Cook County AIDS Benefit, Friday Aug 22

The Presence

Ezekiel 48:23 - 35
and
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Shug and Celie talking about God:

Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.

It? I ast.

Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It.

But what do it look like? I ast.

Don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.

Shug a beautiful something, let me tell you. She frown a little, look out cross the yard, lean back in her chair, look like a big rose.

She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it.

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

I walk around talking to squirrels and birds. I put my hand inside bushes and trees to feel them - not to feel their leaves and their bark, but to feel their life. I reach out to buildings, bridges, and furniture to connect with those who made them. I talk to people that I don't know and try to look at people as I pass them on the street or stand with them in an elevator. I see life all around me. I want to feel it. I want to touch it. I want to embrace it.

There is a heartbeat to this world that is pounding out life continuously. I believe it connects us to each other and to every other living thing. I believe it connects us to our past and to our future. I can't always feel it - but sometimes I can.

This life that I feel and sometimes don't feel but believe is there anyway - this life that connects us and sustains us - this heartbeat, I believe, is The Holy ... Our Creator.

Jesus said crazy things like, "I am the Life" and "I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly." Jesus also talks about abiding with us, even to the end of the age, and that he will send us a Comforter, which is the Holy Spirit that will live with us forever. Our sacred writing promises that there will always be a holy presence living with us and living within us.

At the end of Ezekiel, after all the strange visions and prophesies and bloodshed; after God makes it clear that exploitation and oppression of the weak, the sick, and the scattered is reprehensible; Israel is promised a city that will be divided equally among all the people. It is a city whose name is, "The Lord is There."

There is another city mentioned in our sacred writing. It is in the book of the Revelation. The one seeing the vision and narrating the story describes this city.

Revelation 21:1-8
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them; they will be God's peoples, and God's self will be with them; God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." And the one who was seated on the throne said, "See, I am making all things new." Also the one seated on the throne said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." Then I was told, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death."

There's a lot in this section. I read more of it than I needed to because I don't want to avoid the ugly stuff, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on it either. First I want say that this is someone's vision - someone's dream maybe. I don't believe this is something to be taken literally. I know that many have though, and it has brought pain and condemnation to people who don't deserve to be hurt and condemned. Second, I don't believe our Divine Beloved will torture people eternally. I don't believe our Divine Beloved tortures people ever. I do believe that the author of this book had a vision and framed it in a way that made sense to them.

What I see as the focal point of this passage is that "the home of God is among mortals." The Holy dwells with us! I see this as being the same city that Ezekiel talked about. It's a brand new city. The old systems of oppression and hierarchy have no place here. If you live in this city, you must agree with the ground rules - all who thirst get water, and all who cry get their tears wiped away. This is not a place that The Holy visits or manages from afar. It is the very dwelling place of the one who is Love.

Alice Walker pushes the point even more, saying through the voices of Shug and Celie that we are connected not only to each other but to all of creation. This connection isn't theoretical, but it is the energy of the Creator itself. Shug says, "it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed." This is a form of solidarity that most people are frightened to imagine. She says that "God is everything." If we can believe, or even imagine believing, that God is everything and that we are connected to all of creation, that means that The Holy is present everywhere, or, in other words, that The Presence is.

Think about the Creator, our Divine Beloved, The Holy, God ... whatever name you use ... Think about using the name, The Presence. One Old Testament name for God is "I Am." Another is "The Lord Who Sees." Yet another is, "The Lord Who Provides." All these types of names insinuate a loving and involved Entity ... an Entity that is integrated into life. I want us to imagine this Entity as Presence. The one who sees is able to see because it is present. The one who provides is able to provide because it is present. The one who is ... who simply is ... is present.

That would mean that we are accompanied by the one who has loved, who continues to love and who will always love us. There is a power to accompanying someone. There is a peace that we can offer someone when we accompany them. When you walk a journey with someone and you share their pains and their joys, you are a witness to their life and they are a witness to yours. It goes both ways. So if The Presence is walking with us then we are also walking with The Presence. Our Creator is a witness to our life and we are a witness to the Creator's.

The Presence is the heartbeat of life. It is what I want to feel; what I want to touch; what I want to embrace. The Presence transcends time connecting us to the past and future. This week try living consciously accompanied by The Presence. See if there is a comfort there and a strength. We are the city. We are the dwelling place. We are accompanied by The Presence and at the same time we are to accompany others with our presence. Through us tears are wiped away and the thirsty are offered living water.

The Legacy of Slavery: The Cost of Generational Trauma

by Harriet's Daughter

I grew up in a big city in the Midwestern U.S. The neighborhood that I grew up in was a new development of small bungalows going up in a previously wooded, area, so there were woods to play in all around us, but we were really in the city. It was a very attractive place for those who were buying – young black couples who were recently migrated from the south. My parents both had had rural upbringings in the south, as did most everyone I knew in my neighborhood. We grew up knowing “down home” meant the places our parents, many of them with their southern accents, sayings and folkways intact, had come from. We northern city kids inherited much of that upbringing, although our circumstances were different than our parents.

My parents came north to find work and a life that the segregated south would not easily offer (which is not to say that life in the north was all butterflies and rainbows). My dad came, as hundreds/thousands of others did, to work in the auto plants. If I think about it, practically all of my friends had fathers, uncles, cousins that worked in either in auto or steel manufacturing. These were among the first good jobs – union jobs, too – that opened up to blacks. My mom had come because she had family up north already; an uncle and aunt and their kids - from the same small town in Florida she was from. After my parents met and married, they lived in an apartment near my mother’s relatives for a while. This apartment was in a densely populated, inner city area. When the opportunity came up to move to the new house in the neighborhood described above, where there were lawns and woods all around, they jumped at the chance.

While we lived in that house, our personal family migration story continued. Aunts, uncles, cousins – a whole assortment of relatives streamed through, living with us a couple of weeks, a few months or in one case several years, until they found work and settled into their own homes. That’s what happened in lots of families. The chance to buy a home… to own property was huge.

And although in my childhood memory there was plenty of space to roam, in reality these were tiny little houses on tiny little plots of land, in a corner of the city where our families were allowed to live in relative peace. It was starting out as a black neighborhood. However, in other parts of the city, the white parts, when black people moved in, whites moved out. If they didn’t move out of the city altogether to the suburbs, they moved further west – the white side of town.

A while back, Ding over at BitchPhd wrote a post that talked about the importance of land for black families:

The new Skip Gates special on PBS is full of these stories of passing, diaspora, disappearance and reinvention.

What strikes me about some of these early stories of lost family members reclaimed is how prominent black-owned land figures into them and how crucial the land is to forming early black identity as well as ideas of freedom and citizenship. The program begins with Gates visiting the land his family has owned for 6 generations and passes by a parcel of land his family had owned but had to sell. Since part of their own genealogical story is lost to them, their farm acts like an anchor for their identity. In subsequent conversations with celebrities like Chris Rock, Tina Turner, Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle or Tom Joyner, Gates reveals that their families had once owned land - 40 acres, 62 acres, 65 acres - donating or selling some of their land to build schools or churches. The revelations about property and land ownership become a source of pride in their family.

What is it that Rock says – If he had known this before, it would have taken away the inevitability that he would be nothing. And property is usually the vehicle for these stories to come to light; it acts like a bracket around early black families: you were property and now you have property.

At the turn of the century blacks owned between 12-15 million acres of land; by the 30s and 40s that number shrinks to just a little over a million. For many of these black families the land is a foundation to build their newly acquired identities as freed people that suddenly disappears, forcing their story to jump, only to be picked up further down the line. What happened? What happened in those intervening years? Did African Americans just suddenly decide, “Hm, you know, owning land sucks. Let’s pick up and go north”? Usually something else happened to make a family, or even a whole black town, disperse.

(Read the whole post here.)

She cites Torn from the Land, an investigation into the loss of black families’ land between the period of reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement:

In an 18-month investigation, The Associated Press documented a pattern in which black Americans were cheated out of their land or driven from it through intimidation, violence and even murder.

In some cases, government officials approved the land-takings; in others, they took part in them. The earliest occurred before the Civil War; others are being litigated today.

Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia, oilfields in Mississippi, a baseball spring-training facility in Florida.

The United States has a long history of bitter land disputes, from range wars in the Old West to broken treaties with American Indians. Poor white landowners, too, were sometimes treated unfairly, pressured to sell at rock-bottom prices by railroads and mining companies.

The fate of black landowners has been an overlooked part of this story.

The AP — in an investigation that included interviews with more than 1,000 people and the examination of tens of thousands of public records — documented 107 land-takings in 13 Southern and border states.

In those cases alone, 406 black landowners lost more than 24,000 acres of farm and timberland plus 85 smaller properties, including stores and city lots. Today, virtually all of this property, valued at tens of millions of dollars, is owned by whites or corporations.

Properties taken from blacks were often small — a 40-acre farm, a modest house. But the losses were devastating to families struggling to overcome the legacy of slavery.

Anti-racism education makes the connection between white privilege and generational wealth. This flies in the face of the American myth of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.” In this society, poor people are blamed for their poverty – the reason people are poor, we think, is because they are lazy, or they don’t have good judgment, they have poor morals or they just are not smart. We don’t acknowledge that generational wealth (as one example – there are many others) makes a huge difference in the life of an individual (and therefore a family, and thus a community), and this is absolutely connected to having property. When people have property that they can pass on to their children or other relatives, this makes a difference.

Of course, it is not only about owning land, which is not a universal concept, anyway. When people don’t have to pull up stakes because no one will hire you because of the body you inhabit, this makes a difference. When people move out of neighborhoods that suddenly become “undesirable” this makes a difference.

So it is not only the monetary value of the land. The ability to move freely about is a kind of capital, too. It is knowing that you belong somewhere; that you fit in, that you have an identity and being treated accordingly. It is the ability to not have your very presence be so offensive to people that they want to annihilate you and those who look like, or act like you. And so, while I am reflecting here upon the past, this is not simply a story of the past. People who inhabit bodies that are considered “wrong” are fair game for mistreatment. Some bodies do not matter… not then, not now.

Native peoples, whose identity is closely connected to the land, were murdered or run off land they had inhabited for centuries. Of those who survived, many of their children endured “kill the Indian, save the man” campaigns that were meant to “civilize” them; make them American, make them white… by denying their language, cutting their hair, keeping them away from their communities… so much more. Refusing to abandon their cultures cost them the right to move freely about in wider society. The trauma of this sustained pattern of genocide is evident today.

For my people, the descendants of Africans who were enslaved, there is a different story, but a parallel one. Enslaved people owned no property; they did not even own themselves. Even their children and their partners, (should they be allowed to marry), could be taken away from them in an instant - sold away to someone else. Even our names do not belong to us. There are not many generations that I can count in my family tree; there is no land that I can point to and say, “This is where my people come from.” Several years ago, my daughter and I visited Nigeria – it was my first trip to an African country. While we were there, many people welcomed us, welcomed us “home.” But one man I talked to spoke the truth when he said that he had sorrow for African Americans, because we “do not know where our village is.”

I do not know where my village is. Does it matter? Should it matter? On the surface, perhaps it does not. I prefer to live in a world where I can connect to people beyond the fact of shared bloodline – after all, I am the mother of an adopted child. I have friends whose ties to me run much, much deeper than blood. I want to create a world where people do not align themselves into tribes with boundaries that cannot be breached, whatever those boundaries happen to be. Yet, I cannot help but believe that the combination of this “homelessness” and the reality that my people have been reviled for most of our history in this country feed into a communal psyche that is damaged and goes untreated.

My parents grew up under the system of segregation. They saw the signs that said “colored” and “white.” They learned the corresponding message that they were thought to be so … what? Inhuman? Unclean? Diseased? …that they could not share space - eat… work… watch movies… worship – with white people. What does that do to a people, generation after generation? Yet we are told slavery was a long time ago, segregation is illegal. Get over it. Move on.

I believe this is a wound that has not been healed in the souls of my people. I don’t know that it can be. Last Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an official apology for slavery and segregation. Reparations were not mentioned as part of the apology – I believe the resolution would never have made the floor had they been. Many people believe an apology without the offer of restitution is meaningless. Perhaps so. But the acknowledgement that it happened, and it was wrong, and that the repercussions are long-lasting…. is a tiny bit of salve on that wound.

The Illinois Women of African Descent Coalition

The Future Depends on Memories

Ecclesiastes 11:7 – 12:14

A little over a week ago, I went to see the Rev. Dr. Renita Weems speak. Dr. Weems is a nationally-renowned theologian and an ordained elder in the African Methodist Church. She has been a member of the faculty of Vanderbilt University and Spelman College, and she has been celebrated by Ebony Magazine as one of America's top 15 preachers. She touched on a variety of subjects that made me think and double-think. One such double-think nugget for me was her reference to research that says grown women have a harder time sticking with an exercise program when they did not exercise when they were kids. Apparently they are finding that having no memory of past exercise makes it harder to exercise in the future. Picking up something from scratch is hard when you're an adult.

The word, remember, is important in our reading today. "Remember your creator in the days of your youth." Remember your creator BEFORE the days of trouble come and BEFORE the sun and the light and moon and the stars are darkened and BEFORE the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken. Remember your creator BEFORE the bad things happen. If you have no memory of your creator before the bad things happen, how will you have memory of your creator WHEN they are happening?

Just like kids who avoid exercise when they are young find it difficult to exercise when they need to ... when they are older and their metabolism slows, if we avoid things like prayer or meditation; practicing love, forgiveness, and humility; and being thankful to our Divine Beloved - if we avoid those things when all is well, how will we remember to do them when things get difficult? It's hard to start love from scratch when you have no memory of loving. It's hard to pray from scratch or have spiritual conversations with your friends when you have no memory of doing these things. Often these things don't even come to mind at the most critical times.

Things like prayer, meditation, love, forgiveness, repentance – these aren't just religious ideals for which the ultimate spiritual person strives. These are coping skills. They are the coping skills of people of faith.

Just before the character of Solomon tells us to remember he says, "Banish anxiety from your mind, and put away pain from your body; for youth and the dawn of life are vanity." Youth and the dawn of life don't last, that's pretty clear from this verse I think. But what does banish anxiety from your mind and put away pain from your body mean? I would like very much to do that. I have pain in my body that I'd like to put away and anxiety that I'd like to banish. How about you? It isn't that easy though. Do you just say, "Anxiety, you are hereby banished!" and it all goes away. I believe in miracles ... I do ... but I can't seem to make stuff like that happen just by making a declaration.

But maybe I can make things a little easier on myself if I practice taking care of my body, spirit, emotions, and mind while I am in a good place. That way when pain occurs or anxiety starts to get in the way I have developed a habit of better responses. When a crisis happens and I am already in the habit of prayer, I am much more likely to pray during the crisis. I know of a man who prayed in tongues daily. One day he was at the dentist office and had to have oral surgery. The story goes that while they were putting him under he started praying in tongues. It was just what he did.

I can tell where I am in my prayer life based on how I react to a crisis situation. A few years back I hit a deer. As my vehicle was careening down the highway I started praying asking Jesus for help. It was involuntary. On the other hand, I have been known to involuntarily spew out some, let's call them "unsavory words," in other crisis situations such as when I stub my toes. I hate stubbing my toes. It really really gets to me. I don't always shout out, "Oh Jesus help me."

When it isn't my pattern to remember my Divine Beloved, I'm not going to remember to remember in a crisis. I won't remember when the day of trouble comes if I don't remember before the day of trouble. The day of trouble doesn't put me in a reflective mind ... "Well now, what might be the best way to handle this sticky situation?" That is not what I'm thinking. In fact, we don't tend to think in those situations. We just react. We go to our default.

When life isn't hard is when it's the most crucial to practice our faith. Rest assured life becomes hard sometimes. Church life becomes hard sometimes. Our faith gets challenged at every level. Every church has hard times - times of crisis. This church has had hard times. Living through a crisis takes its toll. We need to keep remembering our creator. We need to keep practicing our faith both at home and within our community. I think it's easy to get out of the habit when the crisis is over because we need to fall out for awhile.

We are all in different stages of healing. We are also in different stages of crisis. While it is difficult to start our faith from scratch during hard times, it isn't impossible. The fact that you are here at church means that you are remembering the importance of community in your life. I'm not saying we all have to go to church every single time there's a meeting. I do want us to think about our habits though. What is your (and my) tendency? What's going to happen with me the next time I stub my toe? What will happen with me if I hit another deer?

No matter where we are in our crisis or healing of anything, we have to remember now. Because if we remember now ... we won't have to remember later. The memory will find us.

Deuteronomy 6:4-12
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. When the Lord your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you - a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant - and when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

When things are going well, don't forget. Do whatever you have to to remember. How do we create these memories? What do we practice? What does it mean to pray or to love? How do we remember to be humble and thankful? Some of you may already have daily or weekly practices. I like to do braiding and knotting as a meditative practice. I also have a meditation moment when I brush my teeth. I don't think about what I'm going to pack for lunch or if I'll find matching socks. It's a way for me to focus on the moment I am in rather than the moment I might be in next. It's a small way ... but for me it helps to remind me that I want to be present in as many moments as I can throughout the day.

According to Deuteronomy, do whatever you have to. Put sticky notes on your computer or bathroom mirror of favorite verses; sing songs in the car that remind you how best to walk your faith; talk to each other about your faith, actively see people you come in contact with as being holy and sacred; look in the mirror and remind yourself that you are holy and sacred. You are holy and sacred, you know ...

Forgive the person who swipes your parking spot - the one you've been circling around to find for the last 15 minutes; forgive yourself for things you would beat yourself up about; thank the Creator for the grass or the trees or the lake; thank the Creator for having running water and electricity if you have it.

All of these are coping skills that you are developing for when the time comes and "the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken."

One day I was walking into the downtown office building where I work, and as I turned the corner toward the elevator with a UPS woman next to me, the elevator opened up. Spontaneously - because I was in a good place - I said, "Thank you, Jesus." The UPS woman said, "Amen!" From the security desk I heard the voice of the head of security say, "Gus pushed the button." Of course I thanked Gus for pushing the button for us. But that reminded me to thank people for the little things - for pushing the elevator button or holding a door open. This may sound simple and maybe trivial, but it isn't. These are ways of practicing. Here's another thing that I've found to be really helpful in my faith walk - I try to remember to smile, especially when I enter a room. If I find myself forgetting, I write the word "smile" on my hand. Smiling can change your whole day.

Verse 9 of chapter 11 in Ecclesiastes tells us to rejoice. Throughout the book we are reminded to Eat, Drink, and Be Merry. Enjoy this life the best you can. It isn't hedonism - it's good faith practice. If you are in the habit of enjoying what you can that's in your life, then when things get messed up, you have a foundation of joy or at least the ability to smile.
Sure there are some intense things you can do. You can go to the gulf coast to help repair the damage there; you can go on a retreat; you can volunteer for an organization - but it's the daily practices that help us develop the coping skills we need for the daily and the unusual crisis. It's also the daily practices that help us know when we need to do something more intense. This week look for the moments when you can actively remember your Creator ... your Divine Beloved. Think about what Deuteronomy suggests to, "Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." Think of ways to remember today, so that in the future the memory will come to you when you need it.