Good morning…
After experiencing the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, I am haunted by the inhumanity, the ugly pain inflicted on millions and millions of black skinned people over the centuries, and the way my privileged, comfortable life has really, really bloody roots. I feel compelled to deal with my own pile of dirty laundry.
How am I complicate?
How do I still contribute to ongoing inequality?
What can I do to step into gaping hole in the heart of our humanity?
I woke to write in the middle of the night, as our internet service finally had been restored. Yet returning to my computer after five disconnecting days plus one full day of witnessing our violent history of human atrocities, I was a tongue-tied person with divine power drained from my fingers. I tried to write, but nothing felt right. No words from within could light my candle in the aching dark.
So I returned to a quote a friend shared this week and went back to bed with these powerful words percolating in my body. “My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places,” writes Marilynne Robinson in the novel Gilead. “That old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must dwell on, because I know more than I know and must learn it from myself. … I have never found another way to be as honest with myself as I can be by consulting with these miseries of mine, these accusers and rebukers, God bless them all.”
With fewer words and more private pondering, might God somehow bless the huge heaping pile of dirty laundry we humans have stained? Wondering honestly about our collective pain, I follow the grief though ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places in my own chest. Is there something I must dwell on? I know more about this pain than I know. I must learn to deal with my own dirt, to learn from it myself. Am I willing to consult these miseries of mine? With the power of God undulating in the center of me, might a blessing of healing somehow comes out in the wash?
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8, NIV).
On an ordinary Saturday morning at the end of this April, it is time to do my laundry.
…Sue…
