Season of Lament
I entered a season of lament. I fell into it, actually. It was like there was a figurative pit of pain, and I was in it. Looking back, it seems this pit was always there. I recognize it from long ago, ever since I entered into deep relationships with people of color.
I remember coming home from the youth center in inner city Indianapolis, broken. Wondering how “the ghetto” existed. It didn’t fit into the rest of my life and how most everyone I grew up with thought and lived. I loved it, I hated it. I connected to it in ways I’d never fit anywhere else: but at the same time, I wasn’t allowed all the way in, and some of it scared me. It wasn’t that I felt physically unsafe: it was that there was a sleeping monster of pain and rage and sorrow in it, and I knew that one day, when I wasn’t expecting it, the monster would wake.
When I wasn’t in the inner city, I could forget it existed. That was how it seemed everyone else around me lived. I worked really hard to fix the ghetto for many years. I tried to bring my middle-class world into the ghetto. I tried to bring the ghetto into my middle-class world. Neither one stuck. I knew (and know) that Jesus is the answer, so I finally just held on to that: Running around loving on kids and asking them, “So how are you and God doing?” Because while I didn’t have the answers, God did. I would mess up while trying to “fix,” but God wouldn’t.
Sharing Jesus didn’t fix everything. It didn’t reconcile the differences I felt so clearly. It didn’t answer any of my questions. It didn’t make the monster go away. But it did get me through each day. God’s love got those kids I loved through each day. He was sufficient.
And then I fell in love.
I didn’t fall in love with him because he was Black. But I was attracted to his skin, his story, his personality: who he was, and he was Black. It’s hard to explain the dangers of colorblindness, because it is so close to the truth: there is a sense of being colorblind, of color not mattering. Most of the day I don’t see color: I see a partner, cleaning up the mess next to me. I see a lover embracing me, I see a father teaching our daughter, I see a provider getting ready for another challenging day of work. But he is still all of who he is, and part of what has made him who he is IS his color. And I see how color is woven into the fabric of his personality, his history, his future. I value his sameness to me, and his differences.
I married a Black man. Now his story is mixed with mine. Now my last name is his. Now we have daughters that are all their own selves, but mixed in and through with us. When I realized I would be sending my daughter to an American school where my protection didn’t reach: I knew I needed to learn to tell the stories. To put words to the feelings. To work through whatever fog was around me to help my daughter’s path be a bit more sure, a bit more clear, and powerfully revealed that Jesus is the answer.
And I found myself in a pit of pain. Maybe I poked the monster I met in the ghetto. Maybe I just understood what this monster really was: a collective, compounded wound, or trauma. I have started to sit with this pain and lament. I’ve read, I’ve listened, I’ve watched. I’ve learned that when my friends and family say they are hurting: to believe them. When they say something is hurting them: to believe them. I don’t have to understand or agree to believe them and to weep with them.
I have followed my husband’s family history through slavery, through the Atlantic slave trade, through 10 million people stolen from Africa. I have followed my husband’s family history to all of the unknowns it holds because there is no written history. I have seen through those unknowns that my last name: the name I say or write every day is a reminder that a white man owned a black woman and raped her. Somehow her children got his last name, and that is the name we carry today.
I have followed my husband’s family history where we see grandfathers pinching the darker babies, because he didn’t like them as much as the lighter grandbabies. I see how this grandfather’s father abandoned him, but he still carried his name because his mother’s family wouldn’t give him their name: he would have died if his old white grandma hadn’t taken him in.
And I, a white middle class woman, get angry. Because this is my history now. This is what my daughters will carry. And if I, who has never had to deal with this before, feel all of this FEELING: I can’t imagine what those who have sat with this collective, compound wound, are dealing with. I have been blessed (shall I call it privileged?) with a completely different kind of history. One that never held slavery, or failed reconstruction, or Jim Crow, or even a million other personal stories that continue today.
I married a Black man and no one spoke against us. Interracial marriage has only been legal since 1967, but what is culturally acceptable has changed. I have two daughters that are Jamaican, Brazilian, American, and have never heard a racist word spoken against them. And I am glad. I am glad that society around us consciously accepts us as normal and human: that is good and needed and right.
But what is hard is that when I tell many white people that I am lamenting, they think it is unnecessary. Or worse, they tell me I shouldn’t be. Or sometimes, they tell me I am wrong. They tell me that there isn’t any collective, compound trauma. They tell me that if someone is feeling that, they are wrong. They are playing the victim. They are reading into a political tale the media has spun-and it is a lie. Fake news. And it hurts. Because I just said, “I AM HURTING.” Did they even hear me?
There has never been a time where our country collectively sought forgiveness (which is a Biblical foundational principle). Where retribution (which is a Biblical principle) was made. There was a war fought and won. There were many individuals who fought and gave their lives for reconciliation: and we are grateful. But the wound made, of being enslaved, of being seen and treated as less than human and less than equal: it didn’t go away.
After the war, most of the people who had been enslaved were stuck in the same place, getting treated the same way: as less than human, and less than equal. As a country, the North largely abandoned or ignored them (the compromise of 1877), and the South wrote history and built monuments to glorify their mindset that whites were better than Blacks. This is collective, compound trauma. Separate but equal. Jim Crow. Lynching.
Imagine after World War 2, we made all the surviving Jews stay in East Germany, without any help to rebuild or relocate. Imagine if instead of turning the concentration camps into memorials, we turned them into wedding venues (as many plantations are today). Imagine if instead of executing or imprisoning the leaders we honored them and they continued to be rich community leaders. Imagine if the Jews had to go to schools called “Hitler Academy” and walk by statues that honored him.
Now we look at the children I worked with in the inner city. The ones whose first experience with a police officer was to see them take their dad or uncle to jail. The ones who are stuck in a broken system of education and poverty that directly relates to different job, loan, housing, and prison policies that affects them more than those outside the ghetto. Food deserts that cause more health problems. The pain and bitterness of their parents, grandparents, and beyond. This wound, this monster is out of control. The wound grows and engulfs more than just Black people: racism and classism are similar rivers that often cross.
It took me years to discover this. It took deliberate education and listening and waiting and growing. It took being willing to hurt, and still hurt, and not just try to fix it. I understand completely why so many people don’t see it. I understand completely why so many, many more people don’t understand it.
Compound, collective trauma and open wounds fester. When you don’t work to heal it, when you don’t even know how to identify it, it comes out in other ways. It comes out in pain. It comes out in exhaustion. It comes out in being overwhelmed and giving up. It comes out in not caring. It comes out in ignoring and pretending everything is okay. It comes out in anger. It comes out in stress. It comes out a million different ways if it isn’t being addressed and dealt with.
If you don’t believe that there is a compound, collective trauma, you get surprised and shocked at current events. Where is this anger coming from? Why would you bring up something from that long ago? Why are you still stuck in the past? Our individualism doesn’t see the collective part of this: it isn’t you or your family—why do you care so much? Our personal feelings are hurt: I wasn’t a part of slavery—why are you blaming me? I’ve never been racist—are you saying I am racist?
As a white person saying these things, I am written off as one more “woke” who has bought into the liberal narrative. A Black person saying these things is written off as bitter, playing the victim. It is easier to write off people who are angry and bitter. It is easier to believe there is no collective, compound trauma: because if there is—then we are in trouble. If there is, as Christians, we are called to first lament that our brothers and sisters are in this pit of pain. And then- we are called to restoration, to redemption.
Our God is a God of redemption. He is a God that takes the broken and restores it: not the God that throws out the broken and makes something new. If there is a collective, compound wound: then we are called to restoration. We are called to see how our sin of selective freedoms and equality created brokenness, and that brokenness directly led to this compound, collective wound. We are to lament. We are to repent and replace those wrong actions and mindsets. We are called to relationship, to healing and restoring.
This is what is needed for our country. But first, this is what is needed for our church.
Do you believe that if the church had properly taught the theology of the image of God that slavery would have been able to take root in America like it did? That it would have been able to continue and flourish? We got our theology wrong. We let our economics dictate our theology to provide a path forward that would be more financially beneficial. And so we, as the church, failed. We were wrong.
Has there ever been a time where we as a church specifically said: “This is what was taught wrong in our churches (explain in detail) that allowed slavery to flourish, and we apologize: HOW CAN WE MAKE IT RIGHT? Not only do we take the first step in eliminating and denouncing wrong theology: but we replace it with correct, Biblical theology. We say “This is the truth about what God says and why we can never allow slavery to flourish (and explain in detail).” We have to intentionally teach a correct theology of the image of God.
It has been said that the most segregated time in America is 10am on Sunday morning. How could we have allowed this to continue for so long? We need to ask our Black brothers and sister in Christ how we, as a church, can make it right and heal the brokenness that so clearly still lies between Black and white Christians. And then we stop and listen. Really listen. We won’t get it right the first time, but we can consistently recommit to trying again. And again. God hasn’t given up on us yet, so we still have time. Maybe this is why we still have time: to work on redemption in the church.