Category: Race

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Anointing Ancestral Land

pathThis was the first time I’d felt called to go on a spiritual pilgrimage. I needed to meet God on the land of my ancestors, trusting that this would help me step outside of my collapse with shame over the fact that they’d owned slaves.

Within the week, I’d confirmed that my friend Alease Bess, whose ancestors had been slaves in North Carolina, was excited joining me on this journey.

I wanted to take something we could offer to the land. My friend and earthmother, Candice Covington, recommended I take rosemary, cajeput and black pepper essential oils for anointing the soil.

“Oil from evergreen cajeput trees,” she explained, “purifies and purges old rot and decay of emotion, pain, loss and fear and creates a fertile place to plant new seeds. As you step onto your ancestral land, you need some of this heavy-duty purification of the old. Rosemary will help strengthen and center you with its healing of memories, and black pepper will strengthen and fortify your cleansing.”

Knowing that I wanted all of the spiritual and energetic support I could muster for this pilgrimage, I packed pocket-sized bottles of each of these oils, trusting I would know when and how to use them.

I gathered maps of North Carolina. I wrote down the few details I knew about the location of the home of the original Tipps immigrant, Lorenz, in Salisbury, and the Dogwood Plantation of his son Jacob near Morganton. Union General Sherman had torched the courthouses that had held the titles to the land, so I had to rely on the description of the general location Mom had found during her genealogical research.

Alease and NancyA few weeks later, Alease and I headed west from her home in Durham toward Salisbury. First, we were looking for the homestead of immigrant Lorenz Tipps, Jacob’s father. Lack of exact locations on the map demanded a different sort of navigation, so we listened to the breezes and trusted that the Spirit would guide us.

Driving up and down country roads, Alease and I explored the area described in Mom’s account of Lorenz’s homesteading documents as “on Hagan Fork off Lyle Creek, tributary of the Catawba River.” In that general vicinity, something faint but clear in both Alease’s and my spirits indicated it was time to pull over, park the car and step out onto the land.

A few fences marked off the field, but no homes lined this stretch of the road. Wandering in silence, we honored the beauty of the land and vastness of the sky. This had been Cherokee land for thousands of years. A few hundred years ago, white settlers named it Rowan County, then Lincoln County and now Catawba County. Political lines drawn in the dirt may have changed, yet the land remained whole.

Alease and I brought what felt to me like meager gifts to atone for such a horrifying history—a few oils and prayer. I picked up a stick and scraped a cross in the hard, dry soil. Opening up the small bottles, I poured fragrant essential oils of tree, herb and flowering vine back into the earth. Their spicy scents rose like incense.

Over the anointed dirt, Alease and I extended our hands in blessing—hers pecan tan and mine a peachy tan. She sang of blood. I spoke of water.

Alease prayed, “Blood has saturated this land. History tried to shove these bloodstains under the grass. We know they are still here.”

She leaned her head back and began to sing, “Nothing can for sin atone; nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

As the last notes of the hymn faded away, she was silent for a few minutes. “Today a new blood is offered, poured freely into this blood-soaked land. This is birthing blood, cleansing blood flowing from Immanuel’s veins.”

I added my prayer: “Come living waters, come to this country soaked with generations of tears. Wash the land and satisfy our deepest thirst.”

When the anointing was complete and a rock left to mark the spot, we returned to the car and drove away. The reality of both of our ancestors’ experiences remained unchanged, yet we felt lighter.

We stopped in town to break bread together and share stories sparked by the morning. Then, we headed west to track down the land that once was Jacob and Margaret Tipps’s Dogwood Plantation.

After the Revolutionary War, Lorenz’s son Jacob moved westward a few miles to Burke and Caldwell Counties to make his fortune. He staked his claim, worked the land and received the title to six hundred and forty acres. Jacob and Margaret had fourteen children and “owned” thirteen African slaves.

“Near the Morganton-Lenoir airport” was as much as we knew. Alease and I drove up and down the roads near the airport. Old Amherst Road wound its way to a new subdivision. We turned around and drove halfway back down the road. Once again, we both agreed when it felt like we had arrived at the right place, and we stopped the car.

Stepping out, we walked through a break in the trees onto to the edge of a pasture. Ancient mountains had eons ago eroded into the blue hills that lined the far side of the field, while Jacob’s plantation home and slave shacks had long since disintegrated.

Sitting on the ground, I picked up a rock. Once again I scored the hard earth and poured out the Annointinganointing oils while Alease and I prayed.

As our prayers grew silent, I stood and walked over to lean on a white pine that might have shaded my family members when they lived here. Through her prickly bark, a warm tingling soothed my back, just behind my heart allowing my shame and anger at Jacob to lessen. The sins of racism and slave-owning remained, but compassion flowed freely in me and out into the tree.

Gazing at the Smoky Mountains, Alease stood at my side praying softly. A white pick-up truck whizzing down the road startled me. Through the dust I saw a white-skinned man at the wheel, gun on a rack behind his head. When he caught sight of us, he did a double take. I assumed he wondered what we were up to.

Actually, it wasn’t a bad question. What in the world were we up to?

We were there on a sacred pilgrimage, not to our spiritual holy land in Israel but to our ancestral land. Standing together, Alease and I felt the hallowed ground under our feet and prayed that healing would move forward and back through the generations.

The next day we headed for our respective homes. Through this shared pilgrimage, I had been given a way to honor my ancestors without forgetting that they also owned slaves. The land and our prayers wove the stories of Alease’s and my families, their joys and woes, into a single fabric.

Excerpted with a few adjustments for this shortened format from Big Topics At Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself, my book published by Rosegate Press in 20012, pages 274-286.

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White Supremacist

1abcbe4e2b0691d683729ce62b3bd3daA viewer answered my YouTube video’s title“What it Means to be White” with a direct answer: “It means to be a white supremacist (racist)!”

In the past, his words would have cut me to the core. As it was, I merely gasped for a moment. Well aware of individual and systemic racism, my emotions would once have boiled at the assumption that I, one who has worked so hard for justice, was a “white supremacist.” Back then, in my offended state, fruitful exploration of his analysis would have been impossible.

I am grateful that I’ve done enough work with racism, mine and the culture’s, to be able to step back and carefully read what he had to say.

Nancy Ann Mathys Thurston
Nancy Ann Mathys Thurston

There is some truth in his accusation. As a Euro-American, I was born, raised and now live in a culture where white skin is considered normative. The vast majority of those with historical and current power in our culture are white skinned. Therefore, collective societal experience and perception is inevitably biased toward whiteness.

In short, ours is a culture where white is considered supreme, even though few would articulate it so bluntly. This bias has been part of the American and European fabric of life for so long that the belief in the superiority of the white race, especially in matters of intelligence and culture, is woven into the unconsciousness of individuals and institutions.

I’ve had my own journey waking up to racism. Sitting in a diverse group of participants in a Be Present, Inc. Training on the Issues of Race, Gender Power & Class, I listened intently as Cynthia told the story of her mother, Pat.* In 1965, shortly after moving from the west coast to Dallas, Texas, Pat was confused by a “Whites Only” sign in the laundromat window. Not sure why they wanted her to wash only white clothes, she’d entered and proceeded to finish all of her laundry, whites and colors. Later, at home, she’d realized that “white” had referred to her skin color, not her laundry. Listening to Pat’s story forty years later, I realized that I’d never seen signs such as these in any Texas business of my childhood. Blinded by a racism I didn’t even know existed at nine years of age, I’d not seen what was all around me. Waking up to racism happened in stages beginning in my teen years. Since then, every new insight has propelled me to wake up and change.

I am a white supremacist by default, because the culture’s shards of racism are lodged within me deeply as they are within any child of this society. Likewise, I work and live in the midst of diversity where collaboratively we seek justice and equity. We humans are paradoxical by nature. Denial merely pushes the parts deemed shameful into our shadow where they can do the most harm.

I am, however, uninterested in keeping silent about race nor about constraining racial conversations within the dualities of oppressor and oppressed, white supremacist and victim.

Instead, I want radical, root-level transformation. To do that we must build partnerships across our differences: Black and white. Red and yellow. Young and old. Rich and poor. Women and men. We must be able to listen to each other outside of our own personal experiences and our cherished social analysis.

Waking up to the presence of the culture’s injustice within and around us is a demanding process. Our deeply divided world cries out for justice, and the spirit of our response matters in spite of our differences.

How do we best support each other to see and shift behaviors that are out of alignment with our longing for justice and equity? We can no longer ignore disrespectful and unjust behavior. We must take the risk and step into the middle of difficult conversations.

Labels such as “white supremacist” may be short hand and direct, but I prefer the longer road of initiating conversations that open the possibility for long-term personal and social change.

*Story told in my social change memoir Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself

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Deep Diving

I come alive when diving right into the middle of topics my father told me to avoid—money, race, religion, gender and politics.

BullNot interested in locking horns or intellectual analysis, I want partners who seek root-level transformation—from personal to global. I am captivated by sharing and listening to a wide variety of personal stories and experiences within diverse groups as these conversations can shift assumptions and misinformation—the things that keep us separated—in order for us to move forward equitably, together.

Since I was a girl, I’ve turned to the written word as my favorite way to explore both the edges of life and my own experiences. During the seven years I wrote and rewrote Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself I simultaneously honed my writing skills and dove into my own stories of sleep and waking up. It was a magical process.

I revel in the dance of writing and deep diving. The best way for me to begin a writingDeep diving roots day is to wake before the sun rises with a brilliant first sentence, followed by a flood of ideas for a new writing. While noticing all that I hadn’t noticed growing up isn’t always fun, I savor the sight of expanded vistas that emerge as I begin to see my life as one part of a multigenerational, global human family in the midst of our diverse, earthly home. And then return to my desk to write about what I see.

In addition to writing and poking into the nooks and corners of my life, I also delight in hosting “big conversations” where groups of people share longings and experiences of living in ways that bring our faith and values right into the middle of our deeply divided world. One particularly juicy topic I enjoy exploring is how money flows in our lives, in the community and in the world and how to continue to bring our engagement with that financial flow into deeper alignment with our values.

Waking up to the paradoxes within and in the world around me is sometimes uncomfortable and often requires me to change my behavior. Yet this is the holy work of spiritual transformation, both personally and in our world. It is pure grace to bring my deep diving faith-in-action to this moment in history.

This is what makes me feel alive from my head to my toes. What makes you tingle with excitement for yourself and the world?

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White Like Me in Times Like These

Illustration by Khara Scott-Bey
Illustration by Khara Scott-Bey

The news reports are always lurking at the edges of my mind; another white policeman kills an unarmed black man and no charges are filed.

What does that have to do with me? I am a good person. Kind. Big hearted. My intent, even as a child, was to treat everyone equally. I don’t know anything about the white policemen who have killed unarmed black men. Some, no doubt, are openly racist. But many, I presume, may be just like me—filled with good intent and thoughts of equanimity.

Unfortunately, none of us was born in a vacuum. The racial values and assumptions of centuries of U.S. and European culture were fed to us with our mother’s milk and our ABCs: White-skinned people are better/smarter/less dangerous/more deserving than black-skinned people.

Growing up in my moderate Texas household in the 1950s and 1960s, the black/white divide was never stated that bluntly nor articulated with such obvious prejudice. Yet my world was filled with upstanding white people—professionals, teachers, authors, neighbors and church members—and unknown black people—often either working in our homes or yards, reportedly breaking the law on the nightly news or rioting somewhere far away in civil rights protests. My limited experience led me to feel safer around my people, white people.

Until I identify and extricate these shards of racism buried deep in my bones, they will emerge in times of stress. Even when my sight is focused on justice and my vision is bold, these deep-seated, cultural biases don’t magically evaporate. I, and we, must wake up to the big and small ways that prejudice is infecting our actions and beliefs.

When racism shows up in me, it can break relationships, put black friends in jeopardy or cause deep hurt. When it shows up in white policemen armed with guns, these internalized racial fears too often turn deadly. When it shows up in grand juries and court trials, justice can’t be served.

We can no longer pretend that racism, conscious or unconscious, is an occasional or individual problem as too many more black men than white men are either killed by police or incarcerated. The underbelly of systemic racism has once again been exposed.

People ask me, often softly, “Do you have any hope?”

Yes, I do.

I’ve spent decades diving into the intersection of my life and the “Big Topics,” as I call them, as they cut through our world. My family and upbringing was rather ordinary, even for a white girl. No alcoholism, drugs or violence. No words of racial hatred. No overt sexism; my grandmothers and mother were all strong, independent women. Nevertheless, I finally noticed that I was asleep to the ways that race, class and gender—the big “isms”—were present and active in the corners of my mind or in a reactive moment.

I knew I had to share these discoveries as small steps toward having our society come to grips with the kind of internal racism that’s hard to acknowledge, which is what I did in Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself. I wanted my story to expand reader’s awareness of a bigger and more diverse reality of themselves and the world around them. When we awaken, I believe that we can see more clearly the ways that our actions—especially under stress—can be brought into alignment with our hearts and values.

Asleep and denying their presence, our unconsciously held beliefs are extremely dangerous in times of stress. Likewise, wallowing for too long in shame or guilt will derail change.

The shards of generations and millennia of racism, classism and sexism do not have to remain in our psyches. We can open them up, look at them with clear eyes, and change.

I have hope, but not because the changes required are quick or easy.

Lillie and Nancy 1
Lillie Allen and Nancy

For the last twelve years, I have been part of an organization, Be Present, Inc., that gathers diverse groups across race, class, age and gender identity. There I learned to build strong partnerships due to my commitment to notice, examine, then shift subtle or overt shards of racism (or any “ism”) that emerge in the middle of our work together. As a result, I am beginning to know myself and others separate from, and outside of, the wounds—historical and present—that have infected and divided us all.*

My hope lies in the fact that more and more of us are waking up to our nation’s horrible generational legacy of racism and taking the necessary steps to remove these shards from our bones and institutions.

It is possible to make these profound changes. I’ve seen the impact of this transformation many times. Even while the heartbreaking violence grows in our streets and in the courts, something new and better is emerging. We must, as a country, wake up because it’s too near midnight to stay asleep.

As American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

*Check here for the more information about the Be Present Empowerment Model, my primary practice that has taught me how to bring my full, white-skinned self into our multi-colored world.

This blog was originally published by The Broad Side.

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Money and Transformation: Diversity

Fundraising. Money. Economics.

Strange topics for me. I hovered near the bottom of the sales list every year when my Girl Scout Troop sold cookies. I hated my economics class in college. Today, I struggle to keep putting myself out there to market my book, Big Topics at Midnight.

Nevertheless, most of my life has circled around economics, especially fundraising. I am passionate about spiritual transformation, global justice and partnership across our differences, and that journey has lead me directly into money.

Money that I invest, spend or give to organizations working in these areas close to my heart. And money that I invite other to give in support of those organizations.

Last week I signed up for yet another fundraising committee.

Did I mention that I don’t really like fundraising?

This past January, I began my third Be Present, Inc. national 18-month training institute. For my first training, which started in 2003, I was a participant soaking up everything I could learn. Though initially I had a difficult time understanding all that was going on in the room, I knew that something was happening that I’d never seen before. I wanted to learn how to know who I was outside of the distress of anything that stopped me from fully participating in relationships/partnerships with everyone from my husband, Howard, to my grown kids, to friends, and to my work in organizations dear to my heart. I wanted to know how to really listen with my full self. And I deeply desired to be in partnerships that sustained and grew even in the midst of conflict across our many historical divides.*

That training was one of the most important of my life, and was part of the nudge to dive into the writing of Big Topics at Midnight.

In my second training, Be Present at the Table: Effecting Sustainable Change in Philanthropy, and this third one, The National Training Institute on Race, Gender, Power and Class, I have been on the leadership team.

Leron and AndrewMany organizations talk about the importance of diversity in their programs, but Be Present makes sure this actually happens. Too often, money stops diversity in its tracks: In order to attend, you must either pay the fee or apply for one of a few scholarships.

At Be Present trainings, no one is turned away due to lack of funds. Registration fees are on a sliding scale and support is offered for individuals to creatively raise money to cover these costs.

Stopping there would allow a few more people to attend, but the trainings would remain minimally diverse.

However, in addition to personal fundraising, all of the participants fundraise. That means that everyone, including people like me who have enough funds to easily pay our own way, works together to make sure that all of the registration fees are covered at a level that covers the site/training and organizational leadership costs.

Normally, folks like me are exempt from this fundraising process, leaving the responsibility for ensuring a diverse Trainingtraining on the laps of people with limited economic resources.

Be Present understands that every one of us benefits with the full diversity of people in our trainings. Therefore, we work together to make sure that happens.

This is what is required for trainings and conferences to embody a new paradigm of justice and inclusivity.

No mattTraining 2er how often I try to turn away from working the money, my commitment to waking up to the big topics and experimenting with keeping my values in line with behavior keeps bringing me back to the money. And fundraising.

 

*Be Present Empowerment Model

 

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Who Knows the Way? Women Do.

Lillie Allen, Nancy, Margherita Vacchiano
Lillie Allen, Nancy, Margherita Vacchiano

The message flows from all corners of the world: This is the moment in history when women need to lead the way.

This clarion call isn’t for women-only leadership. Or the well-worn way of ruling from the top.

“Social justice activists and diverse communities are re-imagining and redefining what leadership means and which faces are at the forefront. Late in the 20th century, scholarship emerged describing new leadership as a collective, shared process that evolves with participants and prioritizes relationship-building.”*a

Relationships are at the heart of leadership. Many women have long understood the importance of living within a complex web of family and friends, colleagues and strangers, ancestors and generations yet unborn.

Be Present Inc.’s Black & Female Leadership Initiative,* highlights the “leadership of Black women in partnering with diverse people to create sustainable change that serves everyone in our communities,” where all voices are welcomed.

Twenty years before I first stepped into Be Present trainings, Lillie Allen offered the groundbreaking Black & Female: What is the Reality?® Workshop at the First National Conference on Black Women’s Health Issues. Starting with black women and girls, Be Present’s work now includes everyone.

Be Present says, “Collective leadership occurs when people come together and mobilize resources in ways that improve their communities. It is an intrinsically inclusive approach to leadership because it requires individuals to cross boundaries of all types –such as race, gender, class, age, religion and culture – as they commit to cooperative learning, joint action, shared responsibility and mutual accountability. Competencies include the capacity to develop oneself and to cross many boundaries: those between individuals and groups, those among organizations and those fostered by issues that divide. It also involves challenging assumptions; expanding perspectives from an emphasis on the “I” to accentuating both “I” and “We”; and bringing people together to address conflicts.” *b

Today’s leadership needs to bridge the big topics that have separated the world into “us” and “them.” Instead, it needs to be collective, grounded in the intersection of “I” and “We.”

Now is the moment for humans to honor all of our wisdom—feminine and masculine—and for leaders to serve in a way that benefits us all.

In my latest YouTube exploration (located on my website’s Gender page), I explore how writing Big Topics at Midnight helped me access parts of myself I understand as feminine wisdom—intuition, body knowing and playful creativity. The more I listened inwardly, the more profoundly I woke up to myself and to the world around me. Only then was I ready to step into the fullness of my own leadership within the collective, Nancy Ann Mathys Thurston style.
*Be Present, Inc., Black & Female Leadership Initiative, Overview and Design, January 2013-December 2017.
All quotes are from this Leadership Initiative. The other citations’ reference information are noted in this Initiative:

*a. A Framework for 21st Century Leadership, http://www.joe.org/joe/1995december/a1.php
A Review of Leadership Theory and Competency Frameworks, http://www2.fcsh.unl.pt/docentes/luisrodrigues/textos/Lideran%C3%A7a.pdf
The Holistic Leader: A Developmental Systemic Approach to Leadership, http://www.julieorlovconsulting.com/docs/holistic_leader_article.pdf

*b. The Collective Leadership Framework: A Workbook for Cultivating and Sustaining Community Change, a publication of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (2007), www.iel.org/pubs/collective_leadership_framework_workbook.pdf

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Grief on the Way to Transformation: My Cell Phone and Violence #2

TeardropWhy concern myself with human rights abuses in far away places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Why make connections between myself and the behavior of a long-ago king, the Belgium’s colonial policies or missionaries’ behavior when, although I personally am outraged by their behaviors, none of these people were my family members?

Why think too much about the fact that materials for my cell phone and wedding ring may have involved injustice and ill treatment of others half way around the globe? For me, my cell keeps me connected to people I care about and my wedding ring is a symbol of a life-long love.

I have no interest in collapsing in shame and despair. That is a dead-end street that feels lousy and helps no one.

Yet, I am no longer willing to keep global horrors at arms length, grateful that since I don’t approve I can wash my hands of any connection to things done by other humans, national and transnational corporations who produce the goods I buy, or “my people” (which includes people who share my Euro-American roots, white skin, Christianity or wealth).

Distancing myself from other’s behavior makes it too easy for me to forget the deep historical roots of today’s world events and the fact that I enjoy the benefits of things grown and produced under horrifying conditions.

Maintaining that distance requires that I go back to sleep. That isn’t an option for me anymore.

However I can’t, nor should I, shoulder the responsibility for all of these actions. Nevertheless, I can stop and grieve. Weep for violence and injustice—for both victims and perpetrators. Let my heart break open for those who suffered and continue to suffer far outside my neighborhood.

My personal grief and the world’s grief meet in my heart. That is where I experience the truth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”1

No defensiveness is needed. Only seeing. Grieving. Not getting stuck there, but also not bypassing my need to wail about tragic aspects of human behavior.

Fear is fanned on every street corner and news show. Despair for the enormity of the environmental destruction and human inequity feels like it could easily undermine our capacity to cope with daily life.

The only path I know of that moves toward transformation, runs right through the middle of grief. “To let ourselves feel anguish and disorientation as we open our awareness to global suffering is part of our spiritual ripening. … Out of darkness, the new is born.”2

Against all logic, this path leads me to joy and gratitude. Standing solidly in the center of both grief and joy, I find clarity about my place in the global world. I am prompted to continue to ask myself, “What’s next? What is my next step to further align my behavior with my values?” Not from a place of despair, shame or over-responsibility but from a solid knowing of the interconnectedness of us all.

Paradox again. I always return here. The more I can learn to hold grief and joy, the greater my capacity to live life fully in ways that serve us all.

 

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
2. Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1998) Pg 45

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My Cell Phone and Violence: #1

My cell phone.

My Belgian roots.

My membership in a Christian church.

My wedding band.

The genocide and massive use of rape and sexual torture in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi are connected to these four things. The violence in that land is not a far off horror that has nothing to do with me, nor is it an innate character flaw within the Africans themselves.

The foundation for these atrocities has its roots in “my people” and me.

“In 1885 Belgian King Leopold ‘founded’ the land he called the Congo Free State (later Rwanda and Burundi) as his own private colony. Booker T. Washington wrote an article, “Cruelty in the Congo Country,” where he reported, ‘There was never anything in American slavery that could be compared to the barbarous conditions existing today [1904] in the Congo Free State.’1 In 1908 King Leopold turned the colony over to Belgium. During the years of Leopold’s rule, the population of the Congo declined from an estimated twenty-five million to less than nine million.”2

Belgium assigned the responsibility for education of the Congolese to the missionaries, staunch supporters of colonialism who were interested in educating men who wanted to go into the priesthood. The first Congolese citizen admitted to a university without heading to the priesthood happened in 1954—the year I was born.  “By the eve of Congolese independence in June 1960, the aspiring nation had only sixteen African university graduates out of a population of more than thirteen million.  There were no Congolese engineers or physicians.

“Perhaps most crucially, the lack of centralized education left the new nation in a stunted state of growth. Across the African continent, educated Africans had often played a key role in the independence movements, and these leaders had then stepped in to govern the new nations which emerged in the 1960s.”3 Due to Belgian colonial education practices, however, this critical foundation was never built.

Limits to education weren’t the only blows dealt the Congolese by the Belgian missionaries. “The most important legacy of colonialism in Rwanda and Burundi involved the Belgians’ obsession with racial, ethnic classification. The Belgians believed that the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda was racially superior to the Hutu ethnic group because the Tutsis had more ‘European’ features.”4 They turned ethnic differences, which had long been present, into gasoline-soaked kindling for a bonfire of war.

Though this region is among the poorest in the world, it is resource rich. “It contains 2/3rds of the world’s remaining rainforests, and vast mineral wealth including cobalt, coltan (used in cell phones and other high tech equipment, Congo is home to 80% of the world’s coltan reserves) copper, cadmium, petroleum, diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, manganese, tin, germanium, uranium, radium, bauxite, iron ore, and coal.” 5 Greed for these natural resources was also a major influence in the Belgian, and later global, treatment of this country.

Millions have been killed. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women, have been brutally raped and tortured. The land has also been raped through extraction of minerals such as coltran.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not taking personal responsibility for actions done generations ago by one of my homeland’s cultural ancestors. I am not refusing to own a cell phone or wear my wedding ring. However, I don’t want to pretend that I don’t see the connections between my life and these horrors.

For decades, my heart has ached for the women who have been brutally raped, their bodies and lives ripped apart. I am grateful that in 2011, many, including Eve Ensler, stepped in to open the “City of Joy” in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, to serve these women.

Only recently have my thoughts turned to the perpetrators of this violence. How does a human being’s behavior become so twisted that he is capable of torturing, raping, brutalizing and killing? What can be done for the men who have perpetrated this heinous violence? How can there be a turning of the tide within these countries with extreme violence still active in so many men?

What can be done about the foreign and transnational corporations, and the people who run them, who have allowed their lust for riches to lead to violence and economic devastation of people native to this resource-rich land?

I don’t know how to stop these horrors, but I won’t pretend that I don’t see the ways that my cell phone, ancestral homeland, faith tradition and wedding ring have connections to unimaginable horrors.

I woke up to the paradoxes in our world today and won’t go back to sleep. In very concrete ways, I am not disconnected from anyone or anyplace on earth. I pray that my life, and my small and large everyday choices, will support the Great Turning so needed in our world today.

1. “The Booker T. Washington Papers,” University of Illinois Press (1904): 8, 85, http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.8/html/85.html.

2. Thurston, Nancy, Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Gender, Power and Class (Portland: Rosegate Press, 2012), 325

3. http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/belgian-congo.html

4. http://geography.about.com/od/belgiummaps/a/Belgian-Colonialism.htm

5. http://www.healafrica.org/learn/history-of-the-congo/

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We Confess

Bleak treesI have ashes smeared on my forehead. They were placed there with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

It is a good spiritual practice to live fully, whole-heartedly, remembering that we, along with everyone we love, will die.

But that is not the main reason Ash Wednesday is my favorite liturgy in the Episcopal Church. Since my first trip to Haiti, the service for this first day of Lent had a special place in my heart. It is the only time when the Episcopal community asks for forgiveness for our cultural sins.

This week, confession and asking for forgiveness as a nation feels particularly important.

Yesterday, I went to an Oregon Humanities Conversation Project talk on “Alternatives to Incarceration,” led by Walidah Imarisha.  I learned disturbing statistics. Our prison population has increased 370% since 1970 (when I was in high school). If it hadn’t been for the “War on Drugs,” 70% of the people now in prison would NOT be there. We lock up more of our citizens than any other country in the world. Ironically, the amount of violent crime today is similar to what it was in 1950 (four years before I was born).

Incarceration is just one hot issue. If I started to list all of the cultural sins that are rampant in our world right now, I’d be writing for a very long time. With such a heavy heart, I headed to church on this Ash Wednesday to join my voice to others praying for forgiveness:

We confess to you, Lord …

Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people …

Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts. …

Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done:

For our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to  injustice and cruelty …

For our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us,

For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us. … 1

These words of confession spoke the things I so long to address in my life and in the world. Often Christians focus on personal sin but ignore institutional and organizational sin that we all participated in together.

Not me.

Not today.

I ask for forgiveness for myself and for my country. That is the first step toward transformation.

1 “Ash Wednesday Liturgy,” The Book of Common Prayer, (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), page 268