Sabbatical Journal 1

Internet access has been spotty so I’ll be uploading these as the opportunity presents itself.

My first two Sundays on my motorcycle road trip/sabbatical presented remarkable contrasts. The second was spent in Big Bend National Park, the first place on my list of sabbatical destinations. The previous Sunday had been part of the preliminary phase a stop along the way as I headed toward the American Southwest and California, the parts of the country I’ve never seen on a motorcycle.

Falls Church, VA to Big Bend, TX is a long drive, so I stopped and visited relatives in the Carolinas as I began, and then headed for Austin and short stay with my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. From there, the road trip/sabbatical would begin in earnest.

Even when I was younger, I could never have made the drive to Austin straight through, and now that I’m old, I decided on a three day drive rather than two. (My days of 600 mile days in the saddle are long behind me.) As I prepared to depart the Carolinas, I picked a couple of stops that broke the journey into rough thirds. The first happened to be Montgomery, AL. 

When I texted my wife that I was stopping in Montgomery, she sent back an article about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice there, noting that it was supposed to be really good. I’d seen news coverage when it first opened, at least on the Lynching Memorial part. The Memorial has a nearby adjacent museum as well, but with a 400 mile drive that day, I decided to take in just the Lynching Memorial.

Growing up in the South, I never heard much about lynchings. I supposed them to be vigilante sort of things that were aberrations from the norm, the kind of thing that I sometimes saw in an old Western movie. But lynchings of African Americans in the South (and in more than a few spots outside it) were not aberrant, vigilante actions. They were part of the Jim Crow culture instituted after the Civil war, a culture determined to keep blacks subservient. 

Along with segregation, poll taxes, and other officially sanctioned tactics, lynchings were an important, unofficially sanctioned tactic. Often these were not clandestine, in-the-dark-of-night events. Some lynchings were attended by thousands of spectators. Local police would provide crowd control, and white parents would pose their children for photos next to the lifeless body. (Lynching victims were often beaten and burned along with being hung.)

The memorial has separate, suspended metal blocks, each representing a county with the victims’ names (if known) and dates of the lynchings. The numbers were appalling, and they played out as one might expect, with counties in the Deep South and other areas where the economy had been largely slave dependent having the larger numbers of lynchings. (St. Claire County in Illinois was a top offender however, with 40 lynchings.)

Far from vigilante aberrations, lynchings were a terror campaign designed to keep blacks fearful and, therefore, in their place. Mass migrations of African Americans to the North was about much more than better opportunity there. These were literally refugees fleeing terrorism. It’s no wonder that southern leaders kept lynchings out of the history books and schools I attended in North and South Carolina.

The memorial had many plaques along the walls that told the tale of one particular lynching. This one caught my eye. “Elizabeth Lawrence was lynched in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1933 for reprimanding white children who threw rocks at her.” When I think about this sort of horror happening with the large scale acceptance and support of the white population, it makes me terrible pessimistic about the state of the human condition. Many times I’ve heard people ask how it was that so many Germans stood by as Hitler imprisoned and then killed millions of Jews with good answers hard to come by. The scale and the official government sanction of the Holocaust are very different, but the public acceptance, nonchalance, a participation in lynchings strike me as very much the same thing.

I suppose that this is why there are Holocaust deniers and why the South has never really owned up to its treatment of people of color. To do so is to admit to something appalling about ourselves and the society we constructed. It is much more appealing to construct fictions about the Civil War as a noble fight for states rights and to forget things such as lynchings for which no heroic or palatable narrative can be constructed.

And that brings me back around to the remarkable contrast between my first and second Sundays on the road. On the first Sunday I witnessed the appalling, horrifying depths to which humans can sink. Not just a few, deranged humans, but the vast majority, perhaps all of them. But on the second Sunday, I witnessed the untold grandeur of Creation, something the pictures I took at Big Bend don’t come close to capturing. And I wonder if I’m not experiencing the very contrast provided by the first two Creation stories in the biblical book of Genesis.

The first story, known to many merely by its seven-day formula, depicts God at work creating the world. Humans are not actors in this story. They are to have a special role of caring for this creation, but in the story itself, they never speak. They are one among many wonders God makes, all of them deemed “good” by their Creator.

But the Hebrews who pulled together what we call the Old Testament using various writings, stories, and myths available to them, knew that this opening story could not be the only one. It required a darker partner, because they, too, knew of this terrible contrast between God’s grand Creation and humanity’s capacity for appalling behavior and unwillingness to own up to such behavior.

In terms of composition, the so-called Adam and Eve story is much older than the seven-day story, but am I glad those ancient Hebrews chose the order they did. At least we get to start with grandeur. But the dark turn will not wait. Because modern people so seldom understand the use and purpose of myth, we miss the terrible pathos of the second story and the hard questions that it raises. Has human behavior irrevocably damaged Creation? And what of humanity’s relationship to its Creator as well as to one another? Contrary to popular thought, the ancient writings in the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not unsophisticated, scientifically bad attempts to explain “what happened.” Rather they are very sophisticated religious thought that makes use of story and myth to grapple with the terrible questions that arise when facing the sort of terrible contrast I experienced on two, successive Sundays. 

The answers that Israel’s theologians give tend not to fit neatly into the sort of religious formulas that many modern Christians seem to like. But through the course of these stories there continues to arise a hope that God will not abandon humanity to its terrible capacities. Hope keeps rearing its head, a theme that continues in the New Testament. 

A regular feature of this hope is that it demands we are honest about our own complicity in creating the appalling stories that continue to be written. Hope does not come by explaining them away, excusing them, or denying them. It requires something often deemed unpopular and old fashioned, confession and repentance. Oh, how we resist that, as my own Southern story so well attests. But God keeps intruding and offering chance for hope. Or so I hope.