Our next guest blogger, the Rev. Dr. David Ferner, retired Episcopal priest, living in southwestern NH near Keene. Together, we have engaged in social action projects for decades.
I’m late posting a response to Margaret’s request because of two weekends I believed might bring some new insight into an understanding of community. I participated in a Pilgrimage to Hayneville, Alabama, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the martyrdom of Jonathan Daniels. Jon was from Keene, New Hampshire, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, and a seminarian at Episcopal Theological School, who heard Dr. King’s call to come to the south and help with voter registration. The web is full of stuff right now, so you can get the story, especially through thorough coverage in the Keene Sentinel and from the website of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama.
I wondered if I might experience community in a new or different way, spending four days with many former strangers, but also interacting with some who have been part of the struggle for civil and human rights for half a century. This included the one Jonathan saved by pushing her out of the way of a deputy sheriff’s shotgun blast and one who was seriously injured in the second blast, eventually carted to a hospital in Montgomery atop Jonathan’s dead body. The pilgrimage was followed by a celebration of this anniversary back home in Keene, with some of the same heroines and heroes of the cause who came north to Jon’s hometown and parish to remember his witness and sacrifice.
With such a preamble, what did I learn about community in these two back-to-back experiences? The first thing I relearned is that when I’m thrown together with a bunch of folks, formerly known or not, it doesn’t take long for me to figure out who I’m attracted to and who I relate with less easily. I also relearned that when thrown together in a community of people who have some common purpose – in this instance learning, commemorating, and reflecting on how things have and haven’t changed these fifty years in matters of race and poverty – ‘liking another’ is low down in the hierarchy of what makes community. Rather, it’s the acknowledgement of a shared desire that becomes the organizing principle. In this instance it’s a desire to remember Jonathan and the other martyrs of civil rights – eleven in Alabama alone. It’s a desire to struggle with the reality that even though things have changed, they haven’t changed so much that a white power structure has been dismantled in a manner that offers economic opportunity, education, housing, health care, and the right to vote (the reason Jonathan was in Lowndes County, Alabama fifty years ago) equally to people of color. It’s a desire to develop an affinity for and relationships with people who are different from us, honoring and respecting their humanity. It’s a desire to overcome the fact that, left to our own devices, even as those devices include some important legislation meant to change the way our society works, we haven’t done especially well with bringing a common vision for our society to fruition. Perhaps, it’s even a desire to wonder why people of faith haven’t embraced a common purpose, a common understanding, organized around what G_d has in mind for the human community.
Jonathan was ‘converted’, if you will, when singing the Magnificat, Mary’s Song from Luke (1:46-55), at Evening Prayer. Mary’s song for those who don’t know it, and it might be a bit foreign to folks at CKI, is a prophetic hymn much like Hannah’s song (I Samuel 2:1-10), much like the songlike quality of Isaiah’s many calls for love and justice (i.e. see the peaceable kingdom, 11:1-10). In it, as well as in its precursors from Hebrew Scripture, the lowly are lifted up and the rulers—read oppressors, are cast down. The world is turned upside down. G_d’s intention of a community of justice and love is an almost realized reality. Isn’t this the prophetic trajectory of biblical history? In some sense we don’t need so much to define and create community. Rather, we need to join G_d’s community – a community that has at its core justice, equality, and, above all, love. In this community, relationship is summoned from the very reality that we share our humanity with others. This organizing principle is not only common to the Abrahamic faiths, but to all world religions. It’s greater than our particular faith’s generally more parochial understanding of community. Jonathan’s ethics professor and mine some half dozen years later, Joseph Fletcher, said justice is love distributed. The Holy One who loves us so very much has given us the gift of human community. Grounded in the heart and mind of the Creator, we are invited to be part of it. We don’t have to create it. We are invited to join it. When we do, the mighty will be cast down and the lowly will be lifted.
The woman whose life Jonathan saved that hot August day in Hayneville, Alabama, Ruby Sales has concluded that she was saved for something. She has spent her life working for justice, fighting poverty, and educating those who would organize others to those ends. In a sermon, remembering Jonathan, yes, but more specifically looking toward G_d’s dream of human, humane community, Ruby challenged us all, and especially those of us privileged by virtue of our color, our education, and our opportunity to embrace life in a world, in a society, in a human community that in some sense already is, waiting only for G_d’s people to enter in.
David Ferner