Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
The protests of the last ten days across our country and around the globe have expressed and elicited the range of passion and perspective that we have come to expect in a deeply divided United States and world. In the streets, in the media, and in my email inbox, the voices reflect passionate opinion, religious conviction, righteous indignation, and partisan politics.
The presenting issues are not new. Racial inequality and injustice long precede our history as a nation. While there has been social change over the four centuries since enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, the underlying reality of racial disparity and discrimination in our society and institutions persists. Every social metric bears that out, whether one looks at educational opportunity; wealth distribution; employment; access to healthcare, housing, and food; poverty demographics; or incarceration rates. We can allow ourselves to be distracted by details and how to interpret them, but the reality is clear. Black lives matter. And while it is true that all lives matter, proclaiming that is like asking the fire department to hose down every house on the street when one in particular is burning.
In spite of all the anti-racism and social justice trainings I have participated in beginning as a teenager, it is in moments like these, when the hurt, resentment, anger, and expectation that we can be a better society break the surface and are demonstrated in widespread protest, that I am most vulnerable to looking at myself and taking a more honest account of my own role and responsibility as a citizen and a Christian. For me, as a person of considerable privilege – racial, social, economic, intellectual, and vocational – and as the parent and foster-parent of children of color who worries endlessly for their safety and security in this unequal society, it is a soul-searching task. For all who are white, privilege means rarely if ever having to consider the color of their skin in the varied experiences of daily life.
To many and perhaps most people of privilege, the mention of racism elicits a defensive reaction. The notion that a society is racist, wherein one race possesses privileges that another does not, falls on the ear as an unwelcome self-judgement, though not necessarily unwarranted. When I share a reflection like this one, for example, I am struck by how much energy is focused, in some replies, on self-justification or defense and abdicating responsibility for change. Of course, I am at one level quite sympathetic to that, as I know how hard it is to look in the mirror, especially if the frame is gilded. For people of privilege, gilt edges become guilt edges.
The power of evil wants the privileged to be hobbled by guilt. It knows how readily guilt can result in denial and avoidance, or lead to self-defense, deflection, and projection. Jesus challenges and encourages us, however, to ask how we might use our privilege to effect change. He asks how can we employ those same things that the power of evil would use to separate us from one another, to bring us together. By his own words and the example of his life, he challenges us to use our positions of privilege, whatever they may be, to advocate for, quite literally to join voices with, those whose voices are not heard; to balance the scales of justice and even the playing field of opportunity; to equalize access to services and resources; and to make what is probable for a few to be possible for all. By the prayer that he taught us, Jesus adjures us to make on earth the kingdom of heaven. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.”
The model that Jesus gave us is that of sacrifice. In the Eucharistic Prayer we ask that we might join with Christ in his sacrifice. We offer to give ourselves back to God, over and over again, that God might receive us and do a new and more holy thing with us. That is what sacrifice means: to make holy, from the Latin sacer (holy, sacred) and facere (to make). Our self-sacrificial gift requires a willingness to change, to become new, to be made holy that, with Christ’s agency working through us, the world might be made new.
And so, we must ask God and one another how we can use all that we have been privileged with – voice and audience, resources and intellect, creativity and authority and power – to make the changes God is dreaming of for the world. Just as the power of evil will do all it can to persuade us to defend our privilege, God will relentlessly challenge us to spend it on behalf of God’s beloved, who are without exception or exclusion. God calls us to demonstrate without ceasing the love that lifts all to the same plane, and to protest, to testify publicly, by what we say and what we do, to the same love that defines everyone as God’s treasured child.
In all that you do, be encouraged by the example of Jesus and inspired by God’s own spirit of holiness to lift up your voice, roll up your sleeves, and give yourself to the new thing that God is always doing. Pray that this moment of racial awareness and responsive social change might be fertile and not futile, and that we, as agents of God’s justice and mercy, might be bold and not belligerent, peaceful and not polarizing, vital and not violent, and humbly willing to march in the other’s shoes.
With prayers for you, this nation, and the world,
The Rt. Rev. Mark Hollingsworth, Jr.
Bishop of Ohio
Labyrinth
