by Ken Sehested
There was a period of years, decades ago, when I experienced a crippling sense of personal shame and social despair when realizing my own complicity in systemic racism. The shame wasn’t because I had enslaved anyone; or had committed blatant acts of discrimination.
It was because I realized how clueless I was. And if I was this clueless in this regard, chances were I was equally clueless about a whole range of other forms of unconscious bias.
Simultaneously I feared that the same applied to larger society, that we as a people were also structurally complicit, trapped in a naiveté that prevented us seeing the truth about our wounded history that continues to color current behavior.
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In the Bible the word “sin” has multiple synonyms, nuances, and associations. In modern English, I think the best synonym for sin is “cluelessness.” This variant is the most serious simply because it is the hardest to expose and thus the most resilient. It has survived all manner of legislative proscription, social sanction, and moral exhortation. It is instructive, I think, that Jesus’ final petition is that such receive Heaven’s most merciful response because “they know not what they do.”
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There came a time, though, when, in quick succession, I came across quotes from three of my heroes that bore me up from the sloughs of shame and despair. Not to make me innocent, but to allow me to be responsible, able-to-respond, freed from humiliation’s disabling power to move forward with courage and perseverance for the work of repair.
The first liberating quote is from James Baldwin, writing in “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”
“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For those innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”
The second quote is from Maya Angelou.
“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it,” and “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
Finally, one from Malcolm X himself.
“Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”
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Each of these are grace notes, hopeful disclosures, stemming from the pivotal word embraced by people of faith: Repentance is not for punishment but for the power of beginning again. Not with a clean slate—we will ever bear our scars. And certainly not as a one-off occasion: Penitential living is a daily commitment and a life long process.
It won’t always be pleasant. As Baldwin notes in “No Name in the Street,” after quoting the text from John where Jesus says, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” Baldwin writes:
“The truth which frees black people will also free white people, but this is a truth which white people find very difficult to swallow.” Or, as in another take on the “truth will set you free” aphorism: You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. But first it will make you miserable.
For people of every ruling caste, there is a certain misery to be endured on the way to freedom, as we become aware of the unconscious privileges to which we have been accustomed.
There is a needed relinquishment, a penitential posture, an unflinching recognition of our blinkered, myopic view of our place in our properly situated place in the eye of God’s delight.
A blessed absolution is available as sustenance on this rough journey—a beatific vision, a being lovingly gripped by the anticipation of a New Heaven and a New Earth, like an aperitif which whets our thoughts and deeds, our longings and desires, toward the coming feast of the Beloved’s consummation of history when “all shall sit ’neath their own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid” (Micah 4:4).
We recognize that our destiny is not a purge but a party, a Spirit-drenched fiesta. The goodness of the Good News is that we can begin again, we can orient ourselves and our society toward the holiness which radiates neighborliness, restoring right relations and just kinship and social policies, knitting together the warp of Heaven with the woof of Earth.
Only by such grace-impelled, hope-provoked work—and it is laborious, sometimes sweaty, difficult, persevering, frustrating work—can we be saved.
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