Bayard Rustin Speaks

Additional March on Washington related posts:

Keep the Dream Alive

“Colored on TV!”

Love Force

My post today is unique because today is unique: the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington. Its too-long-unsung organizer, Bayard Rustin, was interviewed by my friend Mark Bowman, an interview published in the quarterly Open Hands in 1987, the year of Rustin’s death. As subsequent editor of the magazine, I republished the interview in 1999, and you may find its full text on page ten of the Fall 1999 issue. I publish these excerpts in the belief that his voice needs to be heard. And I also believe his story demonstrates again the integrity of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, and other march leaders.

Martin Luther King, with whom I worked very closely, became very distressed when a number of the ministers working for him wanted him to dismiss me from his staff because of my homosexuality. Martin set up a committee to discover what he should do. They said that, despite the fact that I had contributed tremendously to the organization (I drew up the plans for the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and did most of the planning and fundraising in the early days), they thought that I should separate myself from Dr. King.

This was the time when [Congressman Adam Clayton] Powell threatened to expose my so-called homosexual relationship with Dr. King. There of course was no homosexual relationship with Dr. King. But Martin was so uneasy about it that I decided I did not want Dr. King to have to dismiss me. I had come to the SCLC to help. If I was going to be a burden I would leave—and I did. However, Dr. King was never happy about my leaving. He was deeply torn—although I had left the SCLC, he frequently called me in and asked me to help. While in 1960 he felt real pressure to fire me, in 1963 he agreed that I should organize the March on Washington, of which he was one of the leaders.

In June of 1963, Senator Strom Thurmond stood in the Congress and denounced the March on Washington because I was organizing it. He called me a communist, a sexual pervert, a draft dodger, etc. [Rustin spent two years in Lewisburg Penitentiary as a conscientious objector during WW II, later 30 days on a North Carolina chain gang for his participation in the first Freedom Ride in the South.]

The next day, Mr. A. Phillip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters] called all the black leaders and said, “I want to answer Strom Thurmond’s attack. But I think we ought not to get involved in a big discussion of homosexuality or communism or draft-dodging. What I want to do, with the approval of all the black leaders, is to issue a statement which says: “We, the black leaders of the civil rights movements and the leaders of the trade union movement and the leaders of the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic church which are organizing this march have absolute confidence in Bayard Rustin’s ability, his integrity, and his commitment to nonviolence as the best way to bring about social change. He will continue to organize the March with our full and undivided support.” He said, “If any of you are called, I do not want any discussion beyond that—Is he a homosexual? Has he been arrested? We simply say we have complete confidence in him and his integrity.” And that’s exactly what happened.

Someone came to Mr. Randolph once and said, “Do you know that Bayard Rustin is a homosexual? Do you know he has been arrested in California? I don’t know how you could have anyone who is a homosexual working for you.” Mr. Randolph said, “Well, well, if Bayard, a homosexual, is that talented—and I know the work he does for me—maybe I should be looking for somebody else homosexual who could be so useful.” Mr. Randolph was such a completely honest person who wanted everyone else also to be honest. Had anyone said to him, “Mr. Randolph, do you think I should openly admit that I am homosexual?” his attitude, I am sure, would have been, “Although such an admission may cause you problems, you will be happier in the long run.” Because his idea was that you have to be what you are.   …

When one is attacked for being gay it sensitizes you to a greater understanding and sympathy for others who face bigotry, and one realizes the damage that being misunderstood can do to people. It’s quite all right when people blast my politics. That’s their obligation. But to attack anyone because he’s Jewish, black, a homosexual, a woman, or any other reason over which that person has no control is quite terrible. But making my peace and adjusting to being attacked has helped me to grow. It’s given me a certain sense of obligation to other people, and it’s given me a maturity as well as a sense of humor.  …

I have learned a very significant lesson from the Jewish prophets. If one really follows the commandments of these prophets, the question of being hopeful or non-hopeful may become secondary or unimportant. Because these prophets taught that God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What God requires of us is that we not stop trying.

-Bayard Rustin

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Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Open Hands © 1999 by the Reconciling Congregation Program. 

Where's Your Cave?

I hope you will answer this question “Where’s Your Cave?” after reading this post by clicking on “comments” on the blogsite, and following the instructions, which begins with “select profile.” You will not receive spam and you can always reply anonymously! And you might see other readers’ comments. Thanks! -Chris

In his autobiography, Paramahansa Yogananda tells of his childhood and adolescent attempts to escape from Calcutta to the Himalayas to find a guru in a cave and pursue a spiritual path. Even after he has found his primary guru years later, he leaves him and his hermitage near Calcutta to seek out another guru in the mountains, one who humorously chides, “Masters are under no cosmic compulsion to live on mountains only.”

This guru asks, “Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door and be alone?” When Yogananda affirms, “Yes,” the guru says, “That is your cave. That is your sacred mountain. That is where you will find the kingdom of God.”

It reminded me of the psalm that begins “I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come?” (Ps 121) One of my earliest encounters with biblical scholarship was discovering that there should be a period, dash, or semicolon after hills, because the psalmist is not affirming mountains as God’s habitat, but rather, rejecting hills where other gods were worshiped. The psalmist instead affirms in the verse that follows, “my help comes from Yahweh who made heaven and earth.”

Elijah heard God speak in a cave’s sheer silence on Mount Horeb, and Mohammad had his divine revelations in a cave. Jesus preferred “lonely places” to pray, sometimes mountains, and encouraged us to find an innermost room, or pantry, to pray. A Bodhi tree was sufficient for the Buddha. We all need our “caves,” our “set apart” places to be “close to the mystery, [while] never solving it,” in words from Deepak Chopra’s novel Muhammad.

In all the places I have lived or visited, I have found a “cave,” often outside and usually with a view of the outside, to pray. In addition, two places to which I have longed to return each served as a cave away from home, Mt. Calvary Retreat House above Santa Barbara, destroyed in the Montecito fire a few years back, and the shoreline, which I rarely get to these days living in Atlanta. (I was once astounded to visit a church on a perch with a beautiful view of the sea purposely constructed with no clear windows so as not to distract worshipers!)

I’ve written before of Etty Hillesum, who, facing transport to Nazi concentration camps, wrote in her diary (published as An Interrupted Life), “There will always be a small patch of sky above, and there will always be enough space to fold two hands in prayer.”

“Somewhere inside me,” she wrote, “the jasmine continues to blossom undisturbed, just as profusely and delicately as ever it did. And it spreads its scent round the House in which You dwell, oh God.”

Kirkridge is a welcoming “cave” which hosts an annual retreat for gay and bisexual men (scroll down to date after clicking), which I will be co-leading Oct 3-6 this year with Roman Catholic activist and filmmaker Brendan Fay. Register by Aug 31 and subtract a $50 discount, no code required!

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations by mail or credit card are its only means of support. Thank you!

More on Etty Hillesum:

Interrupted Lives

Where Is God?

Books that line the walls of my working cave:

Sacred, Saving Texts

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

The Benefit of Doubt

There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

This quote appears on the homepage of my website. It comes toward the end of Tennyson’s elegy, In Memoriam: A. H. H., penned over a 17-year period about his dear friend Arthur Hallam, who died suddenly at age 22. As they had done as part of a group of friends at Cambridge known as “the Apostles,” the poem struggles with faith and doubt.

The love between the men, even though Hallam was engaged to Tennyson’s sister, intrigued me when I read it as a late teen struggling with my own romantic inclinations toward men and for God. I marked these two lines not only with a yellow highlighter, but subsequently underlined them in blue pen, writing “great” in the margin. Closer to the end of the poem’s 131 sections, I highlighted seven stanzas and wrote “My own struggle” in the margin. This poem gave us the famed line, “Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”

The poem’s prologue, written after the poem’s completion—thus after 17 years of anguished hope and doubt—seems to allude to doubting Thomas in its fourth line, “Believing where we cannot prove.” Though biblical scholarship suggests that the Johannine school, exclusively responsible for casting Thomas as a doubter, did so because of disagreements with the Thomasine school, Thomas could be considered the patron saint of doubters.

In our cynical times, much is made about the need to believe. And cynicism IS problematic when it dismisses all belief out of hand, thus Tennyson’s emphasis on “honest doubt.” But to know honestly what we truly believe, we must be encouraged to acknowledge our doubts. Here are a few doubts that help me:

Doubt yourself. This flies in the face of self-esteem systems that make you the center of the universe in control of your own destiny, but it makes for modesty and humility that behooves a speck on a speck circling a speck in the infinite cosmos.

Doubt religion. This comes more easily to progressive Christians, but I’d say we need also to doubt our own religious pretensions that we’ve got the answers.

Doubt government. This too is easy, as not even democratically-elected governments always behave in a democratic manner, sharing decision-making power. And why, for instance, is one who reveals the mistakes of a corporation called a whistleblower while one who reveals national mistakes called a traitor?

Doubt leaders. Not true leaders, who act altruistically rather than out of self-interest. But discernment of the spirits is key: whose agenda reflects Jesus’ concern for the poor, the oppressed, the outcast, the sick, the homeless, the vulnerable, the imprisoned?

Doubt business. Even business doubts business, because business people know themselves oh too well.

Doubt science. This too almost goes without saying, as the very basis of science requires empirical skepticism, repeatedly testing one’s findings and theories. Yet again “honest doubt” should not include rejecting things out of hand, theories that have already amassed an overwhelming body of evidence, like evolution.

Doubt art and artistic expressions. Beauty, creativity, and innovation can be enlarging or simply the result of market forces, bias, and deficiencies.

Doubt doubt. Just as beliefs need questioning, doubts do too. And some beliefs deserve “the benefit of the doubt”!

Ultimately Tennyson, in his own study of the sciences and his spiritual struggles, confessed faith over doubt as well as doubt over faith in his prologue, written after his 17 years of pondering: 

Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be;

They are but broken lights of thee,

And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations by mail or credit card are its only means of support. Thank you!

Related posts:

A Theory of Everything

What I Don’t Believe, What I Do Believe

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

Mosquito Consciousness

[Last week's post misled some readers that I was moving from Atlanta, so I added "a few years ago" to the first line.]

Sometimes my spiritual life is just plain spooky.

The morning I write this, my morning prayers on the deck were interrupted by the presence of what I thought to be a mosquito. Now I am considered quite juicy in the mosquito community, unlike my partner Wade, who never needs to use insect repellant as I do to keep the little vampires at bay. And though I had administered that sacred ointment, I thought it possible a missed spot might be too inviting. My heavy New Jerusalem Bible came in handy and dropping it on the pest proved fatal.

Yet I immediately felt regret taking a life. I’m one of those people who take spiders and other critters (roaches excepted) outside where they belong and liberate flies and wasps from entrapment between windows and screens if I can, though the latter I do at some risk, for a sting sent me to the emergency room a few years back, in an ambulance no less. 

Examining the remains on the back cover of my Bible, I was no longer certain it was a mosquito, and the best I could do was hope that I had sent it on to its next and hopefully better life! Before you think what a gentle and kind person I must be, all of this is a little disingenuous because I am by no means a vegetarian. But though I can eat meat, I could never kill the animal who provided it.

As you will remember from an earlier post, I am reading Paramahansa Yogananda’s autobiography, and today he finally found his primary guru, Sri Yukteswar. And here’s where it gets spooky, or synchronicitous or miraculous if you like. In answer to his devotee’s concern about mosquitos, the guru tells him, “Is the whole world going to change for you? Change yourself: be rid of the mosquito consciousness.”

During one teaching session, however, the teenage Yogananda is distracted by a mosquito and, as it proceeded to dig “a poisonous ‘hypodermic needle’” into his thigh, he raised a hand to swat it, but then remembered ahimsa (non-violence). Yuksteswar  offered a puzzling response, “Why didn’t you finish the job?”

When asked if he agreed with taking a life, the master replied, “No, but in your mind you had already struck the deathblow.” He went on to say that ahimsa means removal of the desire to kill, then explains, “This world is inconveniently arranged for a literal practice of ahimsa. Man may be compelled to exterminate harmful creatures. He is not under a similar compulsion to feel anger or animosity,” thus “overcoming the passion of destruction.”

Of course the context verifies that “harmful creatures” applies only to dangerous insects or threatening wild animals. Yet even in that context, one is best not driven by anger or animosity. Jesus said something like this when he added to the commandment “You shall not murder” the more far reaching “if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” Or added simple lust to “You shall not commit adultery.”

If only I could achieve mosquito consciousness, realizing that they too, in the words of Yukteswar, “have an equal right to the air of maya,” I could leave them be and save money on bug spray. Maybe in my next and better life!

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported only by readers. To make a tax-deductible donation by check or credit card, please click here. Thank you!

Related posts:

Praying for “Enemies”

Violence—What to Do?

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.