..A REFLECTION ON THE SYSTEMIC RESULTS OF MY OWN BETRAYAL OF GOD'S TRUST, COMPARED WITH THE SYSTEMS OF INJUSTICE FLOWING FROM AMERICA'S ORIGIN STORY OF HALF FREE, HALF SLAVE..
Reflections Written about 7 months ago but Relevant on MLK Day 2024
The prophet decries our ability to know, much less direct the attitudes and affections of the heart. He writes, “The most cunning heart— it’s beyond help. Who can figure it out? I, the LORD, probe the heart and discern hidden motives, to give everyone what they deserve, the consequences of their deeds" (Jeremiah 17:9-10 CEB). Yesterday, I wrote, "I no longer have even the ability to handle, much less direct the multiplying desires that inhabited me and through me, our family, church—destroying every small garden of vegetables that were the financial, relational security binding Joetta's heart to mine and mine to hers." Only by the consequences is our heart genuinely revealed.
It's Sunday. This morning as I was downstairs trying to print my report to the Church Board about our Fire Restoration Project (which I manage), I was once again face to face with consequences. In the past, just hours before the meeting and having no report written I would have jotted down the important information and given the report orally. Given—quite properly—I can no longer speak with the leadership I'm left to writing what became an eight-page report detailing clearly what I've done in the last 30 days and where we are in process. Following a frustrating hour to get just two reports printed, I ran out of ink. I then forwarded by email the report to my pastor and my wife—who is functioning as a lay administrative leader. Having just gotten home from Idaho, I had finally completed the report at 3:30 AM, believing I could print it out in minutes and still make my worship service 25 miles away at Renton Naz. That was no longer on the table. Finally, I sat in my chair, tasks completed when I heard my grandson upstairs giving his mom a seriously difficult moment, refusing to get ready for church. Usually church is a joy to him.
Consequences. The saddest thing about worshipping apart from family is missing my grandchildren at church where I was an honored and safe presence in a community where they felt especially at home. My sin has shattered part of that picture in ways that are not completely seen, but felt.
It is equally true of all my relations within the family; a genuine love, fractured a bit. It is a familial wide sadness that colors what use to be free, sarcastic thoughtless play followed by unedited and comfortable laughter. Now, such moments end sooner than they should and always with a bit of a sigh for what once was—for feelings not yet expressed or processed.
And what will come of such losses where church and home inter-locked with a kind of self-affirming joy that would spread out and between us? Of a truth, who knows? One thing I do know. That in the sixth year of Tanners life wherein Church was/is the formative presence I've released a kind of felt wound that could become a memory of meaning-an iconic shadow of gray in an ocean of sun lit blue. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
If this moment where papa was and is no more—of which he still asks why—becomes a subtle yet real cloud then Tanners heart will be affected, perhaps not psychologically, but sociologically. He won't even be aware of its presence and hence unable to "act", but it will hang around him, in the back of his heart—a systemic small injury seeking to wrap itself around him in far more perverse ways.
Many in Black America and white America are very much trying to work around, with or deny the reality of systemic injustice. I believe the real problem for us as Americans is that we are attempting psychological resolutions to issues that are fundamentally social, communal in nature. Stated differently, we are attempting to finish a cleansing of even our recent racially separate and unequal past with weapons of power (shaming, canceling others, economic and social isolation) in order to remove perceived, often real, inequality of treatment before the legal system and achieve equity of outcomes in education and finance.
The problem is that power cannot meaningfully address social disparity, only a hope-centric
community-based love can. Here's why.
At a person-to-person level it is generally recognized that as individuals in business, civic duty and access to privileges, at home, work, in play and worship is increasingly realized by most Americans. The legal and shared biases (consciously held) that fed Jim Crow America, as a segregated country in housing, public access, education and business have collapsed. In its place has emerged a new and real consensus about equality of opportunity, recognizing such has yet to be achieved.
So white America—like a pastor who has broken faith and returned to fidelity—wants to put it out of mind, or at least celebrate that the hypocrisy that once was and enslaved all of us really, in terms of social distance, is over. It has no more life in its violent and abusive morays. The problem for both said pastor and a nation divided is its blindness to systemic echoes of the past living in the present. having real consequence.
The difficulty for a nation with two hundred years of power enforced abuse and then followed by a
hundred and fifty years of keeping a whole people "in their place" is that the underlying systemic outcomes that were developed in that unjust space remain, including:
• economic disparity, and;
• unequal ownership of property, and;
• vastly unequal use of the WWII veteran's
education bill, and;
• Presence of bias in a justice system towards
communities it previously controlled. In each area the social stats keep saying Black Americans don't matter as much as white Americans.
Equity of outcomes as a government enforced denial of privilege for some and creation of a new privileged status for others won't ultimately work, just as it has not worked in the past. The reasons are multiple, including:
1. Freedom requires the removal of walls and an infusion of real and freely chosen opportunities. Power is oppressive of the very gift required for the promise of freedom to thrive. If the government becomes the ultimate decision maker of winners and losers the very trust, social cohesion of love will be strained to the breaking point. The very power exercised by such governance will become increasingly bureaucratic and corrupted by the current stakeholders, freezing everyone in place, the pie smaller for everyone, but the elites. Power ultimately enslaves everyone.
2. The heart of a sociology of forced separation runs counter to the only real resolution: Equality of Opportunity instead of Equity of outcomes. Forced separation is the ultimate means and end of equity solutions whereas equality of opportunity requires a spiritual/psychological commitment to freedom and creativity. Now, awareness of equitable outcomes remain important just as tracking my sobriety and accountability is critical to healthy outcomes, personally. It's value is instructive and helpful, though it cannot set my human spirit free of itself.
Separation initially enforced by a class of slaves and of privilege was the necessary spiritual schism (leading to the civil war) of the American culture that allowed the vast majority of southern white lower and middle classes to support the institution of slavery. The social order affected the psychology or heart of every woman and man. If now we turn to new social divisions based upon equity, the very emphasis upon class and race distinction or ideology to enforce it determines relative value and the schisms will increase.
3. Only a "spiritual reverence" in the value of every person as made in God's image can motivate the kind of social awareness of systemic racism and current inequities that will allow us to build a new kind of organic social-capitalism that honor free, creative social and individual efforts toward resolving the actual remaining walls to equal opportunity and standing.
What is needed is a deepening understanding of the sociology of poverty and disenfranchised peoples and a deeper understanding of psychology of human well-being.
The new questions should be framed around health and full personal participation in freedoms promise.
Questions like:
• How do we expand an economic pie that reaches all communities?
• What kinds of direct payment incentives like the veterans bill of the 1950's could at critical junctures provide opportunities of education, home ownership, entrepreneurship?
• How do we keep a government foot print very thin in welfare bureaucracy while using the power in a creation of new wealth, such as 0% micro loans to borrowers whose interest is captured by Federal monies?
• How do we make excellent education broadly available allowing maximum control by parents for their kids and young adults for themselves, such that repayment of education loans are tied to economic performance of the graduates?
• How do we make ourselves aware of unconscious prejudice and a historically privileged class or race without placing psychological burdens of shame and guilt beyond what love and character requires of all of us?
• How do we celebrate the tremendous progress of realizing America's promise of freedom and equality of access while retaining a profound awareness of differing experiences?
• How do we revere one another?
• Where is God's love relevant in all the above?
Simply understanding the role, value and limits of social and psychological insights, it seems to me, is the place to begin. Dr. Martin Luther King understood both and addressed each appropriately. His emphasis upon 'reverence' for both the oppressed and dominant classes allowed him to uniquely address both the institutional and individual barriers to more equal outcomes. He was as much a pastor to 'white America' as to 'Black America', always careful to dream a common American future. We should take note.
Terry :)
01/19/2024
Taken from a yet unpublished, though written, book on restoration of our humanity following a destructive attachment to anything or anyone that is unhealthy. It will be called "Entirely Christ's..and Not Yet"
TEMPORARY FILE of "Entirely Christ's.. not Yet"
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