Learning from a Child

First published in the "Spiritual Perspectives" column of the Gallup Independent on August 31, 2014

The May 31 issue of the Gallup Independent, my hometown newspaper, contained a highly inflammatory, racist letter to the editor, one that many readers will have seen. The letter was quickly posted and reposted on social media. I read it there with dismay, along with the angry and injured comments of several of my friends who live in Gallup and in the Navajo Nation. Purporting to respond to panhandling in Gallup, the writer identified himself as a racist and Navajos as “drunken panhandling redskins.” He then went on to castigate Diné who express pain about the US genocide of indigenous people. He incorrectly parodied historical events at Little Big Horn as something Navajos need to stop crying about, when in fact the battle at Little Big Horn represented a victory for Native peoples—for the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho. His parody also referred to Colonel George Armstrong Custer as a general, which he was only temporarily during the Civil War, but not at the time of Little Big Horn.

            My Navajo friends did not only react with anger and pain. They also offered some perceptive and even compassionate comments that could well have put the author of this letter to shame, had he read them. One person recognized him and other racists as insecure and fearful. Another person said he felt sorry for the man who carried such a heavy burden of anger and hatred. Others recognized his ignorance. Surely insecurity, fear and ignorance lie at the root of hatred and racism.

Having grown up in Gallup, and as I return often to visit family, I have witnessed time and again racism and violence against Navajos. I have seen the devastating effects of genocide and generational trauma on Diné friends, as well as on the general populace. I have seen how profiteering, especially in alcohol sales, has resulted in death and destruction.

Because of this long history of racism and violence in Gallup, I was deeply disappointed in the Independent. Many readers were outraged that the Independent had even chosen to run this letter. Some accused the editors of publishing the letter because controversy results in more newspaper sales. I was concerned that the editors had chosen to publish such an inflammatory letter in a town already beset by racial division and violence. I was even more deeply troubled that the Independent had missed such a valuable editorial opportunity to stand firmly against such racism.

As a regular contributor to “Spiritual Perspectives” in the Independent I felt even more distressed than if I had just been a reader. My initial response was to say that I would no longer continue to contribute my column. I didn’t want to be associated with a paper that kept editorial silence when they published something so damaging.

Two things happened to change my mind. A friend who reads the Independent more regularly than I do told me that the paper has often stood up against racism in Gallup in their reporting and editorials. Then, to the editors’ credit, they asked me to reconsider ending my columns and to address the issue here. I had to put my money where my mouth was, and so I agreed.

            Many spiritual teachers, from the Jewish prophet Micah to Jesus to the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man, Sitting Bull, have called upon people to respond to injustice, to right the wrongs in our society. In the end, it was a child whose example I knew I must follow. When I was a middle school counselor in Cuba, NM, my daughter was a student there. One day I overheard a boy put down another child. My daughter immediately spoke up. “That’s mean,” she said. It was so straightforward and simple to her. There was no question about whether to respond or not. At the same time, she respected the student who said those malicious words by indicating that she expected better of him. I could not have been prouder of my daughter in that moment. Her way of responding to vindictiveness has been a reminder to me many times over the years. Often our own children are our strongest teachers, and that day my daughter taught me the importance of standing up against injustice. I learned from her that it can be done simply and without questioning the utmost necessity of doing so.

I still wish the editors at the Independent had chosen to stand up against that racist letter. It would have been very powerful. I’m grateful that they encouraged me to write about it.

Plurality on Easter

News stories make us constantly aware of the tensions and conflicts that divide our world, and so often the roots of the conflicts are religious. Amidst all these divisions, it was refreshing to hear one of NPR’s Easter stories. The reporter broadcasted from Jerusalem and hailed the day as the most important of Christian holidays to which most Christians would likely agree.

The correspondent situated her story at an outdoor Christian service on Mount Scopus, where chiming bells provided the sound postcard. Then she moved seamlessly from the Easter service to show a

Courtesy en.wikipedia.org

Muslim cabbie rolling out his prayer rug and kneeling below the hill. From there she described Jews hurrying to the Western Wall to daven.

Despite the frequent reminders of the deep chasms among these faiths and especially in the Middle East, I thought the report represented a shift in our collective consciousness regarding the value of diversity. I felt pretty sure that this is a relatively recent development, that 20 or 30 years ago, maybe even a shorter time ago, the Easter report would have been exclusively Christian, no mention of the presence of other faiths in the city that Christians recognize as the locus of the first Easter.  

Review: The Spoon from Minkowitz: A bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands by Judith Fein. Santa Fe: GlobalAdventure.us, 2014. $18.95.

Judith Fein, a former screenwriter and now a travel writer with articles in such venues as The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and National Geographic has written a deeply personal account of her journey in time and space to the stetl in the Ukraine that her grandmother left at the age of seventeen. As a child, Fein was obsessed with this place and could not understand why her grandmother would never tell her more than six facts about where she’d grown up. Given a spoon from Minkowitz, Ukraine by her new father-in-law at her wedding, Fein took this as a sign that she must one day visit, but world traveler that she was, she took decades to embark upon this journey of self-discovery.

Fein is not an observant Jew, but the journey necessarily takes her into corners and collective memories that are distinctly Jewish. The Spoon from Minkowitz is an expedition into personal and cultural identity. However, I continued to be moved by Fein’s insistence on a showing a much bigger picture, on remaining first of all human and writing compassionately of our commonality.

I was especially touched by her comments after a visit to a cemetery of Karaite Jews in Halych, Ukraine. Rabbinic Jews rejected the Karaites because of their differing beliefs, while the Nazis spared them because they also perceived them as non-Jewish. From this paradox, Fein questions how religious beliefs can separate people and even lead to their destruction when carried to an extreme. She so poignantly asks, “Why does anyone care if God is worshipped differently, or if others worship a different God? How do humans descend to such a dark place that they kill other humans because they sit in pews or kneel to pray, wear sidelocks, monks’ robes or turbans, read from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Koran?”

While The Spoon from Minkowitz is about a deep exploration of Jewish roots, it often transcends that to become an exploration of the human condition.

Judith Fein will be the keynote speaker and a workshop presenter at the Albuquerque Jewish Community Center’s A Taste of Honey on February 9.

Partnership Between a Gay Mayor and a Christian Evangelist

One thing Bridge People are about is destroying stereotypes. Who will deign to work with whom? These paradoxes of peacemaking are in part what draw me to people who do bridge work, and I’m not referring to dental labs.

In one of the US’s most secular cities, Portland, the openly gay mayor, Sam Adams was desperate to meet the needs of the city’s poor and its schools. Along came Kevin Palau, vice president of the Luis Palau Association, known worldwide for its evangelism festivals. Palau offered to organize volunteers from evangelical, mainstream Protestant, and Catholic churches to mentor at-risk youth and provide food, clothing and shelter to the needy of Portland.

Evangelicals have been addressing these kinds of needs for a long time, but what is new here is the openness exhibited by both Palau, who is vocally against gay marriage and abortion, and Adams, who is gay, to overlooking their differences in order to serve their community.

In my previous post, I wrote about resistance to the idea of bridging social, political and cultural gaps. As much as we, and I include myself of course, give lip service to wanting to bring peace on earth, we often seem to revel in polarization. It was an evangelical friend who called my attention to the Adams-Palau collaboration, and I confess that I wasn’t sure I wanted to give it coverage. After all, so many in the world, including me, have been hurt by evangelicals’ actions. But here is something to encourage, to say we can work together, even when we don’t share core beliefs and methods. We do share our humanness. Thanks to that friend for telling me about the bridge in Portland.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/08/27/when-a-gay-mayor-partners-with-evangelical-churches-in-portland/

http://gospelmovements.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/USATODAY-Evangelism-2.01.pdf

Something There Is...

My Aunt Anna was a dues-paying member of the John Birch Society. Another aunt and an uncle were members, too, but Aunt Anna talked to me more often about the Birch Society beliefs than the others did. I heard her say once that she was afraid that liberals were creeping into the Society. I sent her a UNICEF card for Christmas one year. I think she was rather pleased to get a card from me, but she hastened to tell me, “We don’t believe in the United Nations, you know.” She saw the union of nations as a sign of the end times, as something engineered by the forces of the anti-Christ.

Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” suggests that the forces of nature work against dividing walls—winter frost heaving up the ground to make the stones fall away from one anther. He’d rather

have the walls down and live in harmony, while his neighbor was sure that “good fences make good neighbors.” Aunt Anna would have agreed with the neighbor.

My first and last post to “Bridge People” was made on August 17. Of 2013, I hasten to add. Before and since, I’ve thought of many people, famous and less well known, who have lived, who now live, as bridges in a world divided by so many mean chasms. But I couldn’t get myself to write about them. Maybe continuing to maintain two blogs is more than I can handle along with all my other projects. And maybe, Robert Frost to the contrary, there is something in nature or something in the energy of the world that

does not love a bridge. Maybe my inertia has been fostered by an energy striving to preserve divisions, to keep the chasms unbridgeable. Politicians and pundits slice up the United States into red and blue. Partisans look at a proposed bill not to see how it might benefit us but to ascertain which side of the divide it comes from. In 1948, Mohandas Ghandi was killed by a fellow Hindu because he was committed to bridging the gap between Muslims and Hindus.

Despite the powers that try to keep us separated from one another, from seeing what we share in common, I read stories every day about people who are spanning the differences, reaching out to others instead of building walls. It is these stories I want to tell. The inertia may simply be my own lack of discipline. I say this because I don’t want to sound paranoid or flaky, as if what I might post here is so important that the forces of darkness oppose me. Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that, with apologies to Mr. Frost, “Something there is that doesn’t love” a bridge.