I had the privilege of living near Harlem. I lived and studied right between the 125th Avenue stop and the 116th Avenue stop on Broadway. The 125th Avenue stop was a little bit closer to the seminary I attended, but I remember one professor remarking: “Look at all the students turning right toward 116th, and never left toward Harlem.” Harlem has been a large part of my experience and imagination. I dropped out of college to become an actor when I was barely 21, and lived in a hostel on 128th and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. I didn’t have the correct change to take the bus from LaGuardia Airport, and members from that neighborhood helped me out. When I put in the incorrect amount of change, and had no more, one by one members of that community came up silently to put money in so I could arrive in the city. It probably had just as much to do with not delaying the bus any further, but I still remember that gesture.
I was woefully unprepared to leave my home state and live in Harlem. I had a couple hundred dollars, and made a reservation in a hostel for one week. I was certain I would get some kind of job in that time, and find a way to make it past one week. I’m scared for myself looking back, even though it turned out all right. It could so easily have not turned out ok. I look back at how young and foolish I was, but maybe that’s the way you need to be to pick and move to New York City.
The guys at the corner market would make fun of me. They would tell me how they could tell I wasn’t from there, but that I walked like I owned the street. I think being in Harlem is where I learned to come into my own.
It was years later that I would be in New York under very different circumstances, living only 4 blocks from where I once lived in a hostel. I was a Master’s Degree student, studying theology and everything in the humanities, and this is when I was first introduced to James Baldwin. It’s actually kind of remarkable I had never read his work before. Like Baldwin, I grew up in the church. Like Baldwin, my father was a leader in that church. Like Baldwin, I had an artistic temperament and longed to feel truly free. I wanted to be free from my past, free from the constraints of my present, free to imagine something wholly original and wild. Baldwin became a writer and I became a minister. I learned that these two roads are not very far apart.
If anyone asks me my favorite theologian, I don’t name Paul Tillich or Augustine. I name James Baldwin. Of course he wasn’t technically a theologian, and perhaps that’s why I like him. He wrote about the big questions of ultimate meaning, of life and death, of the definition of liberation through the particular experiences of his characters. He wrote about an incoherent Republic, and the incessant desire to understand and be understood without being limited and put in a box. He wrote about things which we want to avoid as a culture, with the encouragement that “not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” This has been a guiding light of my understanding of ministry and of the religious life. Baldwin pointed a direction forward for me, a direction toward the heart of the particular of the personal, and that the personal was always a reflection of the social. Our deepest secrets and our deepest yearning can control our lives, or they can be faced, and in facing there is a kind of liberation. It is amazing to me the amount of faith he put in writing. He thought the writer had the power to change the world, to re-create it, to transform it. Just through honest inquiry and creative prose, one could upend centuries of oppression, one could heal a sickness that had been lingering one’s entire lifetime. One did not want to repeat the past, but the past must be faced, truly, uncomfortably, sometimes incoherently. We must let lived experience teach us even if that experience contradicts our stories about ourselves.
I’ve been thinking of David Hernandez Colula, the man, the immigrant detainee that was found dead in his cell a few miles from here inside his cell at CoreCivic. He was the same age as myself, 34, and I think of all the steps that led to him being here in the same city I am. I have no doubt we have lived very different experiences. David was picked up and arrested in Michigan for not having citizenship papers. He was transferred to the prison in our city, CoreCivic where none of his family or friends could visit with him. He was arrested in December, and was imprisoned. The reports state that he likely died from hanging himself in his cell, a suicide. I know I will never know the complete answer to why someone like David would have this particular life and have it end this way. But I do know it makes me sick. It makes me angry. It makes me see how our Republic and our city has failed. We’ve failed a human life, and that human life is no longer. That is partially on us.
I bring this up not be a bummer or to cast blame unnecessarily. I mention this because “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it’s faced.” I think Baldwin, were he alive today, would be enamored with this time we are living in. No doubt I’m sure it would make him sick, in the same way he was sick looking at Harlem and our Republic in the 20th Century. But he was not a despairing writer, he was a hopeful one. And that hope came from a deep faith in a principle that unites our experiences, even the ones we want to shy away from. There was a deep assertion of something that held us even in our madness and incoherence, even if we can never name it adequately. There is a music to our experience, if we develop a tolerance for hearing discord, and notes perhaps we’ve never heard before.
The tragedy and poignancy for me is that Baldwin worked tirelessly just so he could feel free to be himself. To be someone who was not defined by a person’s bias, praise, or limitation. To be a person who was not concerned with their citizenship status, or whether they were black, or whether they were gay, or whether he was a writer or a plumber. To be able to simply live as oneself without buying into the narratives of a political and social structure that doesn’t even understand itself. I think of David, an immigrant to this country, and the narratives we already had about him. I think of the policies that are written based on that narrative. I think of the prisons that are built to protect and enforce that narrative. I think of all that work that goes into protecting and upholding a narrative that is a complete disaster. It’s a disaster. It’s repulsive what we’ve done, and it’s repulsive that we continue to do, unless we come to the understanding we don’t need it anymore.
We don’t need it. We don’t need to believe narratives that limit who a person is, so we can feel more certain about who we are. We don’t need to protect something we don’t even understand. It sounds simple to say this, and it is. We don’t need a narrative that limits a person because we don’t know who we are as a person. It’s a way of avoiding the big question, and it’s a question we are running into right now with full force: Who are we?
I think it is a brave move to begin in honesty. It is better to be incoherent and unsure rather than enforce narratives that are limiting people’s precious experience of being alive. It takes bravery to say what is necessary: I don’t need someone to be illegal, so I have a feeling of safety and security. It’s a false safety and it’s a false security. It’s a falseness that leads to living a falsified life.
It is more difficult to say what a truthful life is, but it is much easier to point out the false one. We know we are dealing with a false life when the consequences are nagging dread. Dread is an indicator that there is something waiting to be faced.
We are ready to face who we are. We are ready to face what we’ve done. We are ready to transform. This transformation will not be an act of God. It will not be a miraculous act that will seemingly come out of nowhere. This transformation will originate with us, and a simple decision to face who we are, who we’ve become. This transformation is rooted in a deep faith that even in pain and confusion, there is a principle which has the capacity to unify our life, to bring us into integrity, to teach us the true meaning of resilience.
This is the last Sunday of our monthly theme “Resilience.” It won’t be the last Sunday we talk about it. Resilience is not the protection and preservation of who we were. It’s the willingness to face who we’ve become, so that we can have authorship of who we might be. That struggle, that pull, that falling and getting back up into becoming ourselves is that path of resilience. It is very active and very rewarding, even when it’s discouraging. It’s much more encouraging to see ourselves as agents of transformation, even if we fail much of the time, than we if we spend our whole life protecting a narrative that keeps us small and stuck.
I think the spiritual process and the creative process are linked. The spiritual process asserts that out of hardship and difficulty we can produce beauty and love. It’s the ultimate affirmation of life. The creative process does the same thing. The creative process says that what you think you’re seeing is never the complete story. And I’ll demonstrate this truth by creating in front of you a world and life you can live into. The spiritual process and the creative process are both paths of liberation: liberation of the mind, liberation from economic and political violence, liberation from a fearful understanding of death.
David Hernandez Colula’s death will be a complete and utter tragedy without redemption if all it is, is another death. His tragic death becomes the means of liberation if we let it discomfort ourselves to the point of waking up. If we allow ourselves to wake up and face the brutality, while holding faith in something that binds us together, a death is no longer just a death. It is a step toward liberation. Of course this does not mean we want anyone to die, especially as tragically as David’s. We can’t go back in time and undo what has been done. But we can respond. We can let his death work on us. We can let it help us become who we really are.
Resilience is the ability to use the whole of human experience for collective liberation. And what do I mean by liberation? I mean something completely modest and transformative: the ability to live fully as we are, and to grant the same ability to others. It means we don’t need to incarcerate people in order to fool ourselves that we are more free than we are. It means we quit needing a scapegoat in order to feel secure in our life. It means we quit letting a system kill innocent people for the illusion of safety.
I’ll close with a few words from James Baldwin: “a country is only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become. Now, this country is going to be transformed. It will not be transformed by an act of God, but by all of us, by you and me. I don’t believe any longer we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” This making over of the world is a creative act, it is a spiritual act, it is a brave act. The making over of the world is based on an experience that there is something more going on here. It is based on the experience that even in dread and incoherence, we are united in destiny and in story.
