Dear friends,
As we sit here at the beginning of Holy Week I can’t help feeling both immeasurable gratitude and a tinge of regret. Since this series began over forty new folks joined this Lenten Journey and the longer prophetic-contemplative path toward solidarity we’re up to here. More importantly, there’s been a depth of engagement and response to this call to put whiteness to death which has truly been inspiring. I’m so grateful!
The regret slips in, as it so often does, through the gap between my aspirations and the fragile realities of daily human life. We haven’t begun to do justice to this journey of confession, repentance, repair and reconstruction. And of course not! Had I the ability, there were a few more threads I would have loved to weave in: both from the stories of my childhood places as well as on the conceptual and practical work needed to liberate all of us from the dominating grip of colonizing, capitalizing whiteness. This was not a stretch of weeks that allowed me to sit down and write as much as I would have loved. My father, now 88, is going through the most difficult season of health in his adult life following a heart surgery. That’s prompted three trips for me back to Texas, leading to lots of catch-up time back home with my partner, two little ones, and job. I’ve also been working through some major questions and challenges on a personal level. Thankfully this is emerging into clarity and an announcement I’m very excited to share with you in the next month or so.
As I’ve been sitting with this tension between the demands of my personal life and my longing to “do more for the world,” one of Howard Thurman’s meditations came to mind. Thurman was always attentive to the concentric circles in which we live our lives: the inner turmoils, joys, and anxieties; the relational dilemmas, demands, and dramas; as well as the great social crises and cries of our times. Holding all of these in our hearts simultaneously is nearly impossible.
In this meditation, Thurman honors these struggles to spread love across so great a terrain and helps us return to the grace always present through the presence of God.
“We wait in the quietness for some centering moment that will redefine, reshape, and refocus our lives. It does seem to be a luxury to be able to give thought and time to the ups and downs of one’s private journey while the world around is so sick and wary and desperate.
But, our Father, we cannot get through to the great anxieties that surround us until, somehow, a path is found through the little anxieties that beset us. Do you understand what it is like to be caught between the agony of one’s own private needs and to be tempest-tossed by needs that overwhelm and stagger the mind and paralyze the heart? Do you understand this, our Father?
For the long loneliness, the deep and searching joy and satisfaction, the boundless vision—all these things that give to You so strong a place in a world so weak—we thank You, Father. For whatever little grace You will give to Your children even as they wait in confidence and stillness in Your presence, we praise You. O love of God, love of God, where would we be without you? Where?”
Would you take another moment to read that again, perhaps a little slower than the first time? What is being offered to you through his words?
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The first thing I want to lift up in this brief meditation here at the beginning of Holy Week is that the journey toward the cross is filled with grace. We will lose the path. We will sell him out. We will make our denials of having ever known him. We will be overwhelmed by our private and political griefs until it feels we have lost all hope and can go no more. And every time grace will be there, refusing to throw us away, inviting us back into the grasp of love and the fire of communion in which liberating transformations always wait in gracious availability. We are always given the opportunity to “begin again,” in James Baldwin’s words. I’m so grateful for that.
The second thing I want to remind us of is that we do not follow Jesus toward the cross because suffering is noble nor because sacrifice is liberating in its own right. We go, as Paul understood, for the joy set before us. People raised to be and structurally positioned as white in our society tend to either ignore racial injustice (thus the focus in the first two installments of this series on facing reality) or, when they do confront it, turn to some sort of fatalism—either about our own irredeemability or being overwhelmed by the scope of the problem and acting as though there is no alternative, no way out.
As a way to think about all of our stories here in the United States / Turtle Island, I’ve spent a good deal of time in this series bringing to light the history of the rural county in Texas where I grew up. The plantations white settlers arrived there to build have continued to reproduce themselves. But we are not doomed to repeat that history! History itself is full of proof that people have come together to build more just, mutualistic, and inclusive communities. If I had more time, I would have walked us through the twenty-four year period from June 19th, 1865 until August 1889 during which time an egalitarian coalition of white and Black leaders elected a multi-racial local and state-level government that worked toward deeper democracy and equity.1 I would have told you about the churches, businesses, community groups and schools Black people built in Fort Bend County Texas during this time, and the organized resistance they formed against roving white supremacists. I would have zoomed out to the incredible history of Black cooperatives, mutual funds, 10 million acres worth of land acquired by former slaves, and other collective economics developed during the Reconstruction Era. I might even have looked at groups like the Knights of Labor which was an international workers alliance uniquely open to all races and peoples that boomed in the 1880s—including across Texas and in my area—and fought for their vision of a “cooperative commonwealth.”
There are alternatives. They have been tried and found successful. The only thing that stood in the way, which brought a tragic end to Reconstruction, was an enormous redeployment of violence by white people determined not to share the fruits of their common life. Nonetheless what is clear is that other paths could have been taken and that they still can be. We pursue the death of whiteness this Lent—the end of the plantation’s death-dealing way within ourselves and our society—not because death and sacrifice are worthy ends in themselves, but because the joy of resurrection into a new and more beautiful communal life awaits on the other side. This is the spiritual praxis of becoming new selves and new creations.
These gifts of grace and joy do not simplify the complexities of this work nor do they gloss over over suffering and culpability. They don’t give us a pass on anything. But paradoxically, grace and joy are in fact here in the midst of the inconceivable invitation to pick up a cross and follow. They too make liberation possible.
I will do my best to share one more post on Maundy Thursday to wrap up this series. It will be a meditation on Jesus’ strange comments to his disciples during that final supper and the abolitionist vision of relationships he offered.
Peace, joy, and justice,
Nathan
PS — I highly commend this conversation between
and on Garrett’s newly released book The Right Kind of White. It’s a moving example of what it looks like for two white people to bravely and vulnerably engage this work of solidarity.From this time last year, here’s a Holy Week reflection on the Vatican’s decision to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery (which authorized Portugal and Spain to colonize and enslave the non-Christian world, and which still influences lawmakers today) and the responsibilities of decolonization and reparations we still hold. I think it’s appropriate to close today’s newsletter with the same benediction from last year’s piece:
As we meditate this week on the life of Jesus, whose solidarity with the poor and colonized placed him on a collision course with execution by Roman colonizers and their collaborators, may we grieve with those whose identity and resistance places them on the same path today.
May we weep over the world order designed to produce death for Indigenous peoples, and so many others, an order which we who claim to follow Christ built.
May we come to identify so dearly with the passion of Jesus that we no longer find ourselves identifying with death dealing systems.
May we no longer come to the world’s defense, but rather find ourselves identifying with those Jesus said he identified with in history: the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, the naked, the colonized and exploited.
And may this inner freedom set us free to repair harm in such a way that the sources of harm are abolished, forever and ever, amen.
“Between 1869 and 1889, 44 Black men held different positions in Fort Bend County that included varied roles as sheriff, county commissioner, justice of the peace, and constable. At one point of Fort Bend Reconstruction, more than 50% of the county offices were held by Black politicians. They were actively supported by a small number of Whites who participated in county government as Republicans or as independent Democrats. This meant they did not run or support the all-White Democratic ticket during elections. Unlike other Texas counties at that time, Fort Bend Country actually enjoyed racial co-operation and peace during this post-Civil War era.” From Wikipedia but citing an amazing PhD thesis I have sitting next to me.