Two evenings ago after days of taunts and false alarms, I found the first flakes falling I knew that the curtain was closing on my evening walks. At the beginning of the semester I was assigned readings about spiritual practices. One of the first of these practices required creating a time of solitude or reflection at the end of the day. I gave it a try and got quite used to it. Now it’s getting cold.
I can feel the days get dense and narrow near the end of autumn. They are already getting crushed into tiny units of clock time white-washed in fluorescent light where it only gets sunny and warm imagination.
This year’s long autumn tempted me with a secret cache of time and I took it. I stole off most evenings before bed into the suburban streets of Fridley kicking the fallen leaves just to hear them tumble and scrape against the concrete while I thought about Carolyn Pressler’s OT notes wondering what it means that anyone still reads the Hebrew Bible- that anyone even wrote it in the first place. In the long autumn I started to ask again what it mean that I am still reading the Bible, now that it opens up to me like a handful of tiny, bright stars sprinkled across the night sky, drawing me underneath its canopy so I can feel around and listen for new sounds.
What did those writers hear that made them into humans formed and aroused to life by the hands and breath of deity? What did they see that made them look again, certain that there was something else?
Did they see what Sojourner saw and that her mother saw when they looked up to the night sky? I’m looking and listening too, even to the leaves I’m kicking about with my feet while I think about Augustine and poor brother Luther. They did finally find an end (or at least a beginning to the end) to their tortures underneath that canopy as well. Whatever was said that inspired writing about an Abraham and a Moses must have also intoned with a surplus of resonance that outmatched Augustine’s desire and consoled Luther’s conscience with grace enough to account for the remainder. I think Augustine, Luther and Calvin did make some headway for us. They rendered aid to consciences seeking a place to rest. But what next?
Something remains that I can feel in the fallen leaves while the moon beams at me from behind soft charcoal clouds. I can feel it in my bones and I can hear it in Billy and Nina’s Strange Fruit and I think I see pieces of it in James Cone as well. The brother is right, you know, about Niebuhr’s investment in Jim Crow’s status quo. And I also think he is right that in the United States the cross of Jesus Christ is the spectacular lynching extravaganza that betrays a fatal flaw in Protestantism’s narcoleptic conscience that I still struggle to fully apprehend.
That makes me think again about the social context of Luke’s Gospel that Marilyn has burned into me and I remember that someone in Rome seems to have believed that frequent public hangings could permanently arrest movements toward liberation and sustain Rome’s idea of peace. Is it not an obscene joke that some American Christians recently believed that their place in the American dream would be secure if only congregations of White lynch mobs could be washed in the blood of crucified Black people? Crucifying Black people did not save expectant congregants eagerly grasping their children by the hand gazing with devotion upon our charred and dismembered remains in dark woods and crowded town squares and I wonder if they ever understood why not.
Then I ask the autumn moon and the fallen leaves and the one who made me notice them if it is not time to stop making their problem my problem too.
- Jermaine Ross, MDiv student
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