I could always get out...

I remember a long time ago seeing the mediocre-to-bad 80s movie Soul Man with C.Thomas Howell and Rae Dawn Chong.  It tried to be socially significant but for the time and place it fell flat on most accounts.  Except something that I was reminded of today

The premise of the movie is that Howell's character is a college student who pretends to be black by taking tanning pills and wearing a wig in order to access a Harvard law school scholarship meant for black applicants only.  He wins the scholarship and much silliness occurs.  He meets and consequentially falls in love with Chong's character who was SUPPOSED to get the scholarship money.  Long story short, he gets caught and the dean of Harvard law (James Earl Jones), after much grilling, allows him to stay in school.

"You've learned", he says.  "You've learned what it feels like to be black."

"With all due respect you're wrong, sir" Howell's character answered.  "If I couldn't take it, I could always get out."

"You've learned a great deal more than I thought."

This is how I felt today.  I have a SILENCE IS BETRAYAL t-shirt that I was wearing for the 1st time today.  Doesn't even explicitly say BLACK LIVES MATTER or address the movement as a whole.  But that is the reason I bought it; my silence in the matter of race relations - particularly in this bright red dot in a blue state - IS a betrayal.  Not only my own beliefs and what I know to be right and just, but to millions of my fellow citizens who are treated as 2nd class; in the economy, in the criminal justice system, the penal system, politics, culture, by the race of which I am a part.

I FELT That privilege, maybe consciously for the first time, wearing that shirt out and about today.  I got some looks, got some mumbled comments about it (my paranoid mind may have imagined this, but I don't think so).  After running a couple of errands, the urge to stop home and change my shirt was almost overwhelming.

I can ALWAYS get out...

And that thought changed everything.  I wore it for the rest of my errands and made sure my bandanna did not block the message.  Bottom line; POC cannot go changing their skin any time they feel put upon for the shade of it.  The ABSOLUTE least I can do is offer a few brief moments of discomfort, some tiny shred of solidarity.  To remind myself that is unjust that "I can always get out" while a huge segment of our country's population deal with immoral consequences because they cannot.

So I'm learning.  Maybe not a great deal yet, and certainly not as quickly as I would like.  But learning all the same.  And I refuse to stop.

Black Lives Matter.

Solemnity of St. Thomas the Apostle
Daily Mass Readings
Ephesians 2:19-22
Psalms 117:1bc, 2
John 20:24-29

What now?

Our country is in turmoil, in flux.  No need to rehash the plague of disease and racism and protesting.  There are too many places where this is done in greater detail out there; no need for me to add to that.

I don't know what I can do. But the world is ripe for change, and there will be a conflict before that change is birthed into the world. What that change is, I cannot quite imagine at this intersection. I feel like Gandalf and Pippin in Minas Tirith awaiting the coming Battle of the Pelennor Fields:

It's so quiet.

It's the deep breath before the plunge.





America as it once was will not exist any longer.  Will she survive?  Will Love finally rule the day or be driven further underground for us to unearth again during a worse crisis?  I said half jokingly in the summer of 2016 that while I think Hillary Clinton would make a poor president, Donald Trump would be our last president.  I did not really believe it at the time.  Deep seated trust in bureaucracy and our system made tn a joke, a one-liner I threw out to make me seem clever.  Never did I imagine how bad this would get. And that is my guilt in not speaking up louder and faster; I honesty could not believe what I was witnessing.

I was asleep.  For better or worse I am awake now. And I am clergy.

Divine Spirit, I am asking.  What would you have me do?

I am ready.

Daily Mass Readings
Amos 7:10-17
Psalm 19:8, 9, 10, 11
Matthew 9:1-8