Paula Deen - so am I!

     So  Paula Deen has used the N word in previous conversations.  Well, lets face it. You could not grow up in the South as she did and not use it.  It was not and is not a term of equality. It is not a term of respect, but if you walked, talked, went to school, had a group of friends, played ball, went to dances with your white friends, you heard it and it came out of your mouth.

     I have already confessed to being a racists and using the N word at a Martin Luther King breakfast. I told them nobody taught me that word. My parents wanted me to be a Christian and love everybody, but it just seeped into the language and became part of the words we used.  It was used to choose sides in teams. " Eny-meny-miny- mow, catch a ........ by the toe" There were lots of those kind of things that as a young child you just absorbed.  If you were working very hard and the sweat was pouring off of you someone might say, "Boy, you are sweating like a N."  So the fact that Paula Deen confessed that she had once used that term is not a surprise at all.

     I think it would be much more important to discover whether or not she still uses that term in her relationships with other people. Does she still tell those stories that some people try to call jokes?  Does she still slip and use those "cliques" which have the N word in them.  Or has she attempted to grow and change and recognizes that those are hurtful and inappropriate words.

     It has just been a few weeks since the great southern Prophet Will Campbell died. Will knew the south and our deep seated divide.  Fleming Rutledge, a friend, tells that she talked with him once and mentioned her Virginia birth. She was talking about her past and how she had worked to become more accepting. Fleming wrote," I was confiding in him about my conversion. "My father," I said sadly (I adored my father) but smugly, "was a racist." "Fleming," said Will. Pause. "We're all racists."

      And I don't think Will was just limiting it to white and blacks. There are those who look down on the American Indians. The black community has historically had problems dealing with Hispanics and Latin Americans.  I remember the Kingston Trio once had a song about problems around the world, and it ended with the line, "And I don't like anybody very much."  Why is Iraq still in chaos except for a great divide between two religious groups. Arabs and Jews look down on each other.  Maybe in the technical term some of these are not racial divides, but it is still true that all of us feel superior to some people and dehumanize some group of people because of their skin, the accent, their hair, their economic condition or some other way.

     Paula Deen is a racist?  So we all are racists. The more important questions are do we recognize it and ask for help and try to mitigate the damage that we do by so being.

Interfaith?

     The meeting had been billed as an interfaith gathering of clergies. This was one of the Moral Monday gatherings in Raleigh.  There were Jews present.  I did not see anyone who was identifiable as Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. But the reality was "We don't do interfaith very well."

     The speakers approached the presentations as if they were sermons in Christian Churches.  Jesus and his words and work on earth were a major focus of most of the talks. A few speakers attempted to reference Old Testament passages, but the major impression as one of the first speakers said, "We are in Church"

     We are a society which is learning how to be multi-cultural. We are a people who need to learn how to be interfaith in our public meetings.  It is a learning process.  Emory University in a graduation ceremony had a benediction pronounced by every major religion.  That is certainly one of the ways the Clergy Day could have been interfaith. There could have been speakers of the major religions invited to  speak. The Rabbis in Raleigh did sign a document support the work of the Moral Monday gatherings. A rabbi speaker would have added a good dimension. An inman from a mosque would have been a nice addition.

     The other way of making a gathering interfaith is to edit the talks so that we are only talking about the blessing of the Holy upon our work. That the work we are doing is seeking to be faithful to the guidance of the One who made creation.  We want to reflect in our laws and our customs the values of the great religions.  There are many ways of talking about faith, about social justice, about ethics that grow out of one's faith without limiting that talk to Jesus.  Buddha, Mohammad, Moses, and others can all be named.

     As I left the meeting a woman walking next to me in the rain said, "You know, for an interfaith service you think they could have had a little more sensitivity to multi-faiths."  As we go forward we need to balance the speakers, so that each faith has a chance to push its faith posture, or we need to restrict our language to the more inclusive descriptions of faith. I once heard a prayer concluded, "for we pray in the name of the Grace that saves us."  That got an Amen from an atheist at the table.

Clergy Day - Moral Monday - a reason for going

     I was there among the hundreds, maybe a thousand, in Raleigh for Clergy Day-Moral Monday. It was billed as an interfaith gathering and there were Jewish people and potentially Muslim people.  But from what I could tell most of the speakers where Christian.

     I was there because I believe that this kind of action may have the power to awaken the average citizen to the issues and changes that are happening.  I believe that is necessary because I believe what Winston Churchill said, "The best and most effective argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."  The average person is general unaware of what is happening in those areas of life that do not affect her immediately. If you can get a jury to try O.J. Simpson for murder, a jury who had not heard of the case and did not have an opinion on it, then you know that there are lots of people who do not pay attention to daily events.   A friend of mine said he even hated to listen to NPR because it was so depressing and things never got resolved.  The political news is such a "downer" that one can understand why most people do not listen to it.

     Such demonstrations as Moral Monday, in my view, may make enough noise to get the average voter to notice what is happening in the political scene. Because there are so many things that the Republican legislature in N.C. is doing to the public that negatively impact the quality of life for so many that the average voter needs to stop and pay attention.  

A Great Church Story

     I was reminded today of one of the great stories that came out of a church covered dish supper in Texas.  It is a wonderful story of a citizen in the Kingdom of God teaching a power player in the world a lesson.

     There was a huge covered dish supper in this large church. The Speaker was to be the Governor of Texas who was campaigning for re-election.  The crowd was very large and it looked like they might run out of chicken.  The decision was made that a woman would serve the chicken giving one piece to each person.

     The line was thinning out but so was the supply of chicken when in rushed the Governor and his staff. The Governor came to the table and presented his plate and the lady put one piece of chicken on the plate.  The Governor said, "Listen, I have been rushed all day. I did not get lunch. I am very hungry, could you give me a second piece of chicken."  The lady said there is only enough chicken for one piece per person.

     The Governor was a little annoyed and got a little huffy. Starting talking loud about how he needed a second piece of chicken, he was hungry. Then he said, Do you know who I am?"  The woman giving out the chicken said, "Yes, your the Governor, Do you know who I am?"  The Governor was surprised. He said, No, who are you?   The woman said, " I am the woman in charge of giving out the chicken. You get one piece like all the other people. Move along."

     In the scriptures James tells us not to treat those with power and wealth any different from the rest, and she set a marvelous example of how the church should be.  One piece per person. Move along.

The Challenge of Fear

     The essay was a clear and well documented piece. The author's thesis was that the United States was under attack. There were groups, countries, and individuals who were out to destroy the country. It was not hard for the author to find a number of events to substantiate his claim.  We are under attack. Perhaps there is no real argument on that point.

      The greater question is how are we to respond to that challenge. How are we to combat those groups. How do we respond at a nation to these individuals, this cells, this countries who have different values and different agendas?  It is a question that will have to be discussed in a lot of places.  It may be the question that shapes our entire future.

     The essay was of the opinion that we needed to hunker down. We needed to close our borders to outsiders. We needed to put restrictions on free speech and free assembly. We could no longer enjoy the kind of openness and hospitality that we have offered because the enemy has been taking advantage  of those conditions.  We needed to increase our police and increase the number of activities that were illegal.  There would need to be some surrender of our privacy in order to allow the government to check on the activities of subversive groups.  People who were part of anti-government groups, citizens who were members of strange cults and special interest groups, neo-nazis, groups that promoted the dominance of one race, all these groups would have to be restricted and controlled.  He was afraid that we would have to change the way we lived in order to preserve our country from all these groups.

       Of course, what the essayist was suggesting was that we would have to help the enemy destroy our country by becoming like the enemy in order to fight the enemy.  We would have to sacrifice the very things that makes the country special and unique in history in order, supposedly, to preserve it.  It is not the way that most of the people in the country seem to want to fight the terrorists, the anarchist, the enemy.  When an act of terror is supposed to try to make us shut down or pull back, most people claim that they will not let the "act of war" stop them from living their lives.  Airplane travel is still planned. Marathons will still be run.  All religions will still be protected by the law. All citizens will be given their rights of assembly and speech.

     The fear of the conflict we are engaged in with many different levels can cause us to change the way we live and to become like the enemy to fight the enemy or we can continue to promote, defend and enjoy the rights and liberties we have and trust that those values and principles will overcome the efforts of the ones who seek something else from life.