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In Conversation with Juanita Rasmus

As much as many might disagree, to discuss the contemporary situation in American society is to talk race relations. It is a topic as real and raw now as it ever was. And, although not a challenge unique to the United States, this country has had to face it time and again throughout her tumultuous history. Our writers help to give voice to different facets of this issue while offering hope in the face of overwhelming odds to the contrary.

 

That Crazy Li’l Thing Called Love

Patricia Raybon

 

In this poetically written piece, Patrician Raybon explores her experience of love, together with her husband, while on vacation in Key West, Florida, and some of their inner responses. As she describes, people of color have become so accustomed to secondary status or worse, it can feel almost odd to hear them spoken of in endearing ways. In bemused delight she shares,

“What we didn’t expect after the church massacre in the summer of 2015 is that people would care. Care isn’t a feeling Black folks typically experience in the world, even if they are believers.”

The culture of fear and narcissism is fully revealed when one is on vacation. Some, like our author, are seeking solace from the issues they face and the attendant fatigue of the same. Others get away, taking with them their prejudice that only grows bigger.

There is a fatigue at the core of ecclesiastical sub-culture, too “ground down and myopic, filled to the gills with . . . carefully crafted arguments and righteous indignation” that denies any remaining energy for love. Taking Jesus’ frequent escapes to solitude, they took vacation time to hit reset and renew their energy to love when love is rarely reciprocated. And, even in spite of the fact that they were paying customers, the brief relief from being lumped as part of a group often seen as one to avoid or fear, was life-giving.

As Raybon suggests, to live in God is to live a revolution. It means yielding our foregone conclusions and living as Jesus did, dining with the disagreeable; the counter-cultural life of the inclusive table. “There’s an open-minded beauty, in other words, to adopting Jesus’ way of being in the world. Sitting at a dinner table with tax collectors and harlots, the diseased and the disagreeable, but also the buttoned up Pharisees and teachers of the law, we’re still able to eat.”

One should sit up and notice that the ones most accustomed to being excluded are those quickest to respond with inclusion. Only those who have suffered voicelessness and invisibility can rise to become the kingdom’s welcome mat. The wealthy and powerful have too much to lose.

We must take the example of Jesus and learn to ask probing questions of ourselves and others that pry to the heart of things. The most shining example of love is always grace offered at the hands of those most accustomed to being denied the same. She adds a particularly poignant example of the multicultural choir whose primary claim to success isn’t the choice of music but the intimacy of unexpected connections across cultural lines.

In sum, she exhorts us not to give in or give up in the face of insurmountable issues. Instead, “When an old problem looks irretrievable and impossible, don’t give up on it. Instead, wait for breakthrough. . . . Then something amazing can arrive. Our Light.”

1. Henri Nouwen famously said, “true community is the place where that one person you can least endure will most surely be.” After suitable times for prayer and preparation, seek out that person. Pursue conversation together, perhaps tea or a meal. No agenda. No expectations. Just open, honest mutuality. Leave the rest to God.
2. Become a compassionate observer. Prayerfully seek how best to consider the following: how do we love our immigrant friend? Is there something I can do to help those caught in fear and racism to see Christ in the other? Am I willing to be fully present to this person like I would any other? Look at ‘the other’ and say “just like me this person has known disappointment, sadness, grief . . . hold their image before God.
3. Ask your choir director or music leader to choose an African-American, Asian and/or Latin song that could be sung for a special occasion of worship, highlighting the significance of many voices, one song. Throw open choral involvement to the community in pursuit of those divergent voices most necessary to paint a picture of kingdom unity.

 

 

Anamarie Guardado Dwyer: Caught between Two Worlds

Marian Flandrick

 

For Anamarie, her church at Mission San Xavier del Bac offered solace from the cauldron of pain that was often her daily life. She experienced the tension of black and white dichotomy, stuck in an all too common dualism so prevalent in the West.

After her conversion, the movement of God by the Spirit continued to grow in its reach and impact in Anamarie’s life. She credits her Catholic tradition for providing much of her faith foundation but shares that in “her quest for a church home, she found she needed a church that wasn’t so large, and one with other Mexican-Americans. . . . but soon realized that a Spanish language church wasn’t for her either. As a second generation Mexican-American, she was somewhere in the middle of the two worlds.” She was able to glean for her present theology from her religious past, finding ongoing applications suitable to her deepening faith.

Anamarie’s experience is typical of many who caught between their culture of origin and the place of their enculturation. There is a felt need for the racial proximity and the comfort found from common language, customs, and things held in regard. But there is the reality of life lived in cultural tension, a ‘something’-American looking for home. In the rush to find easily marketable terminologies that act as cultural coagulants, many like Anamarie find themselves unfairly lumped into a faceless dough of little understood people groups.

Perhaps her greatest wisdom is found in her unique understanding of spirituality, race, and poverty: “A lot of racial problems have roots in class. We don’t talk much about privilege, but poverty is huge. It affects spiritual practices. When people find it hard to make a living, how do we ask them to take time to reflect, to pause, to take retreats? A full day or even half day retreat takes up their precious time and costs them money they don’t have to spend. How do you explain to someone in that difficult situation the importance of hearing the Lord? What does that look like when you aren’t in a privileged class?”

What, indeed.

1. Gather together a group interested in learning more about race, language, and freedom in America. Watch this clip of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNCSIWCyvTY [accessed 6 March 2023]). Discuss the impact of these same issues in our own contemporary setting.
2. Get engaged in a relationship with a person/family of a different race. Find out what matters most to them. Perhaps you can earn the blessing of dinner at their home, or better, invite them to yours. and invite them to dinner to the home of an immigrant family where there are numerous generations available for conversation. Contrast and compare the experiences of grandparents, parents and children—how they relate or not to their present American experience.
3. Language is important. Words mean different things to different people. Seek to deepen your understanding of another of mixed race by means of listening exercises. Ask many questions. Make no assumptions. Pursue common humanity through mutually understood language. Prayerfully internalize your discoveries.

 

 

Race, Poverty, and Spiritual Formation

Marlena Graves

 

Through Marlena Graves’ personal story, we’re given an inside look into the existence of a minority family struggling to survive, let alone thrive, among the wealthier mainstream. To be instantly filed into predetermined categories based on hearsay, fear, and the social damnation of stigma, affixes imperfection to one’s humanity.

“My lunch ticket publicly marked me as a poor have-not.” Poverty is the unbidden gift that keeps on giving its pantheon of unasked for shame. Simply by being who she was, she bore the marks of poverty and, by extension, shame. Such things mark us, they wound and burden us. It forces us to think less of ourselves than does God. To many, it also leads to predetermined outcomes and the self-fulfilling prophecy of scarcity, want, and chaos.

To many, celebrations with sacred origins meant to instill a sense of union with others, now baptized in American greed, lead only to alienation and further shame for those facing endless poverty. Says Graves, “ Christmas was a sad time, a reminder of the bad news in my life . . . at Christmastime . . . I was acutely aware of my ‘have not’ and ‘less than’ status.”

It should come as no surprise that those most amenable to the mysteries, commands, and invitations of Scripture are those who most feel the need for those things in lives otherwise impoverished. “In my poverty, I could identify most with the Israelites in the wilderness,” she shares. Those who live in poverty are most ready to receive the promise of a God whose heart pounds a little harder for their plight than any other, whose own people were once mistreated leftovers at the hands of overlords.

The poor are uniquely positioned to understand the subversive sociopolitical undertones of the gospel. Often, those with withering lives have towering souls. They’ve had no other opportunities and have taken up the call to union with the God who sees. “Looking back,” she recalls, “I realize that without me knowing it, my growing up life cultivated a poverty of spirit within . . . [and] Running headlong into God’s embrace has become a spiritual discipline.

In our sophistication, the western church, even in our talk of spiritual disciplines, do so from the vantage point of the privileged, the victors. Jesus, in the gospel, makes it clear that the poor understand long before the rich what are the truest and deepest gifts.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

1. For so many, simply having access to solitude is a challenge. Perhaps offer your home as a place for private space for someone whose meager living situation denies this blessing.
2. Find a grade school that serves “free” lunches to kids from lower income families. Let that be your only meal for a school week. Observe your physical, mental, and emotional outcomes as a result of the lack of adequate nutrition.
3. Have your church plan a weekend spiritual retreat for underprivileged families. Those who would never have opportunity to enjoy catered meals, a warm bed in a room outside their house while deepening spiritually would be given what so many of us take for granted.
4. Engage the imagination. Says Pastor Juanita Rasmus, “it is often the case that those with the least have the most creativity.” Take a team of artists, poets, writers, dancers to the local mission. Begin a process of mutual art-making, rich and poor, whites and non-whites together, to the glory of God.

 

 

A White Pastor’s Role in a Multicultural World

Page Brooks

 

Drawing on his own family’s experiences as an adoptive haven for multi-racial children, Brooks shares his journey as one wrestling with what it means to seek unity and interracial harmony. He shares baldly, “We grew up where racial division was simply part of the culture. . . . [it] was just the way it was.” In so doing, he highlights the cultural assumptions to which they, as we, are so easily predisposed.

We need to be reminded regularly that history is written by and for the victors. One person’s revolt is another’s rebellion. The very way by which we view our own histories colors how we see color.

Racial epiphany came to the Brooks’s home by means of adoption. Adopting children of other races helped provide the courage and impetus to plant a church that could give voice to and illustrate the principles they held to be most important. They lived and served out of the strength of their own personal experience, lending it both credibility and energy.

The gospel of Jesus is a message of radical redemption. But it is also one of bringing into one great household of faith all who call him Lord. Their home acted as microcosm of what would later provide the incentive and example for a multiracial church-planting effort.

They recognized that everything preaches, how they sing, pray, run programs, who gets to lead worship. And, in the power of such intentionality sought to promote it in all they did as a local congregation. As everyone is spiritually nourished from the same elements together we are given a picture of the reconciling gospel.

1. Practice: take exchange students for a period of time for the purpose of deepening your understanding of another’s racial heritage and customs.
2. Practice: partner with existing community development programs in an effort to broaden your congregation’s involvement alongside those of lesser resources and different ethnicity. Perhaps open your church building to short-term mission groups seeking a place to sojourn. Join in their projects with them, learn from how they relate together, with you, with others.
3. Read the entire Exodus story. In the place of Israel, put the people group with which you most struggle. See them as the beloved sons and daughters of God, enslaved and burdened. Pray along with Moses, “let my people go.” And invite The Holy Spirit to instigate transformation.

 

 

Embracing Black Lives to Be Made Whole

Joshua Du Bois

 

Like the intimate pages of a diary, this piece gives the reader a vulnerable look of one man into the violent racial picture in America. “It hit me like a ton of bricks: no matter how far I had come, we had come, I was still black, in America.” Reading such words one can hardly remain unmoved to the plight of those for whom ‘home’ remains a cautious, tentative, even unsafe word. His own story reveals how the goals and aspirations of many black people living in America can be so quickly shattered in the face of unyielding violence.

It is clear that, despite removal of the most discriminatory laws surrounding race, a “spiritual residue” remains. And, if it is true that time heals all wounds, there are many still living under threat of misunderstanding or violence for whom the statement seems a cruel mockery. Moreover, it reveals how deep issues of race go within us as people and as a culture. He goes on to say that our “history, this culture, has clouded our vision. It has prevented us from looking at one another through God’s eyes. We think we can see, but we are often walking blind.” It is generally much easier to see the log in another person’s life than the forest in our own.

His final injunction is crucial for us all, “It is the task of believers to embrace the tension of this moment, seek the guidance of Holy Spirit regarding the aspects of our racial vision that are still askew. . . .”

Yes and yes.

1. Practice Lectio Divina on biblical equality and justice. Choose one or all of the following passages:
2. Galatians 3:27–29
3. 1 John 4:7–8
4. Romans 2:1–4
5. Romans 10:12–13
6. How do these scriptures challenge you regarding your own thoughts on racial equality?
7. How might the Spirit be speaking to you to reconsider ways in which your present ideas are out of sync with the scripture?
8. How might God be inviting you to help educate yourself and others toward a better understanding of racial righteousness?
9. Prayerfully assemble a discussion group centered around issues of race. Ensure that a number of African-Americans are involved who may offer perspective and guidance. Share some of your conclusions with your local congregation.
10. Fast for thirty days from all media. Media is marketing, aimed at ratings. By its constant bombardment of images, it can decide for us our views on people and situations. Allow your mind to become reoriented towards God and God’s love for all.

 

 

Nothing will change in our present racial landscape until God’s people begin to pay attention to “the other.” We must ask ourselves whether or not we are willing to be in the present moment with “that” person; hear them, see in them the same imago Dei that is in all of us.

I leave you with these words from Juanita Rasmus,

 

We must take every opportunity to engage in a holistic experience of reconciliation which includes calling out the sin of racism and doing the wrestling work of forgiveness and accountability to live out the love revolution that Jesus started.