This Ain't Right

This week my youngest daughter sent our family group a text message.  It said, "Guy I grew up with in Durham was shot and has died."  Her siblings and I exchanged a few texts as we learned about the young man.  His name is Cortnay Garner-McDougald.  #SayHisName

The two of them were students together at George Watts Elementary School, at Brogden Middle School, and at Riverside High School.  "Earliest I can remember him is fourth grade."  That's pretty far back.  They weren't best buddies, but they saw each other, passed each other, and sat in class together sometimes.  "He was in a couple of honors classes at Brogden" that she was also in.

All that the newspaper had to say was the place where he was found, shot in the head, dying at the corner of Grace and Liberty Streets.  The police found him in response to a reported shooting.  A young man's damaged body on the street corner.  Some mother's child.  Some father's son.  Someone's grandson, nephew, friend.

I wanted to know more about him.  The picture the newspaper offered was a mugshot.  He had been arrested previously, on the same Grace Street, along with some other young men, charged with shooting into a dwelling.  Why is that all I can find out?  Although he had lived in this world for at least 25 years, the only accessible information was about an arrest, his being shot, and his death.  He had not been tried for or convicted of any crime.

That's not the world I want my adult children to have to deal with.  Four days later, as I write about Cortnay, there is no obituary other than listing his name and a funeral home.  The funeral home website does not list his name.  Someone knew him.

Was there a church or other faith community that he had encountered?  Did they learn his name?  Did they write it down?  Did anyone wonder where he was when they did not see him in Sunday School, at choir rehearsal, or in the service?

A friend I have recently gotten to know, Royce Hathcock, talked to a group of students at Shaw Divinity School last Saturday.  Among many important things he said, one stuck with me.  Royce said that at his church, Tapestry, they were trying to be a community that keeps up with people.  They were not first interested in finding more people; rather, they want to stay in relationship with the ones who have already come their way.  Royce and some other church people in South Raleigh were devastated when their friend, Akiel Denkins, was shot and killed recently in their neighborhood.  They had known him.  He was in and out of their classes and churches, but they stayed in touch with him.  When Akiel died, it was not a head-scratching moment to try to figure out who the young man was.  It was a piece of their heart that was broken.

Royce was not claiming to be part of a perfect church, but there was something basic to being a church that his words expressed that day.  Somewhere, family and friends who had kept up with Cortnay had their hearts broken.  No one is telling their stories in print.  I can only wonder if there is a church who knew Cortnay and is grieving his absence.  This ain't how things should be.  It is never the will of God that a young man get a bullet through his head.  God wants life for us, a life of loving one another.

May God's Spirit surround the people who love Cortnay Garner-McDougald.  May God's Spirit make us lovers of the young men and women in our neighborhoods and cities, loving enough to keep up with them.  May we be found accompanying Jesus life-giving mission at the corner of Grace and Liberty Streets.  #SayHisName

Do You Want to Be Healed? Conversating Down by the Pool of Bethesda

Scholars classify the sayings of Jesus in various ways:  parables, aphorisms, dialogues, etc.  Some who have studied them have focused on conversations or "interviews" Jesus has with various people.  Preachers in our individualistic age particularly love these sorts of sayings.  In such conversations, a sermon can leverage Jesus' compassion, wisdom, or straightforward (even harsh) truthfulness into an assumed conversation between the Lord and the person in the pew.  Probably most who read this have heard a sermon on this text.

Sometimes these Gospel stories portray Jesus asking a question of someone.  One favorite such question appears in the encounter between Jesus and a paralytic man by the Pool of Bethesda.  In this conversation, Jesus asks the man, "Do you want to be made well?"  The man had lay by the pool, reputed to have intermittent healing powers, for a very long time.  Read superficially, the question almost seems like small talk:  "Hi, there.  How's it going?  Are you hanging out here to be healed?  Good seeing you today!" 

But when we let the question soak in a bit, it becomes a kind of probing, even intense question.  It pushes past superficiality and goes to the heart.  Having been there so long, waiting ostensibly to be healed, was this man finally resigned to stay as he was, content with things as they are?  Certainly, even in hard situations, we often find some level of satisfaction, some reward even in our disappointment, some ease in having settled for things as they are.

It's a harsh question; perhaps, even rude.  The man answered defensively by saying that no one would help him get to the water when the healing powers were present.  One might imagine his answering in our age by saying, "You don't know me!  You can't judge me!  Who do you think you are?"   It was that kind of hard question, forcing the issue, pressing past the excuses.  If listened to carefully, it was a disorienting question.

I have thought a lot about this passage during the past month.  I have started meeting with a counselor for help in facing my life without Everly.  It is a reorienting process.  I am living in a season of uncertainty, trying to imagine a different life than continuing to serve God as Everly and I grow old together.  The rest of my growing old will be without her.  What will that be like? 

I probably "put too much of my business out in the street," but the writing itself is a very powerful process for my self-understanding.  So here I go again.

Even before Everly was diagnosed with cancer, I was dealing with some problems.  Relationships at work had gone sour in several cases.  Some colleagues were eager to see me gone from the faculty, and there was a corresponding trend of vocal disapproval by some students that was eating at me.  At my annual physical, my physician said I was showing signs of depression.  I found it hard to go to the office, and when there I found it hard to concentrate and get my work done. 

As most of us would, I came up with various plans by which I would get my life back on track.  I made regular commitments to myself to set up a schedule, to segregate my activities, to improve my habits.  Nothing that I was trying was making much difference.  Everly was concerned, but at a loss on how to help me.  Moreover, her own stressful job was enough for her to handle.  She could not carry my load, too. 

So for several years, I floundered, trying to recover the productivity of my earlier years.  I accomplished some big things during that time.  I helped lead some statewide organizing work among theologians and IAF groups dealing with the economy.  I became involved in the same work on a national basis, even chaired some major national meetings among PICO, IAF, and other local organizing groups.  I received honors for this work.  I wrote and delivered theological papers which received praise from many scholars.  I helped rebuild a robust faculty senate at the university. 

But in between the big events, I often found it nearly impossible to make progress on daily work.  It became my new mode of life.  I got used to it.  I was not sure things would ever be different.  I wondered why I was staying in my profession.

The first big question I needed to face in counseling was this:  "What are the rewards I get by avoiding my daily tasks and putting off work that I need to do?"  It was a surprising question, a way of looking at the problem from a different angle.  Anxiety, regret, guilt, disappointment in myself, little hope for change--these were the ways that I would have described my situation.  They are not what one would normally call rewards.  But it seemed a worthy question, and I mulled it over for days. 

What began to emerge was a sense of the way that occasional anxiety and guilt mixed with longer periods of ignoring and denying other things I needed to do was a kind of reward.  I could avoid the more intense anxieties that came up when I pressed into my work--the philosophical struggle with the validity of grades, the disappointment of occasional plagiarized work, the marginalization within the office politics.  These rewards had become the minimal compensation that came from not dealing with the harder matters in my life.

So it is no surprise that my life did not make a sudden upturn when we discovered Everly had cancer, and we struggled through those fifteen months of fear and hope and loss.  Our focus shifted toward supporting her through pain and treatments.  We had to think about the possibilities of her death and its effect on the children and me.  We had our ups and downs, and we had even begun to think that she might be able to live with the cancer for several more years.  But all of that gave me very justifiable reasons not to deal with my own problems at work. 

The grief of losing Everly has been immeasurable.  I have spent much of my energy working on grief, writing about grief and faith, telling the story of what Everly meant to us and to the world, and trying to keep taking one step after another.  Recently, however, a pastor friend told me, with some insistence, that it was time for me to seek some counseling help.  I had made good headway in dealing with grief, but the enormity of the loss and the complexity of my other problems would probably greatly benefit from someone who could help guide me through the process.  Since I had asked for his opinion, I thought it right that I would follow his suggestion.  And so far it has meant trying to unravel the knots in which I have gotten myself over many years. 

Having started working on that first question about what rewards I might find in continuing the way I have been living, we pretty quickly moved on to a second question:  "Can you imagine a situation in which you do your daily work without dread, without it causing you so much anxiety?"  And there again I was with another door to open, another knot to untie.  Knowing how things are and what gives me an overwhelming sense of dread, could I see a way to face those things with creativity and energy to see the possibilities for good, not just for more pain? 

Ultimately, I realized I was being asked the question Jesus asked the man at the Pool of Bethesda.  "Mike, do you want to be healed?"  Or was I satisfied that nothing I do would make things better, that the mess I was in was inescapable, that I was destined to be a diminished version of what I once was.  In recent months, I had been talking to close friends about a similar question I was posing to myself.  "Somewhere under the layers of disappointment and frustration, avoidance and waning hope, was the person still in there who once was known always to take initiative, to press through problems, to bear the load when needed, to lead when others faltered?" 

I remember being a different sort of person at home, at work, at church.  But the memory was fading.  I could not untie the knots that bound my energy.  I could not find and assemble the pieces that could that happen again.  I knew that Everly had admired that person.  I feared I had disappointed her as I shrank into a smaller person.  And I no longer had her beside me to hold me up and believe in me when it was hard to believe in myself.  Could those virtues I once displayed ever return?  Could new virtues take seed and grow?

So I don't think I am just parroting "positivity" or "visualizing a better life" when I say that I realized there can be a situation in which my work does not cause me pain and anxiety.  The joy has never left some parts of the work.  It has even grown and flourished as I taught this year, forced by my grief to be more publicly "real" as a person and not just a professorial persona.  Seeking out the comfort and guidance of friends has helped me feel less alone in the world.  Drawing near to my children has reminded me of much of my purpose for living and the fruit that my life already has borne.  Taking on myself the task of continuing a beautiful life that I lived with Everly has inspired me to get serious about how I spend the remainder of my years.

Yes.  I do want to be healed.  Even though the sociality of existence means that others have played a role in my frustrations, I can't continue to leave my destiny in the hands of people who have gone on to other things.  There is a door that has opened, and some strings hanging from the knots have been pulled loose and are longer than they used to be.  Small steps, small accomplishments, small satisfactions--this is the path I am on. 

Good people have agreed to support me with regular conversation and prayer.  I'm not walking alone.  Another crowd of witnesses, a communion of saints, encompasses me.  Loved ones and friends are pulling for me.  My students are a great well of refreshing as they also learn about holding their faith in struggle and about understanding the depths of pain and grief through my teaching.  I cannot help but be aware of the work of the Holy Spirit to guide my feet, order my steps, and make a way out of no way. 

Jesus asked the man a question that got to the heart of the matter.  In this season, I've once again taken up that inquiry. 

On Chitchat

For much of the past few weeks, with snow and cold weather around NC, I have kept to myself.  The solitude has been comfortable. I have been able to concentrate on some reading when I can settle down to do it.  I have followed through on some of the assignments I need to do at work.  I've stayed up with my classes and made appropriate reminders to keep students on pace.  I've come up with new ways to teach subject matter for my standard courses.  I've thought about and tried to keep up with family matters.  I've missed my Everly and teared up as the moments demand.

But I must admit that I have felt guilty a few times about the self-imposed solitude.  I have many friends who would be glad to sit down at coffee or lunch to visit, and I don't mean to be unappreciative of their friendliness.  I've never been very good at chitchat, and in the past few weeks I think I have been avoiding it.

I don't mean that I have not conversed with people--friends and coworkers alike.  But most of those talks have been pretty intense, and several have gone on for a couple of hours and more.  The thoughts that are on my mind tend to spin powerfully toward big questions.  Some of it is about how I will discern the next steps in my life now that Everly's work and comfort are no longer part of how I think about the shape of my life.  Some of it is about grieving Everly and the everyday pain that missing her brings. 

I think that one reason chitchat is not very easy for me right now is that for so many years it was something I did with Everly.  She learned quickly that I was not a great casual conversationalist.  On her own, she was often the life of the party, talking, joking, teasing, and acting silly for everyone's entertainment.  With me, she was gifted in bringing out my words and good humor.  She could get me started talking.  She could help me find the people in the group who might be interested in whatever obscure or heavy topics I had on my mind at the time.  And around the house, we would deal with our everyday chitchat topics intermingled with long bouts of listening to serious and intense matters we were thinking about in our work and vocations.  In consequence, easing into a friendly chitchat at this time in my life is also opening a window on my grief over losing those daily conversations.  I know that is not a very good reason to avoid my friends, and now that I'm thinking this through, maybe I can be more ready to face it.

I also don't want to diminish the significance and good that comes from chitchat.  There are many ways of smoothing the path of getting along with people, of greasing the rails toward building relationships.  Friendly chitchat is one very important one.  Laughing together is another.  For those of you who follow research on human behavior, it is not news to find out that about 90% of our laughter has little or nothing to do with humor.  It is a communicative behavior that breaks psychological barriers between people.  It smooths the edges of getting to know people.  We laugh when nervous and it dispels some of the anxiety.  We laugh simply to fill space when we are not sure what to say, and everyone gets a little emotional relief. 

Unlike the nonverbal communication of laughter, friendly chitchat shares intellectual content that helps people to become aware of who we are and to gain a sense of our assessment of them.  The verbal is mingled with body language that may convey a great deal.  Do we seem to like them?  Do our stories convey that we feel superior or inferior to them?  Much is transacted in chitchat that verbally and non-verbally shapes how people will understand their relationships.

Aristotle's list of virtues in The Nichomachean Ethics includes one that is often translated "wittiness."  It is the virtue of being able to carry on pleasant conversation, to speak tactfully, to tell proper humorous stories in a proper manner.  It is contrasted with boorishness and buffoonery as its deficiency and excess.  To be able to make others comfortable in conversation, to treat them well, even to entertain them, is a virtue for Aristotle's well-heeled Athenian male.  I think it is not hard for us to see the value of excellence in chitchat. 

We all have observed those persons in a group around which others gather to listen intently, giggle and laugh, and generally enjoy themselves.  Maybe others of you, as I have at times, have jealously wished to be that person.  That feeling itself may help us recognize the good in having ready wit.  It may not be, as some would criticize, one of the most important virtues of a moral life.  Yet it does not, on the other hand, appear to be a vice, nor even something not worth the trouble of developing as a habit.

I have probably become more habituated in "wittiness" over the years, largely because of knowing Everly.  She might not have thought of herself as having this virtue because Everly sometimes underestimated her strengths as a person.  But I do think she would agree that our partnership had benefited me a great deal in this aspect of living.  From her I learned to be more aware of the people with whom I am conversing rather than tightly closed up in my head with the matters on my mind.  From her I learned to be a better listener and not use others' words as a jumping off point for what I wanted to say anyway.  From her I learned to enjoy people for the good they are bringing to my life and the lives of others.  I don't mean that I've learned to be as she was, but I have loved who she was and embraced the glimpse of seeing the world as she saw it.

My mix of intellectual overconfidence and social shyness found a fascinating and intriguing partner in Everly's gregarious way of making friends, her quick intellect, and her impatience with abstraction.  We also found in one another traits we shared and valued: devotion to God, moral intensity, and a drive to make a difference in the world.  Hanging out with that person:  that's my chitchat heritage.  I miss it.  But I look forward to many more coffee and kitchen and hallway conversations with the rest of you.  Y'all all know you are not Everly, and you were not trying to be her.  Now I need to pay attention to who you are, listen to what you have to say, and offer the wit I can bring to the moments we have to find some joy together in this life.

From the Jubilee File--Hon. Rt. Rev. Dr. Willie James Jennings

I have a file buried several layers down in my Documents file on the laptop.  I have visited it often in the past two years to save or retrieve documents relating to community organizing work on the economy.  I named it when I was working on a theological reflection on the economic crisis with a group of colleagues.  Since so much of the biblical discussion of usury kept taking us back to the Jubilee practices of the Israelite society.  So I called the file "Jubilee."  A big part of my life and creative work for the past two years gets documented in the Jubilee file.

It's been a Jubilee year, and in the past few days I have been reminded to count my Jubilee blessings.  Willie James Jennings, my younger brother, turned 50 last Friday.  I was in Texas, fittingly grading papers, on the birthday of my brother in the professoriate.  I lift an analytical reading report in your honor, my brother, to toast your Jubilee Day.

Willie has worked as hard as anyone has to be my friend.  I take it that some of my professorial instincts and habits--absorption in private study, narrowly focused thinking, lack of awareness of the passing of time, occasional absent-mindedness (to put it lightly), aversion to being told what to do and when, being enamored by my own words--make it a bit harder to be my friend.  I hope I have other qualities that compensate.  But Willie thought it worth his time to keep a friendship going.

Although we met as students, it was after marching for graduation in 1994 that we stoked the fires of friendship.  Willie and I shared Saturday morning coffee for many weeks while our daughters (my youngest and his oldest) hopped and skipped and leaped with joy in the little kiddie's dance class.  We talked through some hard times and some good times.  He put a black man's mirror up for me to look at my white man's life in a racialized world.  I knew that something bigger than I could handle was happening to me.  I had no idea that he was finding in me some hope for the church's deliverance from its demons of malformed desire and imagination. 

I did not know this because as a scholar-friend, Willie kept his cards close to his chest.  I understand this a little better now that I've seen him in action recently on a panel to discuss his book, The Christian Imagination.  Some people in the gathering raised questions which begged for a polemical response.  They either did not understand his arguments from the book, or they just wanted to see if they could get a rise out of him. 

But Willie did not take the bait in his Jubilee year.  He generously referred to the antagonistic comments as "matters of deep importance," or something to that effect.  I was ready to pounce, but Willie gave his winning smile.   It may be that he was simply being political, having learned such skills as a faculty dean for so many years.  But I think it was also a commitment to listen and remain in a friendly conversation with people who are sure that he has gone off on a fool's errand.

This Jubilee year I was blessed to read The Christian Imagination with a class of Shaw students taking Systematic Theology.  As with J. Kameron Carter's Race, in reading Willie's book with my students I continuously found ways that it could challenge my previous theology lectures and supplement the textbooks with which I have become so familiar.  The Christian Imagination opened doors for me and for my students that made theology more alive. 

So often when we take theology to be the gleaned gems of a long [tired] tradition, we find it hard to get a lever on how Christian faith, its leaders, its institutions, and its social productions could become so corrupted and contrary to the ways of the one from whom they take their name.  Books like Willie's give us hope that theology does not have to be merely the crusty oozings from the cracked plaster walls lining the edifice of Euro-American World Domination.  Can there be life within those walls of ageless stone?  Could the academy have a heart of beating flesh?  Or are we destined to have hearts of stone?

So it is that in this Jubilee year, Willie opened the floodgates which had held back a deep lake of theological reflection, fed by mountain streams and woodland springs, flowing through the dark places of middle passage, bottom lands of enforced toil, and the hopeful self-direction of a Second Great Migration.  Along the way, a few droplets from the deeps had come my way, but the halls of Duke and Shaw, only thirty miles apart, are worlds away from one another.  If there were open conversations in Durham, I was out of that loop. 

Moreover, the fast scholarly pace of read, reduce, destroy that makes up hyperacademia is not on the menu at Shaw.  I don't mean to be "hatin' on" Duke, but they really are caught up in the university-military-industrial complex, on a high-speed train toward producing the next world, and the next, and the one after that.  Surely, Willie wisely let only a few droplets out so that when the flood arrived, it would be a season of reckoning.  Folks on the train would have to stop and get off if they were going to have a word to say about it.  He gave us far more in this Jubilee year than we could chew quickly, unless we want to choke on it.

So the back and forth clicking to the Jubilee folder was more than I realized.  In his year of Jubilee, my friend ripped open a place in my heart through which the Holy Spirit may shine to make me a better man than I was, burn away the malformations of desire, and kindle an imagination of another way of being Christian, of being a community that longs to know one another as God's bountiful creation and election.

Happy Jubilee, Willie.  Love that house full of women with all that you have in you.  And save a minute for me so we can plot the revolution.

Thanks for Will McIntosh

A week ago my friend Will McIntosh passed away.

I met Will in 1996, soon after joining Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church. He had recently moved from New York City, where he had served as Assistant Commissioner of Juvenile Justice, to Durham. He was married to Miriam, who completed her doctoral studies and became a dentist. He had a young son from their marriage, Brian, who is a year older than my youngest, Lydia, and attended the same high school.

Will and I met on a Habitat for Humanity project. We were both trying to keep busy on a crowded work site. The chapter was preparing for a house dedication across town, and they had one more detail they needed someone to take care of. So they sent Will and me to the other location to remove the temporary utility pole.

Will and I got a pick-axe and shovel to take with us, and we took off in a pick-up truck. As we drove, we introduced ourselves and got acquainted. When we arrived, I started trying to dislodge the 4 x 4 utility pole from the clay fill dirt. I was hacking away, but not making much progress. I was huffing and puffing, and probably turning red, realizing that as a man of about 40 years I had lost some of the vigor of my youth. Will was the same age as my parents, which meant that at that time he was in his late 60s. He suggested that he take a turn at it. He hacked away at the soil, then began to push and pull the pole until he had loosened it enough to pull it up by his bare hands. We loaded it all in the truck and headed back. He had made a serious impression on me that day.

Over the years, Will and I regularly got together to talk about what was going on in our lives. With children in the same age range, we usually had stories to compare. We spoke with pride about our kids, and we shared our concerns and fears for them. We both recognized the harsh world that our children were facing, and we wondered about the steps they would take on the way to maturity. Will put all of himself into Brian's upbringing and growth. Like my children, Brian probably wished that Dad would ease off on the parenting at times.

When Will and Miriam needed a pastor, sometimes they turned to me. Will was dealing with a heart condition in the last decades of his life, and his extended family dealt with setbacks, losses, and the kinds of things all of us face. Sometimes he came to me to talk through these matters, ask for prayer, and let me reflect back to him what I could see from our conversations. Frankly, this seemed to me quite an honor. Will had much more life experience and a wide range of knowledge and skills that I will never achieve. So I gave him my best, and always felt appreciated and loved for it.

Although we often conversed as peers, at the same time Will was a fatherly friend to me. I am blessed to have my father, W. D. Broadway, still living, and I depend on him for guidance in many ways. We have lived far apart during half of my life, and there have been a couple of occasions when an older friend has been, not a substitute, but a supplemental father to me. One was Weston Ware, my beloved friend from Dallas and the Christian Life Commission, and the other was Will. It's not so much that I went to Will for advice, but I looked up to him and learned about how to live from being around him.

Will believed in working hard and getting things done. Almost every time I visited his home, I was amazed to find that he had just begun or completed another construction project--an addition, an outbuilding, a fence, or who knows what. When I needed to do some cleaning and painting of the outside of my house, Will brought over some power equipment, showed me how to use it, and did a good bit of the work with me. If I had mustered the energy, I'm certain that he would have come over to do all kinds of home improvement projects with me.

Everly and I enjoyed our conversations after I had a visit with Will. "Guess what I learned about Will this time," I would say. Will knew about all kinds of things. He had been lots of places. And above all, he knew all sorts of people. He was widowed and remarried, and there were many stories of his family stretching across his 78 years. His family had to deal with the racist practice of a white neighbor fencing off part of their land and claiming it for himself. Will took charge of resolving that matter down in the family home place in Alabama. He had lots of stories of working with youth from his long years in the juvenile justice system in New York. He had managed his financial affairs well, and he had property in several states, which he traveled to maintain. He would tell me about conversations he had with Rudy Giuliani or George W. Bush.

But Will was very unassuming. He always seemed interested in what I thought about things, even if he knew plenty enough about them not to need my opinion. He was interested in politics, and he had a good sense about people and power. He enjoyed talking with me about Barack Obama, and although he was a Republican, he took great satisfaction in what the 2008 presidential election meant in U. S. history.

He called me "Rev," and I received it as a title of affection. I'm going to miss him. Knowing him has been one of God's blessings.

Buy Nothing Day Report

We had a good Buy Nothing Day in the cold gray weather. We had coffee, ate leftovers (including pie), ran into friends, slept late, did some organizing, walked around in downtown Asheville and made a visit to the grocery store, where we did buy something (we're not legalists).

A few friends in Philadelphia got together to announce the good news of being together and caring for one another. Here is a video they posted. Enjoy it.