"The Blessing I Didn't Seek and Couldn't Imagine."

Spiritual insight can come unexpectedly. Sure, I have self-consciously gone on spiritual searches and even pilgrimages, of sorts, and come away from those more intentional journeys rewarded and enriched, but today, I reflect once again on an experience I had 25 years ago, which still is rich enough to give me insight and instruction.

I guess I credit it as my first and most startling spiritual realization. To understand that, you’d need to know something of where I came from:

I grew up in an idyllic, protected haven, in the deep South, in a solidly middle-class, logical, passionless family of Presbyterians. Perhaps a snapshot will suggest my innocence and my quiet, protected environment.

Once, in my Junior year of high school in a my suburb of Memphis, 1968, I thought of a question. (Part of the significance of this is that little in my life at that time encouraged questioning.) We had a young, idealistic assistant minister who was marching with Martin Luther King Jr., and the church leadership was getting increasingly upset about this fact. Although I was in a very safe world, I was becoming aware that something was happening with black people--the civil rights movement. I began to feel confused and somewhat concerned about the poor, and so I asked my father once something heart-breakingly innocent like, "why are there poor?" And with timing like a humorless, Calvinist Woody Allen, he answered, "it says in the Bible that the poor will always be with us." ...End of discussion. I felt somewhat dissatisfied with that answer and some hunger for a deeper insight, but since I couldn’t put a name to that, I thanked my father for his time and tried to feel content.

Some months later, I had a chance to go to a conference in Washington, DC. The conference was 9/10ths fun and a smattering of social responsibility on the topic of the urban poor. I remember that Life magazine had just published a cover story on the results of a task force which had been investigating the ghetto and the racial tensions that had erupted and reduced ghettoes all over the country to rubble the summer before. One of the questions many people had in mind in the summer of ‘68 was would this be another "long, hot summer?" I flew to that D.C. conference reading that magazine, unable to comprehend the issues, but hopeful that at last I would have a chance to explore these questions and find some answers. Ignorant and positive. Positively ignorant.

For me, the high point began as the participants, about 40 middle-class juniors and seniors from all over the country, rode a bus to an inner-city YMCA where we were going to hear about a pilot program being run there to help the poor. We were from all over the country, but we were all white, all middle class. And until this moment our conference had been little more immediate than that Life article--a memorable meeting with Lyndon Johnson, a meeting with various AFL-CIO representatives, etc. But now, the real thing!

As the bus pulled into the ghetto, I had many impressions. I, as well as the delegates from the mid-West were clear, this was definitely not Kansas any more. Among my impressions was that I had entered a Black world. Every face was black, and peculiar there was a tremendous vitality in the street as Black people of all ages played, talked and sat on stoops.

We parked a few yards from the Y and walked in. I couldn’t help but notice that the people playing and talking on the street got mighty quiet as we filed in.

We immediately began our program, seeing slides and hearing about the very innovative pilot program being run there. The social workers were all black and Hispanic, and clear that it was essential that the program be run by racial minorities. That the minority culture could not be helped by outsiders, but only by their "own people." The spokesperson for the group was the most articulate forceful black man I had ever heard in person.

After a slide presentation, we adjourned to a huge open dining room, where the biggest impression was heat. Windows were open wide; huge fans were blowing. We sat in a large circle for questions and answers. I remember having to strain to hear over the noise of the fans and an increasingly insistent sound of June Bugs hammering away at the screens.

We were interrupted by a more insistent knock at the door. Gradually, one-by-one, every adult in the room was called out with increasingly serious and hushed tones while we teen-agers waited, confused and feeling increasingly tense.

Finally, the leader of the pilot program and the leader of our conference came to the middle of the circle and called for our attention. They explained that a delegation from the community had come to the Y and insisted that we must leave.

We were told that we should walk quietly to the bus. That we should not speak to anyone regardless of what was said or done to us. That we should not panic or run but that we should move briskly into the bus and that we would proceed immediately.

With no time to process this or discuss, we were herded out of the room toward the bus. We walked through a corridor of people who clearly felt deep hatred of us, angry that we had invaded their world and violated their community. I was stunned, feeling deeply their hatred of me for the color of my skin. The crowd was civil, no taunts were thrown and certainly no objects. But we had been evicted by an empowered community that did not welcome us. It was a powerful experience, one I will never forget.

That night and for years after, I was fixated on the sound of the June bugs on the screen, unable to know if they were insects, or rocks.

In the years since that experience, I have drawn many lessons from it. Lessons about racism, empowerment, social action. But increasingly, I have learned about spiritual insight. Although I was unharmed, in a moment, the bubble that had protected me was pierced and I could see, face-to-face the anger and the dignity of the black community. That personal, immediate experience of the "other" has never left me, or the realization that insight and enlightenment can come to you at any time, even when you are not seeking it.

After we got back from the ghetto that night, we went up onto the roof of our building and watched Washington burn. From the safety of that rooftop, we could see the fires of hatred, frustration, poverty in the distance. But I felt them very personally. In my room, I wrote a lengthy letter to my family, barely able to write for the tears that I could not control.

Over the years, I’ve reflected on this experience continually. It has held different messages at different times of my life. In my teen years, it was an awakening to the power of racism and of my interest in justice. In later years, I was fascinated by the power of black anger, empowering them to evict the white monster from their community. Later still, the power of community to heal and make us whole was preeminent. But in recent years, the power of the experience becomes again more personal and intimate, similar to the immediate experience when I was so young. The difference is that now I see a spiritual depth to the moment.

For me, the spiritual message is that insight requires an openness that makes you vulnerable to surprise. The surprise is bound up w/ ignorance, innocence, alienation. And having so suddenly been given this gift of transcending for a moment the limits of my own upbringing, I have felt ever since, eager for other chances to see from a mountain top, or a roof top or the first step of a bus, my own ignorance and innocence in flames.

I am now able to understand what I could not when I was younger, that I was blessed to have grown up in the humorless, logical, safe and protected Presbyterian, white, middle class household. That it was only from that protected, insulated haven that I could have awakened to the richer, darker world of hatreds and passions and closed hearts.

One of the most profound expansions of my spirit came in an atmosphere of quiet, intense hostility. It was a situation I would never have chosen, but having blundered into it, I welcome still the message that my life can be enriched by experience out of my control.

06/04/01