The Long Recovery

I grew up on a small farm, a hobby for my dad, who has spent the past 40 years as a Presbyterian pastor.

Work with words and land is part of my Scotch-Irish, Presbyterian heritage, a heritage that stretches back as far as I know on both sides of my family.

Recently, as I drove through my hometown in South Carolina with my dad, he observed updates and expansions of buildings inscribed or associated with our ancestors’ names. I do not pretend to know or understand all the social, political, theological, racial, and economic realities that have formed me. But I do know pieces of my heritage.

That heritage is etched into my body whether I notice it or not. I am a historied body. Only when I remain ignorant of my history do I allow myself the luxury of denying my complicity in whatever that history may involve.

When bodies become disassociated with land, however, bodies may be subject to redefinition. When unharnessed power has the menacing pleasure of defining and moving those disassociated bodies at will, a concept of race materializes. An unrelenting heritage of slavery emerges.

On occasion, I will hear, “My ancestors did not benefit from slavery. Why should I bear guilt for it today?” Or, I may not hear so many words, but I can see the words written on faces. Truthfully, I am certain that my ancestors were involved and did benefit from the sprawling tentacles of the slave trade. My great grandmother’s grandfather was a colonel in the Civil War. Colonel D. Wyatt Aiken benefited from the redefinition of black bodies. He owned slaves in western South Carolina. My heritage is a Southern textile of church, global mission, and slavery, though to my knowledge it has not been described as such.

I think of the heritage of those who were forcibly brought here on slave ships. The family names of their black bodies are not engraved on the archways of buildings but instead rest uneasily on the bottom of the ocean, extending back to an unknown past shrouded by a thousand impenetrable clouds.

Now, when I hear “white privilege” tossed about, I do not only think of the currency of whiteness today — that inexhaustible social currency that gives me leeway to do as I please with mitigated consequences — I also think of heritage, a heritage preserved and a heritage incinerated.

If we have learned anything from the past several decades, healing from a 500-year heritage of slavery will take more than a generation or two. I am humbled when I think of this because I realize that the relentless, demonic agony inflicted for 500 years will not be undone or healed by a single generation. My body will have flitted through the breeze as dust many times over once this 500-year heritage has been unwound and restitched. Healing takes more than just time.

Healing deep, immeasurable wounds that infect every nook of our social life will take more than lip service or a polite gesture on occasion. Healing will take more than marches, or pretending everything is actually all right when it’s not.

It may be that healing will involve courageous women and men, dedicated to living full lives together, admitting the loss, the wounds, the anger, the sorrow. It may be that healing will involve women and men willing to dream together, work together, repent together, grow together, and change together. Imagine new circles of belonging.

The trouble is this demands more than a hashtag or selfie, though maybe a few of those won’t hurt. It requires women and men doing the mundane business of committing our lives to each other for a long recovery. I do not claim to know how this will be carried out in all its necessary particularity between people.

I begin to wonder if the church, which has been an arm of colonialism and a mechanism for racism, may rediscover its true self in this healing process. As it happens, the church continues to be shifted and shoved closer to the margins of social influence — perhaps where the church should be. Could it be that when all power and authority are extracted from the church, the church may lose its capacity for maintaining the status quo and may become a potential home for healing?

I confess I feel like turning and running away sometimes. I feel I do not have the energy, strength, stamina, and perseverance to stand at the edge any longer than to peek. I am often silent not because I do not care but because I am dazed, rendered speechless.

I do hope. But, like Karl Barth says, “We have no calm hope.” I still hope.