Responsibility

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire2 Comments

If you have not read Marina Magloire’s most recent article in The LA Review of Books, you really must. She explores correspondence between June Jordan and Audre Lorde over their disagreements on Israel/Palestine. It is absolute fire. Here’s an excerpt.

Driven by her grief and outrage at the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in September 1982, in which thousands of Palestinians were murdered by militia groups over the course of two days, Jordan wrote an open letter called “On Israel and Lebanon: A Response to Adrienne Rich from One Black Woman,” dated October 10, 1982. Her address to Rich was both personal (she names Rich alone among the signatories of the two letters) but also pedagogical (it is an open letter to be published in WomanNews and thus intended for public consumption). Using the words “genocide” and “holocaust,” Jordan lays out the shocking array of war crimes committed by Israel over five months—phosphorous bombs, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, the massacre at Sabra and Shatila—and criticizes Rich’s failure to take responsibility for these things as the tangible outcomes of the Zionism she claims to espouse. This idea of responsibility runs through Jordan’s response like a live wire, culminating in this astonishing statement:

I claim responsibility for the Israeli crimes against humanity because I am an American and American monies made these atrocities possible. I claim responsibility for Sabra and Shatilah [sic] because, clearly, I have not done enough to halt heinous episodes of holocaust and genocide around the globe. I accept this responsibility and I work for the day when I may help to save any one other life, in fact.

Because Rich does not take responsibility, Jordan models it for her. This is perhaps the most important rhetorical turn in Jordan’s letter, though it goes unacknowledged in subsequent responses from other readers. Jordan recognizes that being part of an ethnonationalist state, whether born or chosen, carries the obligation to critique its violence. The fact that a Black woman born in this nation can make this statement, with far more humility than Rich’s selective, cherry-picked identification with Israeli statehood, is a testament to the transformative possibilities of Jordan’s identity politics.

The Moment Died

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This poem is called “Just Another Death of a Palestinian Baby” by The Reverend Debra Susannah Mary Rhodes, CMMR, written soon after the genocide began

“My baby is dead,” she wailed!
Another Palestinian mother standing helplessly
as her baby was ripped from her arms,
his body strewed about like the sand in the desert
beyond the border.
Sifting through rubble on her bloody knees
she searched furiously, searched for a part…
any part… of her beloved son.
Three days earlier her daughter had been shot
as their house was destroyed by artillery shells.
The noise still reverberated inside her,
causing her bones to clatter like a toy skeleton
and her ears to shut down in shock.
Finally finding a tiny little finger, she grabbed it
and held it close to her heart.
Was it his?
Does it matter?
It was someone’s baby, and she was a mother.
Running to the only church left standing,
she brought his finger up to the altar,
placed it before the tabernacle,
knelt…
and screamed.
Screamed until her throat was raw while Jesus watched
from his cross, weeping.
With nothing left inside, she laid down prostrate,
barely breathing,
and then looked up just as a tear fell on her cheek
from high above her.
For the first moment in 90 days she felt
clean… loved…. held…
Just then another woman came stumbling in,
sobbing,
clutching a piece of fabric to her heart.
And the moment died, just like everything else.

Mother Debbi is a writer and a priest in the Episcopal Church, and she and her husband, also a priest, co-founded The Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer in 2018, open to all baptized Christians, that receives God’s grace from The Daily Office, Daily Mass, and personal prayer, and then works to exorcise the injustice, oppression, and violence of Empire from our lives and live into the Kingdom of God the way the early Christians did. Mother Debbi loves all aspects of “Spiritual Motherhood,” and has spent much of her adult life volunteering in jails and maximum-security prisons, bringing Christ’s love to the “least of the least of these.”

This Sweet Earth

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Today we celebrate the recent release of a new book by Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, the co-founder of RadicalDiscipleship.net! You can order This Sweet Earth right here. We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to ask her a few questions about it. See below for book tour dates!

RD: We are interested in what led you to write this book. Are there specific experiences or situations that you can go back to that told you that this book needed to be written and that you needed to write it?

LWK: I think more than anything I had this ongoing nagging feeling for a few years that there was this book inside of me. I just needed to make space to see what would pour out.

A big part of why I personally needed this book was because I was shocked by the level of immobilizing anxiety I was experiencing. I was reading scientific studies that kept saying how much worse things are than we thought. I was witnessing predictions for human extinction. The doomsday scrolling was making it hard to breathe. There was so much grief and rage stuck in my body all the time. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. I realized that if I held these feelings by myself that they would turn either towards total despair or I would have to pretend it wasn’t happening just to keep going.

Yet I know that this rage and grief and anxiety are holy. They are how we express how much we love this world. And that if we hold these emotions in community, then there is beautiful, transformational power in it all.

When I was overcome with pain around climate crisis, it was my kids that would grab my hand and pull me over to watch the caterpillar devouring the milkweed. Their ability to slow down and intimately rest in this ecosystem changed my posture.

And as I look out into the future and what I want my kids to know and learn, I find myself leaning on the theological imagination and political analysis of my childhood. My parents and the community around me taught me so much about what it means to be human….what we say yes to with our whole bodies and how we also say no by putting our bodies on the line.

This book in many ways is a love letter to the generations before me and the generations after. I am constantly stumbling over gratitude for the lessons they teach me daily.

Continue reading “This Sweet Earth” →

A House of Cedar or a Tent of Hide: Why Does It Matter?

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Uncategorized1 Comment

By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (pictured above) in Detroit, Michigan (July 21, 2024)

As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things (Mk 6:34).

4 But that same night the word of the Lord came to Nathan, 5 “Go and tell my servant David, Thus says the Lord: “Would you build me a house to dwell in? 6 I have not dwelt in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent for my dwelling (2 Sam 7:4-6).

Thus says the Lord of hosts: I took you from the sheepfold, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people Israel (2 Sam 7:8b).

So, where are we today—in reality, in the text?  In our reality, it is simple, at one level. Apocalypse. An ending of the world as we have known it.  Not an absolute end, but a proximate and particular end.  “What” is ending?  Ah, the big question.  I would say: in a word, civilization.  Not the earth. Not the universe. But our species’ delusion about who we are on the planet.  And already I am deep in it, so let’s back up.

It is interesting in the texts today.  Jesus calls the disciples to go away to a desert-place (Mk 6:31).  Why? As we read in the lectionary offerings two weeks ago, he has gone home to Nazareth and been threatened with death (Mk 6:1-6; Lk 4:16-30). Sent the twelve out for a first foray into . . . . what? Actually, into gift-economy reciprocity and sabbath-sharing, with the very people—peasant small farmers—they are sent to (Mk 6:7-13). They don’t take a credit card and carry-on luggage with themselves.  They depend upon the people they are sent to.  Gift economy hospitality.  (Which, hint, hint, in this [biblical] tradition is characteristic of animal-herding lifestyle, not city-dwelling self-concern and opportunism. Pastoral nomad Abraham offering a meal inside his tent-flaps to three “wanderers” that show up at his “door” not urban Sodom’s exploitation and abuse of strangers as we read in the archetypal story in Genesis of the lifestyle difference between sheep-herders and city-dwellers.) (Gen 18:1-15 vs Gen 18:16-19:29).

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I Am Not Leaving

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Last week, Bernice Johnson Reagon became a living ancestor. This is the tribute that her daughter Toshi Reagon posted on Facebook on July 17, 2024.

I was here before I came and when I die, I am not leaving… – Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon

Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, a multi-award-winning force and cultural voice for freedom, transitioned on July 16, 2024. As a scholar, singer, composer, organizer and activist, Dr. Reagon spent over half a century speaking out against racism and systemic inequities in the U.S. and globally. Born in Dougherty County outside of Albany, Georgia on the 4th of October 1942, she was field secretary of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and a founding member of the original SNCC Freedom Singers, formed in 1962. In 1966, she was a founding member of the Atlanta-based Harambee Singers. In 1973, while a graduate student of history at Howard University and vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Company, Dr. Reagon founded the internationally renowned African American women’s a cappella ensemble, Sweet Honey In The Rock, leading the group until her retirement in 2003. In 1974, Dr. Reagon began her leadership role at the Smithsonian Institution, which included curating the African Diaspora Program, creating the Program in Black American Culture, and producing and performing on numerous Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. For a decade, beginning in 1993, she served as Distinguished Professor in History at American University (AU) in Washington D.C. Dr. Reagon was named Professor Emerita of History at AU and Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian. She is the author of numerous publications, compositions and recordings.

Dr. Reagon has received countless awards and honors for her pioneering work as a scholar and artist, including, the Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities, the Leeway National Award for Women in the Arts, the Presidential Medal for contribution to public understanding of the Humanities, the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award and the Peabody award for the groundbreaking Wade in the Water series (NPR/Smithsonian Folkways).

Born to Reverend Jesse Johnson and Beatrice Wise Johnson, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon’s family members include her life partner Adisa Douglas, children Toshi Reagon and Kwan Reagon, grandchild, Tashawn Nicole Reagon, numerous family members including siblings, Jordan Warren Johnson, Deloris Johnson Spears, Adetokunbo Tosu Tosasolim, Mamie Johnson Rush, several nieces and nephews, and extended family, J. Bob Alotta, Amy Horowitz, James and Miriam Early and a community of beloved collaborators and fellow artists.

Details regarding a public celebration of life forthcoming.

Genocide: Absent from the Title, Marginalized in the Body

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A stunning open letter from Kairos Palestine in response to this letter from the Word Council of Churches last month. This is an invaluable resource for liberal Christians who painfully continue to “both sides” this decades-long oppressive situation. [RD.net bolded portions below for our own emphasis]

Open letter to the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches 

”But based on his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.”  (2 Peter 3:13)

Esteemed Members of the Executive Committee,

We at Kairos Palestine extend our appreciation of your statement issued in Bogota, Colombia by your esteemed Committee (6-11 June) titled: ”THE ESCALATING CRISIS IN GAZA”. We trust that the statement was issued with great concern and with the urgent need to terminate the atrocious crimes in Gaza.

However, as Palestinians, as Christians and as your partners, we would like to bring to your attention the following points pertaining to the content and the calls included in the statement:

1- We believe that the title ”Escalating Crisis in Gaza” is neither accurate, nor adequate. The protracted ”crisis” is a result of 8 months of Israel’s incessant large-scale military aggression which mounts to acts of genocide, prior to which, Gaza has been strangled by a 17year blockade that forced 2.3 million people to become aid-dependent and extremely vulnerable to famine and starvation. Especially with WCC being one of the key partners of the Office of the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide in the drafting of the Plan of Action for Religious Leaders and Actors to Prevent Incitement to Violence that Could Lead to Atrocity Crimes (’the Fez Process’), it holds an elevated responsibility in identifying a genocide, condemning it with the strongest possible terms and acting to end it immediately. Besides our own accounts and meticulous documentation of the genocide as Palestinians, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) did confirm in its provisional measures that Israel’s is plausibly committing genocide. Not only is the term genocide absent from the title, it is marginalized in the body of the statement instead of being the essence of what the statement is condemning and calls for ending immediately. Investigation after investigation concludes that Israel is committing atrocious crimes under international law, including the most recent report[1] by the UN Commission of Inquiry which concluded that Israel is committing the crime of Extermination against the Palestinian people. It cannot be acceptable that crimes of such scale, committed deliberately over 8 months, be narrowed down to a ”crisis”.

Continue reading “Genocide: Absent from the Title, Marginalized in the Body” →