Scripture: Isaiah 59:9-11 and Psalm 27
“Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us; we wait for light, and lo! There is darkness; and for brightness, but we walk in gloom…We wait for justice but there is none, for salvation but it is far from us.”
Those words from Isaiah describe pretty well how I felt this last Wednesday after I listened to a phone message that was waiting for me when I came back to the church office after lunch. The message was from Hilda Ward, who had called to tell me about the attack on the University of Virginia student that had taken place in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Hilda’s call just told me the basic facts which everyone is aware of by now—that a young woman, Daisy Lundy, who was running for student council president, had been attacked by a young and large white male as she was going to her car to look for her cell phone about 2:00 in the morning. He had slammed her body and head into the car, causing some fairly serious physical injuries and yelling at her that he, or “we”, don’t want a nigger to be student body president.
I sat and listened to Hilda’s message and then pushed the button and listened again, and then listened again, trying to sort out my feelings, but not succeeding. They included, of course, anger, and sadness, and helplessness, but much more than that too, feelings I wasn’t sure I had a simple name for. Hilda’s call also was to let me know about a gathering that was to be held later that afternoon, mainly for the university community, but open to the public as well. She said she would let me know what happened if I couldn’t go and at first I thought that there probably wasn’t a whole lot of point in my going. But then as I replayed Hilda’s message and then spoke to her in person it became clear to me that I needed to go, not that I had any role to play, not that anyone else needed me to go, just that I needed me to go. It was the place I needed to be.
I’m glad I went. I benefited from being in the Newcomb Hall ballroom with some hundreds of UVa students and faculty and a few people from the wider community. I benefited from many of the things that the speakers said. One of the speakers brought up the name of Gregory Swanson.
Gregory Swanson was a man from Danville, Virginia who was already a practicing lawyer when he applied to the Law School for advanced study. He was first turned down because he happened to be African American, and the law at the time forbid him to be admitted. He brought suit and in 1951 became the first African American student at the University of Virginia. He stayed for about a year, eventually leaving because of the harassment and intimidation he experienced during his time at the university.
Gregory Swanson’s name happened to be familiar to me. I have been reading a book recently that I first became aware of at last year’s Festival of the Book and that I thought I should read then, but didn’t. I picked it up this year at the urging of Jim Gibson. He and Pam had been reading it in a book club they belonged to and suggested that I might be interested and loaned me a copy. The book is called “The Desegregated Heart”, and it’s written by an Albemarle County native named Sarah Patton Boyle.
Sarah Patton Boyle, by her own account, grew up as a member of the Virginia aristocracy. For reasons that are probably only partially explainable, she came to see it as her task to advocate for Gregory Swanson’s acceptance at the Law School and to personally welcome him when he arrived. Boyle had already achieved some success as a freelance writer and she wrote some articles about the situation that got published in national magazines, so she became publicly identified as a supporter of integration. As a result of this and her many subsequent activities she too experienced harassment, threats, intimidation, and maybe most sadly of all isolation from people she had once thought were her friends. The mention of Gregory Swanson at the meeting last Wednesday had a particular resonance for me, just from reading this book.
It also resonated with some things I have been thinking about over the past few weeks. When Kwame Osei Reed was here a few weeks ago, he said something that I not only agreed with but believe very deeply and have tried to say myself in my own way on a number of occasions. What he said out loud was that if we win freedom for oppressed people, we will also be winning freedom for the oppressor. We seek justice not because it will be good for some people, but because it will be good for all people. Kwame used the phrase, you may remember, that you can’t keep somebody down in the ditch unless you get down there with them. Oppression oppresses the oppressor as well as the oppressed. I don’t remember all of Kwame’s exact words, but those of you who were here may remember Kwame expressing that thought. It’s a thought that was said again at the meeting at UVa on Wednesday. As I say, it’s a thought I affirm wholeheartedly. When Kwame expressed it a few weeks ago, and when it was expressed last Wednesday, I quietly said “amen”. I also heard it, both times, as offering me a kind of a challenge to say exactly why and in what ways it is true for me.
I’ve been challenged in that way before. Over the years I have been a participant a number of times in workshops on racism. In Illinois the UCC recognized that the structures of the church needed to confront the issues of racism in order to do their work effectively, and as a member of various committees and as pastor of a church that was facing racial issues, I participated in these workshops. I remember one in particular where the African American participants pushed the white people in the group pretty hard about why they were even in the workshop, why we bothered to come. What’s in this for you, they wanted to know. Why didn’t we just go about our business, enjoying our privileges as white people and not bother too much about trying to confront the racism in ourselves or in society? It sounds nice to say that racism hurts everyone, but does it really, they wanted to know? Aren’t we asking you to give up some of your privileges? Why would you want to do that? They wanted to know how racism really hurt us and why we would bother to fight against it. What do we personally gain from being involved in the fight against racism?
The white people in the group, myself included, were I think befuddled at first by being asked to explain ourselves in this way. What! Didn’t our questioners think it was a good thing for us to be involved? Were they trying to convince us not to be involved? Why did they seem to want us to have selfish reasons for being concerned about racism? Wasn’t it enough for us to just be there and to think that it is the right thing to do and to try to be people of good will?
The answer, I came to see, was that it is not enough just to be people of good will. There are lots of people of good will in the world. There were lots of people of good will in the room at Newcomb Hall on Wednesday afternoon. The room was filled with people who were outraged or sickened or saddened or all of the above by what had happened. But the question frankly is not whether you will show up when it’s easy to do so and when you are surrounded by lots of other people of good will. The question is whether you will show up when it’s not so easy to show up. The African American people in our group had experienced—they later explained this to me—the betrayal of people who meant well, who would come to workshops or make other gestures of good will, but who would not be there, who coincidentally would find good reasons not to be there, when being there took courage.
Sarah Patton Boyle experienced that betrayal too. The story she tells in the book I’ve been reading is one of increasing isolation as she became publicly identified with desegregation efforts in Charlottesville and throughout Virginia. People who told her privately they agreed with her were silent or cautiously neutral in public. People she thought were her friends were nowhere to be seen when she was being viciously attacked in the press and receiving death threats on a daily basis. She tells a sad story of her increasing distrust and disillusionment and cynicism with regard to other people, including people she had thought to be good-hearted people. But for her, as for the people in my workshop, being good hearted wasn’t quite good enough.
My friends in the workshop had been pushing us, I came to realize, because they wanted to know if our concern was rooted in anything deeper than a general sense of good-heartedness or an abstract sense of what was the right thing to do. Many times the image we have of religion is that it is something that is meant to urge, cajole, or threaten us into being good or doing the right thing when we don’t necessarily really want to.
This is not only not a very flattering idea of what religion is all about. It’s also a not very effective approach. Things we think we ought to do often don’t have much of a hold on us; they aren’t rooted very deeply. I really ought to exercise more. And I ought to eat less. I know I ought to and eventually I will, but not this week. I’m too busy this week. Lots of stress this week. It’s not a good week for exercise or diet. Maybe next week. The middle of next week, after we go out for dinner Tuesday night.
You know how these things go. Ought often succeeds in making us feel guilty, and doesn’t succeed very often in getting us to actually do what we think we ought to do. It’s awfully easy to get distracted from things we ought to do, and find good reasons not to do them. The question is more what we need to do. What are those things we cannot not do?
The question in the workshop about what’s in this for us, was really a question about what makes this something more than an option. What makes it compelling? From my African American friends, the question really was, “How do I know I can count on you?” The accumulated evidence, illustrated sadly but well by the book The Desegregated Heart, is that very often people, even well-intentioned people, cannot be counted on.
I chose the title of the sermon this morning because it has a double, more than double, meaning for me. On the one hand, the term integration is associated with racial issues and the struggle for racial justice, and that is what I meant it to mean. It’s what I have been talking about this morning. This all has to do with race and racism and all those issues that continue to plague us and that the attack at UVa reminds us just won’t go away.
The attack also reminded me of one answer I can give to the question of what’s in this for me. I don’t want to have to feel this way any more. I don’t want to have to deal with the shame, the anger, the discouragement, the sense of powerlessness, and all the rest. When I receive news like I did from Hilda’s phone call last Wednesday, I know for one thing, I am powerfully reminded, that we have not won this battle, that there is still a long ways to go, that this should not be seen as an isolated incident or the act of some single deranged individual.
But I know something else as well. I know that I am not an integrated individual, and can’t be so long as things like this are taking place around me. I know that my heart is broken, not just in the sense of being sad, but in the sense of not being whole, not being of a piece, not being at peace. I bring that brokenness to the communion table today.
In her book, Sarah Patton Boyle, used a phrase that struck me. She talked about how at the age of 45 she became integrated. By that I don’t think she meant, or meant only, that at the age of 45 she was converted to the cause of integration. I read her as meaning something more.
At the age of 45 she became integrated, meaning that her life took on some new purpose, that her actions began to match her feelings, that her life began much more to be rooted in her faith. Whatever being an integrated person meant to her, it has to do, for all of us, with more than wanting an end to hatred and prejudice. Being, becoming an integrated person, a whole person, in our society will always have something to do with race. We cannot avoid that. But it has to do also with being rooted in God. It has to do with seeking an integration of ourselves, an integrity of spirit that arises not from what we think we ought to do, but rather from who we are, and who God is. With that need too, with that seeking for integration, for wholeness, for salvation we approach the communion table today.
“’Come,’ my heart says, ‘seek God’s face.’ Your face, O God, do I seek. Do not hide your face from me…I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage. Wait for the Lord!” Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 2, 2003