This is a Significant Time

“Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.”

Excerpt from "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou


Friends,

We are in a significant time. I remember thinking as a kid that it would have been amazing to live during the revolutionary time of the 1960s. I was always surprised when I asked my mother what she was doing then to hear her say, “not much”. When I was too young to see it, I watched a movie called Cry Freedom. It was a film about a young freedom fighter and activist from South Africa named Steve Biko. Of course, when most of us think about South Africa and its Black heroes, we think of Nelson Mandela who suffered on Robben Island for 27 years before emerging to become a post-apartheid president who would lead a path toward racial reconciliation for his country. Many of you will not know the name Steve Biko. He was a passionate activist who spoke about Black consciousness and liberation. He, like many other prominent Black leaders around the world, critiqued those who were “for the movement”, but did not seek to dismantle the system that oppressed some and benefitted others. Steve died in police custody at the age of 30 in 1977, two years before I was born. He never got to see apartheid banned in his country. I wonder what he might say now. 

I bring him up because that movie changed me. I have never been the same since I watched it. I was a little kid, as I said, when I saw it. I shudder at the thought of one of my children seeing it now. So much Black death, so much violence. I had no way of knowing that more than thirty years in the future those kinds of images would circulate on something called the internet racking up millions and millions of views. They wouldn’t be theatrical recreations; they would be real. There was no way to know then, that the ideas he promoted and fought for would still be pertinent and timely four decades later. All of it seemed so far away, so tragic. It would be many years until I could connect the evil I witnessed in that movie to the evil I experienced in my own life. What I came to realise is that racism is not measured by its brutality. If we think of it only in its most extreme form, we will be content, as some Canadian leaders were, in this past week to deny its presence in our midst. 

When the movie ended, as dozens of names of dead Black people scrolled up the credits with the obviously phony “official” causes of death, I remember sobbing with racked breath, “That isn’t right! It has to stop.” I knew I was too little and powerless to do anything then, but I swore if when I grew up and I saw that happening I wouldn’t sit on the sidelines… 

This week I watched a lot of sermons. I am a preaching nerd so that isn’t unusual, but I wanted to see what people were saying to congregations this past week. I needed to know how were people relaying Scripture in the midst of this time. One preacher named Lenny Duncan, addressed the people this way. He said, “If you ever asked yourself what you would have done during the Civil Rights movement, you are doing it now.” 

This is a significant time. Covid-19 has caused us to reflect and to be still. Perhaps we have some sense now that we are all the same. That we are all vulnerable, that we are not in control, that we like to be hugged and to laugh with the people we love. And that we miss the simple things when they are gone. And now (still) we find ourselves here: a civil rights movement. I pray, that if we are still here some years from now to answer the questions of children about what we did during the revolution, our answers be greater than “not much.”

Blessings,
Amy 


 “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now”

Romans 8:19-22