On June 19th in the New York Times, George Yancy published a Stone article entitled “Is Your God Dead?”
I was so inspired by the power and prose of his piece that I am turning the microphone over today to this brilliant scholar will not only give you a break from my endless ranting, but will hopefully rekindle your outrage and stoke your passion for justice.
After I read this piece for the third time (yes, it is that good), I was struck by how easy it is for all of us to retreat into the comfort of our religious institutions or social bubbles and to remain complacent about the pain and suffering that confronts us daily on the streets and in the news. It made me wonder again what it will take for us to emerge from our safety zones, connect with folks who are having a different experience than we are, and to act with compassion.
I hope this article will provide enough of a shock to move us to make a personal commitment to our own integrity and a collective commitment to social justice.
Below is an excerpt and a link to the full article:
“I am pretty sure that no contemporary Christians have seen God, no contemporary religious Jews have seen Yahweh and no contemporary Muslims have seen Allah — certainly not face to face. Yet all of us have seen the aftermath of murdered children from war-torn countries, their fragile bodies covered with blood. I am haunted by the little body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi who lay dead and face down in 2015 on a Turkish beach after his family fled violence in Syria. I continue to be haunted by the murder of an unarmed Trayvon Martin in 2012. Hundreds of thousands of children around the world are suffering. We all have known about the cruel and despicable violence toward transgender individuals. We know about the magnitude of human trafficking, the magnitude of poverty, and the sickness of hatred. […]
Heschel writes, ‘The prophet’s word is a scream in the night.’ I wait to be awakened by that scream. I have not yet heard it. It is that scream, that deep existential lament, that will awaken us to the ways we are guilty of claiming to ‘love God’ while forgetting the poor, refusing the refugee, building walls, banning the stranger, and praying and worshiping in insular and segregated ‘sacred’ spaces filled with racism, sexism, patriarchy, xenophobia, homophobia and indifference.”
Read the rest of “Is Your God Dead?“
Also published on Medium.
Thanks Rick. Brings me to add that once an everyday moment turned prophetic moment and was recalled in these stirring words:
Thomas Merton’s Mystical Vision in Louisville
Merton’s famous revelation in downtown Louisville is described this way in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Thanks Artie and Amen. The moment we realize we are all One is the moment everything changes. That epiphany can’t be an intellectual insight; it needs to be a spiritual revelation. That’s why telling does no good. For me, it’s still intellectual. I’m still hoping to feel deeply and fully that we are All connected, interdependent, and at One.