On May 23 she described one of the “reasons” that undergirded the violent attempt to destroy America’s stumbling democracy on July 6, 2021 that we heard about on national television Thursday night. She was sitting in the center of the Great Choir, the space in our National Cathedral that provides seating for worshippers during the week, and on Sundays, for the Cathedral Choir.
She was surrounded on both sides by two very distinguished, compassionate and intelligent white men of privilege. On her right was the Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Holerith, Dean of the Cathedral, and on her left was David Brooks, well-known journalist and founder of Weave: The Social Fabric Project.
“She” was Dr. Catherine Meeks, executive director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta, Georgia.
The discussion topic, part of the Cathedral’s on-going “Honest to God” series, was “Love Thy Neighbor: Building Stronger Communities.”
In the aftermath of the Buffalo mass murders, the Uvalde, Texas mass murders the day before, and a week before 12 more mass shootings over the Memorial Day weekend, Dr. Meeks asked “How much of America wants to be made well? Do we really want everyone to have equality?”
Everyone? It has to be clear to any rational person, any empathic person, that one of our (only) two political parties does not want us – the U.S. – to be made well. And with respect to equality for everyone? Forget it.
I kept jotting down Meeks’s questions, powerful bullets of inquiry that penetrated my armor of beliefs of what I thought was an accurate comprehension about what racism and inequality was and is. I have never heard or felt the kind of truth-telling that the woman in the middle spoke on that Monday evening.
“I think, “Meeks said, “we like the world we have created. I don’t think we want that world to change.” In describing broad opposition to government financial programs to support the needy, she noted that there are many people who feel they had “worked hard” for what they have and so why should “they” get a handout?
In response to Meek’s core question “Do we really want to be made well,” David Brooks, has said “It’s clear that we have a crisis of connection in this country. I do a lot of reporting across the country and see firsthand the loneliness and division. So many people feel unseen and misunderstood. Blacks feel that whites don’t understand their daily experience,” he said, underscoring Meeks’s earlier disavowal of the national “awareness” of racism that the George Floyd murder by two former Minneapolis police officers provoked. “The flames of racism in this country are brighter today,” she said, “because of George Floyd. But you can’t put a Band-Aid on what has been happening since the days of slavery.”
On the Weave web site, Brooks states that he founded Weave because he finds “our national problems are really relational problems. I realized,” Brooks said, “that the solution wouldn’t come from Washington, D.C. It had to happen in our neighborhoods.”
At one point in the discussion, Dr. Meeks asked this question: “Do we really want to change society from what we have created? We like what is, which is why it doesn’t change. We talk about it. There are things we would like to see change. We dream about it. We think ‘I want things to be different … but I don’t want to change.’”
In response to a question from Dean Holerith about what needs to be done, Meeks said “We need to become disturbed enough that we can’t help but change. The pain of the status quo has to be bad enough so that you become willing to take a chance on something new … finding something in the ‘other’ that can connect us.”
These words led me back to the day before when Dr. Meeks gave a sermon in the National Cathedral.
She asked the congregation, “what tutorials are before you now? Are you lying there wondering if you want to take a chance on change or not? Wondering if you want to bear up under the transformation that might occur if you say yes to whatever lessons and invitations are being given to you?”
“What,” she asked “is the major thing that needs to be set free in you this morning so that there will be a clear response saying, “yes, I want to get well?” What is the major thing that you need to let go of to allow yourself to be set free?”
John Bos is a contributing writer for Green Energy Times and the editor of “After the Race,” a children’s book about competition and collegiality. His column appears every other Saturday. He invites questions and comments at john01370@gmail.com.