Day I of Pilgrimage:

Travel on Juneteenth

You know you are fully committed to deepening your understanding of the sin of racism and its eradication when you get up at 3 AM to catch a 4 AM shuttle to the airport for a 6 AM flight to Atlanta, followed by a two hour drive to Birmingham before you even take your first steps on hallowed ground.

We did have a wonderful lunch together at a Louisianna Restaurant before our first session at 3 PM. I had “gator bites” – alligator with honey hot sauce, which was less honey than hot, hot, slap-ya-mamma, hotter-than-the-hinges-on-the-gates-of-hell kinda HOT. Holy moley!

And yes, when I didn’t have any hot honey sauce, the ‘gator tasted like chicken.

Mostly, I’ve spent time connecting with my fellow pilgrims. Getting to know them. Letting them get to know me. More than what can be accomplished on a Zoom conference call.

Relationship building and forming a community are really critical to an experience of the spirituality required to confront the history of the sin of racism in this country. We share our stories – or some of them – so that we can share the stories of the experience of slavery and Jim Crow in America.

We have an easy first evening together. We’re going to hear a lecture which will tell some of the story of Birmingham, in “sweet home, Alabama,” from an African American woman who was born and raised here in a place which she calls home but which was/is hardly sweet to her and generations of her kin.

We’ll then check into our hotel rooms, shower and change for dinner, during which we’ll have more of an opportunity to share stories and build relationships and community.

It's a good pace. Not rushed. Respectful of our souls, our bodies and our minds. Nurturing and nourishing. The time for intensity is coming. Of this, there is no doubt.

We’re here. In the places where it happened. Share cropping. Jim Crow. Lynching. Four little girls died in a church bombing. Tar and feathering. Voter suppression. Literally getting away with murder.

All of this at a moment in time in our country when racism is on the rise. When White Christian Nationalism receives the blessing of the highest levels of government. When elected officials are being handcuffed, harassed, and imprisoned for asking questions. Holding the government responsible by providing oversight. Doing exactly what they were elected to do. When brown-skinned people – adults, teens, and children – are being swept up off the street by armed, masked men without any legal identification. Being deported to foreign countries without the due process promised by our laws and the Constitution.

This is exactly what happened here, in the so-called “Deep South”. Behind the “Cotton Curtain,” People were tossed in jail for looking at a white woman. Or, not stepping into the gutter to let a white man pass on the sidewalk. Or, having the audacity to try to register to vote.

Today, this is happening to brown-skinned people who have the audacity to believe in the promise this country has made to generations of people.

Into this reality, we people of faith are here, taking a deep look at our past in order to face our present reality and, hopefully, begin to imagine a different future.

It's just a start. Just a few baby steps. Together. In faith.

I don’t know any other way change has ever happened, except because a few people got together to hold hands, listen to each other’s stories, so that together, we can hear the truth of the stories that are integral to who we are as Americans.

I keep thinking of something Rachel Held Evans wrote in “Wholehearted Faith,”

“So convinced God lived in the boxes I’d constructed, I failed to look for God in God’s favorite place: the margins.”

Off I go to spend some time in the margins of our history, and my faith.