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 Cornel 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.

I posted this on July 11, 2018, and post it today in observance of Black History Month in the U.S.

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

"Somebody's Gotta Be Mary!"

India, January 1983

Once upon a time, respectable members of a respectable church decided to perform a Christmas pageant, and congregants were vying for parts. The big competition was around the roles of the Magi, the Eastern religious scholars bearing gold and frankincense and myrrh. Many were taken with their absolutely fa-bu-lous costumes, reeking of wealth and privilege and prestige.

But there were also many who wanted to demonstrate their own humility by playing the poor shepherds watching their flocks by night, knowing that they’d get to see a sky full of angels singing of peace on earth, goodwill toward all, as well as visit the baby Jesus lying in a manger with a halo for a hanging playtoy.

Others wanted to be those high and mighty angels, who, in our contemporary, secular times seem to represent only themselves, cutely and cherubically and all-too-benignly making guest appearances on wrapping paper, greeting cards, and Christmas films, instead of being the fierce and frightful presence of God they are in the Bible—so terrible, they often had to say “fear not!”—awesomely calling individuals to radical action rather than offering sentimental appeasement.

For the manger scene itself, as you may have guessed, it was easy among the staid and high-end church members to cast the roles of the ox and of the ass and of the many docile sheep. Easy also to cast the unwelcoming innkeeper and King Herod frightened of losing power and the indifferent Caesar Augustus only interested in the bottom line, the church budget.

A few were at least willing to play one of the pageant’s two leading characters, Joseph, who at first wanted to put his pregnant betrothed away in a closet somewhere to avoid public disgrace. You will recall that Joseph had a change of heart after having his own vision of an angel, then choosing to serve as a kind of behind-the-scenes partner to the inevitably unfolding will of God, a ferocious will contrary to decency and order, a decency and order Joseph wanted to at least appear to uphold by his outward compliance.

But nobody wanted to play the role of Mary in the Christmas pageant. “Somebody’s gotta play Mary!” the stage manager Gabriel shouted out, sounding very much like the gravelly voice of Harvey Fierstein. “No Mary, no Jesus!” he cried bluntly.

You see, nobody respectable wanted to play Mary because of the shame of her unwed pregnancy. And absolutely no one wanted to go through the bloody and painful job of giving birth to a new thing.

Mary’s fidelity to God, her willingness to say, “Here I am the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word”—all of this counted for naught in the eyes of these good people. The Holy Spirit was knitting together in her womb the new thing for which the prophets hoped, yet, like all nativities of the Spirit, “the powers that be” trembled, including these dignified religious types. Mary’s birthing this child would be an unsettling and unclean act, embarrassing rather than admirable.

“Mary is not a good role model for our children,” someone said.

Stage manager Gabriel again implored the crowd, “C’mon! As Mary, you get to magnify and rejoice in the Lord and be called blessed by generations to come, though admittedly not this generation. You get to serve as God’s instrument to scatter the proud in their presumptuous imaginations, lifting the downtrodden even as the powerful are taken off their high horse. Your mission is to fill the hungry with good things, and to remind the privileged of their own poverty. This is a good thing. Really.”

Visiting the church for the first time, a timid and small young girl came forward, a recent immigrant with olive skin and dark brown eyes and thick black hair, and simply said, “Here am I.” Gabriel, exasperated by everyone else’s resistance, asked, “So—ya wanna be Mary?” And because his language was new to her, she simply quoted Mary’s line, “Let it be with me according to your word.”

And so the respectable church filled with respectable members was able to put on its pageant, reliving the Christmas story, but they did not live happily ever after. For the nature of all nativities of the Spirit humbles those with privilege and uplifts the underprivileged, shaming the proud and bringing mercy and justice to the oppressed.

But that can’t happen unless someone is willing to be Mary.

I posted this on December 7, 2016 and thought new blog followers might like to read it. Have a meaningful Advent and Christmas!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Ozymandias on the Nightly News

The Karnak Temple Complex in Luxor, Egypt, 

in which Ramses II is depicted as the god Osiris.

1981 (crg)

Watching the evening news recently, “Ozymandias” came to mind. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetic rendering of the transiency and impotence of inflated egolatry of the kings of ancient times speaks to the would be “kings” who dominate the 24/7 news cycle of our own time. I was thinking of one in particular, but there are many around the world who qualify.

So I looked up the poem in my good old Norton Anthology, whose footnotes explained that a first century B.C. Greek historian reported that the largest statue in Egypt had the inscription: “I am Ozymandias, king of kings; if anyone wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits.” The anthology explains, “Ozymandias was Ramses II of Egypt, 13^th century B.C.”

Decades ago, when I visited Egypt as part of a religious studies class, it was pointed out to us that Ramses II had his name carved deep into the stone of structures he built so that a later Pharaoh could not scratch it out, which sometimes happened. In the poem below, the anthology further explains that “the hand that mocked” refers to the sculptor’s representation and derision of his subject, and “the heart that fed” refers to the king’s heart that served as the source of such mockery.

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

“Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” reminded me of the frown, wrinkled lip, and sneer of a cold and callous politician that I frequently see on the nightly news.

It also made me think of my recent reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose familiar story has been told in multiple productions: offering his soul, Dorian Gray’s portrait takes on all his sins and aging so he can remain unblemished, untouched, unmoved, and unreformed. Dorian keeps the painting covered and hidden in an unused, locked room. He occasionally checks on it, finding it uglier and more distorted with each viewing.

Dorian finally decides he needs to change his way of life and he does something he considers good and unselfish, hoping to reverse the process, but in the end,

He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. … Had it been merely vanity that made him do this one good deed? Or the desire of a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these?

Ozymandias could be said to practice the power of positive thinking, thinking of himself and his work in superlatives, but the sands of time are a great leveling field, Shelley makes clear.

Dorian Gray was above it all, privileged and pampered and proud, without good promise or purpose. Wilde’s implication is that conscience is necessary for the soul to survive.

“What does it profit a person if, in gaining the whole world, loses the soul?”

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Parable of My Hydrangea Bush

You might consider this a belated Earth Day reflection.

The hydrangea bush inhabited another part of our yard here in Atlanta, but I moved it to a more prominent place so passersby could enjoy its blooms, between the sidewalk and the street. A rookie mistake.

I should have learned from the azaleas I had once planted in a similar location that disappeared, roots and all, the night before they were about to blossom. My optimism hoped, at least, as it was near Mother’s Day, that someone had taken them home to his mother.

I had just prepared our lunch when a knock at the door summoned me. A young man pleasantly complimented the hydrangea and asked if he and his wife might take a slip or two home to grow for themselves. “Sure,” I said, and trusted him to do this on his own without supervision.

But during lunch, my intuition or lack of trust kicked in and I went to check on my hydrangea just as the man grasped one last handful of stalks, tossing them in a bucket of water with others previously pruned and slamming the rear doors of his white truck as he jumped behind the steering wheel for a sheepish but quick getaway. To my dismay, I realized a florist had just made off with half of the hydrangea’s colorful blossoms. I shouted after him, but too late.

The following season, I called my mother one morning to proudly tell her how beautifully the hydrangea was blooming. She was pleased to hear of it, because we had one in the yard of the home I grew up in, and in which she still lived. My father had tended it, as he had all our plants and trees and lawns. Dad’s family had a farm, and she was pleased to think I had gotten his “farmer” genes.

Later that same morning, I came out on the front porch and noticed the hydrangea’s branches were drooping, dangerously low. I had earlier watered the lawn, so I inspected the plant to see if too much water had accumulated on the leaves, weighing it down. I saw a neighbor outside and asked if he had noticed anything unusual.

“Yeah,” he said, “A drunk guy collapsed on it a little while ago.” I had earlier noticed him stumbling near his truck, still parked nearby, broken down or out of gas in the middle of the street. Now he was nowhere to be found, presumably seeking help or buying fuel, but he had carefully dumped his used beer cans on the adjacent lot. Uncharitably I collected the cans and put them in the bed of his truck. My sense of justice was piqued!

I had other seasons when the hydrangea would return wonderfully from its winter dormancy, but the final insult came one winter when someone removed what he thought was a dead plant: my hydrangea! I was grieved and horrified, but I bit my lip and said nothing, because the person thought he was doing me a favor.

It reminded me of the time I saved a tree in front of my ground floor apartment’s picture window in West Hollywood. I enjoyed watching squirrels playing in it and birds nesting among the branches, like a Disney cartoon. Sometimes at night possums huddled near its trunk, pretending not to be there as I passed by. But one winter, the building’s maintenance guy came with saws and tools to take it down. I intervened, asking why. “Because it’s dead,” he declared, “It has no leaves.” I explained that the tree always lost leaves in the winter, and they grew back in the spring. “Oh,” he said, and was just as happy not to take it down.

Ok, so now I’m an old man rambling, but one more shrub story. I had a painfully prickly bush at the end of our driveway, again, here in Atlanta. A drunk apparently attacked that too, as I found tire marks in its garden bed and a major portion broken off, but carefully placed back in position as if nothing happened. I only discovered the subterfuge when that section turned a telltale brown. When it finally died, I decided, once and for all, to remove it. Big mistake! I had no idea how the bush had become my “North star,” guiding me as I backed out of our curved driveway. I’ve never been as good backing out onto the street since! Now I look like a drunk driver!

For all you biblical sharpies out there, you know that a “parable,” such as I have labelled this, is only supposed to have one point. The point being our relationship with nature.

But as many parables are interpreted allegorically, there’s more to the story. We exploit and even take credit for nature’s beauty. Our addictions plunder, pollute, displace, and even destroy it, and this includes coffee, sugar, cocaine, fossil fuels, urban sprawl, as well as a disproportionate distribution of fruits, vegetables, and flowers to the privileged. We fail to be mindful of its rhythms and we fail to fully understand and appreciate it.

And prickly, annoying shrubs, like prickly, annoying experiences and prickly, annoying people, may serve as guideposts to finding our way.

Related Link: My grandniece Elaine Sanders, interested in sustainable design, edited this brief recycling video for her campus paper: Beyond the Bin.

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Jesus' "Bad" Table Manners

Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus in King of Kings.

(I took this photo the last time I watched it 

in hopes of being able to use it on my blog!)

Over religious objections, Jesus didn’t insist that his disciples ritually baptize their hands before eating, explaining it’s not what goes into a person but the bad stuff that comes out of a person’s heart that’s the problem.

He transformed jars of water intended for ritual use into wine during a wedding, and, on another occasion, defended his disciples eating grain they gleaned from a field on the Sabbath, despite religious prohibition.

Jesus did not object to an uninvited, “questionable” woman washing his feet during dinner, offending his Pharisee host. On another occasion, he defended Mary listening at his feet while her sister Martha was left to prepare their meal by herself. 

He invited himself to the home of the tax collector Zacchaeus, and commonly ate with tax collectors and sinners to the disdain of the truly religious people, who wouldn’t even dine with each other lest they be contaminated by another’s hidden sin.

He indiscriminately fed multitudes with meager resources, declaring the hungry will be blessed and full while those who are full now will be hungry. 

In Samaria he asked for water from a woman, multiply married and of a despised minority, and warned his disciples of the leaven of the Pharisees, while comparing the kingdom of heaven to the leaven with which a woman leavens a loaf of bread.

Jesus told kingdom parables of feasts missed by those with privilege because they were unprepared, inattentive, distracted, late, or dressed inappropriately.

He washed the feet of those attending his final meal over the objection of Peter, who apparently wanted to keep his rabbi on a pedestal. And Jesus had the audacity to confront them with the truth—their anticipated betrayal, denial, and abandonment. He was unafraid to spoil their camaraderie with the harsh reality of his impending martyrdom.

The traditional beginning of the Communion story is “On the night that Jesus was betrayed…” But we did more than betray him that night; we denied him multiple times and abandoned him to the “powers that be.” We expressed shock that any of us would desert him, let alone betray him, and we each said, “Is it I, Lord?” Was our fear of authority figures and the awareness of Jesus’ and our vulnerability already palpable at the meal? Regardless, both believers and betrayers were welcome at his table.

Those shaping the story—the oral predecessors of the written Gospels and the Gospel writers themselves—would associate it with Passover, another ritualized meal commemorating salvation, the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt.

Nice touch, giving the meal a religious gravitas and connecting it to Jewish tradition as well as the metaphor of Jesus as the paschal lamb. But I happen to be of the school of thought that this “last supper” was actually a friendship meal that a Teacher would have with his disciples. That could explain the absence of the usual ingredients of a Seder. In my view, that would make it no less vital spiritually then or now.

Jesus gave the meal his own gravitas, declaring the bread as his body and the wine as his blood, a kosher faux pas given that blood was taboo. Earlier in his ministry he had offended and lost a lot of literalist followers when he told them they must eat his flesh and drink his blood to live forever. Jesus must have been a bad influence, because eventually his followers would set aside all dietary restrictions to eat whatever was set before them, in gratitude, even meat offered to idols—as long as it didn’t hinder another’s spiritual growth.

But not long after Jesus, the church at Corinth reintroduced table manners into their observance of Communion. Thus the Corinthians were reprimanded by the apostle Paul that their customary way of serving guests in Greek culture, separating them by class and desirability in different rooms, was failing to recognize the body of Christ—not in the bread, but in the body of believers, who were, he wrote in another context, no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female, but all one in Christ Jesus. The writer of James similarly felt compelled to chasten followers of Jesus who favored “a person with gold rings and in fine clothes” over “a poor person in dirty clothes.”

“You don’t have to be a member of this church or any church to be welcome at this table.” I learned this from my colleagues in Metropolitan Community Churches. Now these table manners, closer to those of Jesus, have spread to other denominations which want to welcome anyone and everyone to the table Jesus offers.

Just as Jesus welcomed everyone, regardless of belief or behavior, class or condition, so we who claim to represent his values to the world are called to do the same.

This post was inspired by an invitation this past Sunday to lead Communion for Ormewood Church, which welcomes everyone to the table every week.

Apologies to subscribers who received the uncorrected version of last week’s post, mistakenly referring to Joseph Campbell as “Bill Campbell” (a former mayor of Atlanta!). This is the challenge of working without a net—an editor and copyeditor. Though I read each post dozens of times before and after scheduling, I sometimes miss even an obvious error. Thanks to the readers who brought it to my attention!

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Are You Getting Enough "Likes"?

A couple of weeks ago I threw myself a pity party on Facebook. I posted that I was thinking of discontinuing this blog because the number of visitors has hit a bumpy patch in recent weeks. Until then posts enjoyed one to three thousand visitors each week, not counting 500+ subscribers. Visits plummeted to several hundred one week for a post I considered among my best. The next week’s visitors increased but were still well below a thousand. Another week the numbers were down to several hundred again.

I wondered if it was caused by spring breaks or the recent reservations people have expressed about Facebook, my primary way of spreading word about a given post (which I do on organizational and group pages, not on personal pages). A pop-up box that I also get seems to require a log-in and password, but the box is easily dismissed by clicking twice on cancel. (You won’t have this problem on Chrome browser, btw.) But that glitch has been around for several months, and I assumed it was an AOL problem, or having to do with my new laptop.

Finally, it appears, the numbers may have to do with the new Facebook algorithms that only promote a post among those with whom I am more often in direct contact. I confess that, to keep up with all my Facebook friends, I would have to be on Facebook much more often than my introverted self and time limitations permit.

Not long ago, a friend and I were discussing social network addictions, and he suggested I may be addicted to “likes.” Though Facebook friends infrequently “like” the links to my blog (which makes them less visible), what I am keener on are how many people actually “see” a given post by following the link. Obviously, there is pride involved in this wish, but it’s my compensation for all the effort that goes into every post.

I didn’t think to say to my friend that I was no more “addicted” to visits than anyone would be “addicted” to adequate compensation for their work. Given my blog is not really a money-maker, not being “monetized” by ads or links, not charging for subscriptions, and, for example, receiving about $200 in donations in the first quarter of this year, my reward is rather in seeing how many visitors the blog attracts.

I almost scuttled this post because it sounds like a personal jeremiad not worthy of your time. But it occurred to me that many if not most of you have the same experience in your own work. How many of you are praised when you are, in the words of The One Minute Manager, “caught doing something right”? How often do you even know the people your volunteer or non-profit or service-oriented work helps? Do any of us take enough time to let clergy, educators, servers, care professionals, even friends and family know how much their efforts mean to us?

In the midst of populist uprisings in this country and the world, those of us who think “we know best” are being urgently told there are peoples who feel underappreciated, undervalued, and overlooked. Our own occasional feelings of being neglected should help us understand them and their anger and their desire to “even the score.” Many of us who are privileged in one way or another resist those protestors blind to their own privileges, but that is only “catching people doing something wrong.” Better to stop and listen and attend to the woundedness, just as Jesus did when he heard someone cry, “Have mercy on me!” whether a poor blind beggar or a rich young ruler.

Queer Catholic theologian James Alison has suggested that we crave being liked even more than being loved, and this many years before Facebook! We want others to like us, to want to hang with us, to look us in the eye, whether they’re bagging our groceries or offering a medical diagnosis or making love or praying for us.

Linus of Peanuts fame famously said, “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand!” “Loving” humanity is often easier than “liking” human beings.

God loves us, but Jesus likes us, calling us friends, friends worthy of dying for, friends whose feet he is glad to wash, whose hunger he is glad to satisfy, whose thirst he is glad to quench, all while looking us in the eye and asking that we “like” him too, in “the least of these.”

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Justice: Delightful Pleasure or Grim Duty?

Given challenging political times, I believe liberals and progressives need to reconsider our strategies to be effective.

Anyone who has read my books or this blog probably knows I believe people are best motivated by the pleasure principle. Better, in the words of The One Minute Manager, to “catch somebody doing something right” than “catch somebody doing something wrong.” Best, in the view of Pollyanna, to know and proclaim there are more blessings than curses in The Bible.

Many of us got so “judged” by the biblical god that we turn around and judge others harshly too.  And this is not just those who are fundamentalist or biblical literalists; liberals and progressives do it too. A progressive friend of mine once said that the word “justice” had become a weapon that we use on those we believe don’t measure up to our standards. And I’ve written before that progressives and liberals can have our own fundamentalism.

Two weeks ago I wrote of multiculturalism and multinationalism as a pleasurable thing, explaining how my spouse and I “delight in finding out the origins of someone’s name, or accent, or heritage.” I added, “This is the pleasure of a multicultural, multinational world.”  I was attempting to lead all of us out of a fear-based nativism by presenting a positive case for welcoming others—into our countries, into our lives, into our neighborhoods and homes.

Admittedly I had intentionally tweaked the beak of those who consider it a “micro-aggression” to ask “Where are you from?” I said as much in the first paragraph.

On one of the progressive Christian Facebook pages where I post the link to my blog posts, I was taken to task by someone—white and well-informed—for my “racist” assumptions that clearly came from my “white privilege.” Ironically, my intention had been to address a nativist rant, and I had referred to white privilege that shields many of us from its sting.

In several back-and-forth volleys, I explained that I exercise discretion in discovering someone’s origins, just as I do in conversation with someone who may not be “out” as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

But the point of my post was to help others see that multiculturalism can be fun, not just an exercise in a dry diversity training program, not just a grim duty that justice or God requires of us.

There are times when justice may be a grim duty. Even then it can feel good to do what’s right. But if it is most often or always a grim duty, then we might wonder at our motives for pursuing it. If it is not also a delightful pleasure, then we might question our character or values or personalities.

Multiculturalism doesn’t exist for my pleasure or delight, I was told. Now, I have wondered about a kind of cultural imperialism whereby a dominant culture appropriates habits and customs and dress and wisdom of other cultures. As a Hispanic, third-generation Californian friend of mine observed, witnessing a white minister in traditional African garb, “Why do you guys have to take on other people’s cultures?”

My Facebook opponent ultimately retorted with her own brand of “micro-aggression”:  “Check your privilege.”

Weeks ago I considered writing a post about white privilege, but didn’t get beyond my opening illustration. As Wade and I took one of our neighborhood walks, it occurred to me that even in our multiracial community, if we weren’t white, we might be regarded suspiciously as we pointed out features of a house or its yard.

We all have the privilege of welcoming those different from ourselves and celebrating those differences. I do not do it simply because it’s “right” or “just” or “liberal” or “progressive,” I do it because it is beneficial, healthy, wise, and wonder-full. And dare I say it? Pleasurable!

Think what a better world we’d have if everyone felt that way.

Relevant posts:

Black Lives Matter

Black Museums Matter

Please support this blog ministry: 

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Or mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

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