On Being Childish

I'm hardly the one to write some epic treatise on race-relations in the United States, or anywhere else. In all honesty, as a white-skinned American who doesn't even live in the United States anymore, it can be hardly said that my voice is the valid at all.

But as a pastor in these circumstances, watching my homeland erupt into violence over longstanding racial injustice, the merciless killings of black, brown, and other nonwhite folks around the country, rampant incarceration, and any number of other acts of outright oppression, I feel like I have an obligation to speak what truth I can, even if I'm just screaming into the void.

So...with that in mind, I would like to tell you a little story.

When I was a child, maybe around 4 or 5 years old, I would burst into tears whenever I heard on the radio, saw on TV, read in a book, or encountered in even the smallest way an example of someone hurting, suffering, or otherwise just feeling a bit sad. My parents, naturally, found this just as adorable as I do not when my own children do the same, and they chuckled in that way that parents do when they see their children being harmlessly irrational, but still oddly cute.

And their mirth infuriated me.

I couldn't understand why, when presented with the profoundly and unendingly sad fact of another human being hurting, even just a little, they were so unmoved! "How could they be so heartless?" my tiny heart raged in my altogether too-tiny chest. I couldn't imagine ever reaching a point where the suffering of another person, no matter how trivial, could be so easily ignored.

Of course, as all children do, I eventually learned not to break down entirely at every sad song on the radio (a fact for which, I am certain, my coworkers are eternally grateful), but as I grew older I never really shook that dissonant feeling:

How can people just...not care?

These days we see it all the time: good ol' boys chasing down black joggers, police officers beating children, pre-teens executed while playing in the park, all while ostensibly Christian folk rise to the defense of murderers and purveyors of violence, insisting that if they had just complied, if they hadn't been in the neighborhood...if they had just known their place, then all would be right with the world. Every day it seems, another child of God winds up injured, missing, or dead, the perpetrators well known and obvious, while the whole white, Christian world around them reacts with thunderous silence.

So, while I know it's been asked before, and by better theologians than I, but what has become of your faith, white Christian?

I see people I knew of old, my Sunday school teachers, former pastors even, claiming that murder is justified over a stolen pack of gum, a jaywalked street, or some imagined slight, so long as the victim's skin was enough shades darker. I hear the voices of white, Christian America crying out with a perpetual lack of any response while whole communities of color rage, justified, in pain suffering.

No mere song on the radio is this. Entire portions of this country are living in fear, waking and sleeping every day in fear. Dying in fear.

White Christian, where is your empathy?

In Luke 18, Christ himself tells us that it is to little children that the kingdom of God belongs. Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he says, will never enter it.

So, I'm not going to get up here and talk about race relations. I'll not pretend to understand the profound pain that communities of color are laboring under, bearing a burden so heavy and inescapable that all that is left to do is rage and riot.

I'll not claim to speak for the unheard.

No, instead I'll ask my white siblings in Christ...whatever became of that child's heart that once raged in your all-too-tiny chest? Before you learned all the horrible lessons and biases our society buried deep in your nascent minds, before the world lied to you and said that the color of someone's skin was like the price tag on a bargain DVD at Walmart; just enough information to determine whether or not it was worth anything. What happened to that heart that cried when your friend cried, that looked upon suffering, pain, and death as tragedies worth weeping over constantly? What happened to that heart which shook nearly out of your throat at the inhuman injustice of any oppression, however insignificant? What happened to the heart you once had, which loved unreservedly, unashamedly, and without any preconditions? Which cried out for justice, and loved kindness?

I hope you find it. And I hope you find it soon, because until you can let the suffering of other people break your heart, and move you to rage at the injustice, then the kingdom of heaven will remain closed to you, while it throws open the gates to all the poor, tortured souls pouring in because your apathy drives the machines that continues to allow them to suffer and die day in, and day out; sacrifices on the alter of that great idol of white supremacy.

Good, faithful servants of Christ who perished because we couldn't be bothered to give enough of a damn.

So find that child's heart. Find it now. Find it before you get so lost in your apathy that you can never find your way home again. Find it before another mother has to mourn her child. Find it before another kid has to ask why mommy isn't coming home anymore.

Just find that heart. Please.