Evil Exists Across Our Land

In the early morning hours I spent some time in Stride Toward Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr.'s story of the Montgomery bus boycott. I was moved by one of his sentences:  "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."  These words prompted the following words.

In the early morning hours

Not long till the break of day
There are those who are working
Just to torment and have their way.

Politics of the powerful

It sure looks like that to me
I hope I am wrong
It is before us now we see.

In the early morning hours

While people’s hearts are at rest
Some are already plotting harm
Wounding the souls of the best.

Yes, evil exists across our land

It hides in every shadow
It looks and lurches at any moment
Until it finds its prey, no matter.

Destruction is on their lips

Chaos is in their renown
The intent is very clear
To turn things upside down.

In the hearts and in the decisions

Of the one and the many
Spirits of people are at risk
Of malevolence there is plenty.

Our institutions have deserted us

Toward whiteness and maleness
They cast aside all others
Lord, bring back your holiness.

The people in power are jealous

For their positions and fame
While the poor and the homeless
Live with emotional pain.

Racial epithets are hurled through the crowd

The words pierce the soul
Of those who are young
And those who are old.

Racism sexism classism

Just a few
Bigotry and xenophobia
Around things people spew.
 
Policies are made by the powerful
Behind doors that are closed
Things get re-arranged
But evil gets exposed.

We gather up people and send them away

Young and old, bad and the good
Just because their names
Are not understood.

That black woman is in harm’s way

That Muslim teen is at risk
She who is transgendered
They all are summarily dismissed.
 
Acceptance of evil when we see it
Makes out of all of us
Perpetrators and cooperators
Until our bodies are dust.

Causes are righteous

They bring out our best
We will not live at peace
Until the people sleep and rest.

 

The Prayer of a Troubled Bystander

This is a personal peek into my inner world. It may resonate or it may offend. Feel free to leave comments.

 

Dear God:

You have observed my quietness of late, no doubt. You have listened to my inner struggles and angst and torment.  You have heard my unarticulated cries of grief and pain.  You have known of my inability to place things in their proper order. Yes, you have known the roads I have trod.

I am not alone in this struggle. Many, many more are dismayed, troubled, tormented, and, yes, even terrorized, by these last few months.  Neither they nor I have much hope for anything better in the days ahead.  In fact, my suspicions are that things will worsen.

I am a divided man down to the deepest parts of me. While I know that in the olden days, a piece of humanity was seen through the eyes of Hebraic holism, and no one part was separated out from another part, though in the psalms we see much emotion, pain, grief, and rage alongside hope, trust, faith, reverence. In my own self, I am able to pinpoint various parts of me that think, feel, and see things differently and maybe even connectedly. I am angry, sad, worried, perplexed, troubled, and full of doubt.

On the one hand there is the adage that you are in control, that “God is in control.” That comes out from the left and the right. Lest I overly offend you, we have talked before about this.  You were in control but where were you during the decimation of First Nations people? Where were you during the middle passage? Where were you when the chains, whips, lashes, inhumanity, and ownership were perpetrated upon brown people? Where were you during the Holocaust? Where were you during the horrors of Jim Crow? Where are you now?

Have you indeed chosen this particular administration, or is it that you have chosen governments in general to rule the people? Where were you when Nero was raging upon believers, and using them as torches to light the night? I do not do one-liners well, and that is one of my faults, that even when the one-liners have truth in them, I am prone to detect how the one-liners are used by whom and upon whom. I do not ask for easy answers, nor do I want them from those who are other places than me. I do not want to be patronized by folks who feign knowing more than the rest of us. 

Things these days trouble many of us.  I suspect that there are folks who voted for the Republican candidate who are equally as troubled as those of us who voted for the Democratic candidate. I do not know. I only suspect. No one is telling me those troubles.

Knowing that we have elected a man who disparages the physically challenged, who insults women, Hispanics, and Blacks, and who calls for policies that insult LGBTQ persons, one who overtly and covertly admires all things white and male, is deeply troubling. That he is now appointing amongst his cabinet those with racist ties and ideologies that mirror the worst of humanity. That the world is listening and watching, that other nations are already developing their plans, that we have lost esteem in the global community, is difficult to swallow.

Against all of these things and more, to know that some 81% of Christian evangelicals voted for him is even more astonishing.  We voted overwhelmingly for a man whose values are diametrically opposed to those of the Christian faith. I do not know exactly where to put that.  That leaders of the Christian right and apparently leaders of at least one foreign country, one which has been the enemy of American for decades, even centuries, applaud his election.

That children of all colors, and parents of all colors, tremble for the safety of their children. That racial epithets abound, rude words on walls of schools, cards sent to children, teachers who speak inflammatory language, and other things that send a clear message, unless you are white, you are not safe. That these are not just isolated events is deeply troubling.

On the streets in our cities, night after night, people are protesting, and for the most part those protests are calm and intense. At other times they devolve into violence and destruction. I am not in those crowds, but my heart is with them. They as individuals and as communities are speaking their minds. I wonder who is listening.

So, Jehovah, I am troubled. I know only one place to turn.  You have always been steadfast. Looking backwards is more likely to make sense than the present, and certainly the future holds much anxiety and worry.

I just want to know that you are here and that you hear and that you will respond on behalf of our people.  I just want to know that what breaks our hearts also breaks your heart. If that is so, then I am ok. I think we will all be ok if we know that your heart is broken when your people are threatened and scared.

Amen

Need for a Resurrection Rant

This morning before the sun came up, I was reading and pondering a variety of things. The biblical text spoke to resurrection, the book of African American prayers pleaded with God to save them from White Christians (the prayer was written in 1829), and Thomas Merton spoke of love. So here are my meandering thoughts with no punctuations, so with apologies for those who are inclined to edit.  Yes, myself included.

And, if resurrection is a theme, my black people are in need of a resurrection from the deaths and traumas and brutality of lost years and anxious nights lived out of fear and anxiety and worry that my white people would come bearing guns and machine guns with big cars and big lights to take their house and their land and all that they had fought for away from them and give it to someone else or perhaps sell it on the auction block like the powerful men with whips and guns and chains had done with their ancestors years ago because the years had passed but the realities of it had not passed, and now we wonder why Kolin K protested. He is calling out this country and its powerful citizens to unite to eradicate injustices and police brutality. I know people who have experienced brutality. It is ugly and it is more animalistic than it is human because those who do so do so out of imagined good intentions or malevolent intentions and out of intentions of putting the land in the hands of those who can do the best with it, and those people that they deem could do the best with it look curiously enough like them. Smell like them. Dress like them. They may even go to the same church. They are friends. They know what’s going to happen because of the off-the-record conversations and decisions. That is brutality. Saw it too often in Kansas, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and the list of states goes on and on.

We all need a resurrection. First, though, we need to die to our old, racist ways of considering ourselves and our places in the world. Can’t rise without being dead and can’t be dead and resurrected without being buried. Can’t be dead and buried without no life in this human psyche carcass. Only the Holy One of Israel can resurrect us as individuals and a society from the deadness that creeps into our pores when we treat other children of God in ways that are sure to make Him unhappy. 

So, this morning I am also thinking about Romans 6, and death burial and resurrection of Jesus and how the believer metaphorically and physically does the same thing and how even those of us whose theology is different can arise from the swamps of our own self-imposed and societally-imposed disregard for people and from the stench of that emotional and relational exile from people also loved by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and you and me.