Hope out of Shameful Acts

Hope Out of Shameful Acts

“In the Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone highlights a paradox of the gospel: out of the shameful and humiliating act of crucifixion comes hope.”—Debra J. Mumford, “Living the Word” in The Christian Century (3/14/2018).

We drove through Montgomery, Alabama, a week before opening The National Memorial and Museum for Peace and Justice—better known as the Lynching Memorial and Museum. We think we caught a glimpse of it in the distance. We felt a call that we must return to Montgomery to visit both parts.

Between 1950 and 1877, more than 4400 African American men, women, and children were lynched by being burned alive, hanged, shot, drowned, or beaten to death. The memorial structure at the center of the site is made of more than 800 steel monuments, one for each county in our country where a racial lynching occurred. The adjacent museum is built on the site of a former warehouse in which enslaved Black people brought in by boat or rails were imprisoned before going to the slave market.

Ironically, James Cone, one of America’s best-known advocates of black theology and liberation theology, died two days after opening this memorial and museum.

In her Good Friday message in The Christian Century, Debra Mumford reminds us how the horrific lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta in August 1955 sparked national outrage. This led Rosa Parks to move from the back to the front of the bus in Montgomery that December. Her arrest began the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, a groundbreaking event in the civil rights movement.

The Lynching Museum and Memorial, this year’s Black Lives Matter Marches, and the Good Friday services in which we will soon participate can remind us of the shameful acts that did and still take place in our world.

We are to remember this on Good Friday and remind each other, especially our spiritual friends, that our hope, our small part, is not unlike that of Rosa Parks. We are to change the world by remembering the cruelty and standing our ground with trembling hearts in love wherever we see social and racial injustice, as has happened so much this past year.

Cone and Mumford remind us that when we talk with spiritual friends, at some point, we are also to remind them that our traditions teach us about great hope that can follow horrendous and unjust tragedies.

This is part of the problematic walk we will soon walk in Holy Week. The hopeful part is that our president signed into law that lynching was a federal hate crime. The horrendous part is how long it took for this to happen.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

 

Barbara Brown Taylor: Spiritual Practices

Barbara Brown Taylor: Spiritual Practices, Movies, Short Stories

“Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.”—Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World.

 I have been in groups that watched for the presence of God in movies, not necessarily religious films. One of my favorites is Places in the Heart, where Sally Fields is a recently widowed farmer’s wife in rural Texas during the Depression. She takes in a blind boarder, John Malkovich, and with the help of an African American drifter, Danny Glover, raises and picks cotton to keep her farm. Stop here if you do not want to know more, but the movie ends with all the characters, living and dead, black and white, murdered victim and murderer, kind and unkind, faithful and unfaithful, passing communion and love to each other at their local rural church.

I am in another group that reads contemporary short stories to find the voice of God. We have used a four-volume series, Listening for God, edited by an English professor from Yale University, Paula Carlson, and a religion professor, Peter Hawkins. One of my favorite stories is A Small Good Thing by Raymond Carver, about a couple whose child dies and the baker who had made him a birthday cake. Spoiler alert! This story also ends with the three of them having a form of communion late at night at the baker’s shop.

We find communion and spiritual practices in our daily lives that lead us to that connection to God that is always there. We only need to open our eyes to see and tune our ears to hear. We can then live in the present moment, where God lives within us, around us, above, and in our neighbor.

Joanna joannaseibert.com https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

Wounded Healers

 Wounded Healer

“To be a conscious person in this world, to be aware of all the suffering and the beauty, means to have your heart broken over and over again.”—Sharon Salzberg, InwardOutward.org, “Daily Quote,” May 31, 2018.

Caravaggio

Sharon Salzberg is an author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practices. Those in Christian and psychological traditions will recognize this Buddhist belief we share as the Christian and Jungian teaching of the wounded healer.

The best healers are those who have experienced and know the most about suffering. We see this daily in our small group grief recovery group, Walking the Mourner’s Path. Three or four of us are the facilitators holding the group together. The real healers are the group members who try to live through the death of a loved one and begin to empathize with what the others in the group are feeling.  

The same is true for those in 12-step recovery groups.

When we talk with spiritual friends who are suffering, we listen and listen and listen. At some point, they will mention someone else who is suffering and who helped or reached out to them. This is our subtle clue to tell them that perhaps, at some future date, they can do the same for someone else. It is the old native American message of having walked in someone else’s moccasins that gives us compassion for that person when we have a hint of what their life is like.

Christianity teaches us that we, like Thomas, are healed by the scars of the wounds of Christ.

Sometimes, the only resurrection we ever see in tremendous suffering is developing an awareness of what it is like for others who are also in distress.

We have a choice: bitterness for the suffering or an understanding of compassion for others who also struggle.

Five disciplines tell us this same message about the wounded healer. I know there must also be other traditions involved in sending this message. 

For me, when several disciplines intersect, this is a sign of truth.