Category Archives: White privilege

Trying to Make Sense of My Life

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I’ve spent much time in recent years remembering and reflecting on events, relationships, and stories that have shaped who I am. It says a lot about my station in life. I’m poignantly aware of having exceeded by more than a decade my biblically allotted “three score years and ten.”

A few colleagues and several family members, including grandchildren, urged me to share stories from my life and more than sixty years of ordained ministry. It has been a daunting, emotional, frustrating, and yet healing process.

Reliving past struggles, mistakes, failures, hurts, griefs, disappointments, and losses resurfaces unresolved guilt and regrets. The grace I have proclaimed for six decades has been put to a test as a lived reality. Accepting forgiveness for myself is sometimes harder than extending it to others.

But the process of remembering, reflecting, and writing has been predominantly a source of healing, thanksgiving, and hope. I am in awe of the ineffable mystery and resilience of life. Each person’s finite story is mysteriously interwoven into an Infinite Story with limitless connections and possibilities.

Seemingly inconsequential events, encounters, or decisions in retrospect were life-transforming. “What ifs” are part of remembering: What if I had not gone to that conference? What if I had said “no” to a particular invitation? What if I had not enrolled in that school, or taken a different class, or entered an alternative vocation?

Life is a mysterious combination of choices made and conditions prescribed, situations over which we have control and circumstances beyond our control, the “givens” of nature and the influence of nurture.

Life is simply too complex, too interrelated, and mysterious to be fully described. Memory never records the totality of any incident and recall always reflects current contexts as much as the event itself.

Therefore, writing a memoir requires a stance of vulnerability and humility in remembering and interpreting the circumstances, experiences, events, perceptions, and relationships that constitute one’s life. The process is risky and fraught with temptations for distortion and misrepresentation.

The book, Shifting Margins: From Fear and Exclusion to Love and Belonging is my attempt to make sense of my own life. It began with simply putting memories on paper, starting with my earliest recalled experiences and moving through seven decades. Reviewing journals and accumulated files of correspondence and other documents resurfaced forgotten events, transitional experiences, and relationships. The result was almost six hundred pages!

With the help of a skilled editor (who happens to be my daughter), identifying themes, and creating a coherent and readable manuscript followed. Reducing the manuscript by two-thirds became symbolic of my reality. Life’s experiences are narrowing. The circle of engagement and involvement is diminishing. Physical energy is declining. Cognitive functioning remains but with less quickness and retention. The end is far closer than the beginning!

After all this remembering and reflecting, I have concluded that perhaps the goal isn’t to make sense of life. Rather, it is to participate in its unfolding mystery with love, perseverance, and hope.

Whatever the stage, there are opportunities to give and receive love. There are challenges to confront with determination and courage. There is hope that our stories ultimately fold into God’s Story of Endless Love and Resurrection Life.

To order Shifting Margins, https://www.marketsquarebooks.com/store/p123/Shifting_Margins.html

A Needed Challenge from a Black Friend

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I have been reluctant in recent weeks to add my voice to the plethora of  commentaries on race and white supremacy. Careful listening, honest self-examination, and prayerful reflection have seemed a more appropriate approach.

I’ve tried to be attentive to the voices of the victims of racism and white supremacy. I have also attempted to probe my own experiences for residues of racism and participation in the benefits of being white in this culture.

White privilege has been my lot for almost eighty years, and I continue to reap the advantages of systemic racism.

Extricating myself from these sins has been a lifelong struggle.  I have made progress from my childhood days of segregation and Jim Crow. But, I still have work to do!

In the sermon I delivered at the worship service in which I was received as the bishop in Mississippi in September 2000, I acknowledged my own participation in systemic racism and white privilege. I called racism a diabolical sin from which I want to be delivered. I invited the clergy and laity present to confront me whenever they detected prejudice or racism in my actions, adding, “I may be embarrassed by your confronting me, but I’d rather lose face than lose my soul.”

Following the service, a Black member of the Cabinet pulled me aside. He affirmed my openness and commitment to justice and reconciliation. Then, he added, “But, bishop, we Black people can’t cure your racism. Don’t put that burden on us, too!”

He spoke the truth! Racism is a problem we White folks have created, and we must work diligently to root out this deadly personal and systemic sin.

For too long, we have put the responsibility onto Blacks. If they will only respond, behave, do, act, and believe as WE want or expect, then racism would disappear. Such an expectation or projection is clear evidence of our White privilege and presumed superiority.

A first step toward a solution to racism is for us White folks to humbly acknowledge that WE are the problem. We must get beyond our defensiveness and engage the long process of repentance, turning toward the “beloved community” where reconciliation rooted in justice is possible.

The Cabinet member and friend who refused to take responsibility to overcome my racism contributed to my ongoing healing. I am grateful to him!

I’ll continue to listen, learn, reflect, and repent. Perhaps I will share more about my ongoing journey toward the beloved community. I want to contribute to the solution rather than add to the problem.

 

 

Tribute to Ted Jennings

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Jennings-TedA virtual memorial service was held Saturday, June 27, for one of Methodism’s most provocative, challenging, and committed theologians, Theodore (Ted) Jennings. I was asked by his devoted spouse, Ronna Case, to speak briefly of Ted’s contribution to the church.

I first met Ted at a Symposium on Theology and Evangelism held, February 1992, in Atlanta. Later that year, I was part of a working group with him at the Oxford Institute of Methodist Studies. The theme of the Institute emerged from Ted’s recently published book, Good News to the Poor: John Wesley’s Evangelical Economics.

When the Council of Bishops adopted the Initiative on Children and Poverty, Ted became one of the theological consultants. As a member of the task force for the Initiative, I worked closely with Ted. We became good friends, and the friendship continued until his death in March of this year.

Ted’s contributions to the church are those of a prophet in the mode of an Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, or Amos, ever prodding and challenging the church to be a beloved community of liberation for ALL people. I briefly name four specific contributions.

One, Ted challenged the institutional church’s captivity to the consumerist, capitalist culture and institutional triumphalism. Ted’s vision and loyalty transcended preoccupation with institutional prominence, membership statistics, organizational structures, and marketing strategies. His was a vision of a reconciled and transformed world where justice prevails, and all have access to God’s table of abundance. And, as one of his former students said, “Ted made sure that we knew Jesus was with the crucified, not the crucifers; the oppressed, not the oppressors.”

Two, he called the church to presence among the marginalized, the outcasts, the poor, the vulnerable. In his work with the Episcopal Initiative on Children and Poverty, he regularly pushed the bishops toward the overarching goal of the Initiative: the transformation of the church in response to the God who is among “the least of these.” He persistently reminded us of God’s preferential option for the poor and most vulnerable, not as objects of charity but as friends and means of grace.

Three, Ted helped to reshape Methodism’s interpretation of Wesley, from a mere revivalist who focused on personal salvation to Wesley as a catalyst of a movement for holistic salvation that includes personal and social transformation. He challenged much conventional Wesleyan scholarship and spurred a new generation of scholars and pastors toward a more holistic vision of the Wesleyan heritage. He saw the tradition as something to be constructively built upon rather merely defended.

Four, Ted prodded the Church to confront its hypocrisy by courageously challenging us to embody radical love for God and neighbor, and to include ALL within the circle of God’s liberating love.  He had little tolerance for pious pretense and personal or professional posturing, whether by academics, bishops, or pastors. Indeed, he modeled leadership as derivative of authentic Christian discipleship. As a colleague scholar remarked, “Above all, Ted loved Jesus!”

Ted’s contributions will multiply in years to come, for he helped to form two generations of pastors and church leaders in the United States, Mexico, Korea, and beyond. Those leaders now form congregations as outposts of God’s present and coming reign of justice, generosity, and joy!

I give thanks to God for Ted Jennings’s devoted life, his faithful witness to Resurrection faith that liberates and transforms, and his enduring friendship.