“Write about someone who blazed a trail that you later followed. What did they do? How did their example help you along the way?” (Tom Turcich via Saleika Jaouad)
When I first read this query the person that came to mind is Jesus of Nazareth, blazing a broad trail of living with integrity under the Love… through the snares and adventures of this life. Through river and desert, Galilean spring and Jerusalem winter. That’s how I want to live—yet as Michael.
I acknowledge that none of us can actually be Jesus—the job is taken— yet we can walk with human integrity, that is, bear witness in our own unique ways to “Christ in us, the hope of glory.”
I think each of us are called to live fully with grace, grit, salty excellence—as peculiar people—through the travails and adventures of life on this earth. And, like it or not, our lives are interconnected. As Dr. King said, “I cannot be who I ought to be until you are who you ought to be. And you cannot be who you ought to be until I am who I ought to be.” What that mystery means we are still unpacking, God is working it out. Not without pain, not without laughter.
On this October morning I want to thank my fellow sojourners for your beautiful love and prayers. My surgery on Wednesday went well, though it lasted six + hours, 3-9:30 pm. I woke up at 11:00pm in wonder. A beautiful Black nurse welcomed me back to the land of the living. I’m grateful for a truly excellent surgeon and medical team. They went the extra mile to keep me alive and make me whole. Karen and my daughters have been tremendous. I continue to receive the triune gifts of grit, compassion, and gratitude.
And I am thinking anew about what it means to love our neighbor and ourselves (both) in a wider context; to bear witness with salty tenderness and toughness in an anguished nation. Ten years ago Cornel West gave a powerful charge to my friend Chris Hedges and the community in Elizabeth. His words ring especially true in this season of fear and white backlash. They open a path for walking redemption on this day, for following Jesus of Nazareth under the Love with humility and audacity.
Dr. West charged us to love our neighbor in America by centering the experience of Black people, “…who’ve been terrorized and traumatized and stigmatized for four hundred years in a land that likes to trivialize their suffering and overlook their humanity.
It’s a beautiful thing when you think of the Miles Hortons . . . the Anne Bradys . . . Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Erik Foners in scholarship that put at the center of the modern experience the vicious legacy of white supremacy. You don’t remain stuck there, but once you go through that lens you’re gonna be able to more readily understand the suffering of others.
Why? Because the degree to which Black people have been so hated and despised. We have no monopoly on that, not at all. But if you come in that way, you’re going to understand working people a little bit better . . . poor people all around the world a little bit better . . . patriarchy and the sisters a little bit better . . . our gay brothers and lesbian sisters a little bit better, you’re going to understand empire . . . and the wretched of the earth a little bit better . . .
The great Reinhold Niebuhr used to say that any justice that’s only justice soon degenerates into something less that justice. Justice must be rescued by something deeper than justice. And the only thing deeper than justice is love.
And for a Christian like me, old school Christian, the only thing that keeps me going, is the blood at the cross, or I would snap, I’d go crazy, and I might do it anyway. I was a gangster before I met Jesus. And now I’m a redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities. The only thing keeping me is that love…
So the Kingdom of God, that we have the audacity to still align ourselves with, if that Kingdom of God is within you, then everywhere you go, you ought to leave a little heaven behind.
That’s the charge: how much heaven are you going to leave behind in your short move from your mama’s womb to tomb… How much heaven will all of us leave behind?
More to come... But in the end Samuel Beckett is right, ‘Try, fail. Try again, fail again, fail better.’ That when they put us in the grave, even following the charge, we’re still a relative failure because we fell on our faces, but most importantly we bounce back, because we wanted to be part of that love train, that quest for the Kingdom of God— that humility that our dear brother James Cone was talking about at the center of the gospel which is inseparable from memory and inseparable from tenacity.
Charge to each one of us: how do we learn to love our crooked neighbor with our crooked hearts?
Grace—Amazing Grace—Empowers!”
(Cornel West, October 10, 2014)
Our crooked hearts. Reminds me of a Portuguese proverb, God writes best with crooked lines. I am a crooked line. Thank goodness!!!
Were you in divinity school with Chris Hedges?