Red and Blue and Purple Too

  None of us are meant to be observers as the world moves through today and into that which will be. We are to be participants. You may not agree with this, but we are participants even when we sit back and let ourselves merely look on or simply bitch and gripe about the world as we hold it out at arms length so that it will not touch us and we will not have to touch it. When I encounter people of various faith tradition a common thread that is woven into all of our lives is the necessity to have our lives become a part of the fabric of the society in which we live. It does not mean we work to transform the culture or society into our kind. Rather, there are foundational ways to be vitally concerned and a part of our communities. It would be easy to simply say we are invited to love one another - without boundary - without bias - without partiality. But those words, unfortunately, get blown off too easily. The infectiousness of sentimentality within the rubric to love has made love an indecency - for it has become the means to war, tribalism, and the need to destroy the other out of love of our own. What a shame. I must say that the call to love that comes from people outside of a faith community can be powerful and yet, it too, can be nothing more than an sentimental familial journey.

I may be one of the slowest readers in the world. Then, if you throw on top of that the fact that I must read early in the day or else I will fall asleep within moments of a few turns of the page - I can be pathetic. I say this at this point of this blog because I have been doing some of the best reading of my life within the past few years. It is theological and biblical - but it makes my heart stir and my mind work to bring words to life. And yet, I want to read novels. Harry Potter had me for years. John Irving can still grab me - though at times it takes too long to flip my switch. So, in this time of retirement yearnings, I looked up at the books I still have from my years of being a pastor. I gave away many - yes many - of my books. I kept ones I knew I would read again or use as a reference for myself or those few that I had only dipped into for a brief moment. Yesterday I looked up from watching some news and saw a very thin book. At the top of the binding it said, Thurman. As I am doing now, I smiled. It was Howard Thurman's book Jesus and the Disinherited. When I started to flip through the pages, I was glad my wife was not near by. For throughout the book I had marked it up without any regard for the conservation of yellow markers or marginal comments. It was then the I was a bit shaken - but that was good. What a foundational book for me. The book was published in 1949 but he had been writing decades earlier. Even the new 'theological' stuff I'm reading has not stirred my soul like my first review of the first chapter - actually the Preface.

But let me go back to my opening concern about love and engagement and that which I would consider the basic gift of our humanity - keeping our eyes open for the well-being of all. Anything less than that is sheer violence. I for one can be one hell of a violent person. Fortunately, I have voices all around me that hold up visions of peacefulness and the common good of all and the need to never forget those who are too often forgotten within the world I occupy. Let me step back a few sentences. Hell is the violence of this world of ours. Hell  takes on so many faces, we often do not see it sitting at the bar stool next to us or the Thanksgiving dinner or our favored groups or the news we watch or the fear brewing in our hearts or the anxiety blowing in the winds of change. To keep things as we want them, in voice and act and gesture we let ourselves lean into the violence of separation, accusation, condemnation, and self-focused love.

Though I do not read as much as I would like - I read. I take a look at how this side and that side argue. I endure the endless ways everyone seems to attempt to make themselves shine and make sure the other is diminished. I am so sad to hear the violence. It comes from all sides. For example, I am one who strongly supports and even started my career as a pastor in community organizing. It is an important way to be connected to the community in which one lives. In Detroit, that meant a mere section of a big city. It meant I learned so much from neighbors. But I also learned that just like so many ways we move through life, we build an us and a them. Yes, even the most well meaning people know how to be violent at some level. One day at a meeting of about twenty five community members, there was some discussion about including a predominantly Chaldean neighborhood into our community organization. For a few moments, I sat back like a young child eavesdropping on a wise adult conversation that was beginning to implode. There were those (white and black) who were saying they worked with them and - they smell. Hmmm. Then the elder African American member of the board started laughing - one of those deep Heh-Heh-Heh laughs. When faces turned his way he said, 'Do you hear what we are doing? We are describing them in the same way (then he points to some of the white members of the board) they used to talk about us.' Everyone looked around and joined his laughter and follow with a vote to expand the table. The community was not miraculously healed - but, we saw and heard the movement of a humanity that was considering how truly human we all can be - even if it was just in one act of solidarity mixed with laughter and action.

Red and Blue and Purple Too will be my way of talking about the way we continue to be a violent culture and the call to be something new. Some of that will have to do with how we must face the lies that come from the two political parities that attempt to run our country. You may have noticed that both parties have a long history of promises and none of them are kept. Even prophetic voices fall to the side as the mechanism of the way things are marches on under banners promising new life and better times. Unfortunately, over the change of powers and words and parties, the violence of the culture persists.There is no trickle down. There is no program for the hungry and insecure. There is no action to expand the middle class. There is absolutely no action to see to the well-being of the poor. There is no mutual respect for people of all backgrounds. Even when folks attempt to talk of compromises by using words like purple to describe a political reality - purple is nothing more than nothing more.

So, while the same violence of our cultural leaders owns the day - what are we to do - what can we do? I'm one who needs to maintain an imagination and have others expand that imagination. I am one who also needs someone to help move my ass into action that will never forget the least, the lowest, the left out. For  those of you who consider yourself bothered (even oppressed) by changes in society and feel threatened by how the world is moving in directions you may not like, I may not be writing for you. I hope I will be drawing into question the violence we have at the core of how we move through the day and how that movement is a hell of a way to live.
TRRR