.jpg)
Feature
Revolution - Revelation - Reconciliation
by Blayney Colmore
But Jon, aren’t you scared?
Scared? I’m terrified every day.
So why don’t you come home? You’ve done enough.
The weird thing, Blayney, is, that this is home now. Who could have imagined a white boy from Keene, New Hampshire finding his home in the black ghetto of Selma, Alabama?
But what’s it like being scared all the time?
Terrible. The only thing worse would be to give up the home for myself I never imagined I’d ever find.
Jon and I were seminary classmates in 1965 at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, two blocks from Harvard Square. We hadn’t been close friends. In fact, Jon dissed me in our Systematic Theology class for trying to sound erudite. He had years of Jesuit training and regarded me—accurately—as a breezy 60s feel-good dilettante.
Martin Luther King, Jr. called for people to show up in Selma after the Alabama State Police beat peaceful demonstrators at Edmund Pettus Bridge. Jon went with a group from our seminary. When the march to Montgomery was over, all but Jon returned to Cambridge.
He moved in with a black family and ran a tutoring program for children. He also took part in attempts to register black voters and integrate the local Episcopal Church. His old wreck of a Volkswagen with New Hampshire plates became a target for vandalism, an enraging symbol to white Selma of Yankee meddlers coming to change their way of life.
Revolution, from the Latin, revolvere, to revolve. To turn around. Change.
The citizens of Selma in 1965 understood that Jon Daniels—that rather formal, stiff, intellectual young man from small town middle class New England, classically educated in the Roman Catholic rote tradition—was a revolutionary.
And Jon understood that his first few days in Selma had revolutionized him, turned his life—his very sense of himself—around in ways he couldn’t have imagined, and would now never give up no matter what it cost him.
In August of that year, Jon, a Roman Catholic priest, and two young black girls, all of whom had gone to notorious Lowndes County to try to register black voters, were jailed. When they were released on that beastly hot summer day, Jon led the four of them across the street to a bottle store to get a Coke. As he approached the screen door of the store, Tom Coleman, a sometime deputy sheriff, kicked open the door, swore an oath, and fired his shotgun. Jon saw him just soon enough to push the girl behind him off the step before he took the full blast in his belly, dying almost instantly.
Jon would have been a revolutionary had he lived to an old age. Because of how he died, he added to his title, martyr. Martyrs are steroids to revolution.
Our usual understanding of revolution is a violent overturning of the power structure. Our country came into being through a revolution.
Though it’s hard to imagine a revolution that didn’t include political power change, the revolution more closely attuned to its Latin meaning is the kind that took place in Jon before he was killed.
And that revolution—unlike many that merely change who wields the instruments of power—can never be reversed.
Jon had returned to Cambridge for a couple of weeks in the spring to take his exams. One afternoon, he and I sat on the library steps in the warm sun and talked. First, about that theology class two years earlier in which he had cleverly exposed the shallowness of my thinking, and then, about his time in Selma and why he was going back.
I’ve long wanted to apologize for the way I attacked you that day in our Systematics seminar.
That’s kind of you, Jon, but you were right. I was blowing smoke.
Maybe, but it seems so petty now. Trivial. A week after I moved in with that family in Selma, everything changed for me. All that stuff in the Bible about hospitality? It’s real, Blayney. More real than a mountain of books on theology. I feel more a part of that family than even of my own back in New Hampshire.
But, Jon, you’re a white Yankee. How the hell do you think you can find home in a black ghetto in the deep south?
It’s crazy, I know, but it’s the realest, most powerful thing that’s ever happened to me.
Having grown up in the south, I knew both the pernicious effects of segregation, and the frightening determination of entrenched power. Even though I lived with segregated schools, water fountains and waiting rooms, I was from North Carolina, the mid-south. I never traveled the roads of the deep south— Mississippi, or Alabama—without feeling afraid.
One of the first demonstrations I ever took part in was in Boston during the busing controversy in which the city, under court mandate, began busing black and Irish students between the black ghetto of Roxbury and the Irish ghetto of South Boston. The predictable debacle was exploited by Louise Day Hicks, an Irish member of the city council, who made her opposition the cornerstone of her run for mayor. The old New England city felt like it had slipped down the coast into the segregated south.
As a number of us prepared to go stand in front of the State House with signs supporting busing, I cringed at the thought of some burly Irishman having at me. We were required to take part in a training by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. To this day, I carry in my wallet the handout they gave us. Burned into my memory is their teaching about real revolutionary change, the toughest standard I have encountered before or since: “When confronted by someone who opposes your view, picture where in your solution to the problem your opponent fits. If there is no place for him, it is not a revolution, not greater justice, but merely replacing his tyranny with yours.”
Dr. King helped me see the civil rights movement not only as a movement for the freedom of oppressed blacks, but for freedom of whites enslaved by racism. My picture of the world, of power and how it worked, pivoted, turning me in an opposite direction.
An elemental—but uneasy—piece of me, formed by generations of southern culture was turned around. Forever.
On the Boston Common, in the shadow of the gold-domed statehouse, is a statue of Mary Dyer, almost precisely on the spot where she was hung from the great elm tree on June 1, 1660.
Her crime? Claiming that a person’s own inner light was sufficient to determine the validity of their experience of God, challenging the laws of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that required a committee of male elders to rule on the validity of a divine visitation before a person could become a voting member of the colony. (That’s right, Massachusetts!)
Mary Dyer and Jon Daniels, revolutionaries (and martyrs) in the literal, Latin meaning, turned from an identity adopted from surrounding culture, to their own inner identity and authority. It’s the kind of authority that cedes to no one what we call conscience, but what might more accurately be named authentic self.
Of course using such radical inner experience as the authority on which public order rests is disruptive and chaotic—which is why revolutions and martyrs are infrequent.
Revolution begins with revelation and, if it succeeds, ends in reconciliation.
The revelation is that the pain involved in continuing life as it has been is greater than the scary risk of change. Reconciliation is required to complete the process. If it truly is a revolution, powerful people have a stake in preventing it. It can only be completed when there is some sort of reconciliation between those who promoted change and those who opposed it.
A couple of years after Jon was murdered (Tom Coleman was acquitted by a jury of his peers who judged that he had acted in self-defense against a dangerous pervert who’d wanted to disrupt the community’s way of life), three aging wives of Episcopal bishops went to St. Augustine, Florida to demonstrate and were briefly arrested. They were two old Yankee women and one black, the wife of John Burgess, who was the first black Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts.
They met with a group after they returned to describe their experience and were asked, “Why in the world would you proper ladies do something like that?”
The two Yankee ladies explained the noblesse oblige business of one’s duty. And, clearly enjoying this part, Mrs. Peabody said, “We thought those southern men would find it embarrassing to have to put proper old New England ladies in their jail.”
Esther Burgess added, “We also knew there was a chance our presence would incite latent racial violence, and we were offering ourselves as targets of that violence.”
Mrs. Peabody looked shocked. “Surely, Esther, you’re not suggesting we went there to incite violence.”
Mrs. Burgess’ eyes narrowed. You had the sense she had been harboring this. “That’s precisely what I am suggesting,” she retorted. “Until the latent violence that this injustice is built on surfaces, no real change can take place. So long as the violence lies buried, the leadership may change, but the old system will stay intact.”
Good intentions don’t drive revolution. Until something essential, perhaps glandular, shifts within us, our own instinctive fears of change keeps us quiet. Good thing, too, because before they resolve injustice, revolutions make a mess.
Most revolutions’ beginnings are rarely detected until much later. Who could have known when Rosa Parks wearily refused to move to the back of that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, that she had fired the opening salvo of a revolution that would so alter our nation—that one who would have been relegated to the back of that bus would now be in the White House?
It may be that the recent disruption of economic power will turn out to be a revolution. For the moment, it hangs in the balance. Will we continue to worship at the altar of unfettered free enterprise, raising up mega-millionaires, hoping we might hit that lottery ourselves? Or has the self-defeating deification of wealth, eclipsing our common humanity, so reassembled our picture of ourselves that we are about to make changes we would never have considered just a couple of years ago?
Despite our natural conservatism—our fear of change—revolution is our lot, the natural order. The slowness of our consciousness to absorb it makes the change feel radical when it finally becomes irresistible and our world shifts to accommodate it.
In truth, we are designed as catalysts (martyrs all) for this process. Our cells, mysteriously assembled from the chance encounter of the swiftest sperm and an ovum, constructing a marvelously complex carbon platform, take their brief, spellbinding turn in an unfolding revolution we honor with every breathtaking exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. When that exquisite adventure is complete, those cells offer themselves for continuing creation.
Jon Daniels and Mary Dyer gave their lives for the revolutionary reality that burned itself into their souls. With perhaps somewhat less fanfare, so will we.
Blayney Colmore, a retired Episcopal priest, writes a weekly piece he sends through e-mail (blayneyc@earthlink.net), and a blog, (www.blogblayney.blogspot.com). He has published two books: In The Zone: Notes on Wondering Coast to Coast, and God Knows: It’s Not About Us. He and his wife Lacey live in rural southern Vermont until the snow flies, when they shift to coastal southern California.