In Prayerful Solidarity with Dr. Ersula Ore
This morning I am sitting in prayer after watching a video of Dr. Ersula Ore, a Professor at Arizona State University, get thrown to the ground by a violent cop after he demands that she produce identification and she does not immediately do so. She was jaywalking.
Jaywalking Arrest for Professor in AZ
You can draw your own conclusions. Perhaps, like me, you will be struck by how much self-respect and calmness she displays, how she initially strives to remain a human being in relationship to another human being with this officer.
Perhaps, like a (white male) facebook friend, you will see it differently. You will think that she should have done exactly what the cop told her to do and handed over her ID to him without talking to him at all. Certainly that is what African Americans and other people of color are taught to do no matter how inappropriately cops behave.
As a white woman, I have had similar give and take with police officers to the kind that Dr. Ore begins with. Once, I said the exact words she said to the officer, in almost the exact same tone of voice. “Are you kidding me?” At worst, I’ve gotten ticketed in a manner that I consider unfair. But I have never felt at risk of violent assault from a police officer in such an interaction.
But this cop makes a different choice. Rather than speak back to Dr. Ore in a manner similar to the one with which she speaks to him, and take care of whatever he needs to take care of regarding jaywalking, he escalates the situation until, she is handcuffed and thrown to the ground. We don’t see her dress in the video, but according to witnesses, it is pulled up and ‘her anatomy is exposed’ on the street. Eventually, she kicks an officer who is reaching over to touch her skirt. She is now charged with assaulting an officer, a felony.
It’s not an insignificant point that this took place in Maricopa County, where Sherriff Joe Arpaio has been training his officers to humiliate and demean people of color for years. His legacy of abuse of people of color extends all the way to multiple deaths in his “Tent City,” which he has himself described as a “Concentration Camp.”
For Dr. Ore, there is now an investigation taking place about whether or not what happened to her was caused by “racial motivation.” One can only wonder what that means and how such an investigation would take place. What if thousands of white people testified that no cop has ever treated us this way, nor demanded ID when we are walking in the street to avoid road construction—could that help this be seen as racially motivated? What if thousands of people of color testified about how frightening it is to live in Maricopa County? Could the model that Sherriff Joe Arpaio sets for his officers create racial motivation? One shudders to think about the narrow definition of “racial motivation” that will be employed by officials.
Dr. Ore, you are in my prayers today. You and the thousands of other people of color who are forced to prove that you have a right to walk home, and upon whom the burden of proof always rests. Please know that you are not alone—that tens of thousands of white people, as well as the people of color who share your experience of being told you don’t matter—are with you and will be with you as you ask for what everyone wants: Respect for your worth and dignity.
From Your Minister – June 2014
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When I was a kid, my father had a reason why just about everything my siblings and I might do was risky and might ultimately lead to death, or at least dismemberment. He often provided cautionary tales about people who had injured themselves or died, invoking names we’d never heard of as if he was mourning them still.
Pop a pimple? Toddy Mackil’s grandfather knew someone who died that way. Thought it was a pimple, burst a blood vessel, and WOOP, dead in minutes.
From Your Minister
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My uncle had lost his powers of speech by the time he died. In his hospital bed, surrounded by his loved ones, he used a bead board to spell out what he wanted to say during his final days. At one point, my cousin told me, everyone leaned in close because it seemed like he wanted to say something important. C-H-A-N-G-E—the whole family sounded out the word—change!—and wondered what important words might follow. T-H-E O-I-L F-I-L-T-E-R eventually came through. He was reminding my aunt to do a job he had always done on their furnace. For some reason, letting go of this detail was critical for him as he departed the planet. These were some of his final words.
From Your Minister
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When I was in my twenties, so many possibilities about what life might hold for me beckoned from so many directions that the upshot was I was fairly immobilized. Many futures were possible, but none of them called my name. Then one day, I stopped into a book-store and picked up a book.
What Healing Looks Like
I remember as a teenager, home alone one afternoon, listening over and over to David Bowie sing “Is there Life on Mars?” while gazing at the cover of his Hunky Dory album. I longed to be able to articulate the feelings I had inside me, and somehow this British man wearing makeup came closer than anyone else I’d yet encountered. I remember wondering– if my mother listened to him sing “Is there Life on Mars?” would she at least partially understand the desperation, the hopelessness, the profound alienation I felt all the time? I never dared to ask her. My friends and I got high instead of talking honestly about it all.
I didn’t know yet that I’d come to identify the vague loneliness and misery I felt all the time as heavily influenced by sexism and racism, classism and homophobia, in a declining Midwestern industrial town. I didn’t really get yet, that there were problems that were systemic, that the tiny lives of my friends and me were part of a much larger picture. It wasn’t till I was a young adult, beyond the reach of parents and school systems, accompanied instead by friends who deeply saw and heard me, that I could begin to name the parts of who I was and what I knew.
Last night I went to the “Be Heard Minnesota Youth Poetry Slam Series, 2014,” sponsored by a group called TruArtSpeaks. I saw there a group of young people who have found their voices, and who are speaking and heard at the intensity level I longed for myself as a teenager.
What happens when adults like Tish Jones, the Executive Director of TruArt Speaks, devote their lives to making young voices heard? When their coach Khary Jackson (AKA 6 is 9) takes time to work with them to express themselves clearly and with passion? When a packed house of family, friends, and strangers at a local theater pays and cheers and tells them they have changed us by speaking their hearts?
This is what healing looks like, I found myself thinking, even with wounds that are still gaping, in a world of oppression and violence and addiction and all of the other reasons that these kids and other people suffer. This is where healing begins.
Seven out of the nine contestants were young women of color. They, and the two young men—one African American, one white and openly gay–spoke about the ravages of racism and sexism and homophobia in their lives, of parents who are absent or abusive, of schools designed for them to fail. And there we were, a cheering, clicking, community of support, hanging on their every word. What does that do to a young person, I wonder.
For me, as an adult, as a white person, as a person with power and privilege in the culture, such an encounter also means healing. My healing begins with listening, and believing, young people, and marginalized people, the way I wanted my own mother to hear me. It begins with paying attention. And it extends to supporting the organizations and leaders who elicit these voices, in understanding that without people like Tish Jones and Khary Jackson, the safety to tell stories in that theater would not have been present for the young people on the stage.
This is what healing looks like. Led by the courageous, the ones who speak truths denied by louder voices, supported by love and respect. This is what healing looks like.
I feel profoundly blessed to have attended the slam last night, and to be represented as a Minneostan by the six young people who will move on to the national levels of competition as spoken word artists. But, as the MC kept saying over and over last night, This isn’t about competition. It’s about community, and leadership development, and having a good time together. And we did.
In Which Cackling Self Vanquishes Wild Grief, While Rational Self Could Not
Newsflash: Grief is completely irrational.
Does this surprise me? Not rationally. I knew it, know it, have seen it in my own and other people’s lives. But if I ever doubted what I know, this week has given me complete and utter clarity about it.
I’m on a trip away from home, doing things in the real world, in my real life. I hadn’t set off to take a trip down memory lane, or through the land of grief. But to my surprise, that’s where I seem to be, at least in part. The grief is completely interspersed with vibrant blips of current reality. In terms of time spent, vibrant reality overshadows the grief 10 to 1. But the intensity of the grief has given the whole week a strong flavor. Perhaps because of the strength of current life’s vibrancy, the irrationality of my grief sometimes takes me all the way to Wild Grief.
This was a two-part trip: It began with a meeting in Cleveland of a group of Unitarian Universalists, called “Allies for Racial Equity.” A group engaged in compelling, active work on a very present issue that I’m engaged in now. It had barely occurred to me that, 30 miles away in Akron, my childhood home was now owned by people who were not my parents. But when I got to Cleveland, I needed to head down to Akron and circle that house like a buzzard. So I did, driving along familiar streets, noting things I remembered and things that have changed. In a declining industrial city, most things that have changed are not for the better.
At my childhood home, my rational brain noted that the new people appear to be taking care of some major house issues that my father refused to address, and that is a very positive thing.
Meanwhile, my grief spoke in a completely different voice. Wild Grief began to howl: How dare they? Why did they take down those bushes [hideous bushes I had always hated]? How could they paint the door that new color when my mother had so carefully picked out that purple color [I never liked], and hand painted the door herself, twenty or twenty five years ago? What was wrong with them?
I shook myself a little, drove around familiar streets of schools and friends, streets filled with the ghosts of friends , some living and some dead. Then I headed back to Cleveland, back to my life, back to my trip. Next stop: Boston.
The Unitarian Universalist Association is preparing to sell its buildings on Beacon Hill and move across town. These include office buildings and also a bed and breakfast that I have stayed in, literally hundreds of times, over the past twenty five years. I knew that I was grieving the loss of this home away from home, but it wasn’t until I began to see the ubiquitous presence of the people who are purchasing it, measuring and discussing future plans, that irrational grief began to burn in me. “They’re walking around as if they own the place!” I sputtered to a co-worker, who responded kindly, “They do.”
And from there Wild Grief took full flight. As I was walking to a nearby café, I realized that not only am I losing this place to stay, it’s also unlikely that I will, in the future, spend much if any time on Beacon Hill in Boston. Why didn’t I ever live on Beacon Hill, when my child was young? I asked myself. Look at those people with a stroller! Now my child is 17 and I’ll never push a stroller on Beacon Hill! How could I have denied myself that opportunity? It would have been the best place to live, and I denied myself the experience, which is now gone For.Ev.Er.
Rational self pointed out to Wild Grief that, actually, I didn’t like the five years I spent working in Boston. The climate, the culture, the population density was so alien to me that I pretended to myself I was just there for college and would graduate soon and leave. Rational Self also pointed out that my stays at the bed and breakfast include such memories as my young child getting hives because of the lack of screens in the windows and a mosquito infestation, with air conditioning and heating that never quite worked right. Rational self had all kinds of these reminders, but Wild Grief had no interest. She was off and running.
Walking in one of the Boston streets that my Midwestern heart found so claustrophobic and anxiety producing when I lived here, Wild Grief continued to spiral and escalate. What is this time I live in, anyway? Wild Grief moaned. Wouldn’t it have been better to have lived in the 1950’s, when businesses were building after the war and people got married, had jobs, bought houses, and just stayed put for life? Wouldn’t it have been great to live in a time when things were predictable, and steady?
And that’s when Rational Self dissolved and Cackling Self came in. The 1950’s? Me in the 1950’s? I told a friend about this later and we had a laughing fit, envisioning me, a bitter secretary for a mean and controlling male boss, unable to create or claim or own anything as a woman, slinking into smoky lesbian bars on the weekends hoping not to get arrested, a bitter alcoholic, viewed by the rest of the world as a lonely spinster. And with that cackling, wild grief quit soaring in the skies and spiraled down a tiny hole. From which I am confident she will emerge again any minute and take flight again.
I don’t know what adventures my heart will bring me today, but I hope Cackling Self stays with me. Turns out not only is she more fun, she’s more effective, in vanquishing Wild Grief.
From Your Minister
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Recently, at one of CLF’s online worship services, we featured a guest minister, Teresa Ines Soto, who lives with cerebral palsy.
Nomination for Most Necessary Picture: Twelve Years a Slave
I wish I could talk to my Great-Aunt Marie about the movie Twelve Years a Slave, but regrettably “Neenie” died when I was three. This spinster librarian from Detroit did, however, leave a legacy—a self-published book of family history. Written in 1957, this book documented my family’s years in Missouri in the 1800’s.
My parents ridiculed these books; giant unopened boxes of them filled our attic. When my father died, I finally brought one home and began to read it. To my shock, the very first line of the preface, written by Aunt Marie in 1957, tells me my ancestors “left a Virginia country environment where they were relieved of the drudgeries of workaday life by the labor of slaves…they were members of a society in which excellence in manners, morals, and religion were prerequisites.” In 1821, when Missouri became a slave state and offered land at $1.25 an acre, my ancestors migrated there.
I had always imagined these Missouri pioneer ancestors living in a house kind of like Little House on the Prairie. Never did I envision Ma and Pa and the kids with slaves out back, ‘relieving them of the drudgeries of workaday life.’ No one ever talked about our family history as slave-owners.
Aunt Marie says in her preface that the family letters, “too numerous to include, have been incorporated into dialogue. The conversations are necessarily fictitious, but the events are authentic. The story is a family diary with eighteen dramatic scenes.” In other words, old letters have been turned into the equivalent of bad 1957 church skits.
Each of these ‘dramatic scenes’ is scripted, with stage directions and settings written by Aunt Marie herself. These descriptions are the primary reason I wish that Aunt Marie and I could have watched and talked about Twelve Years a Slave together.
Here are a few of the lines Aunt Marie included to ‘set the stage’ for various scenes:
“Smiling blacks bear platters of food to the tables, while strains from banjo and guitar are heard from the rear.”
“Black folks … cluster around the well and weave in and out of the buildings, working, laughing, loafing.”
It wasn’t until I saw and reflected on Twelve Years a Slave and the history of cinematography about slavery that I realized where Aunt Marie’s images came from. They sprang, in technicolor, from her Hollywood-influenced mind. Hollywood has presented dozens of films with images just like the ones Aunt Marie described, showing slavery as a time when blacks smiled and laughed and loafed.
Now, thankfully, Hollywood offers a version of history more grounded in fact. Twelve Years a Slave takes its viewers into slavery, not through the eyes of the slave-owners, but through the eyes of Simon Northup, a freed black man from New York, stolen and enslaved. The film shows slavery as mundane, daily, ceaseless, violence and terror. Some African-Americans I know don’t want to see it, or loathed it. But as a white person, who doesn’t experience the daily relentlessness of racism, the physical intensity of the movie was transformative. Leaving the movie felt like stepping out of a virtual reality booth.
I suspect Aunt Marie would not want to have any of it. Her preferred view seemed to be that owning other human beings didn’t make a dent in one’s ‘excellence in manners, morals, and religion.’ Nor did ceasing to own other human beings involve any sense of repentance. As one ancestor wrote:
“I’m not going to let old John Brown or any confounded abolitionist steal my blacks… I shall free them myself. Freeing my servants will not be a financial loss to me. Most of the negroes I have were inherited. In return for their labor, I have given them food, shelter, clothing, medical care…and security in old age.”
When I utter judgment upon my ancestors, some white folks get upset with me for “imposing 21st century values” on 18th or 19th century people. Do we really have to talk about this? they all but groan.
I guess the primary reason I’m most grateful to Twelve Years a Slave is that it is a kind of family intervention. I was born in the latter part of the 21st century. Silences and lies about my family history were handed to me as intact and unbroken as the four sherbet dishes my mother gave me, which made the journey with my ancestors from Virginia to Missouri. If Aunt Marie, writing in 1957, had come to believe that owning other people was wrong, she never mentioned it. My liberal parents –civil rights activists–never saw reason to talk to us kids about this part of our family history. Like many white people, my siblings prefer not to talk about it now.
Though viciously brutal, the film’s truth-speaking is a relief. Finally! Because when do Americans, or families, sit down with each other and say, “Wow, that was us! We did that! What meaning should we make of that? How did we benefit? How were we hurt? How do we heal our nation? How should we live our lives now?”
Twelve Years A Slave may or may not win Oscars Sunday night. But its real value is in changed and enriched lives: lives of people like me who have new ways to talk about and challenge what Adrienne Rich called “the lies, secrets, and silences” which shroud our national and family and cinematic histories. If there were a category for “Most Necessary,” this would be, hands down, my choice for best picture.
From Your Minister
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I’ve recently been engaged in a fascinating email conversation with a man named Michael Lorence, who found me electronically and reached out. Michael and his wife Diana wanted to share their story of the seven years that they spent living in a 12×12 foot house in the center of 60 acres of woods. They called the cabin, “Innermost House.”
Worthy to be Entrusted
(Today, I preached at the ordination of a new minister in my denomination, Unitarian Universalism. Her name is Rev. Lara Campbell, and I shared the pulpit with Rev. Michael Tino. Here is my half of the sermon.)
“Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message,” wrote Olympia Brown, the first woman to be ordained by a denomination—the Universalists, in 1863. And we know that she did not demand immediate results, she who worked for women’s right to vote from girlhood and finally was able to cast a ballot in 1920 at age 85.
I think of Olympia Brown, loving this faith despite the widespread discouragement she had to face in order to be ordained and the challenges she faced in ministry her whole life. I think of Egbert Ethelred Brown and Lewis McGee and so many other groundbreaking ministers of color who fought, against resistance and sabotage, for the right to lead Unitarian and Universalist congregations, who stood by this faith. And I think of all the people who still struggle to be able to devote their gifts to this faith, for a variety of reasons.
We do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message, their lives say. Their ministries say. Their legacies say. Their legacies are very much with me tonight as I preach, for the first time, wearing a stole given to me after the death of one of my mentors, Rev. Gordon McKeeman, who died in December. Gordon, a stalwart Universalist, who devoted his life to this faith, is now here with us, lending strength and companionship, reminding me that he has entrusted me with leadership, reminding us that he entrusted his life to Universalism and ministry.
I think of these people and I think of all the bold, visionary Unitarian Universalist ministers, ordained and not ordained, right now, some of you sitting right here, who have dreams of new applications for our faith, who believe that our faith calls us to stand with those lofty ideals of equity, justice, lovingkindness, in this miraculous yet devastating world. Who imagine ministries with unusual new shapes and contexts and methods, all of which seek to bring more love into the world.
I think of ministries beginning in coffee shops—Beloved Café, envisioned by seminarians at Starr King School for the Ministry—and yoga classes—Create Meaning, out in Denver—and in the streets—Faithful Fools, which has been inventing street ministry for decades now—and AWAKE ministry in Annapolis, and the Sanctuary in Washington DC—all bold, visionary new shapes for our future. And each week, with the Church of the Larger Fellowship, we live into these new shapes as we try new ways to find each other, to care for each other, to care for our word from all across the globe.
And deep within me, I say, yes! I am so grateful that you stand by this faith! All of you! All of us! I am grateful that so many work for it and sacrifice for it! I am grateful that all of us are here today, attesting to its value, when we could be doing so many other things on a Sunday afternoon!
But then, right there with the yes, something in me whispers, but…just a little whisper that says, but.. yes, but… but I wish you, and I, didn’t have to dream our dreams alone so much of the time, wish some of our best and brightest lay and ordained ministers weren’t still fighting for support the way that Olympia Brown and others have had to fight for support. I wish each vision could be surrounded by others who supported vision and faith, that we could find ways to reach out better beyond our individual enterprises and make common cause, collaborate with one another, build something bigger than our congregations.
In this era of union-busting, I am longing for a Spiritual Union. I want spiritual collective bargaining. I love Unitarian Universalism, and I love the way that our congregations are self-determining and unique, but I believe in those old songs that I was raised on, about how “The Union makes us strong.” I take to heart those words in our hymnal from Dr. Martin Luther King, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” And I say, when do we realize that we are that garment, instead of behaving as if our purpose on the planet is to pull apart the threads?
What might we do if we embodied a place of spiritual union with one another? When I say we, I don’t mean only Unitarian Universalists, I mean all of us who believe that people are worthy to be entrusted with carrying and sharing love so deep it will not let us go? What if that name that’s been assigned to us when we wear bright yellow shirts that say Love on them, The Love People, was really our identity? What if we cast fear aside, if we dared to believe that humanity, collectively, is worthy to be entrusted with the message that there is power of love so big that it can’t be held by any one set of religious metaphors and beliefs?
And who might we entrust with our faith? Who might we trust as prophetic voices in our wider faith, a faith not bound by traditional buildings or denominational stakes in the ground? How might we live into spiritual union with the people whose leadership we need in order to challenge and take down the notion of the saved and the damned, the chosen and the unchosen, the deserving and the undeserving, which dominates the US and so many other countries as much now as it did when John Calvin’s concept of predestination, that some are born saved and some are born damned, was widely believed to be true?
Where might we find union and create more love with other people, of every faith and no faith, who dare to proclaim that all people have inherent worth and dignity? Where are the voices saying, YES, African American youth and other youth of color, you are worthy to be trusted! Youth of color, queer youth, youth in general—you are worthy to be trusted! You are the people we need to have as union stewards in our spiritual union.
Where are the voices insisting, YES, people on public assistance, you are worthy to be trusted! More spiritual union stewards, whose leadership we need. Where are those whose witness proclaims, YES, immigrants without all your legal documents in order, you are worthy to be trusted! We need you as leaders in our spiritual union.
What might we do? Who might we dare to be? We have seen some of this in our work for marriage equality, immigration rights, voting rights, in our anti-racism work, as we join other religions and organizations and people to work together, but what if we had real spiritual union?
Whatever configurations our ministries with one another and the world take, whatever architecture we use for buildings, whatever technologies we employ, our own sense of Unitarian Universalism’s worthiness must be a part of the structure. But the time for clinging to small identities is over. The world is far too small now, we are too closely connected to even imagine that we do not have neighbors on every side who care about what we care about.
It’s scary. It means letting go of so many structures and identities that we have confused with worthiness—structures of privilege, or comfort. It means swimming in the ocean rather than in the small pond which our relational faith can become. But love will save us, again and again, when we are afraid, when we are confused, when we make mistakes, when we can’t get our bearings.
We are worthy to be trusted, not because Unitarian Universalists are the chosen people. Worthy, instead, because we have devoted ourselves to faith in a force–call it truth or God, life or love–a force much bigger than we are ourselves—which will not let us go, and which will not be confined or defined.
We have been entrusted with a great faith, and that faith whispers, shouts and sings, You are worthy! Worthy to wear the mantle of this great faith.
