Woke and Awakening

My well-worn copy

I love that “woke” is related to “awakening.” “Woke” as an adjective is from African American vernacular, and, as employed by Black Lives Matter, entails social awareness, especially of racism and social injustice. It is now used ubiquitously to suggest someone who is politically aware.

In spirituality, “awakening” suggests spiritual awareness. An early twentieth century authority on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, describes “awakening” as the first stage of a mystic’s lifelong process. She described five stages of a mystic: awakening, purgation, illumination, dark night, and union.

What brings this to mind for me are two recent articles evaluating Harper Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird. One article reviews a book that offers a disconcerting analysis of Lee’s novel as a defense of upper class educated Southern whites distancing themselves from racist “white trash,” as if the latter were entirely responsible for racial barriers, while excusing themselves with the actual economic, political and social power to end segregation.

Jarring as this is for me as a fan of the novel, this appears to be true, and, I hate to admit, could also be said of those who insist President Trump was elected by that infamous “basket of deplorables” rather than by educated, middle and upper class white voters.

The other article, reviewing another related book, explains the writer’s disdain of the novel as insufficiently aware of the African American experience. Only Scout’s character is fully developed, she writes, not that of Tom Robinson or even of Atticus Finch.

I wanted to counter that this is because the book is not about Tom Robinson or Atticus Finch: the book is about Scout and her transformation in the light of her personal experience of events and characters in the narrative. The most authentic representation of African American experience would most likely be found in the writings of African American authors themselves.

The novel's film was released a month after Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous “Segregation Forever” inaugural speech. Though the sterling character of a small-town Alabama lawyer like Atticus Finch might have been a stretch, given the times, as one writer suggests, he serves as a counter to the prevailing ethos of racial prejudice. He gives white readers someone to emulate, something lacking in Lee’s original version, Go Set a Watchman. Thanks be to God for a good editor who advised her to revisit and reshape the story!

All this is to say, as I’ve written in my books and on this blog, To Kill a Mockingbird served as a “woke” experience for this 12-year-old boy from California who had never even visited the South. That, coupled with the Civil Rights Movement and good teachers and preachers, began for me a lifelong journey toward a better understanding of racism and social injustice.

The books of African American authors furthered my growth: Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Stephen Carter, Eldridge Cleaver, James Cone, Frederick Douglass, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr., Alice Walker, and Cornell West. Articles, reporting, firsthand encounters and presentations by numerous others also contributed to my “woke” process.

Just as “awakening” is only the beginning of a mystic’s lifelong path, maybe we might consider “wokeness” as only the start of political awareness. Maybe we could speak of a “woke-consciousness” that allows further development as well as application to other social issues of our times.

I was struck by the spiritual parallels as I completed reading this past Sunday Howard Rice’s book, Reformed Spirituality. He quotes Flora Slosson Wuellner’s description of spiritual growth in her book, On the Road to Spiritual Wholeness:

As we are healed and pulled together into wholeness, we are shown many things that we had not seen before. We are shown feelings we have had, but which have been repressed. We are shown things we have done, judgments we have made during our days of blindness and insensitivity. We are shown relationships in a new light, and facts to which we had not awakened. And as we wake and see, decisions about what we see begin to rise in freshness and power.

Related Post: Black Lives Matter

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Who Are Your Neighbors?

A popular sign in our neighborhood.

I just returned from a gathering whose theme, Rolling the Stone Away, was presumably taken from the story of the resurrection of Lazarus. I say presumably because there was little reference to it, save one of the plenary panels I served, “Stories from the Heart,” in which we were asked to read John 11 beforehand and respond to the question, what stone did you personally have to roll away to be and become yourself?

Having served as founding director of a ministry called Lazarus Project in the 70s and 80s, I have read the story literally hundreds of times, and preached on it every anniversary for its first ten years. But I found the way the question was posed intriguing; after all, in the story, it’s the neighbors who are asked by Jesus to roll the stone from Lazarus’s tomb and unbind his death cloths. The question posed seemed to focus on my personal responsibility.

My response was that “I had to get over myself” to be and become myself—by which I meant my shy ways, being an introvert (I know, you who read this blog or my books may be surprised!).

Thus I prefer writing and editing to “performing” like my fellow activists in the church and culture. Now, don’t get me wrong, I admire performers—those who clearly enjoy performing, say, like Justin Timberlake. I even envy them! And I too can perform when required.

In my brief storytelling, I also associated my reticence with the “best little boy in the world” syndrome, common among minorities. It was only when I exchanged the goal of perfection for the goal of integrity that I was able to risk embarrassing myself and getting laughed off stage as I had been in my Christian junior high when required to give my “testimony” before the entire student body. Even now, after such risk-taking serving on two panels for last week’s gathering, I felt a keen sense of embarrassment the day after, as if I had stripped naked before them.

But all this serves as preface to the point of this post. Before answering the question, I explained that I loved the Lazarus resurrection story because it was not just about Jesus, it was about a whole community coming to Lazarus’s aid. I mentioned in passing that it was my community in high school that rolled the stone of conservative politics away from my own closet/tomb, and in college rolled away the stones of fundamentalism and biblical literalism.  

I want to expand on this to encourage you to consider your own neighbors and the stones they helped you roll away to be and become who you are today.

Because my mother taught first grade there most of her professional life, we were able to afford my attendance at a fundamentalist Christian elementary and junior high. These “neighbors” helped me better understand my faith and values as a Christian.

But thank God (literally) I did not stay there in that silo of experience! I went to public high school, encountering actual neighbors of different churches and other faiths or no faith background at all. Among my closest friends were Jews whose parents survived or escaped the Holocaust. My brother’s best friend’s family, who lived on our street, had been placed in one of California’s internment centers for Japanese Americans during WW II.

Though I had a couple of African American friends in my high school, the de facto segregation of Los Angeles meant that most black high school students I encountered I met through special exchange programs with inner city schools. And of course, Hispanic and Asian neighbors were so pervasive in my California experience that I missed them when I moved to Atlanta, only to find them largely in areas I did not live. 

And my teachers in high school were far more diverse and liberal in their political viewpoint than the ones in the Christian school I attended.

For all these reasons, I am not a fan of home schooling!

College brought theological and biblical challenges as one of my majors was in religious studies, enlarging my neighborhood to include those who read the Bible critically and appreciated religious diversity. I participated in demonstrations and organizations that broadened my political horizons, including a Presbyterian congregation that was actively working to dismantle racism as well as establish a community center in the neighboring barrio. At the gathering last week, I was pleased that the organizers brought in speakers from groups addressing St. Louis’s recent racial tensions, and took an offering for their causes.

I have written many times of the inspirational influence of the Civil Rights Movement in my own quest for civil and ecclesiastical rights. And both college and seminary brought feminist neighbors as well as LGBT neighbors.

During every period of my life, such neighbors have rolled away stones that prevented my full enjoyment of diversity. If only those who fear immigrants and Muslims and ethnic diversity could understand the full glory of God’s creation!

Wade’s and my favorite character on the Showtime series Billions is a non-binary person who goes by “them, they, and their,” but last week’s gathering was my first “immersion” with a half-dozen or more non-binary neighbors who do not identify either as female or male, and I liked it. I liked learning how much my reactions and responses to an individual are based on gender. And I liked them. These are my newest neighbors, rolling away one more stone to a fuller life and broader appreciation of our neighborhood.

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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.