So what was so special about these fairly common but meaningful church experiences, that of an ordination and that of a first Mass?  Well, the first clue was at the Ordination: we expected perhaps 125 to 150 people to join us to celebrate Jerry's eternal calling to the priesthood.  300+ attended the ceremony and raucously joyful reception thereafter.  And the Mass?  We had forty people at our 8 o'clock a.m. service - where there are normally half as many on an early summer Sunday - to share the experience of Jerry's inaugural turn as fully official Celebrant and to hear his first sermon.

 

So what was so special about an unexpectedly large consecration ceremony and a well-attended early morning mass?  In a word, the Spirit.  The vibe at both events was truly transformative and blessed.  The Presence and Grace of God were in the room, so to speak.  To say that the events were joyful is a gross understatement.  The buzz at the ordination service was palpable and electric.  Similarly, after Jerry completed his sermon at the mass, there was a spontaneous desire to burst out in applause - scuttled by a collective sense of unease as we all tried to figure out if sermon-induced applause was allowed in (our or any) church - that was finally sated by a hearty round of applause after the service concluded.  When was the last time you were moved to clap during/at a church service?

 

When Jerry smiled, which he does often - or, really, constantly - he lit up the room figuratively and spiritually speaking.  It was not only our shared pride in witnessing the maturation of one of us, his blooming and coming into his own before our very eyes, it was that, just like his mentor and friend the Rev. John A. Mennell (our esteemed Rector and another applause-inducing priest), he demonstrated that he truly has a gift for  reaching, touching and elevating people's spirits.  (Which, if you think about it, is an extremely important - if not the most important - skill for a priest to have, no?)  It was not only that Jerry was good - great, even - in these transitional moments that he made transcendent, but that he was a conduit for the healing, inspiring and elevating Presence of God, an experience all too rare in this too often nightmare of a world in which we live.

 

So this is what I'll remember as Jerry's legacy and gift to me and my fellow parishioners at St. Luke's - the gift of God's Spirit, lovingly and transformatively relayed.  Who knew he had it in him?  Jerry's such a mild-mannered, unassuming guy....  God knew ... and reminded us yesterday and today.

 

And Jerry knew ... because he's chosen a life in which, not only this weekend and with us, he'll show all he meets just what God can do when He/She/It works through us.  Well done, Grasshopper....

 

 

Grace, as it extends to more and more people, brings thanksgiving.

 

- The Rev. Jerry Racioppi

American Exceptionalism? Perhaps....

You think that your pain and your heartbreak

are unprecedented in the history of the world,

but then you read.  It was books that taught me

that the things that tormented me most were the

very things that connected me with all the people

who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

 

- James Baldwin, from the film

James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket

I find myself in pain and at a loss so/too often of late.  I struggle to comprehend what we've made of this great country of ours, even as I appreciate its remaining - and, hopefully, eternal - abundance of blessings and the reality that so much of what we know of the world is not new so much as new to us.  This world has long been a place of pain and torment for too many, as has this country been; it's just that modern media has brought to us so much of what was already there but unknown to us before that we cannot evade this painful (self-)knowledge (although some clearly go to great lengths of delusion to do so).

 

What's been weighing on me lately is a sad and tawdry mélange of issues and scandals and other instances of inhumanity that trouble me precisely because they don't (sufficiently) trouble so/too many of my fellows.  Because of this I've come to agree with the definition of privilege floating around social media of late: its existence is proven when something that affects others but doesn't affect you directly also doesn't move you to consider it a problem because of the reality that it doesn't affect you.  When your empathy and compassion fail, you are indeed in a privileged position, the one of not caring or having to.

 

And what is it that so/too many are too privileged to care about?  What's in this mélange of troubling reality that gnaws at me at the moment and, seemingly, always?

 

Certainly race: that it's rearing its ugly head in new riots a half-century after the ones of my early childhood is a profoundly disturbing reality.  Yes, we've made progress in this time ... but too many of us apparently feel that enough progress has been made so that we shouldn't have to deal with the rest of the work that we have left to do.  I'll let you guess who's mostly in this camp.  If you say the 'winners' - that is, those whom racism benefits rather than disadvantages - give yourself a gold star.

 

Yet we have so far left to go and no Dreamer to lead us there.  Not to be trite, but I really do suspect that candidate Obama was right: we are the change that we've been waiting for.  Now the question is do we have the courage and conviction to do the work.  And not just some of us, but all of us; racism winners and losers alike.  It seems to me that if we really want this to be a land where all men and women - indeed, all humans - are created equal and are able to live in this way, then we have to address and eliminate racism and all of the other -isms that demean and diminish the lives of too many of our fellows.

 

And certainly, too, I am troubled by religion, especially when it intertwines with our politics in life-diminishing ways:  I am constantly dismayed that so much of what is claimed in the name of Christianity today is actually the antithesis of our Patron's example.  The institution of the Christian church has been aligned with the powers that be since the fourth century, so one could expect some 'drift.'  Yet today's religious right is, to be kind, far too often similar to or worse than those who persecuted Jews like Jesus back in the day.  We demonize the poor, the different and the Other ... when the man in whose name we do it did the exact opposite, reaching out to the disaffected, the downtrodden and the Other of His day.  And we wonder why the fastest growing segment of our population is the religiously unaffiliated?  When the ugliness that is too much a part of modern Christianity is reflected upon, is it any wonder that fewer and fewer people - and especially the young - want to be associated with it?

 

(By contrast, I have a belief that if we were to become/be true "Followers of Jesus" - to borrow Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks' term - who are committed to emulating His example, this trend would reverse in a powerfully positive and life-affirming way.)

 

And, of course, on the world stage, it's not just Christianity.  Adherents of many religions seem to vie fiercely to prove who among them wins the metaphorical inhumanity prize.  It's true of too many believers that their behavior in the name of God is so, well, ungodly.  This leads some to conclude that big-R Religion is the culprit, but to them I say not so fast: there is much beauty being shared with the world in the name of religion, too; it's just that the ugliness seems to outweigh this too greatly and too often (and certainly gets more media coverage).  It seems to me that if we really want to worship God, that ultimate Source of Life, then we must judge ourselves by how life-affirming our behavior is, not by the often false piety that we speak or the judgment that we project in God's name.

 

And I'm also bothered by the seemingly increasing level of hypocrisy ... though this, too, is subject to the evaluative question whether it's actually increasing or whether our awareness of it is what's increasing.  The current 'scandal' in this vein involves a member of the reality-celebrity Duggar family who, while until recently shilling for a 'family values' organization, turns out to have been molesting young women and girls, including his own sisters (with, of course, some in his family dutifully covering it up).  On the one hand, the cynical me isn't surprised and hardly considers it news anymore when one of the moral grandstanders in our society is exposed; hate to admit it, but now I assume that all of them are false prophets but we just haven't found them out yet.

 

On the other hand, I shake my head in world-weariness and sadness that sexual abuse is so common in our society - one source says that 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys will be sexually molested before the age of 16 (yes, you read that right - a quarter of our daughters, nieces, etc., and a sixth of our sons, nephews, etc., will be victims of predators, in many cases who are known to them) - and yet we seem not all that outraged about it.  If you ask anyone, of course they'll proclaim their ire at and disapproval of such conduct.  So who's doing the molesting?  And, even worse, who knows about it and isn't doing anything about it and/or covering it up?  If we want to be as good as we too often think we are, these percentages must go down ... a lot.

 

And I am troubled by economic inequality in our society (and world) and our in-justice system and our bought-and-paid-for politics and our willful environmental blindness and our stunning ignorance of other people and cultures of the world and our decrepit and decaying system of public education and our focus on winning at all costs that has led to widespread shortcutting and cheating in our schools, in our sports and in our society and our seemingly endless bloodlust and incessant warmongering and....

 

The list could go on and on ... which is the point: in so many ways we have literally lost our way as a society and our ego-salving claim to American Exceptionalism rings ever more hollow over time.  In fact, I might go so far as to say it exacerbates the problem: when you can retreat into the fantasy that you're the best, you feel no pressure to acknowledge the reality that you're not and address it.

 

But, try as we might, we are not leaving our children a better world than we inherited in many, many meaningful ways.  And this we own.  The world has become a better place in my lifetime, but not nearly enough progress has been made to stem the tide of our own inhumanity.  Ultimately, this may be the test of our Exceptionalism: in that we have chosen to ignore so much of what diminishes the lives of so many of our fellow citizens and human beings - especially now that we're so much better informed about so much of it (and, in fairness, so much more aware than previous generations could have been) - perhaps we are different.  Perhaps we're exceptional in that we know how bad things are and have just chosen not to care....

 



Americans suffer from an ignorance that is

not only colossal but sacred.

 

- Attributed to James Baldwin

 

God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign....

One must say Yes to life,

and embrace it wherever it is found -

and it is found in terrible places....

- James Baldwin

The Fire Next Time

 

I've lost my James Baldwin (collection of books) - or, at least, cannot locate him/them at the moment and feel that periodic intense need to do so - and I find myself in one of those 'terrible places' as the author and artist suggested.  Being without Baldwin for those of us who've discovered him is very much like the delirium tremens experience of an addict.  It seems that every year or two I feel an intense need to rediscover his brilliance and salve the wounds inflicted on my soul by this weary and wearisome world.  And now I cannot find him....

 

The antecedent cause of this latest Baldwin jones is the excellent American Masters documentary on his life.  Two truths be told, I've read a fair amount of Baldwin and not while I was in school and had both the time and the environment to do so deeply, and yet much of what was shared during this moving biograhical documentary was new to me.  It seems that I've only known the man through his writings and have now been exposed more fully to his life (and the particular contexts from which his writings spring), so I am greatly enriched for the experience ... which is the same sensation I experience when reading his (mainly non-fiction/essay) work.  And to think that he's been gone more than a quarter-century and my admiration for him continues to grow.

 

In part this is because so much of what he wrote about has yet to become timebound.  James Baldwin was described not as bitter but as angry by no less than the late great Maya Angelou ... and the causes of his anger - injustice, racism, heterosexism, classism, etc. - continue to this day only slightly abated.  Yes, there has been progress, but not as much as one would think in the half-century since the publication of his seminal work The Fire Next Time.  We are still talking about the institutional racism in our society, still decrying the oppression and exploitation of the poor by the rich and still amazed and dismayed by the strikingly inhumane practice of religion - especially the Christian religion - by many of its supposed adherents, among the many causes of our dis-ease and distress.

 

Oh how I wish his writings would fade from timely to dated, from open, raw and painful to uncomfortable and embarrassing reminders of days gone by.  Oh how I wish that James Baldwin weren't just as relevant today as during his lifetime ... and perhaps even more so now.

 

Where are our modern Jimmy Baldwins?  The eloquent, articulate and elevating capturers and communicators of our hurt, our pain, our weariness ... as well as our desire for love and life?  Who speaks as movingly as he did to the mass of Americans - mostly white then as now - to help them understand what it feels like to be labeled and limited against one's will?  Or to be transported by those you love, whomever they turn out to be?

 

[This being said, one has to wonder if they would listen.  The ferment of the '60s seemed to compel their attention ... but does the modern age call forth such a response, such openness and willingness to listen (even if, then as now, for a very brief time)?  Some, it seems, revel in the reality of their refusal to listen....]

 

And yet Baldwin isn't just great to help frame and address society (and its inevitable and durable ills).  He's also a profound and generous guide to life.  His meditations on love, spirituality and other aspects of the human experience touch and inspire as well.  For example, I continue to be transported by his observation that

 

Love takes off the masks that we fear

we cannot live without

and know we cannot live within.

 

I'm still staggered and guided by his piercing perspective on the Divine, that

 

If the concept of God has any validity or use,

it can only be to make us larger, freer and more loving.

If God cannot do this,

then it is time we got rid of Him.

 

And I finally have matured enough to understand how profound an observation it is that

 

To be sensual, I think,

is to respect and rejoice in the force of life,

of life itself,

and to be present in all one does,

from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

 

So much of what I value in my life now revolves around the gift of loving and being loved and around the breaking of bread with those with whom I share this gift....

 

And maybe as I sit here writing - his cardinal gift - and appreciating his influence - even if felt initially in absence, in temporarily lost access - I am more aware of him deep within my soul than I realize.  James Baldwin still haunts me, and I hunger for his wisdom, so that I can live life more fully, more perceptively and more lovingly as well as be prepared for the inevitable, for the fire next time....

 

There is never time in the future

in which we will work out our salvation.

The challenge is in the moment;

the time is always now.

 



Listening To That Inner Voice....

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky.

I believe that what people call God is something in all of us.

I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha

and all the rest said was right.

It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

- John Lennon

It's been a week since Easter and I've been in a reflective mood: the days that have followed the holiest one of the Christian year have been challenging for me, to put it mildly.  So I've been trying to get in a more spiritual frame of mind and to regain my equilibrium by accessing and drawing on the depth of my faith.  I sit quietly and wait for that inner voice, the one that is my own and seems to stream from my very depths, the one in which I feel the touch of God and am moved to ponder His Infinite Mystery.  And merely in this reflection and contemplation I begin to heal and steel myself for what is to come (while, hopefully, leaving the past behind except for the wisdom with which it's gifted me).

 

Yet as I listen to my inner voice, I come to know two things clearly:  First, too often of late, in it I hear anguish, a hurting more for the world than for myself, but a hurting nonetheless.  And, second, I know that it is my voice, not God's, and this helps me: while I feel His Grace and Touch as I heal, I realize the thoughts are my own, my truth, not His Truth, limited as they are by my human perspective.

 

God doesn't talk to me directly, and that's good: I had too much religious schooling when I was young, so the prospect of speaking directly to God is still a frightening one ... and, in my adulthood, I've come to be wary of those who claim to be a human - meaning finite and flawed - vessel for the Infinite.  And yet I feel His/Her/Its Presence regularly.  Not that He/She/It isn't always there, but just that I'm more aware at some times more than others.

 

And that's the point: God is, however we limited, flawed and finite humans perceive this in any given moment and choose to describe this Ultimate Reality.  To me, among other things, this means that all human conceptions of God are as limited, flawed and finite as we are.  We can't know God as He/She/It is, we can only sense the Divine and try to craft a description in limited, human terms.

 

For example, though I started this piece using the traditional male pronoun to refer to God - capitalized, as I was taught, of course - He is not a male ... and we only describe God this way because men have been the most dominant gender of our species for millennia and thus have decided to refer to and conceptualize God in this (limited) image and language.  He is not human, so He has no gender.  As much as it's more familiar to refer to God as Father, He isn't: God is the Source of our (human) life, to be sure, but He isn't a he, and our Father image is a reflection of our projection of something familiar onto God rather than His/Her/Its revelation of a particular gender.  It seems to me that choosing to see God in such limiting terms creates all sorts of problems, including the tendency to project and fetishize.

 

If you disagree with this last hypothesis, ask yourself the following question:  Why is it that the most popular and ubiquitous picture of Jesus portrays Him as a straight-dirty-blond-haired Caucasian (in Warner Sallman's classic 1940 painting)?  Would all of us - especially (American) Caucasians (particularly of the fundamentalist/conservative stripe) - continue to pray to Him if He were portrayed more realistically, as the swarthy, light brown-skinned Palestinian Jew with curly dark hair that He likely was?  I seriously doubt this.  It seems likely to me that the key to the popularity of the picture in the last 85 years is that it reflects an American ideal more than a 2000-year old historical reality.  And if you don't believe me, just ask Megyn Kelly of Fox News....

 

So, if God's not a he, what is He/She/It?

 

Great question!  And here's where modern theology comes in and, for many, doesn't help that much.  Many question the viability of Theism, the concept of the personal (and most often anthropomorphic) God who acts in human history.  There are many suggestions as to more accurate depictions.

 

For example, one of the many such 'new' conceptions was offered in the late 1940s and early 1950s by theologian Paul Tillich (in his classic compendium of sermons The Shaking of the Foundations, among others), when he suggested that God be thought of as the Ground of Being, or even as Being itself.  For many  this doesn't work as a meaningful God conception because, among other reasons, it seems impersonal and distant.  Well, of course it does: it's a complete contrast to the external, theistic God that we've all been taught for most (if not all) of our lives.  It's intangible and intellectual, not emotional and tangible like we project the theistic God to be.  And yet just because we may believe the latter/what we've been taught doesn't make it true.

 

And that's another point on which I'm becoming clearer: just because we as fellow believers or citizens or whatever classifications believe something doesn't make it true.  We want it to be true, and many may feel that they need it to be true (especially for control and/or security reasons), but, again, this doesn't make it true.

 

Just like 'believing' (or, in reality, claiming) that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God.  It isn't.  That's not my opinion, that's fact, verified by a legion of biblical scholars (who, conceptually, are God's children).  For starters, on its face we know that it's not inerrant: there are hundreds of internal disagreements and/or contradictions, including the two different birth stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke or even the two different creation stories in the first two chapters of the very first book of the Bible, Genesis, to name a few.  And the lack of thematic continuity in literally hundreds of places throughout the Good Book attests to its having been edited and enhanced many, many times in antiquity by all too human hands.  So the fact that many who choose to describe themselves as Christians claim that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God doesn't make it so.  And the fact that this can be disproven but is believed anyway is one of the reasons that blind faith is questioned so vehemently (and appropriately) today.

 

I could list other 'new' conceptions of God like those of Bonhoeffer and Bultmann, et. al., but by now I think that I've established the point that there is no one true way to see - and/or experience - God.  The fact that there are literally hundreds of human religions proves this.  And lest some 'true believer' of whatever sect claim that his/hers is the only true religion, let's just ask for the proof.  There is none, beyond belief ... and, as we know, just because we believe something doesn't make it so.

 

And yet one of the most virulent expressions of human religion today is the deplorable and immoral level killing that is perpetrated in God's name.  Here's another thing on which I've become clear in recent years: if you kill, hurt or in any way diminish another's humanity in the name of God, you're doing God wrong.  God is not tribal, but universal ... meaning that God is not a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, or an adherent of any of the other myriad belief systems and sects that we humans have created to express our awareness of the Ultimate Reality.  A popular FaceBook meme captures this nicely:





 

God was not a Buddhist.

Jesus was not a Christian.

Muhammed was not a Muslim.

 

They were teachers who taught Love.

 

Love was their Religion.

 

Now we can debate how much each of them taught and practiced Love, but, again, this is a human debate and has nothing to do with who or what God is even though each of them is considered to offer a pathway to Him/Her/It.  Slyly, the meme establishes a great point: each of these sages saw and/or described the Ultimate Reality differently and yet we acknowledge the depth and meaning of their insights into the Divine by choosing to use them as the portals to a more spiritual life ... even though they didn't and don't agree on the 'right' path thereto, unless you believe that they were aligned in that they each espoused Love.  But this digression is itself an artifice to reinforce the larger point that irrespective of what each of us chooses to believe - be that the tenets of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Baha'i, etc. - God is ... and the choice of path is ours alone however we feel about another's path or others' paths.

 

In other words, just because we believe a certain way doesn't make it so and God is, whatever we believe.

 

Which brings me back to the anguish that I too often feel as I reflect on the abuse of religion in our world.  Simply put, we get God wrong way too much and to our collective detriment.  That we kill in the name of the Source of Life is proof both that we don't get God and that we are too flawed to comprehend fully the Infinite and Ultimate Reality.  That we are too often religiocentrists - believing that our view of God is the 'right,' true and the only one - just reinforces the point.  What kind of Divine would favor a few of His/Her/Its children over others?  Not one worthy of our devotion and belief, for sure....

 

And, in my humble view, only in the acknowledgment of the limitations of our humanity, especially our inability to know God fully, will we find our salvation.  Only when we accept that the one thing that we have in common is that we are indeed all Children of God - however we choose to see Him/Her/It - can we begin to honor God by emulating Him/Her/It.  As far as I can tell, this means that we treat each other in life-affirming ways, which, now that I think about it, means in a loving way.  Hey, maybe FaceBook is right: God is Love after all....

 

The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple

of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence

before every human being and see God in him -

that moment I am free from bondage,

everything that binds vanishes,

and I am free.

- Swami Vivekananda



 

An Easter Reflection....

I like your Christ.  I do not like your Christians.

Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

- Mahatma Gandhi

 

 

On the eve of the holiest day of the Christian year, I'm perplexed: as deeply spiritual and Episcopalian Christian as I am/as I've become, I'm ever more dismayed by what I perceive to be the routinely and so often almost completely unchristian behavior of others who claim to share my faith ... and I'm also dismayed by the relative silence of so many so-called Christian leaders in combatting this reality.  It doesn't make me any less a believer in Christianity; actually, it has the opposite effect: in response to the unchristianity that's so prevalent in our society (and world), I'm actually called to be more Christian ... or, actually, Christ-like.  And, in modern America, these are two very different things....

 

In my humble view, modern Christianity - at least as many of its professed adherents practice it - is in need of a major overhaul ... and, should it not choose to change dramatically, it will surely die eventually as Bishop John Shelby Spong has predicted.  The signs of this decline are legion and evident: from declining church attendance to the rise of the religiously unaffiliated and "unchurched" to the ever-distressing politicization of the faith coupled almost always with a distinctly unchristian and inhumane vehemence.  I seriously doubt that if Jesus were to return today that He would recognize (or accept) most of what's being done in His name.

 

An instructive case in point is the advent of so-called "religious freedom" laws in twenty of the fifty United States, with Indiana's and Arkansas' iterations serving as the current flashpoint.  As much as some defenders attempt to deny (while they dissemble), the practical effects and the sponsors of such legislation are instructive: in the case of Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, when it was signed in a private ceremony by Governor Mike Pence, several of those invited to stand by him as he did so were in fact among the most vociferous of opponents of gay marriage/rights/equality.  So, if we take the governor at his word that the law wasn't enacted to allow Indianans to discriminate against LGBT fellow citizens - although, in fact, this is just what it did allow - then what are we to make of the reality that a significant proportion of its most visible supporters and, ostensibly, catalysts and proponents want and expected it to allow just that?

 

And though there was popular outrage and an uprising of conscience in response to this travesty, it seems to me that the response from many high profile 'Christian' leaders was muted.  Some progressive Christian denominations were observed among the protestors, but many, many other so-called Christian leaders were not.  In fact, many in the more supposedly socially conservative and fundamentalist wing of the faith were the law's greatest champions and defenders.  They asserted, quite correctly, that the law would allow them to avoid serving those whom they believed their religion to condemn ... like, say, our gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender brothers and sisters.  They see it as a legitimate and welcome  (political) protection of their religious right to discriminate against those whose lives and lifestyles offend them.  Hmmm....

 

To me - and, again, in my humble opinion - this is so wrong on so many levels, but for the sake of brevity let me focus on just two:  First, how on earth can the American constitutional freedom to practice a religion be conflated with the right to discriminate in the public sphere (or, perhaps more accurately put, square) because of it?  If church and state are truly to be separated as the cherished American value alleges, then the State cannot abridge the public rights of one group to satisfy the desires of another one under the cloak of protecting the latter's religion/religious beliefs.

 

An extreme example to illustrate the point:  If I were a devout Muslim and decided (incorrectly) that my religion allowed me to discriminate against Christians, how would this be received in this still Christian-dominant country?  Can any of us seriously imagine even progressive Christians leaping to the defense of such 'religious beliefs'?  Of course not.  The idea only has currency because the dominant group - in present-day America meaning (so-called) Christians - wants to exercise its considerable institutional/political power to do so.  It only works because the in-group wants to discriminate against an out-group (or out-groups); no in-group would ever agree voluntarily to condone discrimination against itself.

 

Another reason that these laws are so repellent to me is that they completely contradict the example of Christianity's Patron.  Jesus was known for communing with the dispossessed and advocating for the powerless against the interests and system of the powerful.  In fact, this is why he was put to death, because he afflicted the powerful on behalf of the dispossessed.  Translated to our time, this suggests that Jesus would be communing with those often spurned by society, including, sadly and still, our LGBT brothers and sisters.  Can any one of us imagine Him demonizing the LGBT community as so many of today's 'Christian' leaders have?  Can any of us imagine Him condoning discrimination against them ... or Jews ... or African-Americans, etc.?  Of course not.  Which makes Gandhi's observation so prescient: too many of us modern 'Christians' are so unlike our Christ.

 

To put a finer point on it, for those who claim their objections are Scripturally-based, such freedom-to-discriminate-under-the-guise-of-religious-freedom runs counter the final charge that the Lord gave his disciples before he left the earth physically.  As captured in the Gospel of John (13:34, NRSV), He instructs them:

 

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.

Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.

 

Suffice it to say that there's no way to contort this commandment to suggest that discrimination in Jesus' name is in any way loving.   So, yet again, so many of His ostensible followers ignore, pervert or outright contradict His commandments, in this case under the guise of their belief in Him.  Can anything be more unchristian than this?

 

So, as we prepare to remember Christ's life and legacy in the celebration of Easter, I'm reminded of Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks' distinction - in his brilliant and classic book The Politics of Jesus - between so-called/self-professed Christians and Followers of Jesus: many if not most of the former support the modern status-quo-aligned institution of the Christian church - including its misguided and perverse efforts to promote so-called religious freedom - while the latter believe that emulating Christ's example is the true version/practice of the faith.  When I see Christians discriminating in Christ's name, I'm glad not to be one of them, but ever more thankful to be a Follower of Jesus and hope that you will be, too, whatever your religion may be....

 

In other words, Jesus' view is that laws are to serve us, not oppress us.  That is why in our practice we must always stress the foundational principles of Jesus' politics - justice, righteousness, and steadfast love.  Any laws that are not based on these principles are inconsistent with the politics of Jesus.

- the Rev. Dr. Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.

The Politics of Jesus:

Rediscovering The True Revolutionary Nature of

Jesus' Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted