I am involved in two streams right now that are greatly affecting me on how I see myself and what I consider my values.
And in one of those streams the topic came up about why people do what they do. For me, the question is really “Why pursue racial conciliation?”, which was prompted by a statement from Jemar Tisby in his podcast “Color of Compromise Pre-Launch Interview” (appx 11/28/2018): “The more you pursue justice, the more of Jesus you get.”
Why this matters to me is something I’ll explain.
First, a brief immediate background. I’ve been working on my “stuff” for about ten years now. I have a lot of things I’m working on and a lot of tools I’m using. Workbooks, books, podcasts, social media, personal interactions, community interactions—I’m working on my overt and my embedded white racism, and I gotta tell you, sometimes I get lost as to the “why.”
I mean, I know why: because I should. That much is just true. We should extirpate white racism. It is a grossly immoral sin, it shatters the imago Dei in humanity, and it breaks the commandment of the Lord Jesus to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Doing what we should because we should is really just the lowest bar of self-ownership.
But the larger “why” for me as a follower of Jesus gets lost. Sometimes I am doing the work, trying oh-so-very-hard to walk my talk, and I realize that I’ve forgotten my motives and my goals. I’m just doing (which is okay, really), but I’m perhaps disassociating it from the reason for doing.
Tisby’s statement really helped reconnect me to my core reasons: I’m a follower of Jesus, by choice (and theologically, also by calling), and that is more than belief in facts or even obedience to commands—it also includes a relationship of the heart and the spirit to the Living God who restores me and heals me and fills me. To pursue justice is the calling and command of God, and to pursue justice is to respond to the wooing of Jesus to his church.
I can’t really tell you how much this helped me this week. It helped me remember. It helped me recenter on why and who. It helped me recalibrate.
But then I thought, and what was it that drew me here?
I was always a Christian, it seems, from my earliest years of awareness. My first memories of church are pre-school, in the main sanctuary of the Methodist Church, where the pastor spoke on the Prodigal Son. I was not yet five, but I remember. (I may have been not yet four; while I have a very good memory going way, way back, I might not have the exact year for those events.) It was the calling of the Father to his sons (plural!).
We moved and we didn’t stay at that church. Friends invited me to their church (Southern Presbyterian), and I grew there in my pre-teens. I moved to a Northern Presbyterian church in my teens, not knowing there was a difference (there is!). I got involved in the Jesus Movement of the late 60s/early 70s, in a very white Orange County, California. My Christian beliefs and behaviors were authentic to my time and my place, but I was nearly entirely unaware of how limited I was. The idea of “whiteness” and that whiteness was central to Evangelicalism was just—foreign to me.
I think I may have had the occasional brushes with revelation. The lone black man in church objected to my saying “I don’t see color.” The gasps from my white co-workers when Rodney King’s attackers were let off—and the anger from the sole black co-worker. The white press that exculpated a cop for shooting and killing a young black teen in his home—and the words from a black co-worker that “not everything is as it seems on TV.” Mostly these were islands that I steered around.
It took a few things to turn the ship, although I think it was slowly changing course already, though it was not by much.
It was in a recovery class in the fall of 2008. A group of about ten men. Nine of us white. One was black.
Only we did not see him as black. We were all very good about that. I won’t tell you much of what I said, because I value his privacy and the privacy of the group, but I was about as ignorant and offensive as you could be.
He spoke up one meeting, angry, and said these words to all of us, words that struck me hard: “You do know that I’m black?”
Gotta tell you, that just knocked me off my center.
I had no way to respond to him, or to come up with the answer to the question “What does it mean to be black?”
Now, I might be stupid and ignorant and self-centered, but I do know I can use Google.
So I typed the words “What does it mean to be black?” in the search engine, and started working through the results. The most suggested way through Google was through RSS feeds. (This is back in the day when Google Reader was still a thing.) I read some black voices online, mostly conservative at first (I was still very, very Republican!). Gradually Google Reader expanded my horizons as I kept reading and trying to find more voices of the black experience.
So it’s February of 2009. I’m slightly more aware of things around me. We’re at a college concert for my son’s choir. I don’t know if it was for “spring” or what, but it was a large venue—a big church in Bellevue with incredible acoustics, with a total assembled choir of a few hundred voices, with smaller subsections at time.
I’m stuck behind a man who’s blocking my view of the “center” of the choir, but hey, I see my son in the top row somewhere, so it’s good. There’s some changeup and then they start this simple, harmonic, somber song. It’s U2’s song about Martin Luther King, Jr., and it’s in honor of his birthday 80 years prior. There is this clear, high tenor lilting above the massed vocalized humming of the song, a plaint and a prayer for Martin. It is a strong, confident voice of a young man asking for peace for Martin, peace for us.
I don’t see my son in the choir in the back, and I am thinking, “that sounds so much like him.” I shift in my seat to see who is singing—and yes, it is he who is singing. It was not in the program. Another soloist was scheduled, but couldn’t make it, and so my son was tapped, with no rehearsal, to be the voice.
In that big church, with the soaring music and the glorious echoes, I heard my son sing of a man who had lived and died around me, who meant so much to others, and yet meant so little to me. I knew almost nothing of MLK beyond the few words from his speech in 1963.
Somehow, though, that song, those words, the lyrics, the soaring, pure tenor voice above the choir—it taught me what it is to dream and to love and to hope.
I still tear up at that. I am tearing up now.
I am a man who follows Christ. I want to be a good man, a whole man. But I was incomplete and shallow and hollow. I had failed to see all around me those who had been left behind and cut out and despised and ignored—and still they hoped, still they dreamed.
Following this song, and with my son back in place in the choir, they came at us with a new song, a song that I still play a few times a year. It was entirely in Spanish, from the 16th century, a poem by a short-lived Spaniard, Garcilaso de la Vega. “Amor De Mi Alma,” it was, and I do not know how to tell you, but it was my prayer as much as it was his.
In Spanish, the words are these
Yo no nací sino para quereros;
Mi alma os ha cortado a su medida;
Por hábito del alma misma os quiero.
Escrito está en mi alma vuestro gesto;
Yo lo leo tan solo que aun de vos
Me guardo en esto.
Quanto tengo confiesso yo deveros;
Por vos nací, por vos tengo la vida,
Y por vos é de morir ye por vos muero.
And in English, a good translation of those words:
I was born to love only you
My soul has formed you to its measure
I want you as a garment for my soul
Your very image is written on my soul
Such indescribable intimacy, I hide even from you
All that I have, I owe to you
For you I was born, and for you I live
I want you as a garment for my soul
And for you I must die
And for you I give my last breath
For you.
It is all I want, really. The pursuit of justice, of racial conciliation, is this. I cannot be who I am if I do not pursue the things that are healing and wholeness and restoration, that do not connect me to my God and to my brothers and sisters, that do not restore them to justice and safety and wholeness.
To be following Jesus is to pursue, for myself, what I am created for. To pursue Jesus, I am pursuing the healing of others in their own lives, and the healing of my community, my brothers and sisters, and my entire world.
It is not because I will succeed. I might entirely fail.
It is because it is the right thing to do, the deepest values I hold, the way to know God, the pursuit of the most important goals in the universe: to be centered in the love of God.
If you are interested in the song, you can find several good renditions online.
This one is by a Norwegian choir:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWD7J7fBmUQ
This one includes the words (in Spanish) if you want to know what’s being sung in each line:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d4A2EXSPxw
A “children’s” choir here. I prefer this one for the purity of the voices.