When I was a kid we lived in the
country in Oklahoma… the driveway to our house was a long gravel road from the
interstate and that is where I learned to ride my bicycle… I still have sweet
dreams of that house and the mulberry tree we used to climb up in and eat the
mulberries straight off the tree… bugs and all... I can remember when I was
riding my bike up and down that gravel road one day and I lost my balance and
veered to the side of the road and crashed… I banged up my knee pretty good and
had gravel up under the skin… it was pretty gross and it really hurt… my
parents used “monkey blood” to clean it out and disinfect it (that red stuff
that hurt like the dickens, but it worked)…. As carefully as they tended to my
wound, I still have a scar on my knee where the gravel was… That is the nature of wounds… even the
small ones leave scars. Reminders of where we’ve been, lessons we’ve learned,
reminders of how to protect ourselves from hurting our self in that way again.
But before they are scars, they are wounds… open, exposed, painful, messy
wounds.
Wounds can take on a life of their
own… if not properly cared for, they can become infected and take over your
body… and if they get bad enough, a special wound care doctor has to come in to
oversee their care. It involves carefully inspecting it and debriding it…
removing the dead, damaged or infected tissue to improve the healing potential.
It requires proper calorie and nutrition intake to give the body the energy it
needs to heal. It requires constant oversight and attention to make sure that
infection doesn’t set in and take over. In their early stages, wound are
uncomfortable… a nagging feeling to remind you they are there… but not so
uncomfortable that you feel the need to do stop what you’re doing to address
it… and sometimes the care necessary to heal is uncomfortable, even painful and
leaves the wound even more exposed and sensitive to the outside elements. To an
untrained eye, one may see necrotic tissue of a wound and think it’s scabbing
over… it’s hard and black or gray… one may think that maybe it will just heal
itself… But, under the surface the infection is taking over and if the wound
doesn’t get the care it needs it can eat away at the tissue, and the tissue
cells begin to die as it spreads and goes deeper into the body… eventually
seeping into the bloodstream… an then we have a whole new problem as sepsis
surges through the body and it’s too late. By that time, the discomfort has
become painful and debilitating… stopping you in your tracks… What a tragedy to
be poisoned to death when proper attention and care, while painful, could have
provided the healing necessary to recover and thrive…
I probably don’t need to say this…
because if you know me at all, you know where I’m going with this…. But just to
make things plain… Racism is our wound, America… any reasonable person,
regardless of your worldview cannot deny that our nation is hurting and broken
where race is concerned… the people in the streets of our cities all across the
nation are proof that racial tensions have hit a breaking point. Our scab has been knocked off and
exposed a septic wound that has eaten away at the very fibers of our being and
poisoned our institutions and systems in ways that we cannot even see… WE ARE
SEPTIC and if we don’t comply with some serious life-saving measures and apply
the necessary treatment to clean out our systems and start healing, we are
going to self-destruct… that’s not me being dramatic… that is real life… even
if you don’t see it.
As a Chaplain, I have learned many
things from the patients and families I have served, but even if I had learned
nothing else, I know this much to be true…. Presence, compassion and empathy
are powerful and vital tools for standing with those who are hurting, grieving
and struggling with the deepest of sorrows, anger and fear… Compassion and
empathy are the only ways to sit with them and offer your self… your presence… your
acknowledgement of their personhood and their pain, when there are no words for
the tragedy they are facing… When cards and hot meals and flowers and texts and
Facebook messages of sympathy are lost in the winds of well-meaning attempts to
fill the awkward silence when people don’t know what to say. Presence,
compassion and empathy are the tools that can create sacred space that invites
someone to be authentic in their pain and struggle, and sometimes…. sometimes… you are privileged enough to
be invited into their journey, to walk with them as an ally, to be their
partner in the struggle to create meaning and find the Divine in the aftermath
of destruction and chaos. Only, to do that means being vulnerable yourself… you
can’t truly journey with someone in their struggles without hearing with your
heart… and sometimes that means hearing things that convict you and make you
uncomfortable… I’ve heard Moms who have experienced neo-natal loss share other
people’s reactions to them sharing their “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” photos of
their infant… that it made others too sad to see pictures of their now precious
child… “I’m sorry the photos of my
dead child make you sad, but this is my child, and I want to acknowledge and
honor this member of our family.” My pediatric hospice patients’ parents who share
how their support system dwindles when they make the decision to go on hospice
because their friends and church communities can’t handle the thought of
children dying. It’s selfish… human, but selfish.
Presence,
compassion and empathy are vital tools for creating sacred space that invites
people to begin to heal… but at the end of the day… No amount of presence or
compassion or empathy is going to put you in another person’s shoes… We are
limited in our understanding… in our worldview… by our own experiences… and
until we can acknowledge that and acknowledge that limitedness equates to blind
spots in seeing the whole picture when it comes to tragedies that affect other
people’s lives… we cannot engage in
meaningful conversation about things that really matter… like race and our nation’s eternal
struggle with how to acknowledge the intricacies of how our history informs
present day race relations and racial tensions in this country.
Here’s the deal… It’s not
intrinsically bad that our nation continues to have difficulty navigating race
relations (except that it is the result of centuries
of slavery and segregation in our nation…
which is, in and of itself, intrinsically
evil). But our history (those centuries I just mentioned, followed by
the fact that there are still individuals who were alive during Jim Crow) makes
it impossible for our struggle to have been resolved… The consequences of centuries
of slavery and segregation are not going to be erased or eradicated in less
than 1/3 of the time they were the societal norm…That is not how grief and oppression and healing works. The problem
is not that we still struggle… it’s that we want so badly not to…. We want so desperately for it not to be
a problem… to put it behind us, that we pretend that it’s not a problem until
we can’t anymore… we take such offense at the notion that we benefit from its
existence… and, by “we” I mean white people… It offends on multiple levels… on
one level, we can’t accept the differentiation that you don’t have to be “a racist”
to benefit from white privilege and a society whose very fabric is woven with
systemic and institutionalized racism (the way its also woven with patriarchy)…
it just is what it is, whether you want to accept the boost it provides or not.
Which hits the other nerve… to acknowledge that we didn’t all start off on the
same ground, somehow minimizes the hard work we’ve put into achieving the
successes and achievements that we are so proud of… Just because someone else has to work twice as hard to get
where you’ve gotten doesn’t mean that you haven’t worked hard… it just means
that they have had obstacles we know nothing about. This idea of white
privilege hits our nerves in such a way that we feel we have to reject the
notion of systemic and institutionalized racism in order to pardon ourselves
from participation in anything racist and hold onto the pride we have in our
accomplishments… we are so bound up in our own comfort with the status quo that
when it implodes on itself we try to blame the “victims” and transfer the
issues, deflecting to how “they need to do better” because the exposal of the
Truth makes us feel guilty and like something is being taken from us… and
that’s uncomfortable… It’s easier to feel good about how far we’ve come,
individually and as a nation, without acknowledging that our nation, just like
each of us individually, are a work in progress, we have wounds that need to be
healed so we can become whole in our broken places….
We can’t continue to say “I’m so tired
of hearing about racism in America” when we have no idea what that reality is
like for those who are living it every day… it’s like being offended at a
grieving mother’s photo of her dead child… Get over it and put your big-kid
pants on because we have some tough work to do…
I
will admit that for months I have struggled and wrestled with what part I play
in the current struggle we are facing… it started with Trayvon Martin when I was
pregnant with our first child and I was trying to articulate the extra layer of
fears the mother of a “brown baby” must wrestle with on top the fears any mother
experiences… because every mother worries about her baby out in the world,
unable to protect them from the inevitable pains and struggles and evils they
will face… but if your child is
brown or black… and God forbid, male… those pains, and struggles and evils are
multiplied simply because of the color of their skin… something they cannot
control and cannot hide or “overcompensate” for with “good behavior.” And trying to articulate this to a
loved one whose life-experiences simply limit their capacity for understanding
this reality, was isolating… so I kept my mouth shut… And then Michael Brown
was shot and killed in broad daylight and we learned there wouldn’t even be a
trial… and I tried to talk to my husband about it… my black husband… I wanted
to protest with my Black Church Studies Minister colleagues in Dallas and felt
like I needed to DO something… to stand up for my husband… and my cousin and
his wife and children… my brothers-in-law, and my sister-in-law and nephews…
and my friends and colleagues…. And MY DAUGHTER and unborn children… but my
husband and I have very different ways of processing this sort of thing and
different outward responses and he felt like I was being to vocal and public
with my frustration and was concerned that I may offend his friends, and so I
learned to keep my mouth shut… because this is more about his experience than
mine… so his desires trump mine where this is concerned…. And then while I was
still digesting that injustice on my own and feeling paralyzed, we learned that
even though Eric Garner was killed in the light of day, ON CAMERA FOR THE WORLD
TO SEE, where he unarguably did NOT resist arrest, by a police officer who used
a banned chokehold to execute and arrest for an infraction that normally
warranted a ticket and not an arrest in the first place, where he said ELEVEN
TIMES…. 11 times…. “I can’t breathe” and multiple police officers continued to
bring him down in a chokehold and then sit on him to restrain him without
regard for his pleas for life… where he is seen lying on the ground, not
breathing and no one checks his pulse for 4 minutes… no one performs CPR at
all… and he dies on camera…. We watch him die… and nobody is held responsible… NOBODY!
There are so many different factors at play here… so many systemic issues that
need addressing… but the one we seem to have the hardest time with is that if
Eric Garner were white… this whole scenario would be different… and he most
likely wouldn’t have been dead… and even if he had still been arrested and died
in the process, there would have undoubtedly been an indictment… It makes me
sick… It scares the shit out of me… literally terrifies me to the point that I
have resorted to praying that as I will someday bring another child into this
world, that it won’t be a boy… because I don’t think my heart can handle the
weight of that responsibility… to protect him, teach him how to protect himself
by making himself smaller when he is being disrespected by authority whose
fears and ignorance are blinding and incite panicked and fatal reactions… I
can’t imagine that God would trust me with the weight of that responsibility
for Her child.
I’m
not sorry… My silence is suffocating me… and I can’t breathe anymore…
Literally… I sit and think about my daughter and the children we want to have
in the future, and I CANNOT stay silent anymore… When they learn about this in
their history lessons, because make no mistake… this is a pivotal moment in
history… and they ask me about it, I have to be able to show them that I fought
for change so that they wouldn’t have to experience the gravity of the struggle
we are facing today… And finally, I stand up not only for them, but for me… For
my soul… To address the sickness in my gut… My soul is not right with this… I
have been aching and sick because if this were 5 years ago… I would be standing
up in a much more active way… and the fact that I have censored myself has
added salt to an already aching wound in my heart… I know better… I know that
there are different realities for how this world is experienced based on race,
gender, class, physical ability, mental health… and I know that my salvation in
the Kin-dom is wrapped up with that of my neighbors… So…. This is where I
start… My Presence and Compassion and Empathy without censor… We have to start having difficult
conversations… not only in times of crisis, but ongoing conversations about how
we can clean up this oozing wound of ours… We have to do better…
#blacklivesmatter
~Rev. Megan Elizabeth
Lilburn Turner, MDiv
“If you have come here to help me then you are wasting your
time… But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then
let us work together.” ~Lila Watson
