A Time to Laugh

Pick a Pact.

One may preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another. . . . But when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth.

Anne Hutchinson at Trial

Soul Sister

You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm. I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands.

Anne Hutchinson at Trial

Ever wonder how Wikipedia will document your life story in 300 years? I feel like I just read mine when I perused Anne Hutchinson’s.

I always just kind of dismissed her as a nut — you know, an outspoken crazy woman with a sad obstetric history that ticked off a powerful man who simply labeled her a heretic. Nothing of consequence there, right?

Oh, dear me.

Needless to say, I’m not going to be inviting in any group of wandering natives anytime soon.

Critical Thinking

Lewisland Park — Our Magic Kingdom

The Swing

By Robert Louis Stevenson

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside–

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown–
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

We are very busy in our new yard. We swing. We recite poems about swinging while we’re swinging (part of a formidable list, yes?). We count sprouts. We write in our field journal. We get very, very dirty. We play with the home-made floam that’s too messy for inside. We play baseball and terrier soccer. We water new sod.

And while the lack of scrubby has scared off our goldfinch family, we have found some other wildlife. Bugs. Grubs. Worms. And . . . a small brown rabbit whose clothes got stuck in our yellow hose. . . .

Presently, we put up his jacket and shoes in the carrot patch so he could find them again. No rabbit pie for this Lewis home (other Lewises prefer their rabbit dredged in flour and browned and then baked. I prefer mine with skin on and hopping through the yard.).

The home-made topsy-turvy tomatoes just gave me their first ripened fruit this morning. Our Kouza is gorgeous still. The sunflower house is sprouting. And the summer bulb bed is ready to pop.

We can hardly resist calling the yard a metaphor for the previous year. I prayed a long, long time ago about fixing it, saying, “Okay, Lord, all I know is when it gets done, it’ll clearly be straight from You.”

The whole thing makes us smile as we have our daily PB&J picnic. It really is a stone monument to how the Lord has helped us thus far.

Amen!

Things I Wanna Do

Here’s my list of things I really want to do someday. Really. If I had written this list 6 years ago, I would have included potty-training the cat. That was a complete catastrophe. Oh awful. . . . I don’t recommend that at all. But for now:

• Finish a sweater. For me. I knit little things. Scarves, food. I’ve knitted a couple disasters. But I want something that’s not a Category 3. Lace would be cool too. So I’ve started this. You think I can finish it? Not sure.
• Worm composting. This looks SOOOO cool! Grant thinks it’s silly. But imagine making compost out of dryer lint and banana peelings. WITH WORMS!!
• Learn bobbin lace. I have a home-made lace-making pillow upstairs, and my dear MIL bought me some bobbins years ago. I have a few patterns and one or two books. I’ve been fascinated with this ever since my Dad pointed out the little scribbled-up, apple-cheeked lady doing it at the Henry Ford Museum when I was ten. It’s like teeny-tiny macramé. So . . . amazing.
• Stay in a Disney Resort. Yes, I know this is bourgeois. Can’t help it. Someday I’m gonna do it.
• Wire the dollhouse. I should write a post about the sentiment behind that dollhouse. Anyway, I started the wiring, so I know the kit works. Now I just need to finish it up.
• Figure out how to use this thing. I’ve got that upstairs too. Everything’s upstairs now that I think about it.
• Try cloth diapers. If a little one ever blesses our home again, I wanna try it. Mollie makes it look so easy!
• Write another book. I’ve got a couple of outlines on the hard drive already.

Another Ebenezer: Camille Lewis, Independent Scholar

If you caught my Ebenezer series (which ended with this final post), you’d be interested to know that the final chapter, removed from my book under threat of termination, is now published in this month’s Kenneth Burke Journal under the title, “Publish and Perish?: My Fundamentalist Education from the Inside Out.” It includes an explanation of those events leading up to that chapter’s expunging.

Sto Lat, Dad!

If you ever hear a group of loud but happy people singing this is a restaurant somewhere in Greenville county, look out. It’s the Kaminski clan celebrating a birthday.

This week we sang to the patriarch. Eighty-five! Hurray!!! Sto lat! Sto lat!! Happy Birthday, Dad!!

Happy Mother’s Day!

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.

Isaiah 40:11

This motherhood thing is something else. I can’t even express how much God has taught me about Himself–about how much He loves His children, cares for them, and leads them.

Luther said as much:

Now observe that when that clever harlot, our natural reason (which the pagans followed in trying to be most clever), takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labour at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself? 0 you poor, wretched fellow, have you taken a wife? Fie, fie upon such wretchedness and bitterness! It is better to remain free and lead a peaceful. carefree life; I will become a priest or a nun and compel my children to do likewise.”

What then does Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels. It says, “0 God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers. or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? 0 how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labour, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight.”

A wife too should regard her duties in the same light, as she suckles the child, rocks and bathes it, and cares for it in other ways; and as she busies herself with other duties and renders help and obedience to her husband. These are truly golden and noble works. This is also how to comfort and encourage a woman in the pangs of childbirth, not by repeating St Margaret legends and other silly old wives’ tales but by speaking thus, “Dear Grete, remember that you are a woman, and that this work of God in you is pleasing to him. Trust joyfully in his will, and let him have his way with you. Work with all your might to bring forth the child. Should it mean your death, then depart happily, for you will die in a noble deed and in subservience to God. If you were not a woman you should now wish to be one for the sake of this very work alone, that you might thus gloriously suffer and even die in the performance of God’s work and will. For here you have the word of God, who so created you and implanted within you this extremity.” Tell me, is not this indeed (as Solomon says [Prov. 18:22]) “to obtain favour from the Lord,” even in the midst of such extremity?

Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool, though that father is acting in the spirit just described and in Christian faith, my dear fellow you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other? God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith. Those who sneer at him and see only the task but not the faith are ridiculing God with all his creatures, as the biggest fool on earth. Indeed, they are only ridiculing themselves; with all their cleverness they are nothing but devil’s fools.

I thank God for the way He sanctifies through motherhood. I can’t imagine any other way that more completely changes a person in a completely happy way!

My Confession: Part 3

So in conclusion, I can’t pass a law. I don’t have the authority without my colleagues in the Congress to apologize to African Americans. But as a person and a citizen of my country, and a US Congressman, I can apologize. I can say to you that I feel very [voice breaks with emotion] inadequate to stand up here and say that. I don’t have the words. I haven’t experienced the suffering. I feel it in my bones that it’s right. I’m very sorry for what’s happened. I hope that you’ll forgive me because it’s easy to pray, “Well, it’s those other people that did it.” No, I’m part of it, too. Forgive me. Forgive me for my sins. Forgive me for my ancestors, and [Applause] . . . This is just a start. It’s not the end. It’s the beginning. And maybe God, hopefully God, will take this conference, take these apologies and start to heal, start to close this wound that’s there. Amen.

Tony Hall

About a week ago, I found a description of life at BJU written by a former student–a well-liked, bright, Who’s-Who kind of student who just happened to be a person of Color. Just happened to be, right? It didn’t matter anymore that his ethnic makeup was more diverse than mine. BJU dropped that horrible racist rule forbidding interracial dating during Campaign 2000, right? The rule was a relic of an ugly, by-gone age, right? . . . RIGHT??

That’s how I’d distance myself from the racism around me: it’s not me who’s racist–it’s them–and BOY! are they racist!! I did that over and over for years.

What I’m about to say is not unique to me in any way. This is just how well-intentioned, but willfully blind whites live knee-deep in the ideological muck of racism.

Let me give you a very recent example that proves my point. Just about a year ago, a colleague entered my office and said about a student, “Well, I knew he was . . . well, BLACK.” She spat out the word reluctantly but still pregnant with prejudice. He had wanted to perform a Langston Hughes poem, but she refused to allow it because Hughes was a . . . Communist (yeah, that’s the reason! [/sarcasm]) and actually suggested–and I kid you not–a Robert E. Lee tribute. I was just a computer guru for her, a hack who could change the database entry. But as I clattered and clicked away, I heard her ever-so-politely articulate that very old and very Southern prejudice.

It was too easy for me to sit there agape and think, “That’s her problem. Not mine. Oh my, I can’t believe she’s saying that.” I rubbed my temples after she left as if to cleanse my mind from what I had heard.

Some time in the mix the student who had wanted to use Langston Hughes’ words to express his own voice told me about his own hurt. I ached. I empathized as best I could. I was sorry. And while I did speak out in the departmental meeting and said, “We came off looking like jerks in that situation!” I was still in it. Was there much difference between my sitting in the middle of that and Phil Yancey buying Lester Maddox souvenirs?

As much as I’d like to pass the guilt off on another person, the ideology was wrong. And I participated–perhaps unwittingly ignorant or perhaps willfully ignorant.

So when I found another student’s online description of what went on at Bob Jones University just months before (and after) the lifting of the inter-racial dating rule during Campaign 2000, I was appalled. I knew that BJU had roots in a broken ideology of the antebellum South, but I really didn’t know.

Maybe I didn’t want to know. Maybe I was too committed to “the cause” of a particular expression of Christian education that I shrugged off the problems. Maybe that’s just too easy to do because I’m white.

But I must say now–to all my former and future students, my friends, my neighbors, and the Body of Christ at large–I’m sorry. I’m sorry for my willfully blind participation in a racist ideology. In order to make amends, let me tell you what I best remember about my interactions with racism at BJU since 1986:

• I heard my first Southern roommate talk about “them” while my mouth hung silently open and my eyes widened. Are you kidding me? You believe that?!!
• I listened to my Southern classmate’s public speech arguing for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ignoble connections to Marxism. I did object in writing on the student response sheet.
• I heard another classmate assert that African-Americans should go into the military because “well. . . . they are good at following orders.” I pretty loudly objected after being disappointed in my earlier silence.
• I hung my head in shame as I saw a small group of my classmates, a few years my senior, actually mourn the national celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday by donning black arm bands. They thought it was pretty funny.
• During that first semester as a graduate assistant while lecturing on avoiding sexist and racist speech, I scolded my student, a prominent administrator’s son, who stopped me in the middle of my talk and proudly declared that “blacks were made to be our servants.” The class did audibly gasp in horror, and I said with my brow furrowed, “You have no logical or statistical or biblical proof for that statement!” Then the bell rang, interrupting us. I took action with my supervisor who wrote the boy’s father. “That kind of talk is okay in South Georgia,” the father, an administrator, explained to his son, “but you can’t talk like that around here.”
• I ached when a dear friend of mixed ethnic heritage described her “viewing” before two administrators so they could decide if she was white or asian. They chose white for her.
• As a full-time faculty member, I refused to allow a faculty child to speak on the glorious benefits of slavery for an upper-level speech class. I offered no explanation. I just said emphatically, “Uh. . . no!”
• I rolled my eyes at Dr. Bob Jones, III speaking in faculty meeting about the interracial dating rule, stating, “If you don’t agree with this rule, then leave.” No one I knew actually agreed with it. But no one left either.
• I took a leave of absence in 1996 from BJU to study rhetoric at Indiana University. I took the mandatory diversity training required for all Associate Instructors, and I enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I still don’t understand the controversy around these sorts of requirements.
• I took the African-American rhetoric class in my department and even wrote an award-winning paper on Malcolm X. The biggest thing I learned from my white professors (albeit published and respected scholars in African-American rhetoric) was that as a white woman I didn’t get it. I could never really get what it was like to grow up black in America. I do understand that I don’t understand.
• I cringed when John McCain made a spectacle out of BJU’s racist policy. I had been praying quietly for BJU to change that horrible rule. It was a blight. BJU deserved the rebuke, but McCain seemed like nothing more than a rank opportunist.
• I listened to Dr. Bob Jones, III, then-president of BJU drop the interracial rule on Larry King Live on March 3, 2000. I’ll never forget that day. I was enduring my first (of four) pregnancy losses. I was at the hospital in Bloomington for a D&C, and all around me I saw people poring over the USA Today article and the cable news channels were blathering on and on. The receptionist called me to the front for my insurance card, and she looked at it and loudly said with amazement and disgust, “BOB JONES UNIVERSITY?” I felt the room glare at me. I said a quiet “yes.” For the first time in my life, I was very ashamed of my alma mater and employer.
• That night when Dr. Bob announced the elimination of the rule, I was too relieved to hear the liberties he was taking with the truth. The rule was no big deal? Meh — that’s just ’cause he’s clueless up there in his Ivory Tower. One-world-ism? Are you kidding me? I’ve never heard that one before. The rule was never preached or taught? Not hardly. . . .
• Dr. Bob said about the interracial dating rule: “Students never hear it preached. There have been four, five, six generations of students that graduated from there have never heard this preached in our chapel or taught in our school.” That wasn’t true, and Joel points that out. Just a few months before March, 2000, students were expelled from BJU for “interracial dating.” Students of Color heard for themselves in their Bible classes–before and after 2000–that they personally were cursed descendants of Ham.
• Upon returning to BJU, I planned a tribute to Black History month in my curriculum. I determined that every Rhetoric and Public Address major would have some exposure to Malcolm X and understand that his version of separatism was not much different from theirs. Like my diminutive additions could counteract the racist hermeneutic elsewhere. I don’t know. Maybe it could help.
• I put Marcus Garvey and Eldridge Cleaver and Toni Morrison on my office shelves–right next to Cixous and Steinem, Nietzsche and Foucault, of course. And Billy Graham and Jonathan Edwards, too.
• I wrote my dissertation. That final chapter was about Campaign 2000 and the fallout before and after. I relished the rhetorical opportunities available to be inside the camp and still be critical about the rhetoric around lifting of the ban. I took Dr. Bob at his word when he said that the Board wanted to eliminate the rule in May 1999.
• In discussing the lifting of the rule, I said in my dissertation: “The Associated Press reported the next week that the rule was only partially lifted: students now needed parental permission to date outside their ‘race,’ the report said. But the story was incorrect. As of March 3, 2000, no prohibitions on interracial dating whatsoever exist at Bob Jones University despite continuous media reporting to the contrary.” I know now that that’s simply incorrect. If you look at the footnotes of the book, you see that I had a brief email conversation with the Assistant Dean of Men at the time (I was at IU). I asked him if students had to get parental permission to date “outside their race.” If this was true, then the rule hadn’t ostensibly been lifted at all; another layer of bureaucracy had just been added to the enforcement. The Assistant Dean of Men simply told me that “No, they don’t need parental permission.” I should have probed deeper. I now know that Dr. Bob III did make an announcement in chapel on Monday, March 6 stating the parental permission stipulation only to rescind it on March 7th.
• I also said in my dissertation/book: “Reverend Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, does not believe that ‘Bob Jones has had a change of heart. I think that perhaps Bob Jones has had a change of mind.’ The difference between ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ is lost in this civic context.” I honestly didn’t understand what Reverend Butts was trying to say. Now I do.
• I continued: “Maxine Waters, prominent Democratic Representative from California is ’suspicious when a change comes under this kind of pressure. I would not rush too fast to believe that we have reached a new milestone here.’ Dramatic, albeit tardy, changes in policy are ignored.” I concluded that timing was the problem in BJU’s rule change. I now better see Waters’ point. It wasn’t timing alone that was the problem. It was substance. No repentance had been made.
• When our daughter Elise was born still, I asked that in lieu of flowers donations be given in her memory to the BJU Minority Scholarship Fund. I think upwards of $600 were given. The doctor that delivered her was on the board governing those funds.
• In talking with God on the Quad author, Naomi Schaefer Riley, I explained that the interracial dating rule was nearly impossible to enforce. What is race after all? And so what the administration did was stretch the boundaries of “white” as far as they could logically go. As if everyone really wanted to be white.

I now know better after reading my former student’s account. It wasn’t just “white” or “race” that was ambiguous. It’s the word “dating.” “Marriage” is plain and clear, but what’s a date? Sharing a meal with friends? A conversation? A serendipitous meeting on the sidewalk? A glance across the room? Sitting two or three down from a person? Who knows?

I now know that what had happened since the Supreme Court loss was that the rule went underground, more unspoken and hidden behind closed administrative doors. “The principle” behind the rule was revised as “one-world-ism” when it was nothing more than a sinister fear of miscegenation.

I say that because of documents that have recently been made available online. The Nation article when Dr. Bob III states that “a Negro is best when he serves at the table.” Letters that prove that a large church was pushed out of the BJU orbit because it welcomed an interracially married couple into membership. Testimonies from fundamental African-Americans who were harshly treated when they so gently pointed out the sin of racism in BJU.

There are many things about BJU’s religious House of Cards for which I could apologize. But I don’t know of any more foul than the trenchant racism. The philosophical-theological-political mess I’ll leave to discuss in another post. For years I’ve wanted to bellow an apology to every person of color I’ve met. For now, I’ll just say this: I was so concerned to cling to a pristine image that I ignored the disease growing right next to me. It’s like a woman who paints over the melanoma on her face. She can’t see it, but everyone else can. And, if she ignores it, it’ll kill her. Her doctor may say, “You have a ton of these cancerous blotches, but we have to start with the worst one.”

I can’t do much. I really can’t. I’m not rich or powerful. I’m a stay-at-home-mom with a blog. I can’t pass a law. I have little influence–less influence even than Senator Tony Hall. But the very least thing I can do is repent. I know that the vast majority of my former “co-laborers” at BJU feel the exact same way I do, but they are too deep in the ideology to form the words of an apology.

So again, I am sorry.

Yancey and Yadah: Part 2

Awhile back I read Phil Yancey’s first chapter in Soul Survivor. I was floored. The world he described was so alien to me. I grew up in Detroit, and he grew up in Atlanta. Racism in Detroit is more unspoken — an undertow of white fear and flight keeps the civic tension just below a simmer. Racism in Atlanta in the middle of the last century was unashamedly overt and outspoken. Yancey was raised hearing that the “dark races” were the result of God’s curse. In his native Georgia the gas stations all had three bathrooms for white men, white women, and colored. The museums set aside one day a week for “coloreds” to attend. Yancey remembers buying a Lester Maddox “Junior” size souvenir pickax handle similar to the ones that policemen used on demonstrators. He witnessed the KKK parades.

I, of course, had read those descriptions before. My parents had even mentioned to me how startled they were by the segregation when they drove through Georgia on their honeymoon in the 50s. White Northerners really have no idea. We’re kind of dumb like that. And we can move easily between our white world in Detroit and South Carolina–even if we do have a ’ski’ at the end of our names–and the only culture shock we feel is the sweetness of the tea we’re served or the quaintness of the drawl we hear.

But that was a long time ago, I always reasoned. That kind of racism is for old people or stupid people, right? That’s for people who are absolutely not like me, right? . . . RIGHT??

That’s why Yancey’s account still sends chills down my spine. He grew up a “New Testament, Blood-bought, Born-again, Premillenial, Dispensational, fundamental” Protestant just like me. He attended some unnamed Bible college in South Carolina that forbid interracial dating and marriage. Scratching my head, I searched my employer’s records for Yancey’s name–without success. Was he talking about BJU?

Connecting the dots wasn’t that hard. Whether or not Yancey attended BJU wasn’t the point. This was the South and the so-called religion that created BJU. I couldn’t distance myself from it any further. This was the ideology that bore the system in which I lived, worked, ministered, and was raising my family.

Read Yancey for yourself.

When I visited Mendenhall in 1974, a sign welcomed me to town: “White people unite, defeat Jew/Communist race mixers.” I asked John Perkins [Yancey's African-American friend] to show me an example of racism in action. “When I write your story, people are going to tell me everything has changed,” I said. “The civil rights bill was ten years ago. Is there still overt discrimination?”

Perkins thought for a minute and suddenly his face brightened: “I know — let’s integrate the Revolving Table restaurant!” We drove to an elegant restaurant famous for its mechanized Lazy Susan, which slowly revolves in the center of a huge table, bearing platters of blackeyed peas, squash, cabbage, sweet potatoes, chicken and dumplings, and other Southern favorites. When we sat down, the white diners all glared at us and then, as if at a prearranged signal, got up and moved away to smaller tables. Except for Perkins and me, no one in the restaurant spoke for the next hour. I ate uneasily, glancing over my shoulder, expecting a nightstick. When I paid the bill and commented on the delicious food, the hostess took my money without responding or even looking me in the eye. I had the tiniest glimpse of the hostility Perkins had lived with all his life.

Two months later, when I published my article on John Perkins, the Mississippi branch of the Christian organization I worked for passed a resolution demanding that I be fired for stirring up bad memories. “Things have changed now,” they said. “Why dig up the past?”

Why indeed? Almost three decades have passed since my Missisisippi visit, and the great civil rights victories are nearing the half¬century milestone. We live in a new century now, a new millennium even, and much has indeed changed. Nowadays, black patrons in Mississippi can eat wherever they want, drink from any water fountain, sleep in any motel. The victories that Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evans, Bob Moses, John Perkins, and many others fought for were won — legally, at least — although they waited a full century after the Emancipation Proclamation. Progressive Southerners from Georgia, Arkansas, and Texas have served as president. Black visitors can attend white churches at will, though they seldom want to. All these dreams seemed unattainable to Martin Luther King, Jr., just four decades ago. As a token of the momentous changes, the nation now pauses each year to honor King himself, object of so much controversy during his lifetime, on a national holiday. He is the only African-American, the only minister, and indeed the only individual American so honored.

The victories did not come easily, and most did not come at all during his lifetime. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, an uneasy rival of Dr. King, kidded him in 1963 that his methods had not achieved a single victory for integration in Albany or Birmingham. “In fact, Martin, if you have desegregated anything by your efforts, kindly enlighten me.”

“Well,” King replied, “I guess about the only thing I’ve desegregated so far is a few human hearts.” He knew that the ultimate victory must be won there. Laws could prevent white people from lynching blacks, but no law could require races to forgive or love one another. The human heart, not the courtroom, was his supreme battleground. As one of those changed hearts, I would have to agree.

King had developed a sophisticated strategy of war fought with grace, not guns. He countered violence with nonviolence and hatred with love. King’s associate Andrew Young remembers those turbulent days as a time when they sought to save “black men’s bodies and white men’s souls.” Their real goal, King said, was not to defeat the white man but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority…. The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.” And that is what Martin Luther King, Jr., finally set into motion, even in born racists like me.

Despite the moral and social fallout from racism, somehow the nation did stay together, and people of all colors eventually joined the democratic process in America, even in the South. For some years now, Atlanta has elected African-American mayors, including civil rights leader Andrew Young. Even Selma, Alabama, has a black mayor, who in the year 2000 defeated the mayor who had held office since the notorious march. And old “Segregation forever!” George Wallace appeared in his wheelchair before the black leadership of Alabama to apologize for his past behavior, an apology he repeated on statewide television. When Wallace went on to apologize to the Baptist church in Montgomery where King had launched the movement, the leaders who came to offer him forgiveness included Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, and the brother of the murdered Medgar Evers.

In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention, 150 years after forming over the issue of slavery, formally repented of their long-term support of racism. (A pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church responded, “Finally we have a response to Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham City jail’ in 1963. Too bad it’s thirty-two years too late.”)

Even the large Baptist church I attended in my childhood learned to repent. When I attended a service several years ago, I was shocked to find only a few hundred worshipers scattered in the large sanctuary that, in my childhood, used to be packed with 1,500. The church seemed cursed. Finally the pastor, a classmate of mine from childhood, took the unusual step of scheduling a service of repentance. In advance of the service he wrote to Tony Evans and to the shunned Bible professor, asking their forgiveness. Then publicly, painfully, with African-American leaders present. he recounted the sin of racism as it had been practiced by the church in the past. He repented, and received their forgiveness. Although a burden seemed to lift from the congregation after that service, it was not sufficient to save the church. A few years later the white congregation moved out to the suburbs, and today a rousing African-American Congregation, the Wings of Faith, fills the building and rattles its windows once more.

Observers of the South sometimes speak of it as “Christ-haunted.’ Perhaps they should speak of it as “race-haunted” as well. All of us, white or black, who grew up in those days bear scars. Some black people, like John Perkins and Bob Moses, bear physical scars. We whites bear spiritual scars. Although I have not lived in the South for thirty years, I live with its memories, like the medieval murderers who were forced to wear the corpses of their victims strapped to their backs. The entire nation bears scars. Who would suggest that we have achieved anything like “the beloved community” King longed for?

I have visited King’s old church in Atlanta, Ebenezer Baptist, and sat in tears as I saw through new eyes the moral center of the black community that gave them strength to fight against bigots like me. I was on the outside in those days, cracking jokes, spreading rumors, helping sustain a system of evil. Inside the church, and for a time only inside the church, the black Community stood tall. My eyes, blinded by bigotry, could not see the Kingdom of God at work.

A few years before his death, King was asked about mistakes he had made. He replied, “Well, the most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our Cause to the white power structures. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, and direct appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands–and some even took stands against us. . . .

Only one thing haunts me more than the sins of my past: What sins am I blind to today? It took the greatness of Martin Luther King, Jr., to awaken the conscience of a nation in the last century. What keeps us in this new century from realizing the beloved community of justice, peace, and love for which King fought and died? On the wrong side of what issues does the church stubbornly plant its feet today? As King used to say, the presence of injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Occasionally, grace and power descend on great and flawed leaders to convict and lead us on. In the end, it was not King’s humanitarianism that got through to me, nor his Ghandian example of nonviolent resistance, nor his personal sacrifices, inspiring as those may be. It was his grounding in the Christian gospel that finally made me conscious of the beam in my eye and forced me to attend to the message he was proclaiming. Because he kept quoting Jesus, eventually I had to listen. The church may not always get it right–and it may take centuries or even millennia for its eyes to open–but when it does, God’s own love and forgiveness flow down like a stream of living water.