Back in the saddle

I am struggling with re-entry. I have this trouble whenever I'm away, for vacation or study leave, but I am experiencing it really profoundly since coming back from the Freedom Ride Pilgrimage.

Freedom Ride 2010 was envisioned as a pilgrimage of racial reconciliation. Ten adults and 32 youth got on a bus and traveled from eastern North Carolina to Greensboro, exploring the affects of racial division on our nation, state, and church.

We considered the Wilmington coup of 1898, where the elected government of North Carolina (black and white legislators) was ousted and terrorized by Southern Democrats spreading fear and hate. We walked the streets of historic Edenton, looking at the fabulous houses on the sound, and considering the life of Harriet Jacobs, who spent 7 years hiding from her tyrannical owner in a space too small to stand in until she could escape to freedom.

We walked across the campus of NC A&T University, Greensboro; we saw the remnants Scott hall. We placed our hands in holes left in the brick by 50 mm shells fired by the National Guard. We endured the "Hall of Shame" at the Civil Rights Museum, confronted by life-sized pictures of lynching horrors: mutilated bodies hanging from trees; a man's body reduced to charred remnants. The most horrifying image for me, was that of a white man, smiling at the camera with the carnage behind him, his arm draped casually around a boy, who looked to be about my son's age.

This is American history. It is part of the very fabric of our nation. It is also a part of the fabric of our church: from the enslaved people who built the church buildings, to those who advocated for their freedom. From William Saunders, a chief organizer of the KKK, to Jonathan Daniels who died while trying to register Black voters.

I struggle with this history because I want my kids to know the whole story: all of the ugly, mixed up, nastiness of it. I also want them to understand how dangerous it is when "the enemy" becomes something less than human in our eyes. Still,there is a part of me that does not want my kids to see it. I don't want them to see the atrocity that human beings do to one another. I don't really want my children to see (in the words of Vernon Tyson)"what hate looks like."

Nonetheless, I recognize, in all of this, the nature of sin. The child at the lynching did not choose to be there any more than those lynched men chose the color of their skin. And in the midst of such unspeakable evil, God loves them all.

For me, evil does not originate in some outside demon. It begins with the malevolent will of the human heart. From there, it becomes part of the forces that corrupt and destroy the children of God. And many were ground down under the yoke of slavery and the boot of Jim Crow. Through the fires of the civil rights movement, have come the uneasy peace that seems even more restless since the country put a Black man in the Oval Office.

Jesus said it wasn't enough for us to love those who loved us. We are called to love those who hate us, to bless those who curse us. Laws can create a civil society, but it takes more than laws to create a just society. It takes love. Freedom Ride 2010 reminded me how difficult a task this call is. It also reminded me how absolutely necessary it is for world.