Midlife Meditation

My wakeup call. I grew up in church. My father was a United Methodist minister. My childhood was marked by that: the frequent moves making it difficult to keep friends and, by the time I was in high school, to even make them in the first place; the many evenings when Dad was absent from our home due to a crisis, a call, or a meeting; and the weekends marked by Dad's Saturday night cramming for his Sunday sermon. It took a major illness to keep me from being in the pew for that sermon. As I grew older, I acquired church jobs of my own: watching children in the nursery, reading litanies and Bible lessons from the pulpit, eventually typing and printing the Sunday bulletin and monthly newsletter as Dad's church secretary. When teaching music proved more difficult than I expected, my 23-year-old attention span pivoted instantly to following in my father's footsteps, and going to seminary. I arrived at seminary already steeped in church life; and yet, in a way, I...

Mourners pray at Emanuel AME Church for the victims of Wednesday's shooting. He sat through an hour of the Bible study. Once captured, he told police he was having second thoughts about what he was about to do because everyone was being so nice to him. But then he took out his gun, called the people who had just been so nice to him rapists, said they were taking over his country and had to be stopped, and shot and killed nine people, leaving one witness alive so she could tell others what he did and why he did it. The shooter's motives were clear for many reasons, most obviously the statement he made before opening fire. There were other clues: the confederate flag stickers on his car, the photograph that surfaced of him wearing patches of the flags of Rhodesia and Apartheid-era South Africa, and the particular church he carefully selected as scene of the crime, then drove two hours to reach. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church--"Mother Emanuel," to ...

Rachel Dolezal In almost every category Americans use to discriminate, I come out on top. I'm white. Very very white. I don't tan; I freckle. I'm a melange of European blood lines--French, German, Swedish, Scottish--that plant me firmly in the Anglo-Saxon camp. I'm solidly Protestant: Baptist-Methodist, to be exact. I'm university educated, with a Bachelors and two Masters degrees, plus enough post-graduate credits to put me on the top step of my district's pay scale. I'm neither too tall nor too short, and have an average weight for a man of my age and height. And last, but certainly not least, I have a Y chromosome. With all these status points in my favor, one would think I would've lived a charmed life up to this point: privilege, wealth, career, easy credit, immunity from traffic tickets, and all the other benefits, both tangible and intangible, typically enjoyed by male WASPs. And in fact, I almost certainly have be...

The Rev. Willie B. Smith, 1928-2014 What a man he was. John Schwiebert introduced me to Willie Smith in September, 2000. I'd been living at the Peace House for two months at that point, nursing my wounds over losing both a marriage and a career, unsure what direction to take in the days ahead. John knew that, apart from being a minister, I was a musician; in fact, my last six months as a pastor had been spent in music ministry, directing a choir and playing the piano when I wasn't engaged in other tasks. John knew that Willie Smith was looking for a pianist for The Church of the Good Shepherd, an independent African-American congregation he had founded six years before. I had an affinity for black worship and needed some income, so I agreed to meet with Willie, and was soon spending my Sunday mornings at his church. Willie Smith was a striking man, tall, handsome, energetic, and utterly confident in the truth of what he had to say. He had served in the Air Force ...