Weathering the Storm

 I find it interesting that some of the voices that were the loudest and most radical when it came to desegregating the Methodist Church are now the same ones advising caution and patience, and moderation with regard to the current conflict over sexuality. Some of these voices are pretty high up in the church. Some are very high up in the church.

A lot of this I attribute to the fact that our members fought to desegregate the church over sixty years ago. Time and experience have a way of tempering the raging passions of youth. Young pastors care little if their actions divide the congregation when they believe they are acting as Christ would. Older pastors are more anxious to wait and see.

These are not universal descriptions. I know some pastors in their thirties seeking caution and advising patience and some pastors in their nineties who are more than ready to storm the ramparts. Some are very concerned about showing that the rules of the church are important and will be followed, while others are adamant that the only rule that matters is the example of Christ.

What I know is this: there's no way out of this without some people getting hurt. There's no way out without some people having their faith in the church challenged. I think about this a lot, and I can't think of a path through this that doesn't alienate somebody, and alienating people from their faith is pretty serious business.

For me personally, me Boyd here at my computer: I'm always going to side with the weak. I'm always going to side with the smaller force. Some of the best Christians I know are gay. Some of the best Christian couples I know are gay. Some of the most devoted members of my church are gay. I come from a time when these people had to hide who they were to survive. Some of them still do. It's hard for me to imagine this is what Jesus would want.  It's hard for me to imagine Jesus wouldn't fight for their full inclusion in every aspect of the church.

That being said, I'm not in a position of any authority in the church. I can say my piece and decide where I stand, but that's about it. This will be decided by other people. I'm getting used to the idea that some people I know, some people I support, are going to get hurt--and I'm sorry for that, but I can't figure a way out of it.

I don't like being in the position of having to say, "The church doesn't support you, but I do." I don't know how to stop that, though. I think that's what Jesus would have me do.  I think there are times when that is what Jesus did.

Churches that follow rules give many people a great sense of comfort and security, and I appreciate that. When they lose faith that their church doesn't follow rules it causes them great discomfort and feelings of insecurity. I appreciate how important that is. I also appreciate the damage it causes when you tell people, "You're not good enough to go with us." which I believe the current conflict does.

There are people I knew who are no longer with us, who were members at Galloway for many years and had someone in their lives that they loved enough to marry at the church but were forbidden to. There are couples, young and old, now that I would love to say, "The church sanctions your love as much as I do," but I can't.

When I can put names to an issue, it's no longer political. When I can say: This is about Patricia, or Lawrence, or Elizabeth, or Timothy, then it becomes something more than doctrinal; when it becomes about people I know, then it's deeply moral and considerably more important.

I feel like our roots are deep enough for the tree to weather this storm. Hopefully, the trunk is flexible enough. Sometimes, I think love attracts lighting, that caring for others lays the seedbed for pain--mine and theirs.

For the people I know who will be hurt by all this--I can't make it stop. I just can't. My ego is big enough and warped enough where that alone causes me considerable pain and embarrassment, but I can't change it.

I'll sit with you through the storm, though. It doesn't matter how wet or cold we get; I won't budge. Sometimes, that's all anyone can do.  

Till Justice

People are upset that Carolyn Bryant Donham died without ever being prosecuted for her part in the death of Emmett Till.  They're hurt because the scales of justice were never balanced in his death.

They're missing the point.  Because the scales of justice were never balanced is what gave the Till story its power.  Because Emmett Till was denied, justice moved the country to begin taking action on civil rights in the South and racism throughout the whole country.  That may not have ever happened if Till's death was met with equal justice when it happened.  

Sometimes the entire point is that a thing was broken.  Consider the crack in the liberty bell or the leaning tower of Pisa.  Were these things whole, you would never have known about them.   Emmett Till never received justice.  That imbalance, that brokenness of purpose, moved the entire world.

Good Ole Boys

Big parts of Mississippi politics are pretty wholesome. We don't have much money, so everybody kind of goes along to get along. Some of it could easily be an episode of the Andy Griffith Show. We do pretty well on issues about gender. The most powerful mayor in Mississippi is a woman, and Evelyn Gandy was once the most powerful person in the state, even though she couldn't get elected governor.

We get along pretty well on most things until it comes to issues of race, and then it gets murderous. I'd say improving the lot of Mississippi's black citizens was our third rail, but hardly anyone in Mississippi has ever ridden a subway, so they don't get the metaphor.

Why can't we have hospitals in the Delta? Black people live there. Why can't we have money for Jackson? Black people live there. Why did a football star, a professional wrestler, and a governor think it was ok to steal money for the poor? Black people are poor.

What ends up happening is in these districts that are mostly black, nobody wants to work with them, so they elect people nobody wants to work with, so these districts like the Delta and Jackson that need cooperation from the state don't get it. They end up electing candidates who are really good at civil rights rhetoric instead of economics and industry, and civic administration, which is what they really need. Jackson is the best example of this.

My uncle Boyd and my Dad were acolytes of Ivan Allen. Allen was the mayor of Atlanta, and he believed that there were too many black people who lived in Atlanta for the city to ever prosper if he, as mayor, continued with such brutal oppression as they experienced in the past. By today's standards, Allen didn't do much for the poor blacks of Atlanta, but what he did do was give Martin Luther King Jr. and his church enough room to breathe so that they had room to grow and whatever happened in Selma or Jackson or Memphis, they had a safe place to grow in Atlant, and that changed everything.

Mississippi has got to realize that the only way we're ever going to lift ourselves off the bottom of everything is if we enable our large black subculture. It's not going to be easy to incorporate a subculture that's been oppressed for hundreds of years with the culture that did the oppressing, but that's out only viable path forward.

What I'm writing sounds like it could have been said in 1960, and it was in several of my Uncle Boyd's speeches, then again in some of my dad's testimony on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce in the seventies. It's been sixty years, and the message isn't getting through.

It doesn't do any good for me to call for a Mayor for Jackson that's better at facilities management, economic development, or real estate because so many people in Jackson are more concerned about having their basic civil rights protected, and they have reason to. They're less interested in developing an effective police force because they're more concerned about what the police do to their people. I would be too.

I don't have any answers. That's gonna have to come from somebody wiser than I. What Ivan Allen said is true, though. We're never gonna rise unless we take everybody with us. Without that, we're gonna stay on the bottom.

When We Remembered Zion

 I had lunch on Zoom today with a friend who's thirty-two and lives in Seattle. She's Ashkenazi, a descendant of grandparents who immigrated from Russia in the twenties. She made a joke about how a Jew like her must seem very alien to people in Mississippi.

So, I told her Jews aren't aliens here at all. They came in fairly large numbers during the cotton boom and settled all over the South. I told her about Beth Israel Cemetary, where we told ghost stories when I was in college and how it was the most immaculately manicured cemetery in Mississippi.

Then I told her about what happened to Rabbi Nussbaum when I was a little boy. How the klan had bombed the Beth Israel Temple and Rabbi Nussbaum's home, and she had a look of confused pain on her face.

Then I showed her a clip of Driving Miss Daisy, which she'd never seen and didn't know was about a Jewish woman. I showed her the scene where Houke tries to drive Miss Daisy to temple, but the police turn him back because someone had bombed the temple, and he tells Daisy a story about a man who was lynched.

I explained that the scene in the play was inspired more by a similar bombing in Atlanta in the fifties, but the impact was the same as the one in Jackson. To preserve their closed culture, men in the South would destroy places of worship.

A tear rolled down her cheek. In her young life, where she lived, the persecution of her people never really seemed that real. Somehow, me telling her the story made it feel real, and she wept.

By the waters of Babylon, we sat down, and we wept when we remembered Zion.

Men will do terrible things if you make them believe their culture is in danger, and there's great political power in making people believe that danger is real, even when it isn't.

I wish bigotry and hatred of the other were only limited to race and religion, but it goes so much deeper than that. There's always somebody willing to say, "They are dangerous because THEY are different," and someone will do something terrible because they believe it.

When I was a child, about the same time as the Beth Israel Bombings, even my church split apart over race and culture; now it's happening again over sexuality. Nobody's set off any bombs yet, but it's not a far journey.

You don't have to be "woke" to be afraid of what bigotry does to your community. You just have to be good at history.

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10CatherineandRichard Freis, Edward Peter Cole II and 8 others