My "Racism"— Part Twenty-two. Prayer and Chutzpah.

In the testaments of the Holy Bible, in my seminary studies, in my ministries as a priest/pastoral counselor, chaplain, and spiritual director, my “racism” came into glaring focus. So did my wondering about large categories like race and gender. Is there no category called race or gender that is not now called racISM or sexISM? I mean it is the addition of ISM that suggests that the concept before the ISM wields exclusive, or too much, power—psychologically, spiritually and institutionally. 

Over time I’ve grown to understand my own “racism” as intersectional—layered with many other -isms, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, feminism, socialism, fundamentalism, materialism, intellectualism, consumerism. Such complexity describes my lived experience of my “racism”, making it bearable, forgivable, and, dare I say, manageable. 

Carol Lee, my best preteen friend and the black girl I betrayed because I was racist, no longer haunts my soul or pricks my conscience, thanks to Bible stories, the presence of God within me, and the little bird in PD Eastman’s book, “Are You My Mother?” who at last realizes that all his questions, all his earnest questing for his lost mother, all his heroically strenuous efforts have come to naught. He kneels on his tiny exhausted wee bird legs and becomes a prayer. 

I am my prayer to you, says the psalmist in Psalm 109 (Greenberg translation). 

How does one become one’s own prayer? It is not by working obsessively, seeking answers to your prayer, although such efforts are good for your mental muscles and may even be helpful to other people. It is rather to slow down enough to uncross your eyes so as to see beyond your own desire, to slide off the throne of your ruling desire, your immediate worry, to release your held breath, to open your clenched fists, to let your willing tears flow freely, thereby giving God’s Spirit some stretching space in your soul. 

Scene LXI.  Prayer Rose

I discovered this on many many silent retreats in which prayer was the only bloody thing I did. Well, I cheated, but not much. I became a living, walking, breathing prayer. At night in the chapel at Mercy Center in Madison, Connecticut, I knelt alone and gazed at the elongated oil portrait, painted by artist Mary Daly, RSM, of a rose—long stem, thorns, bursting petals against a faintly visible green cross—hanging behind the tabernacle. This to me became the sacred heart of Christ, not bloodied or dead, but beckoning. 

I wanted to walk into this rose. The tabernacle below, containing the sacrament consecrated as Christ’s body and blood, was locked. Locked. I stared. I became a prayer. I climbed the “stalk” of that rose, feeling pricked and torn by thorns, finally to enter the sacred rose-heart of Christ—bruised but breathing. The next day when there was light I drew my own rose and wrote: "I am a rose/You are too/We two rose." 

To make such a climb—powerless, longing, praying—was what it was like to feel called to priesthood in my own religious tradition while trapped in one of those -isms, the sex one, and to be locked out, as I, because of the White-only rules at our beach club, had locked Carol Lee out for her -ism, the race one. Locked out. 

Scene LXII.  Breaking Up the Old Boys’ Club. Women Breach Male Collegiality in the Episcopal Church

In 1974, and again in 1975, groups of Episcopal women deacons organized, inspired by their calling to priesthood. They got political. Some willing bishops broke ranks to ordain these women outside of Church canonical regulations. Prayer, communicating with one another, and their shared desires led them to disobedience—and success. 

These women, on whose shoulders I stood as I pursued my own call to priesthood in the Episcopal Church, acted together to break a small but not insignificant sound barrier in patriarchal Episcopal Church politics. It would take a long time for the Church to swallow the whole law whole, to unlock its heart, to disrupt the “order” of things, and admit women as priests—and eventually as bishops. Here are some of the original 1974 group, the Philadelphia Eleven, lifting up the consecrated body of Christ-in-bread. 

Scene LXIII. The Syrophoenician (Canaanite) Woman

This small ancient story (Mark 7, Matthew 15) is one of my favorite ones in all scripture. Biblical women to me are not without flesh. Their stories count and help shape my soul. The woman in this small story counted as much to me as the actual women who paved the way to ordination for us all. It took me eleven years of knocking on doors and prayer-begging to be ordained priest. It would have been easier if I were a man, easier if I’d not been divorced and single, therefore dangerous, you know what I mean, harder perhaps if I’d been Black, or burdened by any other -isms, and easier if I had not overexercised and flaunted my natural chutzpah. 

I identified with this Syrophoenician woman, because she too was an outsider, a noisy threat, a Greek, a Gentile, banging on doors, annoying the Rabbi who was on a mission to secure the promised land for his people, the Jews. She was an interruption and a disruption of ordered canonical processes, like all of us women seeking priesthood were. She was even viewed by Jesus himself as unacceptable by standards we could call NationalISM.  He said: “I came for my people Israel!” Locked out she was. He turned her away three times. She kept on asking for healing for her daughter. Jesus I suppose felt a bit bullied yet heard in her cry, her prayer, the reminder of the depth and breadth and inclusivity of God’s own healing mission—not for Jews alone.

I, like her, and like the other women seeking ordination who were trying to overcome ancient biases, never gave up. Never. 

 

2020.07.19 My "Racism"—Brief Ancdotal History, Part Six. Privilege?

Scene XV. Racism—A Discernment

I know it’s unfair to write about my racism without acknowledging that it came about largely because of the absence of Blacks, coupled with the piercing, indelible, unshakeable memory of my childhood friendship with one black girl, Carol Lee. It was that friendship, and the shame I felt when I chose to have my beach club party without her because the beach club barred blacks, that let me know there even was such a thing as racism—a phenomenon I did not know how to name, but whose impact stayed with me. I chose from privilege rather than from heart.

I do not say: “My best friend is black”—as if that assertion proved anything. One of my best friends really was black. Our connection happened over a few summers, and I haven’t seen Carol Lee  in over 70 years. I tried to work Google-magic to find her and did find one image I thought might be my Carol Lee—in an obituary, alas. Nevertheless, my Carol Lee memory became a benchmark strong enough to serve as a plumb line against which I measured, and measure, my felt racism.

My “Racism” has quotation marks around racism, because I’m writing about my discernment process over some 80 years. My scenarios are wisps of personal memory that structure the grid of my learnings—bits and pieces that unfold in answer to my question: I’m not racist—or am I?  I do not yet know the answer.

I intersperse some contemporary wisdom on the subject, everything in the context of my own direct experience.  Racism is word that in 2020 is headlined all over the world and laid at our national doorstep as a call, I’d say from God, to examine and change our personal and national addiction to its practice. It’s time.  

In 2019, I heard African-American, Isabelle Wilkerson, the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, speak about the great migration of southern blacks to urban areas of the North and West, I was spellbound by the memoir-like flavor of her historical study. A whole people were forced to move en masse, because, although emancipated, they were denied adequate access to resources necessary for thriving in America.

The New York Times Magazine (7/19/2020) published Wilkerson’s article, “America’s Enduring Caste System” in which she imaged caste as the usher’s flashlight in a darkened theater silently guiding us to our assigned seats—assigned, but who bought the tickets?  This is caste, not racism, according to Wilderson who writes: “The instinctive desire to reject the very idea of current discrimination on the basis of a chemical compound in the skin is an unconscious admission of the absurdity of race as a concept. With no universally agreed upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute.”  (Italics mine.)

Anyone who has ever been in high school knows what caste feels like. Everyone is ranked. Everyone is hurt. No one forgets. It is the field in which the seeds of racism, and all other -isms, take root and grow.

Scene XVI. Dominus Flevit 

One makes forced choices when trapped in a radically caste-enclosed and unjust system. I thought of Jesus, how he sweated and wept and groaned before he decided to head to Jerusalem to challenge the system of injustice that trapped his people. He shed tears over Jerusalem when he got there, telling his followers that the things that made for peace and justice and love were “hidden from their eyes.” Many thing were hid from my eyes. I too know so little, so very little about so many things. I was no Jesus. I had no larger vision. All I had was my ignorance, twinges of conscience, and a few tears of my own.

There is a church in Jerusalem marking the site where Jesus wept about all this systemic ignorance and the impending destruction of the Temple. There wasn’t much he could do—not much at all. The church is shaped like a teardrop. When I saw it in 2012, I wept for all I did not know, had not known, still don’t know. The church is called Dominus Flevit (The Lord Wept). It means a lot to me.

 

Scene XVII. A Wound of Privilege

I went to Smith College, partly because I was NOT going to go to Vassar like my maternal grandmother who’d graduated in the “class of aughty-aught".  Also, because I loved Smith’s campus and living in houses—no dorms and no sororities with all that sisterly pain. Mostly, however, because my best friend, Annie, was going there too.

I knew it was a privilege to go to Smith, not because I knew I was privileged, but because my father groaned out loud about the “astronomical”tuition which in 1956 was absurdly low—below $10,000 in today's dollars.

Annie had to leave Smith after one year. Her scholarship money dwindled, and her father couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. Our hearts were broken. Impulsively, I told her my father would pay her room and board, but she said her father would be too proud to accept. We both were right.

Annie went on to graduate from the University of Connecticut with honors. We stayed friends of course, but there was an almost indiscernible crack inside me, like a slight fracture in a bone. What was it? Guilt? It was the fissure of privilege. I could spell that word correctly, but now I was learning to feel its power—the power to rent asunder, to hurt when it was supposed to help.

Despite my father’s money worries, we had wealth—not vast amounts of money but wealth, that invisible security blanket enjoyed by some and not others. It had to do with family security; it had to do with neighborhood, class and family assets; it had to do with privilege and the cruel habit of ranking that limited opportunity. It had to do with the same thing that forced those southern blacks to flee in order to survive. It had to do with something a friend recently said in the midst of her own severe lack of resources: “I’m super scared, but I know I’ll be okay because I have family with money to help—if I get less proud.”  

I had wealth and Annie didn’t. The wealth gap had nothing to do with what I’d been brought up to value: work hard and you’ll get ahead. Oh no you won’t! Annie’s father had worked and struggled all his life. He was bright, had a PhD, and was principal of a school. My father worked on Madison Avenue, a business executive. I was learning about classism, a first cousin to racism, fertilizer of privilege, pollinator of all -isms.

Annie and I were white, yet our friendship was wounded by my privilege. We cried so hard—so very hard—when Annie left Smith and I stayed. My privilege bought me rank and a great education, but it sure did not buy me peace of mind, and it sure didn’t make me feel good. 

At Smith I met my first Jew. I didn’t know what a Jew was. Now that is an hilarious statement. Really! It sounds absurdly anti-semitic now, but I didn’t know what that was. I’d heard of the Holocaust, but not really, if you know what I mean. As with Blacks, there were no Jews in my suburban town.

My sheltered ignorance was appalling, not my fault, and painful anyway. White as I was, I didn’t connect it with my privilege—yet.

I chose academics to make my mark. It did pay off. I studied like a fiend, got good grades, earned graduate degrees, and felt smarter than I really was. Okay, that’s not fair to me, but in college I didn’t yet know how to be fair to myself.