A few days ago I received an email from the Leadership Team of my own community, the Sisters of Mercy, asking me to read and sincerely reflect upon this National Catholic Reporter article, “The Assumptions of White Privilege and What We Can Do About It.” The Team’s email asked us to take a deep look at our own inner, deeply rooted dispositions and to eliminate any of them that would in any way feed racism. They said that “educating ourselves also expands our personal and collective consciousness of our complicity.”
The article addressed racism as it appeared to surface in the May 26 Central Park encounter of a female dog walker and a black male. As I read the article, and as our Leadership Team hoped would happen, I came to a deeper understanding of the roots of racism and perhaps the reason racism keeps surfacing in our American society: it may be rooted in a deeper attitude, a good attitude that goes bad every once in a while – sort of like what this adage warns us, “Too much of a good thing can be bad for us.”
Perhaps the core of the problem is not racism; perhaps it is something like our seeking the comfort and sense of “at-homeness” we feel by being among “our own” people, be they white, those of our own ethnicity or the people we have developed a “bonded-ness with”, even among church parishioners! That sense of “at-homeness”, of comfort and well-being goes away when we feel ill or threatened or lonely. But that, too, may not go deep enough to be the core because that is caused by whatever, at the moment, is winning in our personal struggle to be the “me” our Creator fashioned me to become. That “me” is a person who participates deeply in the life of God – a God who is love itself, this Trinity of Persons, ever expressing an out-flowing of love and comfort to the Other. I am meant to see others that way. I am meant to be comforting to others rather than seeking comfort for myself. Jesus’ teachings are calling me to this outpouring of loving concern and entering into our destined oneness with God and each other. But. . . I get sidetracked. I’m not quite there yet. None of us is quite there yet!
WE ARE ALL SINNERS: WE FALL SHORT OF THE MARK
While I do not condone the Central Park woman’s reaction in the aforementioned May 26 incident, I recognize that she may have, at that moment, been experiencing weakness or fright. We all have such moments. We say that these moments “color” our perception of reality. Perhaps they let surface our truly deepest state of reality – what we really care about as opposed to what we want to believe we care about? And when we experience weakness, pain or a threat, one of these bad inclinations we have not yet worked on, not “educated” ourselves about, gets the best of us. As odd as it seems, and as author Flannery O’Connor tells us in so many of her stories, these are moments of grace which we often miss or refuse to accept.
AND SO WE NEED TO COME TO CHURCH REGULARLY
This is just one of the many reasons why we need to come together in the church on a regular basis – to acknowledge our complicity – to move, for an hour, out of our “me first/my family/my friends first” mode of being and nurture the “I am here to help me put God and the other first” core of our beings. That is what the real COVID-19 and racism eradification teams should be addressing in ourselves, first, and then, collectively, in our families, workplaces and parishes.
That is the first step we need to make in order to be racism-free Christ-followers. And to do this, as our Church calls us to do, we need to come together – acknowledging our weaknesses, expressing our trust in God and in each other that we are a community participating in the life of our Trinitarian God of ever-flowing Love. It is there and with that core value of being in that ever-flowing love that we will overcome racism and all causes of evil.
As we gather – virtually now – on this Trinity Sunday let us breathe new life into the Church and the world.
Sister Loretta
Notes:
In 2016 Franciscan Father Richard Rohr wrote an article “How God As Trinity Dissolves Racism.”
Click here for an explanation of Andrei Rublev’s Icon of the Holy Trinity pictured at the top of this post.
