Return to No Person Evil for Evil

I carry a collection of photographs on this iPad.  Some are of my kids.  (141, actually … pictures, not kids!)  Just edging them out – at 156 pictures – is a collection I call “icons.”  These are images of people – real and imaginary – who in one way or another inspire me.  I’ve got Barack Obama, and Duncan McLeod (of the clan McLeod).  There’s Gandhi and Tich Nhat Hanh, a baby meditating, Ged (from the Earthsea Trilogy), Nellie Bly, Santa Claus, and an icon from the Church of St.John Coltrane.  Two of my favorites were taken during the first and only, extremely brief, meeting of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
 

I’m going to pause here for a moment and give you a spoiler (so if you don’t want to know how the sermon ends, plug your ears).  Okay.  Here goes:  I don’t know the answer.  I have to admit that I find this one insoluble.  I’m going to have to leave this one in your hands and hearts to find the answer that makes the most sense to you, and for you.

So … (you can take our fingers out of your ears now) … back to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  These men are iconic figures in the struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s, and they were seen then, and often still seen, as polar opposites.  One is held up as the embodiment of non-violent resistance; the other is remembered as wanting equality for African Americans “by any means necessary.”

Since for the majority of liberal King is by far the more familiar figure, I want to share some quotes from Malcolm X.

We are peaceful people, we are loving people. We love everybody who loves us. But we don’t love anybody who doesn’t love us. We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.

[…]

I don’t think when a [person] is being criminally treated, that some criminal has the right to tell that [person] what tactics to use to get the criminal off [their] back. When a criminal starts misusing me, I’m going to use whatever necessary to get that criminal off my back.

And the injustice that has been inflicted on Negros in this country by Uncle Sam is criminal…

*********

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American [black's] problem just to avoid violence.

************

[Our goal is] to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western Hemisphere, and first here in the United States, and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary. 

That's our motto. We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary. We don't feel that in 1964, living in a country that is supposedly based upon freedom, and supposedly the leader of the free world, we don't think that we should have to sit around and wait for some segregationist congressmen and senators and a President from Texas in Washington, D. C., to make up their minds that our people are due now some degree of civil rights. No, we want it now or we don't think anybody should have it.

***********

We want freedom now, but we're not going to get it saying 'We Shall Overcome.' We've got to fight to overcome.

Not quite the rhetoric that white liberals were raised on.  We’re more used to the words of Dr. King, which we quote at least around the third Monday in January – (though often out of context).  Malcolm X’s words were not a call to join in the realization of a dream; they were the fiery demand to wake up from a nightmare.

Most weeks we end our worship with the same words of benediction:  “Go out into the world in peace.  Have courage.  Return to no person evil for evil.”  And I want to stop there.  Return to no person evil for evil.  Return to no person evil for evil.

On Saturday, May 14^th, a crowd of about 100 people gathered at the feet of the statue of Robert E. Lee in what was then called Lee Park.  They had torches, and made their white nationalist worldview and agenda quite clear:  “All white lives matter,” “You will not replace us,” and the Nazi-era slogan, “blood and soil.”  The next night a group of several hundred people gathered in the same place, holding candles and singing.

On the evening of Thursday, June 1^st, there was a direct confrontation in front of Millers on the downtown mall, where Jason Kessler and some of his alt-right cohorts were eating.  There was in-your-face yelling; there was, by some accounts, physical contact.  Acouple of weeks later Kessler was on the mall again, this time “introducing” to Charlottesville the group the Proud Boys, and again there was direct engagement – violent by all accounts, even if the violence was only verbal.

This coming Saturday, from 3:00 – 4:00, members of the Loyal Order of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan will be holdinga rally in Justice Park, what was formerly known as Jackson Park.  And the question on many minds is, “what will our response be?”   Candles and singing, or angry altercations?  What should our response be?

And here’s where we reach the “I honestly don’t know” part of the sermon.  I was raised to value nonviolence.  I was raised to respond to hatred with love.  I was raised to believe that there is good in every person, no matter how crusted over it might be.  I was raised to try to follow the path of reason, and reasonableness. So I am with those who say that there should be no confrontation, no engagement on the 8^th.  I understand and agree with those who say that everybody should just stay home; that we should make the klan’s visit to Charlottesville as disappointing as can be; that we just leave them there, by themselves, to “shout their hate to the trees.”

I also understand and agree with those who say that there should be a presence; that there needs to be a demonstration of another way; that there needs to be a witness; and that this presence should be non-confrontational, with no engagement whatsoever.  (There’s been a request sent out that those who feel that they must go to the park should wear all black – to counter the klan’s white robes – and stand in silence, arms linked encircling the klan but with our backs toward them.)

Yet there are others who are saying that there needs to be confrontation, and if it’s loud and aggressive -- even if it’s violent -- it’s necessary.  Things are bad, things are really bad, and things have been bad for far too long – there needs to be a change now.  This struggle isn’t one of philosophy; it’s one of life and death.  Literally life and death.  There simply isn’t time for singing,  Returning to one of those quotes from Malcolm X, “I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American [black's] problem just to avoid violence”

So what are we to do?  I don’t know.  As I said at the beginning, I have to leave this in your hands and hearts.  I know that I will take the nonviolent approach; I know that I will be trying to respond to hatred with love; I know that I will seek, with every fiber of my being, to return to o person evil for evil.

Yet I will also not condemn those who see the need for another approach, who see this struggle as needing a solution by any means necessary.  I have come to believe that there is no one way to respond, and that perhaps all of them have a place.

There is a story told of a time in early 1965, while King was jailed in Selma, Alabama, Malcolm traveled to Selma, where he had a private meeting with Coretta Scott King. “I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult,” he assured Coretta. “I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King”

I cannot tell you what to do; I cannot tell you how to respond.  I have come to believe that there may well need to be a whole variety of responses, including violence.  But I cannot tell you how you should respond.  I can tell you that you have to respond.  And I can tell you that we ought to be intentional about that response.

If you decided to stay home, to stay away, to keep your Saturday “business as usual,” that’s fine.  But don’t do it unmindfully.  Make it a choice.  Make it a response.

If you decide to respond in a non-violent, non-confrontational way, that’s fine.  But please be intentional in that choice.

And if you feel you need to respond through direct, confrontational engagement – even violence – I cannot tell you that that’s not fine, too. But please, please do so as a conscious choice, and not merely an emotional acting out.

I cannot tell you how to respond, but I can tell you that you must respond.  Each of us must respond.  Our Unitarian Universalist faith demands it, as does our humanity.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Charlottesville Clergy Collective is hosting a number of events -- before, during, and after the klan's rally.  Their website outlines these, as well as listing many of the other events that are happening around the city on the 8th.   

 

Eruptions

This morning I submitted the following letter to my local paper The Daily Progress.  In July I wrote a post which expanded on this theme

Protests “erupted” in Charlotte, North Carolina, CNN reported.  The protest was in response to the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, but that’s not what caused the violence.  “Eruption” seems an apt description.  Volcanoes and geysers erupt because the pressure beneath them has built to a level which can no longer be contained.  So, too, when violence “erupts.”

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote::

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

In the one hundred and forty-one years since, those “ten thousand recollections” have not dimmed, nor have those “new provocations” ceased.

I do not condone violence.  Rather, I abhor it.  Yet I can understand it.  It is not a surprise to me when it erupts.  How can it not?  All of that heat and pressure has to find an outlet.

Two quotations have been echoing in my mind these last few days.  Both are from Malcolm X;  both are, I believe, quite relevant.

“I don’t favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.” “We are peaceful people, we are loving people. We love everybody who loves us. But we don’t love anybody who doesn’t love us. We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Riots or Uprisings ...

In 1784 Thomas Jefferson published his Notes on the Sate of Virginia.  In his chapter on slavery he proposes that slaves should be emancipated and then put on boats and sent back to Africa.  He rhetorically asks himself "Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave?"  He then answers himself with these words:

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

Take a moment to read that again.  Isn't this what we're seeing in Baltimore, and Seattle, and Chicago, and Ferguson?  "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites" coming up against "the thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained," along with "new provocations"?

Malcolm X said:

"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that's not progress.  If you pull it all the way, that's not progress.  The progress comes from healing the wound that the blow made.  They haven't begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there."

Some are beginning to say that we should really think of these "riots" as "uprisings."  Angry people, with "the thousand recollections of the injuries they have sustained [along with] new provocation," are responding not just to any particular specific instance of injustice, but to all they have endured and continue to endure.  Some are responding with control and strategy; others with unbridled rage run rampant.

I've also seen on the Internet this summation of the situation:  Black people are literally saying "Stop killing us!"  And there are people saying "But ..."  I can't imagine -- as a white person I really can't imagine -- how that feels.  But I can't imagine that it doesn't count as a "new provocation."

So what are we to do?  I guess that depends on who we mean by "we."  On April 29th, Salon.com published Julia Blount's article (originally posted on her FaceBook page) "Dear white FaceBook friends:  I need you to respect what Black America is feeling right now."  We -- and by this I mean white Americans -- could begin by reading things like this.  The Unitarian Universalist blogger Kenny Wiley has written some wonderful things on his blog "A Full Day."  (His perspective, by the way, is that of an African American Unitarian Universalist millennial male.)  For a brutally honest big picture view of the background to what's happening pick up Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow:  mass incarceration in the age of color blindness.

Better than -- or, perhaps, in addition to -- reading is talking with people.  Again, to the primarily white folk who read this blog, talk with people of color you know.  And maybe better than "talk to" would be "listen to."  Listen to what they are thinking and feeling about all of this.  (And by "this" I don't mean just Baltimore, nor even just issues of police violence and the inequities of our justice system.  I mean anything having to do with the ways people of color and whites are treated differently from one another -- that thing called "systemic racism.")

If you don't know any people of color, you could talk with other white people.  But don't allow the conversation to fall into easy assumptions.  Question and, then, question again.  Challenge -- both the person with whom you're talking and yourself -- to see things from outside of your experiences of "normal."  Try to imagine the issues from as many different perspectives as you can.  Push yourselves to try to make sense of the things you can't understand and defend things you disagree with.  Broaden your perspective.

If you don't have people of color in your life with whom you can talk about these things ... ask yourself, "Why?"  See if there are things in the way you're living your life that are keeping you from making connections with African Americans, Latino & Latina Americans, Asian Americans (which, of course, encompasses a widely dispirit group of folks!).  Look for ways to begin putting yourself into situations where you can meet folks who don't look like, think like, you.  Tread lightly here, naturally.  You certainly don't want to create a single, token, "Black Friend."  Nor do you want to too soon assume the intimacy and trust that talking about race-related issues with someone of a different race requires.

For a moment I'm going to directly address Unitarian Universalists;  If you're a FaceBook user you might want to check out UUs Resisting New Jim Crow & Mass Incarceration, and Allies for Racial Equity.  (Consider joining that later one!)  For all of us: are you yet a member of the NAACP or the National Urban League?  Things to think about ...

Is what we're seeing in Baltimore and elsewhere a case of "riots" or is it an "uprising"?  I think the answer to that will rest mostly on our -- white -- shoulders.  Our brothers and sisters of color are giving voice to their outrage, their grief, their anger, and their exhaustion.  If it is to be more than that -- if it is to be a full-bodied, long-lasting assault on "the way things are," then it's going to take the involvement of those who most benefit from "the way things are."  As this blog puts it so well:  racism is a white problem.  But maybe, just maybe, we can come together not just to calm this violence but to eradicate its root cause and, so, avoid Jefferson's predicted, "convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

RevWik

Deconstructing Bondage & Freedom

This is the text of the sermon I preached on Sunday, March 8th, 2015 at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, VA.  If you'd like, you can also listen to a podcast.

Opening Words:  The Road fromSelma by June Brindel

 Sermon:

“When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.”

That’s Malcolm X talking (and I kept his gender specific language in place for historicity’s sake).  “A person who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve that freedom.”  “Whenever you hear someone saying they want freedom, but in the next breath tells you what they won't do to get it, or what they don’t believe in doing in order to get it, that person doesn't believe in freedom.”

It doesn’t take a lot to see that in this Malcolm is taking a crack at the Rev. Dr. King, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, and the hundreds of people who fifty years ago today were in Selma nursing the wounds of “Bloody Sunday,” and the thousands of people – white and black – who were on their way there to stand in solidarity and to march, eventually, all the way to Montgomery.  The folks President Obama was talking about yesterday, the ones he described as, “ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching toward justice.”  These are the people Malcolm X is dismissing as not really believing in, not really understanding, freedom.

What we have here is a clash of ideologies or, perhaps even more accurately, of strategies.  Malcolm X said, "We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary."  If Dr. King said that “We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means,” then Malcolm X was essentially saying that those seeking freedom must have the freedom to choose how they’re going to do it.

“I don't favor violence,” he said. “If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people."  He also said, “"I don't mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I'm nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you've made me go insane, and I'm not responsible for what I do."

Martin Luther King, on the other hand, believed that “hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that [and that] we must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.”  He said, “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the [one] who wields it. It is a sword that heals.”

Malcolm X said, “Concerning nonviolence: It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself, when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle. We believe in obeying the law.” 

What we have here is a clash of ideologies or, perhaps even more accurately, a clash of strategies.  And this clash reveals a paradox – can violence ever achieve peace?  Can limits ever lead to freedom?  It’s this later one that I really want to dig into this morning.

Miriam Webster’s Dictionary defines “freedom” as, “the quality or state of being free,” which it further defines as “liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another (in other words, independence),” and, “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.”  And by this definition it seems as though Malcolm X was on to something – if freedom is “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action,” then how can you achieve freedom if the road you’re going to take to get there is, of necessity, constrained in advance by a principle like nonviolence?

And I’ve got to tell you, the more I read about what went on in Selma 50 years ago the more respect for I have for the discipline, the restraint, the limits that those peaceful freedom fighters placed on themselves, and the strength and courage it took to remain true to them.

Last week I talked about Mark Morrison-Reed’s book, TheSelma Awakening.  This week it’s Richard Leonard’s Call to Selma:  eighteen days of witness.  Richard Leonard was the Minister of Religious Education at the Community Church of New York 50 years ago, and he was one of the hundreds of clergy and lay people who responded to Dr. King’s call and headed down to Selma to stand in solidarity.  He went expecting to be gone just a couple of days.  He stayed for eighteen.  (But don’t worry, by the seventh day he finally managed to call home and tell his wife and kids that he’d gone.)  This book, published back in 2002, is the story of his experiences during those days, as reconstructed from the notes and journal he kept at that time.  What makes Call to Selma so moving is that it is the story told from eye level.  It’s doesn’t depict the perspective of the leadership, but the rank and file.  It’s not the story of the people making the decisions, but of the ones who, in faith, acted on them.

And what a story it is.  

We know, I hope, about that first march, the one that happened 50 years ago yesterday, the one where the marchers hadn’t even gotten all the way over the Edmund Pettus bridge when they were set upon by police with billy clubs and tear gas – Bloody Sunday.  And we may know about the march two days later, on March 9^th, that came to be called Turnaround Tuesday, because the marchers voluntarily turned around in order not to violate the federal court order prohibiting a march (to show their respect for the law), yet also having gotten just a little bit further than they had two days before (to demonstrate their resolve).  And then there was that third march, which started on March 21 and ended with 25,000 people marching up to the state house in Montgomery on March 25^th.

In between there was the lesser known stalemate at the so-called “Berlin Wall.”  With the road to Montgomery blocked by a federal injunction, and hundreds of people wanting and needing to do something, organizers decided on March 10^th, the day after Reverends Reeb, Miller, and Olsen were attacked, the organizers decided to march to the Dallas County Courthouse.  Almost immediately they were met by Mayor Smitherman and Chief Baker, and rows and rows of police officers stretching across Sylvan Street, blocking their way.  This faceoff would continue for six days – night and day, good weather or rain (and there was apparently a lot of hard rain that week).  At one point Chief Baker strung a clothesline across the street to physically demarcate what we might call now “a line in the sand.”  The story of the hours and days on that line is powerful stuff, no less powerful than the stories of the meetings between King and Johnson, for instance.

But to bring us back to that paradox, here were hundreds of women, children, and men who were fighting for their freedom, yet who were incredibly disciplined about it.  They knew that an “anything goes” kind of anarchic freedom could get them all killed and, maybe worse, hurt their cause.  Leonard tells of seeing at one point a hand, coming out of the rows further back, with a pair of scissors poised to cut Chief Baker’s “Berlin Wall,” and then, almost immediately, another hand reached out and pulled the first hand back.  There were times when folks wanted to push through that line, to break through those “stiff ranked troopers / white as a shroud / rimming the road from Selma” the way our Opening Words imagined the ghosts of Reeb and Jackson, Evers and Till, and those four little girls from Birmingham doing.  Oh they wanted to, but they didn’t.  Their actions were dictated by necessity; seriously constrained and restricted.  There were things many of them wanted to do but that they would not do.  They gave up freedom to gain freedom.

And that may be an important point to highlight.  These weren’t constraints placed upon them from the outside; these were limits voluntarily imposed on themselves.  If you choose to limit your own freedom, is your freedom truly limited? 

That’s something I think Malcolm X may have missed.  And you’d think he would have understood this.  After all, members of the Nation of Islam denied themselves the pleasures of the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs … eating meat.  Members adhered to a strict dress code and what’s been described as a military discipline.  Yet they accepted, even embraced, these limitations to their freedom because of the sense of greater freedom such discipline made possible.  (The word “Islam” itself, the Arabic word, means “submission” as in “submission to the will of Allah.”)  All of this Malcolm understood and it didn’t bother him at all.  Here he understood that an unbridled, no-limits freedom was potentially dangerous and damaging.

King understood the power of self-control, of discipline, of making the choice to limit one’s choices on behalf of a greater freedom.  His belief in the power of nonviolence came from two very different sources.  One, the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, whom King once called “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”  Gandhi is remembered as saying about meeting violence with nonviolence, “They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience.”   The other inspiration, of course, would have been Jesus who exemplified devotion to love and truth even if that meant his own execution.  Jesus who was remembered as, even from the cross, asking for mercy for those who tortured him.

So why talk about all this this morning?  In part because this is the 50^th anniversary of those events in Selma and we need to remember because, despite how far we’ve come as a nation there is still so much farther we have to go.

But there’s another reason as well.  The dominant culture in which we swim tells us in ways both subtle and overt that we should let nothing stand in the way of our “pursuit of happiness.”  The culture of conspicuous consumption and on-demand … everything … is presented as the highest ideal, and we are inculcated with the notion that our highest goal should be the freedom to do what we want when we want.  We’re told, in short, that bondage is bad and freedom is good.

Yet without its banks a flowing river becomes a swamp.  “Make channels for the streams of love where they may broadly run,” goes the hymn.  Without those channels forward movement is dissipated.  This is true of a fight for civil rights; this is true for the living of our own lives.

When I hear somebody talking about freedom – or anything of value that they seek – and then, in the same breath, hear them say what they’re not going to do to get it, or what they don’t believe in doing to get it, then I feel certain that they eventually will.

Pax tecum,

RevWik