Seven Years Between Haircuts

On May 20 I wrote about a hermeneutical flight of imagination.  I had realized that it was 70 months since Everly's death.  I had realized it had been seven years since Everly's first harsh and nearly deadly dose of chemotherapy, when her hair fell out from the poisonous effects.  Those numbers recollect biblical images of fullness, completion, and specifically the number of years associated with the exile of Israel after Jerusalem was destroyed.  I don't need to repeat everything I said there--you can go back to it.  But in summary, I said that I'm not claiming the verses of ancient texts are directly about me; rather, they interact with my life through imaginative comparisons and reflections.

I've continued to think about whether I should see this period of my life as marked by new beginnings.  Is there something I might learn about my own time and place by thinking about the end of Israel's exile?  "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?"

One thing that occurred to me back on that day was that maybe the time had come to cut my hair.  Some people know that I started growing it out to its full length when Everly's hair fell out from chemotherapy.  Since 2012, seven years ago, I have had only a few trims when my mom or kids urged me to get the ends cleaned up.  I've not been much of a hair stylist.  I just let it grow as it will, and tried to keep it clean and combed.

I've told that story to many people who might have wondered why the Baptist preacher had such long hair.  I've explained when people inquired about the old man's unusual non-fashionable hair style choice.  I would say, "I started growing it when my wife's hair fell out from chemotherapy.  After she died, I kept it.  So far I haven't thought of a good reason to cut it."  I'm not sure what I thought a good reason would be.  But on that day, I thought maybe a reason with symbolic sense had come to me.

A few days later, I was talking with a friend who told me she had a discipline of "harvesting" her hair.  She grew it out to a full length, then periodically cut it off to send to an organization which used it to provide wigs for cancer patients.  She had done this cycle many times.

I also had sent my hair to a cancer support group once before when I experimented with growing out my hair for few years.  It seemed to be one more reason to add to my hermeneutical reflection about possibly cutting my hair.  I started planning to get a haircut. I even leaked this plan in conversation with a few people.  One person, knowing my mischievous side, suggested that I wait to cut it until I made my out-of-state trip to visit my dad in Texas.  That way, when I returned to North Carolina, I could anticipate getting the "maximum shock value."  I settled on that plan.  Dad was extremely happy to be a partner in getting my long hair cut off, as he was never fond of it.  We took care of it right away after I arrived.

The shock value plan worked.  I've had a great time showing up to my usual activities and encountering people's amazement.  A few have felt the need to tell me I look younger, which is not my goal.  I'm proud of my years achieved.  I'm not surprised that many emphasize that I "look great."  I know that having that long, shaggy mop of hair was in part a way to make myself distasteful to people's expectations, of thumbing my nose at conventionality.  I didn't expect people to like it.  One fellow minister said that if I could get a haircut, it was another sign that "with God all things are possible."  The locally owned pharmacy staff, with whom I've been doing business every month for a decade or more, had to ask my name when I came in to get my refills.  It's been fun to reappear in Durham as a new person.

Aside from the shock value and the fun, getting my hair cut is also for me a symbolic change.  Growing my hair was a sign of solidarity with Everly when her hair fell out, and it continued to be that for the remaining months of her life over the next year.  After she died, keeping the long hair involved shifting from solidarity with her in her living to a symbol of grieving her loss.  From year to year, I did not see a reason to cut it.  Perhaps at some deep level I was wearing my hair like a veil of mourning.  I sometimes entertained that idea, but never formally adopted it as my rationale.  I simply could not bring myself to the point of wanting a change.

In May of this year, as we were approaching what I had come to call my "sad season" between May 24, my wedding anniversary, and July 18, the anniversary of Everly's death, once more the weight of grief pressed upon me.  But under that weight, I found myself in the midst of a complexity of emotional and intellectual ferment.

Intellectually, I had arrived at a moment in my research and writing that had been very slow coming.  About ten years earlier, Willie Jennings and Dan Rhodes had coached me toward developing a book idea based on thematically similar essays I had written.  Dan even helped me create a possible outline and suggested a title I might use.  Yet as he and I talked through the structure of the project, I realized that there were severe gaps that I would have to fill before an outline of the book would make sense to me.

So I started working on those particular tasks.  I wrote and presented papers in the next few years that took important steps toward filling those gaps.  In each case, when I reached the temporary end of an assignment, I realized that I still had more work to do.  My pattern of scholarship over the years would have meant that I would pick up these topics again and complete the research as I prepared to present at an academic conference.  That process was interrupted in 2012 when Everly was diagnosed with cancer.  All of my energy and focus shifted toward supporting her "in sickness or in health."  I stopped writing new essays for a number of years afterward.

Eventually I started to get back on track, but the great breakthrough came about because of the invitation to give lectures at Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary last October.  They agreed to my topic for Baptist Heritage Lectures as "Baptist Ecclesiology After Whiteness."  The three lecture topics corresponded to three unfinished gaps in my research and writing.  The gift of a place to stay and focus on writing allowed me to bring all three topics to a satisfying point of development.

Building on that progress, I wrote an essay for a conference in May which further built upon the critical work necessary to write the book I was envisioning.  A month later, on a week-long writing retreat, I put together a full outline of the book, with chapter summaries, a new prologue, and a fleshed out proposal so that colleagues could help me refine it before sending it to a publisher.

Yes, something new is happening in this year of my life.  I am emerging from a season of intense grief toward what my buddy Willie has been pointing me for a couple of years.  He has told me a few times that he is seeing signs that "I'm still living."  In similar tone, Curtis Freeman keeps reminding me that I have important work to do and things to say that he and many more people need to hear. He told me that my presentation in May had him and the entire room "spellbound."  I'll take the complement even if it may be an exaggeration.  And my colleague in organizing, Tim Conder, keeps reminding me that there are things that I need to write that no one else he knows is able to say the way I can say them.  I'm not inclined, at least in my saner moments, to believe with Elijah that I am the only one left to do God's work, but I appreciate Tim's reminder that the distinctive person I am and the life that I have lived entail a message and calling from God that I need to faithfully carry out in my scholarly work.

Part of what is new in my life is also the rising up of joy after a long valley of sorrows.  If any of you followed my blog over the years, you know about the grief I have waded through.  It has not been only grief, but I have sometimes wondered if I would forevermore be known to many of my friends as the sad widowed man.  I wondered for myself whether I would have strength to be more like the visionary and committed servant of God that Everly once chose to share her life with.  Or would I be confined as the broken man who struggles to find the energy to finish out an academic career.  It's an exaggerated contrast, but it isn't lacking in truth.

In May, and June I started writing in this blog about the emotional transformations I was recognizing and working through.  I wrote about friendships, and about taking to heart my responsibility to enrich and expand those relationships with people who care about me.  I wrote about friends who were influencing me, encouraging me, and inspiring me to fulfill what they could see in me, even if I did not always see it for myself.  I'm not going to repeat what I wrote in those posts, but I will reiterate that I'm striving to live not only in the shadow of a great loss, but in the light of a community of friends and the hope of joy in sharing life with them. 

My deepest theological convictions tell me that we are put into this world to play our parts as builders of loving, just community wherever we find ourselves living and working.  We receive the blessing of those who come our way.  We recognize the failures of justice and love and commit ourselves to repair and restore the goodness that ought to be. 

I can't do that if I'm shrunken into myself and pulling away from the liveliness of caring for one another.

A few days ago I was looking through my Facebook account and noticed that it said I am married to Everly.  I guess I never felt the need to change it.  But now it seems as if the symbolic meaning of keeping my hair long aligns with the symbolic meaning of continuing to list myself as married.  My marriage with Everly brought fulfillment, gave us three children, and I believe blessed many other people.  It is okay to acknowledge that our anniversaries ended at 33 years, and the household we built did not continue as long as we had hoped.  I've been saying it for many years--I am widowed.  So I quietly changed it on the worldwide software platform, too.

Recently I was looking at some photographs in a blank greeting card display.  One of the photographs showed a trail through a plush woodland, thick with green undergrowth.  The picture showed the trail bending as it appeared more narrow, extending farther into the distance.  Around the bend, no one can yet see.  I can't be sure what is ahead, but I do believe this is a season of new things.  I've cut my hair after seven years (for now).  I'm opening my daily routines and my heart to build loving friendships here and now.  I'm in the midst of compiling many years of work into a book.  I'm looking ahead to see what might be next.  "From this time forward I will make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known."  I hope y'all will walk with me.

When Words Fail

This sermon was first preached at Shaw University Divinity School Chapel Service on February 18, 2017

1 Corinthians 3:1-23

            I think that most of you would understand what I mean if I said, “It’s been one of those weeks.”  You can probably identify with having that feeling at some point in the recent past.  In the midst of living life, sometimes we prepare our best work, we pray our most beautiful and confident prayers, we express ourselves in conversation as clearly as we can, but nothing turns out as we expected.  We are hurt, people don’t understand, friends are angry, God is distant.  I’m not good at hiding it.  Students see me walk into class and ask if I’m okay.  Co-workers pull me aside to ask what’s wrong.  It was one of those weeks.   

I have made a career out of using words: reading, speaking, and writing.  I read news, commentary, essays, and books a large part of every day of my life.  I listen to preachers in church; I listen to radio news in the car.  I write short, clever comments on what is happening in the world.  I write longer reflections on social issues and the church.  I do my thinking with my fingertips on a keyboard.  I must have written tens of thousands of words as I have struggled to live with the illness and death of my beloved wife. Sometimes what I write is simple and straightforward.  Sometimes it is complex argumentation.

            There are plenty of times when I can’t seem to get started.  Occasionally I begin, only to find myself headed down a road to nowhere, making me have to start over.  On some subjects, I have stored away many long and complicated sentences and paragraphs in the recesses of my memory, ready for me to pull them out on a moment’s notice to clarify a question or drive home a point.

            There is joy in crafting words.  Constructing a strong first sentence or a challenging final sentence in an argument can satisfy a thirsty soul.  Framing a vivid metaphor or a lyrical turn of phrase can give life to a project.  Employing the rhetorical skills passed down by a lively intellectual tradition of preaching can lift an entire room of spirits together, or stir them to anger, or challenge them to action.

            I’m not the greatest wordsmith by any means.  Too many of my sentences meander toward obscurity.  Too often I make an argumentative leap that leaves out important intermediary steps, forcing the listener or reader to wonder why I suddenly changed the subject without clear warning.  We all can look beyond our own achievements toward the oratorical craft of another preacher we admire for her or his depth of understanding, precision of vocabulary, and skill of delivery.  We find ourselves returning to certain writers whose ability to articulate and inspire on the printed page or on the pixilated screen leaves us wanting more.

            So for me, and perhaps for many of you, life unfolds in a proliferation of words.  It’s more than words, but it still is a flood of words.  A few weeks ago, I sat down in a hotel room in New Orleans where I was attending the Society of Christian Ethics.  I had been reading books and essays, contemplating an essay on the topic of reparations in theological education.  Over a period of a couple of days, broken up by conference events, meals, and a small amount of sleep, I wrote over thirty-two pages on the topic, and still felt I had not quite covered all that I should say.  I’m not really trying to brag here.  It’s simply an illustration of how my writing often gets done.  I was only able to do that because of habits coming from so many years of devotion to and immersion in speaking and writing.  It’s far from clear yet whether all those words will make much of a difference in the world.

I doubt that my three kids believe it, but there was a time in my life when I was known as a person of few words.  My wife, who could outtalk me any day, used to laugh at me for the way I had something to say about almost any subject, even those I knew little or nothing about.  She would tease me about being a “know-it-all.”  That’s probably not so hard for my colleagues to believe.  While I slip into the quiet mode still some of the time, mostly nowadays I produce and spout and swim in a sea of words.  I have come to trust in the power of words, especially when combined with the power of communities organized for strategic action. 

A little over a year ago, our community organizing group, Durham CAN, was struggling to see words turned to action on affordable housing in Durham.  The City Council, leaders of the County Commissioners, and of course the Durham Housing Authority all were on record supporting affordable housing.  It’s hard not to think that more affordable housing is a good idea.  But liking the idea and making change happen are different things.  We applied the power of words by creating and conducting a Downtown Durham Subsidy Tour. 

We held a public teaching session about the millions of dollars in subsidies that had gone into various commercially profitable projects.  These were tax incentives and public-private partnerships amounting to tens of millions of dollars from which private developers and businesses would benefit greatly at taxpayers’ expense.  A tiny fraction of those subsidy amounts would be enough to get Durham moving toward more affordable housing.  So we took citizens all over downtown and hung up signs on various buildings, detailing the subsidies that went to private developers and businesses.  Those spoken and written words made a difference.  Television and newspaper reporters’ words made a difference.  Targeted, strategic words made a difference, and progress quickly got underway on three different projects for affordable housing.

A public event like that or a powerful sermon or a groundbreaking book can demonstrate to us the power and importance of words for human society.  The Apostle Paul was clearly a man of words.  He was a speechmaker, a preacher, and a teacher who could adapt his style to the particular audience he was addressing.  In the opening three chapters of 1 Corinthians he discusses this aspect of his ministry extensively.  He reminds his readers of the good times they have had in the past teaching and learning about the gospel of Jesus Christ.  He points out how people started out not knowing much, and that God is able to use foolish people to shame the wise.  He insists that the wisdom of the world may, in fact, not be worth much at times. 

He is setting them up.  All these words, all the things he calls to their remembrance, suddenly are challenged in this third chapter.  He says he wishes he could use some of his big words with them, but he says he has to use words more suited to infants than to adults.  Apparently they are stuck in the age of eating baby food.  They may have picked up some fancy words to use, but they have missed the point of what they have learned.  They might know how to pronounce propitiation or concupiscence, but they haven’t let their training transform them adequately toward God’s purpose for them.  They are dividing into camps and sects, picking and choosing among their teachers to create factions.  Some want to claim Apollos, some Cephas, and some Paul.  He gets no satisfaction that some claim to side with him because he wants them to recognize that all the teachers are contributing to the one unified message and calling God has for them.

We’ve seen it happen.  Someone says, “Reverend Smith never would have done things that way.”  One whispers, “Deacon Johnson never tried anything like that.”  Another complains, “Sister Jones always knew the right thing to do.”  Soon it breaks out into conflict in the committee and board meetings.  Then small groups form in the parking lot to continue the criticisms and complaints.  Church conferences heat up with angry words.  People begin to impugn one another’s integrity and doubt the truth of one another’s words.

We take up sides.  We resist leaders trying to make a difference.  We shut out innovative ideas.  Churches too often work against our own best interests and our best opportunities for ministry.

Paul argues in our text today that all the teachers the Corinthians have had were building on a single foundation.  That foundation is Jesus Christ.  All the teaching and preaching had pointed back to this reference point—the ways and words of Jesus Christ are the basis for all that the Corinthians or any other churches must build.  Yet for all the words that Paul has loved sharing and has depended on to accomplish his work of building up the church, it seems that little growth in grace and discipleship have occurred.  Words have failed.  The people in the church have not remembered what they learned, nor have they remembered who they are.

Paul doesn’t give up.  He starts again to build his case with persuasive words.  Now he tells them that they are a temple.  The second-person pronoun in these verses is a plural.  It’s hard to tell in English.  We use the same second-person pronoun for singular or plural.  “Y-o-u” can mean one person, and the same word “y-o-u” can mean a group of people.  In the South, we know how to translate it differently than the English Bible usually does.  Paul, in this case is saying “Y’all.”  Y’all are a temple.  This is not the same way he uses “temple” elsewhere to refer to a human body.  In our text today, the temple is the community of faith envisioned as forming a structure together.  It’s similar to Peter’s image of a building made of living stones.  But the Corinthian church people have broken up the building.  It’s cracked, and there are big gaps, broken down walls, and fallen roof timbers.  For all the teaching, they have failed to become united as God’s building, the family of faith, the body of Christ.

Paul quotes from Job to remind them that just because a person can make a lofty and wordy speech does not mean one has displayed true wisdom.  They may be twisting their words to manipulate a situation, to try to prove themselves superior, to try to put someone else down.  God knows the difference, and Paul says he can tell the difference, too.  Words are failing the Corinthian Christians because they are willing to use them as weapons.  They are abusing the power of words to benefit their particular faction or camp, and the temple they are supposed to be building is falling into ruin.

Words fail us when we use them against one another.  Words as weapons tear down.  They deny the purpose of human living:  to love one another.  Words that shade the truth in order to try to win are failing words.  Words that construct alternative facts for the purpose of verbal battle succeed only in crushing truth beneath our feet.  Words fail in politics and in church when they become our sledgehammers and crowbars to destroy what God wants us to build up.  We may end up like so much of the world around us by choosing up sides and despising anyone who disagrees.  Paul was a couple of millennia too early, but I’m sure if he had been writing today, the people he was criticizing would be calling one another Nazis, fascists, and communists.  He tells them not to boast about human leaders—if they are good leaders, then what each of them gives you is good for all of you.

I’ll have to leave this 1 Corinthians text to talk about other times that words fail.  Here, Paul spoke to the misuse of words to divide, mislead, and destroy.  But sometimes words fail for other reasons.  For instance, sometimes words fail because they choke in our throats and drown in our tears.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had words fail me in this way.  Sometimes a hurt is so intense, the mind seems lost in a fog.  Words spoken seem pointless.  Things I’ve been able to say before no longer make sense.  I was so sure I understood a situation, but now to have even thought those thoughts seems utterly stupid.  Or I had thought I knew the direction my life would go, only to find out it will be impossible for those things to ever happen.  In these moments words fail us.  We try and fumble about to describe what we are going through, but with little success. 

In those moments of pain and struggle, words can fail another way, too.  For those of us reacting to someone else’s pain, we may become like Job’s so-called friends and start tossing words about in harmful ways.  If I approach someone going through the hellish pain of losing a loved one, and I offer platitudes about their loved one being in a better place, or say it’s all going to be all right, or claim everything happens for a reason, my words are likely to become instruments of greater pain.  The compulsion to provide a solution to other people’s pain is really about my own discomfort.  If I can sum up the problem with shallow theological-sounding clichés, I may assume my job is done.  I’ve figured it out for them, and now they will be fine.  What’s needed in times of pain, grief, and loss is fewer words, more presence, and humble service.  Don’t make words fail by forcing your pile of happy, crappy, empty theological banalities on someone in deep pain.  They are struggling to put words to their situation, and they don’t need useless and hurtful words to fill that void.

When words fail us in the depth of pain, we can be thankful that we are not left alone.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul describes the situation when our hurt and longing may be too deep for words.  In that crisis, God has not abandoned us, even if words have.  Paul says the Spirit cries out for us when we cannot handle it ourselves.  We may not know what the meaning of our situation is.  We may feel only loss and emptiness, loneliness that looks to be endless.  But God is present in the midst of our struggle. Remember this is the same God incarnate who saw his friends sleep when he needed their prayers, saw them run away when he was arrested, and ultimately cried out in the anguish of abandonment when hanging by nails from a wooden implement of state-sponsored torture.  In the depth of suffering, God knows the wordless void, enters it with us, and initiates the crying out and healing that will restore us.

Here in 1 Corinthians 3, Paul reminds us that when words fail, whether it is through our arrogance and divisiveness or through our hurt and emptiness, we still have a place to stand.  There is one foundation.  That is the foundation of Jesus Christ.  He is the firm foundation.  He has come for us and never deserted us.  We belong to him, as siblings, as joint-heirs, and members of one body, as living stones in a temple not made by hands.  To belong to Christ is to have our lives surrounded by and embedded in God.  You belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

To know Christ is to walk in his way.  In word and deed, we take up his path.  He calls us to follow him.  He says to choose the narrow way that leads to life.  He reminds us that it is not merely following a road he walked, but that he himself is the road, the gate, the life we must live.  He is the Word, the logos, the dabar, the essence of both God and humanity, in whom we live and move and have our being.  So words may fail, but the Word of God, our Savior, the True Human and exemplar for our lives, will never fail.  Thanks be to God.

Double Consciousness and Independence Day

I have resisted writing lately.  I'm not one who often suffers writer's block.  I don't mean writing is always easy, but I mean that I usually have something I want to write about and rush in where angels fear to tread.

We are in a time when white supremacy's terror has become so vivid that we cannot easily avoid seeing it.  It is a time that excites strong reactions.  I have not avoided talking about what is going on in the streets and in the pulpit.  I have made sure not to ignore these events in preaching and in teaching.  We have had lively Sunday School and seminary classroom discussions.  I have tweeted and Facebook statused some of my sentiments in shorter form.  I've had coffee to ruminate with friends.  I have read and listened to many opinion pieces and scholarly discourses.

But I have had specific reasons to resist writing lately.  One thing that happens when events turn attention to racism is that we white people who consider ourselves sensitive to and appropriately positioned toward racism feel a need to remind people of our credentials.  In a more crude way, we are anxious to make sure people know we are "the good white people." But this anxiety tends to subvert the very purpose we believe we are pursuing.  Rather than focusing on work necessary to overcome the structural and systemic forms of white supremacy that shape every part of life, we are caught up in making ourselves feel better, assuaging white guilt, and sustaining the pretense that at least around us, things are soooooo much better.

So in part, I have been inclined to believe that it is better to shut up and listen. (I would hope that in explaining myself here, I am not simply doing what I described in the previous paragraph. I guess I can't avoid it completely.)  To that extent, I have set aside writing about what is happening on purpose to hear other voices.  But that is only part of it.  I have also found it hard to write.  I have worried that I would simply be making noise when there is so much need for insight.  I have feared that in such intense monologue and dialogue all around, I would say something stupid, reveal from somewhere within my misunderstandings and my formation in a culture of domination. I don't want to be that writer.

This subconscious or semi-conscious fearfulness about writing something stupid comes at a very inconvenient moment for me, in that I promised to write an essay on race and theology with the title "The Deformed Imagination of Why We Are Light and What We Call Darkness."  But last night, the writer's block on that essay finally broke, and it is underway.  Somehow, that opened the floodgates and I decided to write a brief comment on Facebook concerning a post about the Declaration of Independence.  That turned into a poetry analysis of a song by Kate Campbell, bringing together the insights of W.E.B. DuBois, Cornel West, and some things J. Kameron Carter and I were talking through over coffee.  After a while I realized that I was writing a blog post.  So I might as well copy it here.  Here's hoping I'm making my way down the road to get my essay written.

I found this article about the ambiguity of the Declaration of Independence to be worth sharing. It echoes the equally powerful words of Frederick Douglass concerning the paradox and travesty of Independence Day in a system of slavery. It also got me thinking about a song by one of my favorite songwriters.

A very moving song by Kate Campbell tells the story of a fire one night in the late twentieth century, burning down an old mansion with its "sixteen stately Doric columns." Anyone would recognize it as a plantation house, iconic of white domination in a landscape populated by enslaved workers of African descent. Yet the narrator tells the story from the point of view of a child who had not known the horrors and terrors of that system of trading and debasing human beings.

I was taught by elders wiser,
"Love your neighbor. Love your God."
Never saw a cross on fire;
Never saw an angry mob.
I saw sweet magnolia blossoms.
I chased lightning bugs at night,
Never dreaming others
Saw our way of life
In black and white.

Yes, it is naiveté that speaks such words. It comes from a life privileged to avoid seeing what others have no choice but to endure. One might say that it is early formation in the "normative gaze." Yet both black and white parents often seek to shield their young children from the worst of the world. Since Sanford, Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, and now Emanuel AME Church, it has become so much harder to hide from these realities. This is the world we live in. This is the world given to us by our parents. This is the world produced by the centuries of European-American world domination.

I mention this song because it shows something that is not always present in the reflections of dominant culture. W.E.B. DuBois wrote about the "double consciousness" of being African American, being both and yet neither. He wrote it in the context of knowing that "American" meant white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. This double consciousness exists in contrast to the forgetfulness of a singular consciousness. It is the privilege of some to forget that "one ever feels one's twoness:" Irish and American, Italian and American, English and American, Scottish and American, French and American, both and yet neither, living in a land claimed, annexed, appropriated, "reaping where you did not sow."

Kate's song illustrates the dawning of such double consciousness in the narrator, and its eschatological orientation toward the possibility of community to emerge from the dismal swamps of human cruelty to one another. Parsing out the death and life in the structures and systems around us forces one to face what James McClendon said of theological reflection, that "the line between church and world passes through each Christian heart."

Part of me hears voices crying.
Part of me can feel their weight.
Part of me believes that mansion
Stood for something more than hate.

But it is not promoting the assumption that one can go back to a pristine golden age when it was possible to pretend everyone knew her and his place and rank. We must, in fact, retreat from our falsehoods and retreat from our forgetfulness. We want to forget the repression of the black churches through laws making them illegal, through domination by white church leaders, through burnings and massacres. But Charleston won't let us forget.

Forgetting is deadly for our souls, and it is deadly for the bodies of those whose lives are considered not worthy of preserving in the streets or in the prayer meeting. Learning our twoness is also learning that we need to be made whole. But we cannot be made whole by a purifying ideology of triumphalism, which only makes of us tools of those who benefit from such violent systems. It is an eschatological hope, but I don't mean pie in the sky by and by. I mean a hope that looks for and longs for and works for the beauty and goodness of that promise to be done "on earth as it is in heaven." That's why

It's a long
And slow surrender,
Retreating from the past.
It's important to remember
To fly the flag half-mast,
And look away...

The Dilemma of the Fourth of July - OnFaith

The roots of America's systemic racism are printed in many of our founding documents.

faithstreet.com

Joseph Stroud Chats with Tu Fu

Joseph Stroud was reading some of his poems on the radio as I drove this evening.  All were intriguing, but one struck me particularly.  In it he affirms and re-asks a question from the Chinese poet Tu Fu about the measure of life.  It is not unlike a question that occupied the Greek Aristotle and drove his writing about virtue and ethics:  what constitutes a good life?  Intertwined in this shared set of inquiries is the puzzle of how the moments and relationships, the times and places, the stages and phases of a life hold together and converge to make a person, a whole life that one might call "good."  Rather than go any further down the path to windbaggery, let me just share Stroud's poem and what it spurred me to write as well.  You can find this poem in Stroud's most recent book of poems, Of This World.

I've never been one to do much revising.  The percolation and redisposition of my writing is more latent from days or months or years of thinking over and back over something.  So I'll just put this out there right away, even though it probably could be better.

Once I imagined myself a poet.

I wrote in bursts of inspiration

About loves and friends and

Potent moments of turning

Or grasping at life and death

When they walked up to me

To say, “Can you spare some change

For the bus?”

Prosish poems, not so artful,

Not so crafty, but with a clever turn

Of phrase here and there,

Always in a hurry to get on to what’s next.

I was on top of the world,

Or soon to be on the top,

Riding the momentum of a life

I had been given while being

Taught that I was

Making it myself.

The poems posed me

Over against and in among

People around me,

Or echoed my ambition to

Know the lifescape in which

Other poets had written their

Verses that now my teachers

Assigned me to study.

Then I stopped reading poems,

Went on to find other pages.

Embraced and embracing my beloved,

Making a home, walking a path together,

I wrote more than ever,

But not poems.

She was my poem.

The poem we were writing

Was an encompassing life,

A vision too close to my eyes,

Too deep in the ears for my eardrums,

Too far into my lungs to smell—

Somewhere in the flow of blood,

The respiration of mitochondria,

Amidst synaptic exchanges—

Organic flourishing,

Not composed:  it writing me

In rhythms of iambs, anapests,

Dactyls, trochees,

Rhyming or blank,

Unchained melodies.

A poem’s long unfolding ended.

She is not beside me.

The rhythmic feet falter,

A cataract grows and visions dim.

I go looking for books of poems

That they may read me and read to me

Of a life well lived and worth living

Even when the path disappears,

When sight seems untrustworthy,

When voices echo beyond hearing.

Such a long poetic frame—

It seemed to be the air I breathed.

I am still breathing.

Joseph Stroud converses with Tu Fu,

As I eavesdrop (having not noticed

The falling dark of this night

That burgeons mere hours before

Morning will again open with sunlight),

Suggesting I enter words in the ledger

Of a friendship

Spanning innumerable years.

Writing in New Places

Spring and summer were hectic with preparations to relocate.  I am going to be living in Austin, Texas (sort of).  Everly, my wife, is now changing the world in Austin.  I am overjoyed to finally be joining her.  I will still, however, be teaching at Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh, NC.  And we are not buying a house yet, so I'm fulfilling my parents' nightmare by moving back in with them at 53.

Education is changing, and graduate education is no exception.  I will be teaching in a hybrid format.  Five times each semester, I will be present in the classroom in Raleigh with students.  The rest of the time will be online, group sessions in my absence, teleconferences, and guest speakers.  I like it better than purely online teaching, which I did this past year with only minimal satisfaction.  There is much to learn to get the right habits to teach students online.  I'm still learning it.

So the truck is loaded, the house here for me to stay in when I travel back to teach, and I'm full of memories, hopes, and wondering about what is coming.  I'll be writing from Austin, Salado, Durham, Raleigh, and who knows where in the coming year.