Not What I Expected In Church

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.  

Her Name On Google

 I searched her name on Google.  It's been a few years since we lost her and many more years since we last spoke, but there was a time when I said I loved her, a time when I said I wanted to be with her forever.

I don't know what the policy for Facebook is for people who are no longer alive.  Her account is still there.  Eleven friends, nine are mutual.  That doesn't seem right.  I don't know anyone who didn't love her.  By the end, I had pretty good reasons not to love her, but I still did.  

It doesn't seem right.  A life, any life, should leave more of an impression on the world.  Her life, even just her smile, touched so many people, but when those of us who remembered it are gone, there will be nothing left.  

I don't know how to fix this.  When she was alive, I tried.  Sometimes I tried really, really hard, but whatever it was that tortured her just wouldn't move.  Most people never knew this about her.  Most people thought she was forever happy and forever carefree.  That wasn't the truth.  

I can't say something crazy like "She was the only one I ever loved" because that's just not true.  I loved as deeply as I could and as often as I could.  She wasn't the only one, but she was a very, very important one, but I was never able to make things better for her for more than just a few days.  I was pretty strong, but her demons were a lot stronger, and I'm honestly really bothered by that.  

My gift, it seems, isn't being strong or leading fearlessly.  My gift is muddling words together in a way that means something sometimes.  That's kind of an ironic joke because I was born with a disease that should have made words my enemy.  

Maybe one day, I can put words together that make a better monument to her life.  I want to do it in a way that I don't have to say her name because then people will say, "What happened to her?" and I don't want to get into that.  That's not the point.  What I want is something that makes people feel like they felt when she was around, when she was alive.  I'd like for that to be what the world remembers.

A lot of people carry really broken things inside of them.  Sometimes you can see it, and sometimes you can't.  It doesn't define them.  It doesn't sum up their existence in this world.  

Her smile was the most powerful thing I ever saw.  I would have done anything to see it.  I'd do anything to see it again.  Part of me can only say I'm sorry.  I'm sorry for not coming back for her.  I'm sorry for not being there in the end.  I'm sorry for not ever making it any better.  

One day, I'll write something, and even though I won't say her name, people will read it and say, "Wow, I really wish I had known her."  That's not enough, but I think that's something I can do.

Through The Desert

There's a lot of consternation about the changes you see in the United Methodist Church.  A lot of it, I understand.  If you look at my church as an example: this morning, we had a pretty small gathering.  After all the activities of Easter and Church on the Grounds, I expected that, plus there was a big concert in Oxford.  

In our pews were what you always saw, plus about twelve percent Black Methodists and twelve percent Hispanic Methodists.  Twenty-four percent is the beginning of a paradigm shift.  For people of a more progressive frame of mind, this is a wonderful thing.  For people of a more conservative frame of mind, this is a mild threat to their existence.  

Religion is one of the primary arteries that feed our culture.  In some ways, it is THE primary artery.  Education, literature, art, music, food, dance, film, theater, politics, and economics, these are also arteries feeding our culture, but Religion is bigger than those and often encompasses those, so any mild change in it has larger ripples throughout the culture.  Sometimes those ripples can be discomforting. 

If you add to this another twelve percent LBGTQ Methodist to the mix and the fact that a little over fifty percent of our pastoral staff is women, and this starts to look like a very different sort of church than what it was just thirty years ago.  Twenty-five years ago, I used to make church dates because I thought hearing Ross Olivier speak would impress the girls I liked.  We've changed a good bit even since then.  

People think of the church as a static thing.  As a fixed place.  That gives them comfort in a turbulent world.  It may not be the best way to understand what the church is, though.  To me, the church is like the entire body of Israel who left Egypt with Moses.  They had an idea where they were going, but none had been there.  It had been so long since anyone had seen the promised land that nobody knew the way.  Out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, to the foot of Saini, Moses led them.  The church is our Moses.  It leads us through time to a place we have heard about but have never seen.  We carry the bones of our dead with us so that they may see the promised land.  One day, my bones will rest in a niche in the walls of my church.  Wherever it is that we're going, I won't be alive when we get there, but, like Abraham, my bones will be.

The people who left Egypt were not the people who crossed the Jordan.  Some died along the way.  Some were born along the way.  The individuals changed, but the body of Israel remained the same.  This is true of our churches.  Some churches move out into other counties to be less changed, but it's a temporary fix.  Our neighbor, St Peters, has a one o'clock service in Spanish that's filled to capacity.  When was the last time you saw one of our downtown churches filled to capacity?  

Not everybody will be happy with all these changes.  Not everybody was happy with moving through the desert for forty years.  These things aren't up to us.  What we can do, is stick together and keep moving.  The faces will change, but wherever we're going, we'll get there.  This was promised to us.

Our Reputation

There's a culture war on.  Because of that, there have been a few times this week, including twice today, where people have made comments to me along the lines of: "Millsaps should work to appear more conservative because the other small private colleges we compete with are."

I'm most likely going to have an opinion on that.  First off, and the most obvious to me, is that this is a battle we can't possibly win.  Some of these other small, private colleges are so far out on a limb with regard to their cultural doctrine that we could never hope to survive out there with them.  I question not only their academic integrity on this but sometimes their sanity.  That's simply not a path Millsaps can travel down.  

Secondly, I don't think we should sell something we don't believe.  We're not a conservative Christian college.  We're just not.  What we can do is get better at telling the truth about ourselves, and that truth is that we work pretty hard to present a balanced view of things to our students and then make them work like hell to develop the critical thinking skills that enable them to make their own choices.  Producing students with the skills and the knowledge to make their own decisions is about the only thing I can think of that makes the effort and the money that go into a Millsaps education worthwhile.

We allow and encourage both our students and our faculty to go down whatever path they feel is the most truthful, and that sometimes means we have faculty and students who get involved in protests, and seeing Millsaps shirts at these protests means we're a bunch of communists to some, but to others, it signals that we're fighting for them, which sometimes makes a big difference.  For some people, one kid with blue hair and a picket sign makes all the kids with short hair and Bibles invisible.  Millsaps has always fought that perception.  We may enroll purple-haired lesbian communists sometimes, but there are not that many, and they don't describe us--but most importantly, we provide them with the academic freedom to pursue their own path, so long as they do the work, and there's a lot of work.  

When I was at Millsaps, there was a detente moment in the culture war, and the socialists broke bread with the Young Republicans fairly often.   I myself was pretty conservative until I figured out that Reagan wasn't going to keep his promises.   If you go to Millsaps today, you'll see that the Young Republicans are still active, and so are the Babes for Bernie Socialists.  They live together and take classes together because we allow them to and we encourage them to.  We don't make their decisions for them.  As much as people accuse us of indoctrinating students, the reality is just the opposite.  We provide them with a varied table of information and make them make their own choices.  We refuse to indoctrinate them.  We put a balanced diet on the table and force them to use critical thinking in what they choose to put on their plate.  

Over the years, I've come to realize that one of our biggest allies in this effort is Ole Miss.  Whatever they were in the sixties, they now work to present students with a balanced perspective.  You'd be surprised how many students go from Millsaps to do graduate work at Ole Miss.  It's a good fit.  Ole Miss doesn't have the same reputation for liberalism that we do, probably because they fought against segregation way back when and we avoided the fight by opening our roll books without being forced to.  Beyond that, we're very similar, and after college, we end up in the same law firms, the same medical offices, and the same banks as the kids who went to Ole Miss on day one, and it's a good fit.

We sometimes get the reputation for being a bunch of radical nutbags, and that isn't fair because it isn't true.  We have some people on one end of the socio-political spectrum, but we have people on all the other ends too.  Our best path forward might be to just get better at communicating the message that we're balanced, and we teach our students to seek their own path, and just how valuable that is compared to schools that make these choices for their students.