First Parish In Lincoln



“Hope is Invented Every Day”Nov 15, 2020The First Parish in LincolnRev. Jenny M. RankinTwo weeks ago, I talked about historian Jon Meacham tracing cyclical nature of American history; how eras dominated by fear, racism and violence would then give way to chapters, grounded in hope, where social and political progress was possible.I was reaching for hope on the brink of a presidential election in an extraordinary year.Today I’m going to take a different tack and invite us to spend time with a writer, James Baldwin, who tells us not to move too quickly towards hope, not to brush past chapters of our own history we’d rather forget.“We fail to linger in the dark moments at our peril,” writes Baldwin. Frankly, he urges us to stay in places we would probably rather not stay.Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says much the same thing but that’s for another day.This week, riding the post-election roller coaster of relief, anxiety, apprehension, (rinse, repeat)I decided to immerse myself in a book called Begin Again, James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own by Eddie Glaude, Jr., a professor at Princeton.The book is a biting and incisive tour through a specific moment in time—the 1960s and 1970s —when the soaring hope of the civil rights movement had crashed to the ground—And it’s a look at our time as well. When the hope of the Obama era crashed to the ground with Trump’s election in 2016, Glaude says “I was trying to deal with my own despair, so I turned to Baldwin.” How did he manage his rage, Glaude wondered? How could he be so angry and still believe we could build a New Jerusalem?It’s a brilliant book and a hard one to read. I have been picking it up and putting it down again for months now, ever since Ray Shepard recommended it to me last summer.A central thesis is what Professor Glaude calls “the lie”—it is his kind of shorthand to describe a whole set of assumptions he thinks are at the core of our identity as a nation: Blacks are inferior to whites.America is fundamentally good and innocent.Historical events are always distorted to fit the story that America is a beacon of light. Difficult chapters are always “aberrations” to this basic positive narrative.This “lie”—America’s failure to tell the truth about who it is and what it has done—is at the heart of what is wrong, then and now.Baldwin’s whole life was one man’s effort to bear witness to this lie.With the relentless urgency of a Biblical prophet, and in language that sometimes is just as difficult to hear as Jeremiah or Isaiah—Baldwin tried to tell the truth about America. Glaude says we have to do that too, now, in order to have any hope at all of at last putting white supremacy to bed and becoming a truly multi-racial democracy.*********************************************************James Baldwin was born in 1924,And grew up in Harlem terrorized by a stepfather who hated white people and hated his own inability to financially provide for his family.That hatred flashed into a violence that was most often visited on Jimmy who was the oldest of 9 childrenHe would spend his life trying to come to terms with the effects of the hell he caught from his stepfather and the reality of growing up poor, black and responsible for 8 other kidsIt was a wound, writes Glaude, that never fully healed.As a teenager, Baldwin:Served as a Pentecostal youth ministerDecided he wanted to be a writerPublished short stories and poemsPut his plans for college put on hold and got a job laying railroad tracks in New Jersey to support his familyMade friends with Richard Wright which eventually led to a travel grant to go to ParisHe left the US in 1948 at the age of 24It took getting outside the country to see it clearly and For the rest of his life he would live large chunks outside of the US, in France and Istanbul. In Paris he found, writes Glaude, the “breathing room to imagine himself anew”Free from the infernal pressure of American racism, he could begin to heal, try to put himself together."Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I could see where I came from very clearly...I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both," Baldwin once told?The New York Times.In Paris, he claimed his vocation as a writer,Came to terms with his bisexuality,And most of all, tried to “vomit up the self-hatred that America had lodged in his gut.”POET AS MORAL WITNESS“In the dark corners of Paris, a young Baldwin worked relentlessly to make himself into the kind of poet Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined in 1844, as one who ‘’shall draw us with love and terror,’ who sees through our comforting illusions, ‘chaunt(s) our own times and social circumstances’ and speaks of the unique genius that is America.” For Emerson, America was a “poem in our eyes” and what it needed was a poet to bring that vision to the page. Baldwin was trying to become that poet.It was in Paris that he truly claimed his vocation as a writerFor him, that meant being a witness.The poet as a moral witness.The moral role of the writer is to put aside American myths and force a confrontation with our society as it is.:It is to name what Glaude calls “the lie.”*********************************************************If it was in Paris that Baldwin had claimed his role as moral witness, it was on his first trip to the South in 1957 that he began to understand in a new and more wrenching way what that really meant.What that vocation was calling him to do. Demanding him to do. Looking into the eyes of a 10-year-old boy or girl in the South, Baldwin KNEW he had to try and tell America the truth, the awful truth of that young child’s life.“I think I really understood and probably for the first time that what you are doing, as a writer, or any kind of artist, was not designed to you know make you special …what your role was, it seemed to me, was to bear witness.. to what life is—does—and to speak for people who cannot speak. That you are simply a kind of conduit.’”This was different than being a spokesman for a particular movement or ideology. No, as Glaude writes, he had “to capture what moved in the guts and what was desperately desired among the people, what happened in the country, and in the moment, he had to write about all of that and about what and who was lost.”To speak for people who can’t speak.Tell the storyBring the suffering to the attention of those who wallow in ignorance.Shatter the innocence.”In doing this, he would expose again and again that essential “lie” at the heart of America.Like Emerson, Baldwin stayed true to his vocation in an unflinching way. His truth-telling nearly killed him.“We must tell the truth till we no longer can bear it,” Baldwin said to a bunch of students at Howard University in the spring of 1963. Stokely Carmichael was one of the students and Malcolm X happened to be in town that night and dropped by. There were times when Baldwin came very close to not being able to bear it. Watching Medgar Evans and one after another of his friends be murdered, Martin Luther King Jr., the betrayal of the civil rights movement and the beginning of mass incarceration, a black underclass, police brutality—Baldwin was one of the few who survived to tell the tale, and when he told it, it was like he was standing in fire.Standing in that fire, telling that godawful truth, nearly killed him. (He attempted suicide twice in his life).One of his colleagues, commenting on the intensity with which Baldwin bore witness, said he was surprised that all that anguish hadn’t killed him long before the cancer that took him in the end at age 63.The second crucial thing to understand about Baldwin—in addition to his role as a moral witness—is to understand the particular historical moment in which he lived and worked.Glaude calls it the “after times,” a phrase as core to this book as “the lie.”There were three moments of hope for blacks in America, 3 moments of hope that the “lie” would be finally exposed and overturned.They were: ReconstructionCivil rights movementObama’s presidencyAnd each time, it was followed by a crushing disappointmentThat the lie had NOT been brokenThat it was as strong as ever.Glaude calls these three moments in American history the “after times,” a phrase he took from Walt Whitman.He says that Baldwin stood in the middle of his own “after times” in the 1960s and 1970sAnd Glaude says that we are in the middle of our own “after times” now.With the collapse of the initial Black Lives Matter movement, Obama gone, Trump in the White House, America found itself in another “after times,” Glaude believed. A moment when the old was gone and the new had not yet emerged. A time of enormous disappointment and wreckage and rage and yet also potential possibility, hope and change.In this particular moment, Glaude writes, “I like to think of Baldwin as a moral compass.” His witness during his own after times gives us some clue about how we might approach our own. How we might imagine beginning again in the face of another failure of America, another instance of its insistence on not relinquishing the lie.“What might an honest reckoning with the country look like now?” Glaude wonders.“How do we muster the courage to keep fighting in the face of abject moral failure? To not abdicate our responsibility to fight for our children and democracy itself? Baldwin’s later writings are saturated with these questions. He sought to answer them while grappling with his own trauma, grief and profound disillusionment with the moral state of the country and in the people who repeatedly choose the safety of being white over a more just society.”“We need to gather ourselves for we are in the eye of the storm. We must find the courage to make the bold choices necessary for these after times. We cannot shrink from our rage. We have to look back and tell a different story, without the crutch of our myths and legends, about how we have arrived at this moment of moral reckoning in the country’s history.”I want to end this morning with some of Baldwin’s own words from his last novel Just Above My Head:“When the dream was slaughtered and all that love and labor seemed to have come to nothing, we scattered….We knew where we had been, what we had tried to do, what had cracked, gone mad, died, or been murdered around us.Not everything is lost.Responsibility cannot be lost, It can only be abdicated.If one refuses abdication,One begins again.”I think James Baldwin’s voice comes through loud and strong thereChallenging us not to abdicate the responsibility that is oursThat is every American’sIf we can have the honesty to look the truth straight in the faceAnd “stay in the arena” as Teddy Roosevelt would have put itWe can, despite all odds, begin again.Again, and again and again.May it be so. ................
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