With Sighs Too Deep for Words

Give me that old time religion, Give me that old time religion, Give me that old time religion, It's good enough for me.   It was good for Paul and Silas, It was good for Paul and Silas, It was good for Paul and Silas, It's good enough for me   “Old Time Religion” (African American Spiritual, Public Domain)   Beer and Bible is a small bible study group at our church – about a dozen or so attendees has been our max number so far. B&B meets every 2nd Wednesday of the month at 6:30 pm to discuss selected scripture we’ve read on our own since the last gathering. Before the COVID Era (BCE), we met at Merlin’s Pub, a couple of blocks from our church, to drink a beverage of our choice, ranging from beer to wine to water. Not everyone likes beer. Some of us also enjoyed fish and chips with our drinks while some sampled other pub foods from the menu while others mooched off other people’s plates.    It’s a fun fellowship with a great deal of laughter and learnin...

(Dana Amihere/LAist) In late October or early November, Steve Reiser, my pastor at Epworth United Methodist Church, asked me if I wanted to write for  Black Voices Unveiled . It was a first-time event presented by Minnesota Annual Conference’s Commission on Race and Religion / Racial Reconciliation Movement partnered with Black Methodists for Church Renewal.   I hesitated to commit at first because I didn’t know what to write nor why I was writing it. I was full of questions with no answers. So I contacted Shawn Moore -- a pastor at Living Spirit UMC, one of the organizers, and someone I somewhat knew -- with an email bombarding him with all my questions about writing guidelines, theme, genre, audience, purpose, deadline, and more.   Ron Bell, a pastor at Camphor United Methodist Church and another organizer of the event, responded with answers to five of my many questions: The deadline – November 13 Theme – “ give voice to the current social condition we find ourselves” ...

  If you white,  yo u alright If you yellow,  y ou mellow If you brown,  s tick around If you black,  s tep back   We were Negroes and I was in the first grade when our teacher for some inexplicable reason asked us to line up by skin color. Thinking generously, one might think she was just trying out a new method for lining up so the same beginning and end of the alphabet weren’t in the front and the back. Thinking otherwise, one could imagine all manner of reasons as I have over the more than six decades since then.    Still it’s inexplicable because this was in segregated Mississippi, meaning all the students were Negroes as was our teacher. But I no longer think the why is really important as I look back.   I see my six-year-old self place myself in line among my darker chocolate friends near the end of the line. My friends laugh and my teacher tells me to stop fooling around. When I look at her with my face wrinkled in confusion, she grab...

Refraction is the bending of light when it goes from one medium to another so, when a ray of light passes through a glass prism, refraction of light occurs both, when it enters the prism as well as when it leaves the prism. Since the refracting surfaces are not parallel, therefore, the emergent ray and incident ray are not parallel to one another. In this case the ray of light is deviated on passing through the prism.     Even though I loved my mother, I did not like her. She was uncomfortable and unsettling to me whenever I was in her presence. Her language was crude and southern country. A speech impediment further diminished her articulation. She wore too-small clothing that shouted, “Buy me!” She preferred cheap fur coats over wool or down, and even cheaper wigs over her own hair. She was the original hoochie mama in my life. I loved her for all of this. She drove obscenely huge cars in flashy colors as if she had a small penis to compensate for. We knew she’d bribed ...

“I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours, in Christian America”  (Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.).       I’ve heard several versions of this quote attributed to Martin Luther King over the years and because there were so many variations, I decided to research the exact wording as well as the source of this quote. What prompted King to utter this sentence? What was the context? Was it written like “Letter from Birmingham Jail” or “Why We Can’t Wait,” or was it a speech like his famous “I Have a Dream” or “Mountaintop” speeches? Something else?       In my mini-research, I learned that in 1968 on the Dick Cavett Show, James Baldwin attributes at least part of the “segregated hour” quote to Malcolm X: I know as Malcolm X once put it: “the most segregated hour in American...

  “Complicit” On a group’s page, I shared a Facebook post by Ally Henny, written after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery became another shame upon our nation.  This post got five “likes” and 13 comments. Henny began with this paragraph: Honestly, I don’t need white folks sympathy right now because we have been telling you on this very app for years that there’s a problem. Y’all will cry a few tears, make some posts, and then not do crap beyond that. What are you going to do different?  And ended with these two paragraphs: Some of yall are mad because you see yourself as good and you think that I shouldn’t snap at people who want to help. Fine. If you want to help you need to get out here and COLLECT YOUR PEOPLE. You have to deal not only with your own racism but you must get your people to do better. You have to stop tolerating it. You have to seek a brand of justice that elevates the marginalized more than it makes you look good.   At this point yo...