Cries for Justice at the Philadelphia Art Museum June, 2020
Over the past four weeks I have been feeling the terrible weight of racism in our country, freshly renewed by recent brutality. I grew up in a white neighborhood in the Philly suburbs basically ignorant of the way the country was treating our black citizens. My family was often in the city visiting relatives, relatives who lived in white neighborhoods and I vaguely remember conversations about where blacks might be moving. I must have been ten or twelve years old when I first was driven on an alternate route into the city through a black neighborhood. I saw black men and women talking on street corners and sitting on stoops and children playing in the streets. The housing looked deficient compared to the white city neighborhoods that I had visited and the children lacked the broad yards and open streets, parks and fields where I and my siblings played with our friends. The environment looked stressed. Did I already know that God loved these kids on this street as much as God loved me and my city relatives?
For the last fifty years I have been given the grace of knowing wonderful black men and women. I first assisted in an interracial project when as a deacon preparing for Jesuit priesthood in 1971 and since was blessed with ministry in a black parish and school. But now still I am struck dumb. That is, yes the neighborhoods I saw in the 1950s were deficient and they remain deficient through the years since. But I was able to meet people who lived in these neighborhoods, to worship with them, to visit in their homes and to enjoy baptisms and weddings and even many faith-filled funerals. I learned more about community, about reconciliation, about family and faith, about humor and solidarity, much more than I could have anticipated. But suffering, and very often raw and bitter suffering, visited every household. At best Christ shares the victory of the paschal mystery in so many of these households. But at worst the strain of economic struggle, the stress of poor health, and the lack of promising futures offered to the young fray and fracture the edges of even the strongest of families.
During the first days of June when I realized that Philly’s neighborhoods were in turmoil because of the terrible ugliness of the death of George Floyd and so many others, I felt sorrow for all the extraordinary men and women I knew in these neighborhoods who worked years and years to foster health and integrity, pastors who built senior and home-ownership housing, churches that sponsored investment clubs to support small business, and leaders and teachers refreshing schools and making them as good as any in the suburbs. With this sorrow, I came to realize, too, that the recurring violence against black men and women simply ignited a reaction fitting to its brutality.
Now when a tired calmness has returned to these
neighborhoods, these institutions and men and women of soul are still in place. And I find hope in knowing that they will stay in place and stand up. They and
their like will raise their voices and use this moment to strengthen their
institutions with added classrooms, added health centers, added housing, added
ways of reconciling with those responsible for just law enforcement.
A black brother Jesuit, Fr. Mario Powell, president of Brooklyn
Jesuit Prep, points to Psalm 13 as the cry of black Americans: “How long, O
Lord, will my enemy triumph over me?” He
asks us all to come close to the suffering.
“…until you jump up on the cross
with black Americans, there can be no Easter for America.”
