PRIVILEGE

Privilege is what I have.

I am not wealthy, but I have an income from my part time job, my SS and Bern's, and the Church Pension Fund that has been in 6 figures the last 6 years--it never was before that, by the way. So, I have all the money I need. And with the Pension Fund's health insurance beyond Medicare, we hardly ever have a medical or dental bill more than $16.

I am also white, male, heterosexual and Protestant.

Newt Gingrich, of all people said it today: "Most average white people have no idea what it's like to be Black."

No kidding.

Back in the Viet Nam years, with my hair much longer than now, I got some 'looks' from police officers--but they never looked at me the way some police look at young Black men...like a threat, like a danger, like someone to fear.

There was a photo on line today from somewhere--Memphis? maybe--at a Black Lives Matter demonstration. A 28 year old black woman in a long dress is standing absolutely still as two police officers in riot gear rush toward her.

It reminded me of the photo of the single demonstrator staring down a tank in Tinneman Square in China and the photo of of a Viet Nam demonstrator, a young woman, putting a daisy in the barrel of a National Guard soldier's rifle and of so many of the photos from the civil rights movement when peaceful people stood still in the face of armed police and police dogs.

I served an historically black church in Charleston, West Virginia and two deeply integrated churches in Connecticut cities. And Newt was right (about this if little else!) I don't have any idea what it's like to be black.

And I have never needed to know.

That is 'privilege' that the growing number of people of color in my nation don't have.

I sometimes notice, when my granddaughters and son and daughter in law are walking in Baltimore with Bern and me, that white people do a double take at Cathy because she's Asian and the rest of us look white (though the grand-daughters are mixed-race). But it's not a double take with much more than curiosity. If she were Black or Hispanic or Muslim with a head scarf, I'm not sure what the double take would be about.)

No white person has ever done a double take at me. Except maybe for my hair. But it is usually amusement that I haven't advanced from the 60's.

I live in a town so safe that we never lock the doors or our cars. Many people of color and poor white people couldn't imagine that--just like I can't imagine being them.

The thing is, now that I ponder it, people without 'privilege' probably can't imagine being 'privileged' any more than I can imagine being them.

So here we are in the only country I'd want to live in (except maybe New Zealand) and we can't imagine what it's like to be on the other side of the divide between privilege and "not".

My privilege gives me guilt. And I have mixed with 'the other' most of my life.

Somehow, someway, we have to bridge this gap, this divide.

I promise to try to work on that--though I have no idea how to do it. And I hope you will ponder doing the same.

We can't live in such a divided society. We must do something to enable the diversity of our nation make us strong and united rather than divide us. We must do something about the distribution of wealth that drives much of the divide. We must find ways to come to identify with 'the other' so that we can be 'one'.

I long to know--really 'know'--my brothers and sisters who are not like me.

I pray for the wisdom to somehow, someway do that.

My 'privilege' is a weight on my back. I long for it to be my ballast in the rough seas of life.

 

The Good (?) Samaritan

Here's the sermon I was going to preach today at St. Andrew's, but I left it at home. I said a lot of it, but not all.

THE SAMARITAN—“GOOD” OR GOOD CHOICE?

          In St. John's Church in Waterbury, where I was Rector for 21 years, there is a stained glass window up the the balcony, just to the right of the pulpit, of the Good Samaritan. I could see it, up high to my right when I stood in the center aisle to preach. It was beautiful. It was always there. And for all it's beauty, it never told the whole story.     

          When the ‘good Samaritan’ as we know him, shows up, the preacher scratches his or her head and wonders what to say.

          Everyone knows the story—our culture has even adopted the term “good Samaritan” to apply to laws that have been passed to prevent prosecution of people who were ‘just trying to help’ and may have caused harm instead. It is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible and most everyone knows ‘what the term good Samaritan means’ even if they don’t know the story.

          There’s simply no way to talk about this parable that hasn’t been done and redone dozens of times before. So the preacher is left scratching his or her head and wondering what to say. Yet the story is radical and remarkable.

          So, all else failing, let’s review, just so we are all clear about why this story is so radical and remarkable.

          When the Assyrians, under King Sargon, invaded Israel, some 250 years  after the time of King David, early in the 8^th century BCE, part of the population of the Northern Kingdom was taken into captivity while the rest intermarried with the invaders. Thus were the Samaritans created. They were Jews who continued to read the Torah and follow Jewish law but did not accept the prophetic literature as scripture and did not think Jerusalem was the center of worship.

          In Judea, just south of Samaria, Jerusalem remained the holy city. But both Samaritans and Jews worshipped the same God and shared a part of what we call “the Old Testament”.  Yet, in spite of what they had in common, there was a remarkable antipathy between Jews and Samaritans.

          How can we explain it? The more like you the Other is, the more you hate them.

          Where I come from, the bloody feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys was the greatest example of this virulent kind of hatred. Anyone who has researched that great family feud realizes almost immediately that Hatfields and McCoys had been intermarrying for generations before the fighting started. The two families were all related by blood in some way before the first shot was fired. And, BECAUSE THEY WERE SO MUCH ALIKE, the hatred was hotter and the divide deeper.

          Jews and Samaritans, by the time of Jesus, were the Hatfields and McCoys of the first century. As ‘alike’ as they were, each was “The Other” to the two groups and they hated each other absolutely. You see, “The Other” is not just someone far away and foreign…”The Other” can be the one close at hand and profoundly related. Take the Middle East today: who are the Muslims in the Islamic State killing? Other Muslims of a different sect.

         

          Jerusalem was in Judea and Jericho was north-east and down-hill all the way and part of Samaria. It was a foolish trip to make alone because robbers and bandits were known to be waiting on that rugged terrain, hidden behind rocks to assault and steal. Few Jews took that road, but the man in Jesus’ parable did and, sure enough, was attacked and robbed.

          Let’s let the priest and Levite who passed by ‘off the hook’ just a bit. A devout Jew avoids coming in contact with blood because it is ‘unclean’. And since they were traveling away from Jerusalem into Samaritan territory, who knows where they could have washed themselves and become Kosher again? They were simply “minding their own business”, may have thought the injured man was a trap set by hoodlums to entice them near enough to suffer the same fate. AND…remember this: THEY WERE CAREFULLY OBSERVING THE PURITY LAWS AND HOLINESS CODE OF THEIR FAITH.

          But I’d bet most of you still think the Priest and Levite were wrong.

          (It’s not all that different today, is it? The Anglican Communion and the Episcopal church are in an equally silly argument about “Who is Pure and Who is Holy” that is tearing us apart….But I have better sense than to “judge” people on whether they keep walking or stop.)

         

          So, the Samaritan shows up. And if we demonize the Priest and Levite too harshly, we also elevate the Samaritan too much as well.

          Who knows if he was, as we call him, a GOOD Samaritan?

He was most likely just an AVERAGE Samaritan, who, when faced with a decision, made one.

There are more than 100 Saint's days in our liturgical calendar. As far as I can tell about what made them a 'saint', is this, just like our Samaritan in Jesus’ story, they were merely average people who, when it came time to make a choice, made one.

Everyone in Jesus’ story had a choice to make and they all made one. The Priest and the Levite chose to keep on walking. The Samaritan chose to stop and help the injured man.

I suggest we all have choices almost every day that are not unlike this. And sometimes we choose to keep walking and sometimes, God bless us, we choose to stop and deal with the brokenness of our world for a while.

In Kurt Vonnegut's novel, The Sirens of Titan, a robot named Salo, who is traveling the universe looking for 'the meaning of life', finds himself on Titan, one of the moons of Jupiter with an Earth woman named Beatrice Rumford. (What Beatrice is doing on Titan is another story!)

So Salo asks Beatrice, “What is the meaning of life?”

And she answers, “The meaning of life is to love whoever is around to be loved....”

          So this is what I suggest to you…and to me….Let’s be more attentive and present to the choices we get to make each day. Let’s take the story of The Good Samaritan out of the stained glass window and let it be something we all experience all the time.

          We get to choose who our neighbor is. If you are a McCoy, the neighbor you choose might just be a Hatfield. If you’re a Samaritan, the neighbor you choose might just be a Jew. If you are who you are, the neighbor you might be challenged to choose might just be “The Other”—the one you never suspected or imagined.

          And you get to choose…..You get to choose whether you'll love whoever is around to be loved...or not....

           You get to choose….Keep walking or stop and deal with the brokenness of life.  It’s really up to you.    So be it and amen.

I envy Bern and Sherrie

Bern and Sherri Ellis are going to NYC tomorrow for Mimi's baby shower given by her friends in the city.

I envy them.

But, no boys allowed.

I could get upset about the gender bias of all that.

But, hey, I'm a heterosexual, white male. I'm the poster boy for having bias.

I think I wrote something in the last month or so about acknowledging 'privilege'.

Given the political atmosphere today, that is even more important.

As a heterosexual, white male with 6 figures of income a year, I embody 'privilege'.

And that means I have to accept that everyone who isn't a heterosexual, white male with my bank account can 'bar' me from stuff, just as folks like me have barred them for all of American history.

And I do accept that. I heard a black woman say on radio that all the deaths of black men at the hands of the police is just "headlines" for people like me. For her, she said, 'it's my life'.

That is true. As true as true can be.

So, I won't go to Mimi's shower 'cause the women say I can't.

But she's my baby girl. So I envy Bern and Sherrie. I do.

White, male privilege has it's costs....

If you could know....

Something I've been pondering today (since it was cloudy and cool and I had not one thing I 'had' to do) is this: if you could know the date and time of your death, if some omniscient being could tell you...would you want to know?

I'm pondering this because I'm 69 and have outlived my mother by 6 years. My father was 83 when he died and I guess I could take heart in the old wives' tale than your age matches the parent of your gender. I'd get to be with my yet to be born 4th grandchild, Ellie, until she was in her teens. And I'd see Morgan, Emma out of college and Tegan graduate high school. That would be wonderful.

People who  have 'bucket lists' (things they want to do before they die) would probably want to know so they could time things better. But how about other folks...would they want to know?

I haven't come down on either side yet, but I'm wrestling with it.

What about you? Would you want to know?

Ponder it and see what you learn.

Irony I don't like

I am a big fan of 'irony'. I would use 'ironic' as one of the words to describe myself. "Irony Rules!!" in my book.

But the irony of Dallas is not something I like at all.

From all reports, the Police in Dallas are on the forefront of making reforms to make policing color blind in meaningful ways. Their chief is Black. Large numbers of their officers are Black/Hispanic. They are, it seems, a model for how to police in a diverse society.

There was a demonstration against police violence yesterday in Dallas. It was about the murders of black men in New Orleans and Minnesota.  It was totally peaceful. The police have been praised by the demonstrators for their helpfulness. The crowd--a real diverse group--even felt the police of Dallas by-in-large supported their peaceful march.

And then a sniper killed and wounded a dozen or so members of the Dallas police.

How ironic that at a peaceful protest against police violence in a city whose police are seen as a model for what 21st Century 'policing' should look like, someone would kill and wound the police.

Tragedy is bad enough--as in New Orleans and Minnesota--but 'ironic' tragedy, as in Dallas, is even more senseless and troubling.

Deep breath, everyone. We've got to figure out how to get this right.

We've got to. All of us.

doctor visits

So, tonight I went to see a 'sleep doctor' and he agreed I should get my CPath machine replaced without a sleep study (sleeping in the sleep center hooked up to stuff). The chip from my dead machine convinced him I was both using it correctly and needed to use it. They took my vitals and my blood pressure was 120/64. Bern's food choices are working beyond well!

I know I told you about my urologist yesterday. But hang in there, I have a kidney cat scan and a colonoscopy coming up next week.

When you're 69 you have lots of doctors in your life. Just the way it is.

I'm really feeling fine--a tad sleepy, but a new CPath machine will fix that.

I really do hope, when I come to die (as I will, beloved, though I dread it) that I'll be able to blog about my last days. I'd like to do that so I wouldn't be going through it alone.

But that probably consigns me to some long, drawn out death where I'll be in pain but able to type.

I don't fear Death, but I am concerning about the 'dying' part. I can handle being dead, I'm just not sure about the transition.

I remember a joke I like.

"I'd like to die in my sleep," the joke goes, "like my grandfather. Instead of screaming like the other people in the car he was driving."

I've gone back and forth between dying in my sleep and dying screaming.

I'm not sure which I would prefer yet.

Ponder that, if you have the time.

Urology

I know all about Urology.

I had prostate surgery, radiation and a round of hormone therapy. That was years ago now. But I still see a urologist yearly.

Today she looked into my bladder.

The two words in that sentence that should catch you are: 'she' and 'looked'.

My urologist is a woman--Dr. Wong. Dr. Kurz retired and it was easier to stay with the practice since Dr. Wong took over. She treated me in the hospital once--the only time I've been in the hospital since my surgery. It was for a urinary blockage (don't even think about it!) she cleared it right up.

Today she looked into my bladder.

There's only one way into a bladder from the outside. Obviously there's a way in from inside the body but only one from outside.

I commented while she had a camera 'up there' that it was hard to have thoughtful conversation in that situation.

She laughed. I like her a lot.

I don't like her looking into my bladder.

Or anyone for that matter.