I'm probably gonna get in trouble for this. Don't you love it when I have to start with a disclaimer like that? I'm not gonna lie and say something like "some people feel" or "there is a perception" This is what I feel, my perception, me, nobody else, and I'm just vain enough to think that hearing it might help something somewhere.
When I was in high school, at an expensive, upper middle class, mostly white, private school, I had four unlikely friends from football that became known as The Travelers. Someone suggested we took the name because that was the name of Robert E Lee's horse, but Mike Shepherd said, "No, man, That's Trigger!" and that was that. We called ourselves Travelers because, in my old Ford LTD, we traveled three in the back seat and two in the front seat and saw Mississippi.
We took our white privilege, little prince asses, around Mississippi and saw things we never would have been exposed to in our Fondren Neighborhood high school. We nearly got arrested for driving the wrong way down the only one-way street in Bolton, Mississippi, but it was ok because the cop was drunk and sent us home. We met the famous wrestler Ernie Big Cat Ladd and bought him dinner at Jobie Martin's chicken restaurant and lounge and danced with women much older than us while Jobie promised if he ever got his show back, he wanted us to be on it. We would have too, but he never got his show back.
We visited Charles Evers at his radio station often enough that he knew our names. The engineer let us in while he was on the air, and he'd talk to us while the record played. He, too, promised to put us on the air but never did. To us, he wasn't the guy whose brother was murdered because he fought to integrate Mississippi. He was a guy on the radio who was willing to talk to us.
Back at school, James Meridith wasn't the guy who integrated Ole Miss or even the guy who got shot marching for more integration; he was the dad of two kids in our lower school. Ed King was a guy I ran into over and over with issues relating to Millsaps. Sometimes, we were on the same side. Sometimes, we weren't. He's in my Sunday School now.
I mention these names because I was born at a time and in a place where the Civil Rights movement to liberate the descendants of African Slaves in Mississippi was very real and very present, and people who made real and genuine sacrifices weren't just names in a textbook, they were people I would meet and know under other, less painful, circumstances.
Knowing these people and knowing what they went through and seeing some small bit of it firsthand made me realize they understand more about bigotry and oppression than I ever could. As much as I tried to understand them, their experience was so much larger and more real than mine.
To me, black Southerners had a perspective on alienation that made them experts, and became people whose perspective I sought when discussing the alienation of others. While nobody had it as bad as them, their experience offered insight into other oppressed people that I consider valuable.
There have been times when I expected Black Southerners to fight against the oppression of other people in one way and got something entirely different. It's impossible for me to judge them. Their experience is not my experience, and just because they may once have suffered doesn't make them obligated to think one way or another, but it makes things difficult when they stand in the way of someone else's liberation.
Because she is black, I expected Mississippi's new United Methodist Bishop to see something familiar in the act of civil disobedience performed by Elizabeth Davidson and the Paige Swaim-Presley. I thought she would see it, as I see it, as two young ministers fighting for the civil rights of their congregants. The Bishop didn't agree. I can't judge her for that. I haven't been through what she's been through in life, and she has an awful lot more concerns in this matter than I do, but her reaction was very different from what I expected.
I'm not alone in confusion about how to respond here. There's been maybe eight people I've looked to for spiritual leadership in my life more than all others. Three are dead, and one has dementia. Two of these people were discussing the Bishop's response, in this case, yesterday at Sunday School. To my way of thinking, that's a pretty high-level conference in the United Methodist Church. They felt like, as I feel that the Bishop was being unusually harsh with Elizabeth and Paige. They also felt like she wasn't following the procedure set out in the Book of Discipline in cases like this. Normally, I'd say that aspect was an issue for a lawyer; fortunately, there happened to be a few of them present. You can't swing a dead cat at Galloway without hitting three lawyers.
I had hopes that a Black woman from the South would have been more sympathetic to this case, not less, but that's not what happened, and I have to respect that, and I do respect that, but I'm not satisfied that this is over. I'm told there's a chance that Paige and Elizabeth will be defrocked. They might go to another denomination, but they'd have to start the process of becoming a minister all over again. I've seen that happen before, but I sure would like to keep people with their kind of energy and conviction within the UMC.
So, I sit in church, and I see empty spots on the pews where people I knew and loved once sat. They lived their entire lives without being able to share with their beloved church what they were. I see people who are still alive and who have lived a long full life in the church that, despite all, still doesn't accept them as equals. I see young people, so full of life and promise, who I worry the church will lose because we cannot say they are equal to me. I can say it. I can hold them as much higher than me, but until the Book of Discipline says it, until our Bishop supports actions in that direction, I can't say that my job is done. I can't say that our church loves them as much as me, even though it should love them more.
Life in Mississippi is complicated. Life as a Christian is too. Somehow people here always find room for rejection and alienation. I don't get that. We barely have enough talented people to make Mississippi work; I don't see how excluding anyone helps anything. I can't parlay our bishop's experience as a Black Woman in the South into mercy and acceptance for two young pastors and two even younger Millsaps students in love. To me, that tracks as my not being able to understand the experience of Black Southerners, Women, or Lesbians well enough to bring them together. I accept that, but I'm not giving up. I don't exactly know where to go from here--but that's never stopped me before. Mississippi isn't a story that ever ends. Sometimes, it doesn't even change that much. I'll keep turning the pages, though. After me, someone else will. There is progress, but man is it ever slow.
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