Mois : novembre 2022

« Get on the bus. »

That was a catchphrase for the 1961 Freedom Rides. And it also is a current call to pilgrimage.

Recently, I returned from what is called a Sankofa Journey that is hosted by the Love Mercy Do Justice initiative of the Evangelical Covenant Church. It is a four-day, prayer-filled visit to civil rights sites in the South that also includes relationship building and reflection as individuals, partners, and small and large groups. Although most Catholics have probably never heard of them, this denomination is engaged in some of the most effective work in racial justice in the U.S. today.

The Evangelical Covenant Church calls this an « immersive discipleship experience » and it’s similar to what we Catholics call a pilgrimage. It is four days where the participants leave ordinary time and enter into a liminal space where transformation can occur through journeying as a community in God’s presence. The idea is that God has been, is and will continue to be working for racial justice and reconciliation. And this discipleship journey is a deep dive into both the horrific evils wrought by white supremacy over the past 400 years, and the countless creative ways in which people, mostly Black people and some white accomplices in the South, have flowed with God’s Spirit for resistance, liberation and a measure of salvation in this world. 

In a way, the journey is an entrance into the paschal mystery, especially Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Similar to the Freedom Rides, the mode of transport is a bus and each participant must be paired with a partner of the same gender but different racial background for the four-day journey. Through visiting the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration (which caused me a full-body lament, aka, ugly crying and wailing), and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery (aka, the national lynching memorial), my fellow sojourners and I followed the Via Crucis and descent into hell that African peoples were forced into as they were stolen and racialized into enslaved property.

We followed the boundary crossing among suffering, death and new life that Christ demonstrated in the paschal mystery as we engaged in a prayer walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma that spans the Alabama River. This was the ground for Bloody Sunday, Turnaround Tuesday and the starting point for the subsequent successful march from Selma to Montgomery that eventually spurred the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Bill.

Similarly, walking through Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, was a kind of Stations of the Cross that commemorates the trials and tribulations freely undertaken by Black men, women and mostly young people and children to break the back of segregation. The participants in the nonviolent movement did so voluntarily and were trained in the hard discipline of nonviolent resistance as a « weapon of love » that could disarm the oppressor and in which freely undertaken, innocent suffering was known to have a redemptive quality to it.

The suffering hastened the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And then came the memory of crucifixion, while visiting 16th Street Baptist Church, where four little girls were murdered as a bomb planted by white supremacists detonated at the east side of the church in 1963. Later that same day, in the same city, two Black teenage boys were shot to death.

The next stop was Memphis, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of his most powerful sermons, « I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, » and was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. The day ended with a tour of Black Memphis that included a stop at Slave Haven, a station in the underground railroad that is a museum telling the story of the long history of resistance by enslaved Africans against their white enslavers.

Then, since the Freedom Riders in 1961 could not stop anywhere to rest, we slept on the bus for the long drive from Memphis back to Atlanta. We finished the journey in the church where we began — with prayer, sharing a final meal and offering final reflections.

Too many white Catholics do not want to encounter the terrifying magnitude of the wound inflicted by « those who think they are white » (to use a phrase from James Baldwin) against all others in the racialization process that went part and parcel with enslavement and colonization. The horrors of the enslavement of African peoples in the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent domestic political economy thoroughly beholden to and disfigured by this evil, paired with the genocide of Native peoples, has left us all disfigured and wounded, albeit in different ways.

A paschal pilgrimage, prayerfully in an ecclesial community, that retraces the path of those who were forced into centuries of torture, crucifixion and hell on earth, is not easy. But it is one way of letting God’s Spirit flow where it will and learning to become Christ’s hands and feet in the world. And, yes, there is the hope of the resurrection and empowerment for participating in God’s ongoing work of racial justice in it all.

For the paschal mystery is a story in which ultimately God triumphs over evil, despite all evidence to the contrary. But the triumph occurred in a way that no one expected and that created a new future for anyone who freely chose to follow Christ.

The hour is late, the effects of great sin that has bred evil are tearing us apart as a nation, as communities, as a religion, as families and as disciples of Christ. Yet we are called to remain faithful to the triune God of Jesus Christ in such times and to one another in Christ’s name. We as Christians are called to become small sacraments of salvation in this world.

So, what are we to do? How are we to do it? Open our eyes to the racialized lives we lead.  Embrace the yoke, offered by Christ, of anti-racist discipleship and practice. Follow a « little way » to subvert white privilege with fellow sojourners as an ecclesial community within your context. Trust that God will be with us as we enter into this paschal mystery of racialized suffering.

And, above all, get on the bus.

They sang, they danced and they clapped. As world leaders gathered at the United Nations climate conference to figure out how to deal with climate change, faith organizations found their voices through protests.

The Christian youths from across the world were out to dramatize the hurt the environment was going through, and with it, the entire human race.

Joe Bongay of the Catholic Youth Network for Environmental Sustainability in Africa told Catholic News Service the protests were meant to draw attention to the need to care for the earth, in line with Pope Francis’ encyclical « Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home. »

« When you sing about it, when you clap about it, it reminds people of their moral obligations toward caring for what we all share, which is the common earth that we all live in, » he said.

He told CNS how a changing climate was affecting ordinary people across Africa, citing the drought in East Africa, where the U.N. has predicted more than 50 million people will suffer from acute hunger by the end of the year.

« We are struggling to survive in terms of food, in terms of hunger, and so many other problems brought about by climate change. Africa is at a point where it can’t even feed itself, » he told CNS.

Nigerian Catholic activist Lucky Abeng talked about the devastating floods in his country that killed more than 600 people in October alone and displaced more than a million more.

« Climate change is here with us, » he said.

Rita Uwaka of Friends of the Earth Africa expressed discomfort with the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists at the COP27 event, as the climate conference is known.

« The so-many corporations taking over the climate space are hijacking and manipulating the negotiation process, and we feel that these criminals fueling climate crises need to be kicked out. It’s high time that there is sanity in COP. And the only way we can get sanity and justice is to make sure that these polluters pay but also (are) kicked out of the climate negotiations, » she told CNS.

She blasted leaders for seeking what she called « false solutions » to the climate emergency, citing carbon markets as an example.

« There are a lot of false solutions. Take carbon credits for instance. It means you have to keep polluting in the developed countries, and then you come to Africa to plant trees to absorb the carbon, but you are not stopping pollution at the source. That is a false solution, and we reject it, » she told CNS.

She complained that agro-commodities companies « are in the negotiation space; they are fueling a lot of land grabs in Africa — taking over forests, cutting them down and replacing them with plantations. And this increase in deforestation as a result of agro-commodities expansion is fueling climate change. But here, they are putting it as a solution. »

« We don’t want false solutions, » she said, explaining that local communities in Africa and other developing countries should be leading the search for solutions in which accessible and affordable renewable energy is encouraged.

« We want solutions like agro-ecology, where you put food production in the hands of the people. We want community forest management methods that put the management of our forests in the hands of communities. »

Bongay added that he was opposed to the proposal that some kind of carbon insurance should be instituted. He said it would be an injustice if Third World countries, already reeling from the effects of a changing climate they did little to cause, were asked to pay climate insurance.

« We can’t afford it, » he said.

« It is not a solution. He who begins the fight must finish it … We shouldn’t use our … taxpayers’ money to adapt, because we didn’t cause climate change. Developed nations that are getting the profits at the expense of humanity and the environment should be able to pay their climate debts and reparation to those who are most vulnerable.

For Luke’s community, it was the Jerusalem Temple. Perhaps for us it’s the twin towers or COVID-19. Jesus warned people who were enthralled with the Temple’s majesty: « The days are coming when there will not be left a stone upon another stone. » Many who heard him discovered sadly that he predicted not a far-off calamity, but a tragedy they would see with their own eyes and mourn in utter confusion. The Temple had been the centerpiece of Jewish practice and the place where God dwelt among them. According to ancient sources, the Temple of Jesus’ time was under construction for nearly 50 years and was completed only six years before the Romans destroyed it.

What was Jesus telling his followers when he predicted the Temple’s destruction? While he avoided responding to questions of when it would happen, he warned them of other dimensions of what it would mean. Charlatans would appear, posing as God’s envoys. Natural and social catastrophes would make it seem that the world was coming to an end, and God’s own people would be persecuted by enemies, former friends and even family members. The answer to their anxieties? Only this: « By your perseverance you will secure your lives. »

Our selection from the prophet Malachi helps us make sense of it. Malachi’s description of the day of the Lord is wonderfully paradoxical. He says it will blaze with contradictory effects. Evildoers will be reduced to stubble and at the same time, that sun which destroyed the proud will heal those who stand before God in reverence and awe. In Jesus’ example, cataclysmic events will traumatize some and lead others to act as false messiahs, yet those events will also provide the occasion for the faithful to come into their truest selves.

The faithful who gazed on the rubble of the Temple had to search painfully for what it meant. The ruins testified that their faith in the Temple had been misplaced. Some wondered if even their faith in God had been an illusion: a comforting fiction as long as it lasted, but ultimately little more than what Karl Marx called the opiate of the masses. Had Roman power finally overcome Israel’s God? Others questioned whether their faith depended on the Temple. They remembered that before the Temple, God had traveled with their ancestors, present through the tent of meeting that traveled with the people. Some of these followed the lead of Pharisees and rabbis as synagogue worship created the practices which have continued for millennia.

Jewish Christians, as devastated as the rest, could hardly avoid recognizing the similarity between the ruined Temple and the death of Jesus. Underlining that, Matthew, Mark and Luke recounted Jesus’ interpretation of the tragedy as an event that led disciples to give witness. Later, John made the connection explicit: « Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up » (John 2:19).

Ironically, when Jesus warned the disciples about coming persecution and destruction, he warned them not to try to prepare for it. Attempts to prepare would have only led them to fight imaginary battles. Instead, Jesus promised that when the time came, « I myself shall give you a wisdom that your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute. » He offered a persevering hope rather than strategy.

Contemplating first-century Christians and Jews at the destruction of the Temple dares us to ask what anchors our faith. The Second Vatican Council challenged Catholics to a renewal that led us to distinguish between what sacramental theology calls outward signs and inward grace, between symbol and what the symbol points toward, between particular expressions and the essence of faith.

Today, instead of the destroyed Temple, we live with the memory of how Sept. 11, 2001, obliterated our sense of national invincibility. COVID-19 has taught us that national borders are fictions, divisions no more protective than were the emperor’s new clothes. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine keeps us mindful of the constant threat of nuclear war. These realities are universal expressions of the intensely personal truth we all know but usually try to forget: to be alive implies that we are mortal.

As Malachi said, this reality can be either terrifying or hopeful. Going for the latter, we can remember the tent of meeting and persevere in trust that, while we don’t and can’t know the details, we know that the destination is what Pope Francis describes as « the sabbath of eternity, the new Jerusalem » where « we will find ourselves face to face with the infinite beauty of God, and be able to read with admiration and happiness the mystery of the universe » (Laudato Si’, 100 and 243). Trusting in that, we will live like people who know that no catastrophe is beyond the reach of God’s healing sun of justice.

When D.L. Mayfield’s agent asked if she had a topic for her third book, only one subject came to mind: Dorothy Day. As a millennial Protestant and social justice activist, Mayfield had long drawn inspiration from Day’s writings and decided it was time to put pen to paper to share her hero with a new generation of Christians.

Here, Mayfield talks with NCR about the process of writing Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

NCR: Having grown up in a fundamentalist evangelical religious tradition, you might be considered an unlikely Dorothy Day devotee. How did you first discover her work and why did it resonate with you?

Mayfield: I first heard of her when I went to a social justice conference where activist Shane Claiborne was speaking. I saw a button that said: « If you have two coats, you have stolen one from the poor » and it was attributed to Dorothy Day. I fell in love with the black-and-white thinking of that line. Then when I read her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, I felt seen in a way I hadn’t before. I eventually read all her books — and most of the books written about her, as well — and became especially taken with her letters. 

I loved how she wrote about the early years of the Catholic Worker movement in particular. My husband and I have lived in refugee and immigrant communities in the U.S. for over 15 years, so the stories of camaraderie and communal living were so touching to me. And I also appreciated how she took her faith seriously, because that is what I was trying to do as well. For someone like myself, who grew up highly religious but was increasingly becoming dismayed by how little my religion had to say about the injustices of the world, Dorothy offered a way forward.

The Dorothy Day canon is extensive. She was obviously a prolific writer herself, but much has also been written about her by others. What compelled you to take your own stab at telling her story?

I had started almost obsessively reading her diaries and then comparing/contrasting that with her other books, in particular The Long Loneliness, Loaves and Fishes and House of Hospitality. I wrote a few essays on my thoughts about Dorothy as a complicated person and was surprised by the feedback. People didn’t like to think of her as someone who was human; they thought of her as a rigid, strong, pious activist; a devout woman who served the poor. But I saw her as incredibly human, full of guilt and joy and longing and desire and conflicted feelings and rage at the systems that dehumanize people. She loved people and they annoyed her to no end. She loved the masses and yet craved solitary time. She smoked constantly until she was in her 40s and gave all her possessions away for the entirety of her life.

I wanted to write a book that would help set the scene for modern readers who wanted to approach her work. The Long Loneliness can feel inaccessible to folks like myself who don’t know 1930s history and don’t know half of the names or events Dorothy references. I centered my book around the birth of the Catholic Worker movement because it is a bigger story than just Dorothy, and the parallels to that time and now are stunning.

I asked Kate Hennessy, Dorothy’s youngest granddaughter, what most biographers miss about her and she said they tend to ignore the early radical writings of the Catholic Worker and they also ignore the fact that she was a mother. In my book I focus a lot on both of those things because they were of interest to me and give so much insight into Dorothy Day as a human.

Unruly Saint is your third book and you have said it’s your most heavily researched work yet. Can you tell us about your research process?

I read the scholarship available on her and utilized her diaries and letters heavily. I was beyond fortunate to have some of the best Catholic Worker scholars be open to phone calls and emails with me. Brian Terrell, who lived at the Worker and knew Dorothy, has an almost encyclopedic memory of everything Dorothy ever said (and what she didn’t say, which is almost as important!). We had so many phone calls and lovely conversations, and he helped me understand my blind spots.

Robert Ellsberg was also incredibly gracious and helpful. I should thank him simply for the incredible work he has done editing Dorothy’s writings and publishing them for the past few decades, but he also gave me so much insight into Catholicism as a whole and where Dorothy fits into that system.

I was terrified to get Dorothy wrong and so it was a stressful time. But I decided the best course of action was to be honest about my perspective and include it in the book. The truth is, every biography carries the fingerprints of the person writing it. But a lot of authors try to pretend they are outside observers with no agenda. I can’t pretend, so I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t try as hard as possible to take Dorothy seriously and use her own words as my guide.

What surprised you the most about writing this book?

Up until I was immersed in the research, I was always suspicious about how often Dorothy Day credited Peter Maurin as the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, even saying it would not have existed without him. At first blush he seems like a hobo philosopher who was always wandering off somewhere, and I wondered if she was just appealing to the patriarchal nature of Catholicism by saying he was vital to the movement.

But the more I studied, the more I realized how intelligent Peter was and how he came into Dorothy’s life at the perfect time. Right as she was asking herself how she could marry her leftist leanings and love of the laborer with her Catholic faith, Peter Maurin shows up at her doorstep with the knowledge of all the papal encyclicals and the history of Catholic social teaching. I was surprised by how I fell in love with Peter Maurin by the end of writing this book. He was such a special and unique person.

There is debate about whether Dorothy should be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church (she herself famously said she didn’t want « to be dismissed so easily »). Do you have a strong opinion on whether or not we should have a St. Dorothy Day?

As a Protestant, I don’t really have an opinion. But in general, I am saddened by how the stories of radical people get flattened by those in power who have an agenda. There are good people who are a part of Dorothy’s canonization process, but there are also people who have an agenda and want Dorothy on their side of the culture war. How tragic is that?

I have the same hope for the canonization process as I have with my book: if it leads more people to read Dorothy Day’s actual writings, then I think it’s a good thing. You can’t escape how radical she is — especially when you read her newspaper, The Catholic Worker — but people sure do try and ignore it!