By Tommy Airey, an unabridged end-of-the-year review

On Easter Sunday this year, I made my way out to the sacred place Native people call Wahnabeezee. It’s a 962-acre island in the middle of the Detroit River. I walked over to the willow tree. Right where I snapped a photo of my dad on his final Father’s Day in 2015. He was standing under the long yellow stems that the original stewards of this land used to weave baskets. Dad was looking across the water to Canada. Where enslaved Africans were once ferried to freedom. The last stop of the underground railroad.

On that clear blue Easter morning, I sprinkled some of my dad’s ashes. On the base of the trunk where the lichen was growing. Willow sounds like wallow. The basket tree held my sorrow. Crucifixion came six months later. Samhain summoned me back to my dad’s ashes. When I pulled up, I could not find the willow. It was gone. Not even the trunk. Totally uprooted. The only traces were a few long stems she left behind.

I thought to myself. We truly are living in The Age of the Uprooted. Palestine was heavy on my heart. An oppressed people enduring occupation, apartheid, genocide. For the past seventy-five years. Totally uprooted. I was also thinking about my neighbors. Over the past fifteen years, more than one-third of the entire population of Detroit has been forced to foreclose on their homes. Totally uprooted. Almost all of them Black. Rev. Roslyn Bouier runs a local food pantry. She recently told me that many of these residents now live out of their vehicles. A significant population of women and children sleeping in parked cars.

Continue reading “The Uprooted” →

By Tommy Airey

I am re-reading Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham jail.” MLK wrote the letter 60 years ago to white Christian and Jewish leaders. He lamented their lukewarm acceptance of the racist system. He lamented that they were more interested in order than justice – and that they were content with a kind of peace that forced the oppressed to accept their plight. MLK explained that the nonviolent actions that got him arrested were not creating tension, but simply bringing to the surface the tension that was already there for too long.

This letter is coming to life in those resisting the occupation of Palestinian land and the genocide of Palestinian people. MLK wrote that the movement for Black freedom was turning the monologue into a dialogue. The old Zionist monologue that mutes and cancels anyone with an opposing perspective is fading fast. People of faith and conscience are demanding a real dialogue about this situation. They are breaking the rules of what can be talked about in their families, faith communities, campuses, corporate media outlets and the Democratic Party.

Continue reading “Exposed” →

By Tommy Airey

I’ve been working on a book project over the past few years. It has evolved into a series of shorter reflections focused on reconstructing a biblical spirituality committed to collective liberation for those of us who have been in a process of deconstructing fundamentalist, evangelical, conservative Catholic or denominational expressions of Christian Supremacy. This reconstruction project pivots on the Power of love, the only force that can fuel us to live for Something Else. 

I believe that this Something Else is rooted in the radical act of repenting from the American Dream, the corporate-sponsored conventional wisdom that comes at the awful expense of this agonizing statistic: the US and Canada comprise 5% of the world’s population – and consume over 30% of the world’s resources. I am calling the North American context the 5/30 Window, a play on what my white Evangelical pastors referred to as “the 10/40 Window,” the African, Asian and Middle Eastern regions of “unreached” people who live between ten and forty degrees north latitude. I am flipping the script and saying that the souls of dark-skinned Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims who live on the other side of the world do not need to get saved. We do. 

Continue reading “A Reading List for Repentance” →

By Tommy Airey

Last week, in Southern California, we got to spend an entire afternoon at the beach with our nephews. We were on boogie boards for most of it. The next morning, Riley and his brother Mason played a couple games of UNO with their Aunt Linds while I made them pancakes. Riley won both times. When we were driving them back to their dad’s place, Riley pulled out an UNO reverse card from his pocket.

Riley said he carries the card with him because it possesses the power to reverse any of the bad stuff that might happen in real life. He said there’s a YouTube clip that shows a guy getting pulled over by a cop. He flashes his UNO reverse card and the cop lets him go without a ticket or jail time. Riley said the blue UNO reverse cards are the most powerful – then the red, the green and the yellow. In that order. He said that all the other fourth-graders at his school last year respected the power of the UNO reverse card too.

Continue reading “The Reverse Card” →

By Tommy Airey

And at this sound the crowd gathered and was confused… – Acts 2:6a

Last weekend, I preached a Pentecost sermon at a church down in Kentucky. The text brought me back to my roots. When I was ten, I transferred to the Christian school where my mom got hired to teach 5^th grade. Every single morning, we pledged allegiance to the American flag, to the Christian flag and to the bible. We would pray together. We would read something from the scriptures – and then my teacher, Mr. Cavallaro, who I absolutely loved, would proclaim, “God said it. I believe it. And that settles it.” His triumphalism is all it took to hook me.

I was ten – and I was being scripted into Christian Supremacy. My pastors and teachers propagated a world that was black and white, saved and damned. They taught me that we get to heaven by believing what God said, but also that some people are just better than others. Some people earned their wealth, their power, their sun-splashed perch overlooking the Pacific. Other people made bad decisions. They live in ghettos, reservations, barrios, slums, cells and socialist countries because they swerved from God’s Holy Word. Game Over.  

Continue reading “A God Who Confuses” →

By Tommy Airey

I am someone who spends a lot more time casting a vision for what’s coming next than composting what’s already happened. It is both a gift – and a growth edge. I am learning that the more I slow down and process the particulars of my suburban past, the more I can subvert the sources that scripted my supremacy. One of those old sources was Gene, the father of one of my best friends. He was a passionate and playful pillar of the community. He was also a purveyor of patriarchy – and he had a profound impact on my early years.

Gene dismissed the perspectives of women with a warm smile and a witty joke. He made it clear that he believed that women were the weaker sex. Why? Because the bible says so. One time, when we were teenagers, Gene read us the passage from I Peter that says that wives must accept the authority of their husbands and that real women – biblical women – should stop obsessing over outward appearances, and instead embrace the lasting beauty of a meek and quiet spirit.

When I started studying the original languages of the bible in seminary, I learned that the word meek, in Greek, is praus, pronounced prah-ooce’. It is a divine strength soaked in gentleness, confidence, humility and open-heartedness. The irony is that Jesus used it to describe himself, not women. Jesus was a Palestinian Jewish rabbi who empowered people who were oppressed by professional religion and Roman culture. Jesus preached that God reigns not from the perches of the powerful, but from within the hearts of weary and burdened people.

The message of Jesus, according to Howard Thurman, focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of his people. They had access to divine power and agency. It was rooted in how they responded whenever provoked by their oppressors. Thurman wrote that humility – not fear, hypocrisy or hatred – is the best defense against everything intended to humiliate. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me,” Jesus said, “for I am praus and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Continue reading “Meek Ain’t Weak” →

By Tommy Airey

After a thirty-month delay, I finally went in for hernia surgery last week. Lindsay hauled me over to the hospital in Grosse Pointe, Michigan – Detroit’s eastern adjacent suburb. As soon as we crossed Alter Road, everything changed. The mourning turned into mansions. Dr. King gave a speech in the high school gym in Grosse Pointe three weeks before he was assassinated. He talked about the two Americas. Those who grow up in the sunlight of opportunity – and those barely surviving in the fatigue of despair. During the speech, he was shouted down – several times – by white people who did not appreciate some outsider telling them that racism was still a real thing.

The day before my surgery, I drove to the lab in Grosse Pointe to get my pre-surgery blood screening. A Black woman was working the front desk. While I was waiting, an unmasked white man in his seventies walked in asking where to sign in. She pointed to the table and told him he needed to put on a face covering. He looked at me and shook his head, muttering that he had one in his bag. I stared him down. He didn’t sign in. When he found his seat across the room, he looked at me again. I just stared back. We both grew up in the sunlight of opportunity, but I wanted him to know that I would not be signing off on his supremacy story.

Across Jefferson Boulevard from the hospital, the yards of the mansions are lined with election signs promoting the GOP candidate for Secretary of State who got her masters degree in Christian Apologetics from BIOLA and is adamant the 2020 election was stolen. Many signs say, “Vote No on Prop 3,” the reproductive justice measure that got more signatures than any initiative in Michigan history. When we arrived at the hospital on the morning of my surgery, everything was quick and convenient. Parking spaces were abundant and free-of-charge. It was a close walk to the lobby. The surgery wing was a well-oiled machine. I did not wait long to get in.

Continue reading “The Recovery Room” →