Category: James Baldwin
The (un)Making Within the Theo-Creative: Wrestling with James Baldwin and John Coltrane
Art is not only dangerous, it dismantles. As artists create, potentially, their work unearths the deepest forms of beauty in the foulest of places. As Toni Morrison denotes,
“Art requires a critical conversation about being human.”
In comparison, art as a theological praxis envisions God as a disciplined creator, creating within the infinite and borderless, space. In his lecture, The Moral Responsibility of the Artist, James Baldwin wrestles with a collision that occurs when the invented god of America and the creative vision of the artist begins to asked questions of humanity. He refers to this event as a collision, to represent an emphatic reiteration, as he proclaims, “because people don’t…wish to see their deepest intimations confirmed.” Baldwin’s view of artists reveals an intention of seeing the religious or transcendent authority that lies concealed within art. Understandably, from Baldwin’s recollection the artists are the only people capable of galvanizing the creativity to exegete from the captured space of the ugly. In other words, the artist has been blessed with foresight to see the beauty within the grotesque. We also find this type of reverence or foresight, in the artistry of John Coltrane. During an interview Coltrane insisted: “I want to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start immediately to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he’ll be cured. When he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different song, and immediately he’d get all the money he needed. But what these pieces are, and what is the road to attain the knowledge of them, that I don’t know. The true powers of music are still unknown. To be able to control them must be, I believe, the goal of every musician.” The un-making within the theo-creative for Baldwin and Coltrane embodies an engagement of unhinging from the white gaze while simultaneously embracing how their Black experience has been cultivated by their community.
What is the unmaking within theo-creative? The theo-creative is the artist; being consciously inspired by the moment, where their creative response assumes transcendence. Therefore, the theo-creative is not merely a moment, movement or occurrence; it is also the person. It is the artist’s understanding how their artistry cultivates and reconfigures. The theo-creative is where art expands the conversation, while theologically struggling to provide solutions for what George Yancy describes as the “quotidian social spaces,” (think of: Public Enemy -Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, Alabama- John Coltrane, Mississippi God Damn- Nina Simone). This is art performing an unmaking, a reconfiguring of the space to become a proponent of Black irruption. The un-making within the theo-creative conjures an artistic moment, where perfection is not an automatically centered part of the “sociocultural vocabulary” as denoted by Ashon Crawley (BlackPentecostal Breath, 230) or normalized. Rather, the most important factor becomes how does the art register in the spirit of the people. i.e. How does it make one feel? The unmaking within the theo-creative forms a distrust, radicality and subversive disposition with dominate ideologies/theologies that refuse to interrogate the white, European gaze of artistry.
Dr. JoAnne Terrell articulates on her a podcast, Shift of the Gaze, that “Being an artist is a given; becoming conscious of one’s artistry, and becoming conscientious as an artist depends on having or developing a sacramental theory of perception.” Terrell readily designate that the sacramental aspect of art must first be secured within the artist and the artist’s gaze. Therefore, the artist is not merely offering a response but producing a work. This work is not based, solely, upon the reaction of feeling but has been nested within and through a creative process. Now, the artist, in all of their disclosed banality, maneuvers with a tempered “disruptive clarity” as noted by Ed Pavlic’( Improvise, 24), in order to create. Therefore, how one practices, and, continually, engages in a method of practice transforms their art. This is noticeable evident in the artistry of Coltrane. His maniacal commitment to practice made his improvisational skills otherworldly. There are many stories where friends, family and other musicians would find Coltrane fingering his saxophone without blowing air into the instrument. This form of practice established an uncanny fluency with the horn and developed hand coordination as one heard the music in their head. Professor Lewis Porter insists, “That [it was] essential for improvisation, since one must hear music in one’s head in order to produce it at will.” (Lewis Porter, John Coltrane, 52)
James Baldwin as an artist is not the identity that first captures the attention of most. Many would primarily label him as an activist, writer, queer/gay Black man, and playwriter. And, I might add a progenitor of Black Rage. But, the label of an outright artist is something that is rarely connected with the genius of Baldwin. The artistic world availed his imagination unto a wider perspective from which he was able to extract his information. Baldwin proclaimed in a conversation with Studs Terkel: “nobody knows what’s going to happen to [him/her] from one moment to the next or how [he/she] will bear it. This is irreducible and its true for everybody. Now it is true that the nature of society has to be, you know, to create among its citizens an illusion of safety. But it is also absolutely true that this safety is necessarily an illusion and artists are here to disturb the peace.” For Baldwin, art arranged moments for people to communicate their truth even in the midst of oppressive times. Ed Pavlic’ denotes that “art put people eye to eye with the essential state of risk and made an engaged joy possible.” (Pavlic’, 40) This is the beauty and the un-making of the theo-creative work of James Baldwin. He is consistently reworking the accusations that God abandons the Black community, allowing atrocities to dismantle their lives. Baldwin’s search for answers both torments him and fuels his work. Black Rage serves him as a theo-creative form of release to explore the problems that plagued the Black community. Though he notices the distinct places where despair could be the course of the day, Baldwin’s sense of Black Rage activates his artistry. His Black Rage revises his understanding of the imago dei. Baldwin’s rage towards his father has implications toward God as well. Viewing his father as a fraud, Baldwin also identifies God with the same fraudulent intentions. Nevertheless, God, through the church, appears to have had an apparent impact on his thinking, because Baldwin admits that he will never be able to rid himself of the church because “it is in him.” Baldwin is conduced to define God as a distraction, not as a sovereign being working on behalf of Black folks who are oppressed. He concretely believes that Americans, specifically, white Americans, use God as a shield so that they do not have to wrestle with the reality of white supremacy in America.
In the liner notes of A Love Supreme, John Coltrane writes ,” During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD. “ John Coltrane embodied his art, ontologically, to the point that his wife at time, Naima, declared, “he was 90 percent saxophone.” Coltrane’s theo-creative moments are centered around his relationship with the saxophone. This collision between Coltrane and the saxophone happen in the midst of family tragedy: his father, maternal grandparents, and uncle pass within months of each other. Coltrane uses music as a means of survival. For Coltrane, his art represented a path of righteousness. He understood and lived under the philosophy that “playing right meant, and required, living right.” Though he questioned many things including his idea of faith and God, Coltrane “found salvation through the saxophone.” (Ashley Kahn,8) But, Coltrane, like Baldwin could never severe the connection from the Black church because “it was inside of him.” As he journeys through the musical scene and develops as an artist, Coltrane has a moment where it appears as if his skills are eroding. Ashley Kahn describes the time, in May of 1957, while playing at the Red Rooster, Coltrane begins to play like a six year old in the middle of a set. Coltrane was [obviously] detoxing from drugs, cold turkey, It was during that time that he had a dream about Charlie Parker, and Parker said that he was on the right track. This is the moment that Coltrane begins to transform in his playing.- (Love Supreme, 35-36) After witnessing Coltrane fight through that detoxification, Nat Hentoff would later emphatic detail , “there was Trane with his band…standing with a spiritual force.” Mcoy Tyner, who would later accompany Coltrane on A Love Supreme, marveled at his transformation saying, “It was almost like he had something he had to get done. You know? He had a lot of work to do.” This spiritual weightiness in the music of Coltrane is not only reshaping Coltrane but redefining the sound of the saxophone as well. Regardless of the particular style, Coltrane provided a credibility as well as his spirituality to upcoming saxophonist. His art was his infinite invitation to his Sunday Church. Coltrane allowed his music to speak “with a particular force to Black America, where politics and culture—the civil rights movement, R&B music, and jazz—were tightly enmeshed in a rising wave of racial pride.” (Ashley Kahn, 73)
Theo-creative Mechanisms of the Un-making
Within the theo-creative, Baldwin’s typewriter and Coltrane’s saxophone emerge as mechanisms of the avant-garde. Through these sacred surrogates (typewriter and saxophone), the creativity of both men grapple with the grief of losing their fathers. First, Baldwin’s chaotic love affair with the typewriter becomes apparent. Though he finds some sacred release from the typewriter it also produced his greater place of pain. It was the typewriter, where he was able to release pain, pleasure and fear but the actual expedition to the typewriter manufactured anguish. But, justifiably, Baldwin knew that solace was conceived and enveloped in the keys of the typewriter. Embedded within the tiny, creative space of the typewriter, he was forced to confront his inner demons, and the turmoil known as the memories of his father. The typewriter became a space for Baldwin to develop his voice as he struggled to tell his Black narrative. As Baldwin is struggling with communication and the decisions of life, the typewriter provides him a “passionate detached” space to create. ( James Baldwin, Cross of Redemption, 73) Though Baldwin does not understand why anyone would ever want to be a writer, he understands that he has been called to such a task. The typewriter is the place where his father becomes characterized and Baldwin is able to release his rage. A rage produced through Baldwin’s contempt for his father’s misappropriation of God’s holy. Because he observed his father attempting to evolve into whiteness, he discovered a disdain and bitterness that he harbored against him. It was so formative that Baldwin would later write, “…that God [himself] had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas.” (Baldwin, Notes of Native Son, 85) Interestingly, Baldwin, associates “holy” with whiteness, in relation to his father, yet his father had such unspoken hatred for white people. (Baldwin, Conversation with James Baldwin, 47) The commentator Buzz Poole supposes that these particular “codas” God devised for his father are the few things that Baldwin can say, honestly, that he inherited from his father –a rage. (Buzz Poole, Happy Birthday James Baldwin, The Millions) Codas that demark a Black Rage that is unescapable to any Negro alive; “a rage in his blood –one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it.” (Baldwin, Price of the Ticket, 133)
Secondly, Coltrane’s saxophone was his place of peace that allowed him to rediscover his faith. The sudden death of his father appeared to leave an aperture to which the saxophone would creatively satiate. Coltrane’s love for the saxophone was visibly apparent as he spent most of his waking moments attached to the instrument. Everywhere he went the saxophone was either in his hand or nearby. It was known that he would practice from anywhere from 10 to 12 hours a day. There was something intrinsic and ancestral about the saxophone that made Coltrane feel close to his deceased father and grandfather. Wayne Shorter connects this thesis of Coltrane’s playing and his appreciation for his grandfather’s Black form whopping as an AME Zion pastor. Inseparable, he denotes, “his grandfather was a preacher and I can hear the wailing [through the horn] …and the appreciation of his grandfather’s mission.” Shorter is positing this inevitable resurgence of spirituality that emerges through the artistry of Coltrane as he is chasing lost time with the men—his father and the father figures— in his life. This is apparent in the mentoring of Miles Davis versus the paternal pedagogical approach to practice with Thelonious Monk. During Coltrane’s tenure with Miles Davis he refused to answer question but preferred for the artist to creatively explore their way to understanding. Thelonious Monk, on the other hand, takes time with Coltrane, and rehearses different methods of playing until he has mastered the musical phrases and movements. Though Coltrane flourished in both environments, it was Monk that expanded his creative parameters. Coltrane admits, “[Monk] got me into the habit of playing long solos on his pieces, playing the same pieces for a long time to find new conceptions of solos. It got so I would go as far as possible on one phrase until I ran out of ideas. The harmonies got to be an obsession with me.” Ultimately, Monk’s pedagogical, fatherly and instructive approached orchestrated a “complete freedom in his playing” as Coltrane would confide during an interview.
Conclusion
The un-making within the theo-creative is Black performance awakening to the historical value of culture.
Because art produces itself in the means of the crumpled and the creases of struggle, Black folks had/have to be creative in order to survive. Baldwin and Coltrane are products of a people where as Fred Moten denotes “Black performance was a means and a practice of resistance. “(Fred Moten,foot note 14 pg 263) With Blackness and God servicing as a connected never-ending muse, the quest to reshape humanity avails itself as a total disruption for these two artist. Their art mimetically induced their lives. Or in the words of Sonny Rollins,
“I’m not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I’m just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that’s when it’s really happening.”
James Baldwin’s Black Rage in “The Fire Next Time”
(This is part of a larger work entitled, “Perspectives of a Black Rage Sensibility: (Reshaping) God Through Spaces of Blackness”
Throughout his writings, Baldwin wrestles with the essence of Black Rage: a rage that engulfs the life of black people, trapped in an endless cycle of injustice, pressing to survive the vicious trials of life. Baldwin’s statement “to be a Negro in this country and relatively conscious, is to be in rage all the time” serves as a defining epitaph for Black Rage.[1] Pamela Lightsey notes that Baldwin’s explication of Black Rage was not limited to erroneous slander, deemed as an “irrational outburst.”[2] His explication was a “passionate response to the evil of racism imposed” upon the black community.[3] Baldwin’s “blackness” can be understood as an intertwining of how Black Rage influenced Baldwin’s relationship with God and humanity.[4]
James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is a transcending essay that captures in paralyzing clarity, the experience of a young black man navigating the racist terrain of America. Exploring black people’s fear, pain and rage in mesmerizing detail, Baldwin, relocates the reader into a foreign reality –the world of the Negro in America, past and present. Baldwin challenges white Americans with a first-hand perspective of black males in the ghetto and, simultaneously, celebrates the Black community. His quest was to find out what made Black males so attentive to the Nation of Islam.[5] While writing this essay, he discovered the topic was richer and deeper than he first imagined. He never turned it into the editor of the Jewish magazine, who had hired him to write the story.
The book starts with a compelling and thought provoking letter to his nephew, My Dungeon Shook, which gives poignant instruction to his nephew on how to negotiate through the streets of Harlem, as a Black male, in the midst of a people who present a false Christianity.[6] The penetrating critiques of America opined in almost every sentence phrased with preciseness and rage present a pedagogical protest for his nephew. Baldwin’s overarching theme resonates in his words to his nephew, “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”[7] Baldwin is very intentional about highlighting the texture and color of his nephew’s skin while giving him a preview of his temperament. [8] His nephew’s socially- constructed black body and political identity will serve as a stark indicator that his nephew “is” in danger. He cannot misplace his self-awareness in the white world, yet he cannot misplace his own true dignity. Baldwin’s insistence that his nephew identify with his blackness is utmost. Theologian John Perkinson forms this experience as a radical rethinking of the black body. Purposely, he places all white bodies in the thralls of the lived history (a mythic fantasy) of white supremacy. He intentionally demarcates whiteness as a “structure of violence and a significance of injustice.”[9] Perkinson asserts that “the black body as a ‘possibility of theophany’ would place the white body as “a question of exorcism.”[10] He implies that the white body stands in need of divine healing or exorcism in order to be delivered from its own racism. In this assessment, the black body personifies God. Thus, confronting white people with a specificity of color and creed. The black body confronts white people with their sin before God. For Baldwin, his own father’s lack of awareness of the black body politic, pushed him into wanting to be “so holy,” because Godliness provided a false invitation into whiteness.[11] Making holiness synonymous with whiteness was the fallacy Baldwin dismisses, while wrestling through life in the black experience. Ultimately, the commingling of whiteness with godly normatives would be Baldwin’s wrestling partners the rest of his life.
The Black Rage that Baldwin demonstrates to his nephew is one soaked in love with a governing sense of black pride, a pride that is timelessly connected to the black community. Baldwin’s unique perspective is guided by a strong principle of love. A love that he describes:
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. [12]
Baldwin may appear to link his father’s false sense of Christianity with a pseudo-pursuit of holiness. However, looking deeply, his understanding and pursuit of love is profoundly Christian. Professor Clarence Hardy supposes that Baldwin’s idea of love is the result of self-examination. Hardy posits that Baldwin’s self-awareness caused love to flourish and this love becomes “the principal site of transformation and the self-actualization.”[13] Could this self-affirming love be similar to the Christian process of discernment? Baldwin is clear with his nephew that his mere presence is a salvific happening; his life –a hope, which love must prevail. Baldwin admonishes,
There is no reason for you to be like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing…is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For those innocent people have no other hope.[14]
The assertion that hope, reconciliation, and love rest in the hands of the black community is a radical statement of purpose and identity. In Baldwin’s perspective, humanity is equipped with the responsibility for their own soul’s salvation. He states that humanity is responsible, “to expand and transform God’s nature.” [15] Baldwin is unapologetic about this particular affirming of the necessity of black people acting as the redeeming factor in the lives of whites. The impact of oppressed people’s presence and their being creates favorable opportunities for the oppressors to change. Baldwin is transparent with his nephew about the cruel treatment that he will endure but exudes a reconciliatory posture.[16] Though Baldwin does not proclaim that this is an authentic Christian value, his childish hope for/in humanity compels him to reluctantly trust in a governing love.
The message that Baldwin is trying to convey to his nephew is ultimately woven in throngs of suffering. Baldwin’s interest in suffering is connected to a belief that through such an act one would/could “discover what they really lived by,” indicating that “suffering holds purpose even if God does not.”[17] Baldwin is constructing an intricate theology of a redemptive suffering that, hopefully, forces the oppressors to change. In his critique of Anthony Pinn’s Why Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology, Dwight Hopkins suggest that redemptive suffering can never be positive or fruitful for African-Americans.[18] Hopkins furthermore confirms that redemptive suffering, directly or indirectly, “implies God sanctions suffering, relieving the oppressors from accountability…”[19] In the closing words to his nephew, Baldwin says, “…then we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”[20] Through Baldwin’s Black Rage, his interpretive lens perceives God differently than his father. God is an active presence, but only in the sense that humanity (in this case his nephew) can convey that presence. The “so holy” aspect of divinity that is sought by Baldwin’s father is not the same “so holy” that Baldwin is conveying to his nephew. The Black Rage that ignites Baldwin is displayed as he tries to “write” the wrongs that may have the probability of killing his nephew. Baldwin’s Black Rage has activated a new sense of God that relocates suffering as a godly imperative.
[1] James Baldwin, “The Negro Role in American Culture,” Negro Digest, March 1962.
[2]Pamela Lightsey, Our Lives Matter, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2015.,56.
[3] Ibid.
[4] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, First Vintage International: New York, 1962 The capitalization of G or lack thereof, is intentional throughout the paper. The thought is to try to convey the difference of expression in a god that is expressed in Baldwin’s concept versus a Christian example of God. The writer has tried to make the differences noticeable through the paper.
[5] The Nation of Islam was a Black Nationalist group that followed the teaching of Elijah Muhammad. The influence that Elijah Muhammed garnered from 1950 to the late 1960’s was unprecedented in the black community. Drawing from an early predecessor, he highlighted a separatist agenda that called for blacks to be given parts of America to live apart from whites.
[6] Ibid., Baldwin, Fire, 3-10.
[7].Ibid.,4.
[8] Ibid.,3.
[9] John Perkinson, White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity, New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2004.,150.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Baldwin accuses his father of trying to be “so holy” not as an attempt to be like God but as an alarming attempt to be white. Though his skin is dark like Baldwin and his nephew, Baldwin’s father is trying to escape the reality of being black in America. Baldwin is making a concerted effort to address this experience to his nephew. Ibid.,4. This person Baldwin references was Baldwin’s adoptive father. But, he lived his life trying to find the approval of his stepfather. Baldwin was born after his mother, Emma Berdis Jones left his biological father because of his drug abuse. Emma Jones, who never would tell her son the identity of his father. James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem Hospital. In James’s third year, his mother married the Reverend David Baldwin, a Pentecost preacher, who legally adopted James, and moved the family to Harlem.
[12] Ibid., Baldwin, Fire, 95.
[13] Clarence Hardy III, James Baldwin’s God: sex, hope and crisis in black holiness culture, Knoxville: Tennessee Press, 2003.,49
[14] Ibid.,8. This may be “innocent privilege” that Bruggemann asserts in his assessment of Coates. (See footnote 33)
[15] James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket, New York: St. Martin’s Marek,1985.,441. Clarence Hardy uses this exact quote to highlight the same frame of thought. Ibid.,Hardy.,13.
[16] Though Baldwin seeks such grand reconciliation he is not advocating for a complete surrendering or overhaul to whiteness. Baldwin poses a very stringent question: “Do I really want to be integrated in to a burning house?” Ibid., Baldwin, Fire,94. What he is proposing is that black folks consider whether it is feasible to be productive in an environment that does not even consider one’s self to be human. He is trying to convey this message to his nephew in a wise manner, while getting his point across with assuredness. Baldwin is also trying to get his nephew to embrace his blackness unconditionally, yet safely. This is a strange dynamic that has to be worked out through the entirety of Baldwin’s writings. It is seen as Baldwin writes to his nephew. It is also visible in many other works as well. Baldwin presents a high, functional level of love. What is deemed the “Negro problem” is not moved by love but by white people’s resentment of being judged by those who they see on a lower status. Ibid., 95. Baldwin is walking a very slim, but necessary, tightrope with his nephew. On one hand he is insisting that he becomes a savior for white people by virtue of his social presence, but on the other he is making sure that he does not lose his identity with the black experience.
[17] Ibid., Hardy,48.
[18] Dwight Hopkins, “Reviewed Work: Why Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology. by Anthony B. Pinn.” Review by: Dwight N. Hopkins. African American Review, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 514-516, Indiana State University. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3042581
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., Baldwin Fire, 10
Brothers In Conversation About Race (Part 8)
Religion is a space where the boundaries of God are fortified through tension and reified through reformation. It avails itself to a strong critique while offering solutions that are filled with active love. Oftentimes, this is not the picture that is painted by the Christian church. Walter, in part 7, introduced the notion of a space where Black people are given the freedom to be, inextricably, themselves. One of the few spaces where black people can relive their liberation is the black church. The black church has provided black folks with a liberating space where their visibility and presence is honored. Racism loses its power within the midst of this fictive kinship.
Racism is a retardant that hinders sound judgement from processing. The oppress are influenced to look past their oppression and reinterpret it as security, instead of seeking freedom. Racism discourages freedom because freedom fuels intellect. Consequently, it is hard to keep intelligent people oppressed. No longer can the plight of white power and white privilege be held as doctrines of a constructed god, who dehumanizes and beguiles black people into believing that oppression is acceptable and godly. When the oppressed start to rebel against the oppressor, their words against oppression are labeled as radicalized hatred. James Baldwin declares this is when
“white power is broken.”
Baldwin also proclaims that when this white power is broken:
“an English man can’t tell an African what it means to be African and he believes it; a white man can’t tell a negro what it means to be a negro and he believes it, anymore.”
The black church has been the space where our humanity is unquestionable. It has been the sacred site of resistance where beauty emerges in spite of pain and trauma. The black church, constantly reconstructing herself as the avant-guard against this constructed, neo-liberal god that sanctions racism. The black church is a complex institution, constantly on the front-lines fighting against racism. It is a creative space where black genius reclaims the identity of Jesus. A Jesus that racism refuses to accept or serve.
Prophetic Urges from Orlando: Part 1
Over the next 8 weeks or so, we will have a few of my friends, classmates and fellow pastors write on their feelings of the church, their thoughts, hopes and theology after Orlando. Some you may agree with while other you may be the voice of dissent. Nonetheless, it will hopefully spark honest dialogue for change:
I am Brian Foulks. I am a heterosexual male and married with children. I am black male that grew up in the Black Baptist church but now part of the ELCA. Yes, the ELCA that is 96% white. Yes, the ELCA that ordains folks for the LGBTQIA community. Yes, I am pro-black but I am not anti-white. Yes, I read James Baldwin and James Cone. Yes, I love Hip Hop. I have three master’s degrees but still get looked at strange in many Lutheran circles. Yes, I grew up in a two-parent home where my parents have been married for 43 years. Yes, I grew up in Lexington, SC. Yes, I have friends and classmates who are Muslims and I care deeply about them.
Why did you say all of that? Because in the midst of all those labels and categories, I am lost for words. My honest critique of the church and the concern for human life, after the terrorism in Orlando, has left me numb once again. It is that same numbness that I felt after the Mother Emmanuel terrorist attack: It was that feeling of what do we do now. Where will all of our “believe in Jesus” and “trust the Lord” rhetoric get us now? When the senseless slaughter of human life becomes synonymous with a loving God, then it may be time for us to create a new god. Some may declare that creating a new god teeters on the verge of heresy but so does condoning of the murder of LGBTQIA lives and the owning of a AR-15.
Honestly, I don’t understand everything there is to know about the LGBTQIA culture. Somethings I may not understand or can reason but, I do have friends in that community of beautiful people. Yes, the brothers and sisters in the LGBTQIA community have taught me how to love in the midst of the terrible face of evil. I have been made better by interaction and fellowship with this community.
As I wrestled through the murders of Mother Emmanuel, the love of a crucified Christ looked more like a crucified Christ finding no reason to love. Then to imagine 50 or more, brothers and sisters, mowed down by an AR-15 becomes a place where love is non-existent but the crucified Christ stands in the midst of the bloody dead bodies. The Crucified Christ standing, heart torn asunder because 50 lives have been stolen by sin. The Crucified Christ, always present. We mourn the lives of the brothers and sisters stolen too soon. There is no celebration for me. There is anger. There is unease. There is fear for my children. There are places where faith has appeared to relinquish its mode of life. The Crucified Christ is present…but sometimes I ponder on Langston Hughes’ Goodbye Christ:
Listen, Christ,
You did alright in your day, I reckon-
But that day’s gone now.
They ghosted you up a swell story, too,
Called it Bible-
But it’s dead now,
The popes and the preachers’ve
Made too much money from it.
They’ve sold you to too many
Kings, generals, robbers, and killers-
Even to the Tzar and the Cossacks,
Even to Rockefeller’s Church,
Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.
You ain’t no good no more.
They’ve pawned you
Till you’ve done wore out.
Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all-
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME-
I said, ME!
Go ahead on now,
You’re getting in the way of things, Lord.
And please take Saint Gandhi with you when you go,
And Saint Pope Pius,
And Saint Aimee McPherson,
And big black Saint Becton
Of the Consecrated Dime.
And step on the gas, Christ!
Move!
Don’t be so slow about movin?
The world is mine from now on-
And nobody’s gonna sell ME
To a king, or a general,
Or a millionaire.
Then I remember, the Crucified Christ is present. He gets down in the mess with us. He stands in the bloody mangled bodies weeping for the broken fellowship. So what can we do as the church: be present.
Syncopated Hustle 