WHEN I LIVED IN DC
[Disclaimer: I love and try not to judge all the people I am writing about in this. Please don't be offended or please forgive me if you are. This is just a musing about a part of my life. Thanks.]
If you call someone in DC you can figure that it might take up to three days for someone to get back to you if you left a message. When I was pastoring three rural churches in WV the average time for someone to get back to you was 45 minutes.
This was only one thing that I needed to adjust to after living in the DC area from June of '88 to July of '96.
Theme . . .
The parsonage I lived in was a beautiful red brick salt box style on two and a half acres of land in a small town pretty much right across the street from a CSX rail line and in the midst of apple orchards and dairy farms.
One of the first car race tracks in the US was a little ways down the road, and between Charles Town and Summit Point, the small town, was the property that George Washington had bought for his first plantation after he finished going with Lord Fairfax, who was like a father to him, up to the Canadian border to survey what the Thirteen Colonies could really claim at that time int he 18th century,
George and his brother Charles were half-brothers to Lawrence, the heir of their father, so they needed to strike out and find their own way. George told Charles he should buy some land, too, so he bought the land to the north east of George's land and named it after himself.
The second county courthouse in the US was built there . . . John Brown was tried there and hanged down the street and most of the roads and streets were named after members of the Washington family (George, Muriel, etc).
The Lawrence up and died and George inherited Mount Vernon.
Change of fortune.
The valley is about 2000' above sea level and sits in between two ranges of the Appalachians -- the BlueRidge and the Adirondack, if I remember correctly.
When settles left the east coast for the interior, they approached the Cumberland Gap and headed to Ohio, but some of them just decided to stay there and many of the parishioners of the three congregations I served were descendants of these people.
Light Horse Harry Lee from the Revolutionary War was given property up there and his grandson Robert E. stayed in his brother's stone house on the plantation oon his way to the battles at Antietam and Gettysburg. And by the way, Robert E was still a colonel in the US Army when John Brown and his buddies attacked the armory in Harpers Ferry and captured John Brown.
Ghosts of slaves and solders were just EVERYwhere.
Once upon a time I drove the mother of a bride home from a wedding rehearsal on a Friday night but she didn't get out of the car right away.
"We think you are very strange," she opened the conversation.
I thought . . . "This can't be good."
But I answered, "Yes?"
"First of all you have been to so many places and we mostly only go right aorund here."
Granted. I have been to every state except South Dakota, to ten countries on four continents.
"No argument."
"And have an Italian grandfather with 20 grandchildren," she continued.
Now a lot of them have big families, so it took me until Tuesday to realize that from her perspective the problem was that he was Italian.
"Okay."
And the last thing she pronounced was, "And we don't believe in interracial relationships."
Now I had kind of gotten that idea already since there were very clear areas where Hispanic fame workers and "people of color" lived and worked. The people on the edge of Summit Point lived int he area that had been the old slave quarters for the plantation. The manse that was visible from the upstairs office in the parsonage even had two slave cabins kept up like new.
(Unfathomable.)
And the Methodist Church was built with $2000 in funds given to the Methodists of Summit Point in 1888 by the US government in reparations because General Sherman's troops had burnt it down. (Please correct me if I don't have the general right.) The manse had been his HQ.
One of the farmers told me that if it rained a lot they still picked up relics from battles.
There is also a Cistercian Monastery 12 miles from the parsonage set on the banks of the Shenandoah. It is Holy Cross Abbey and has a Berryville, VA address.
A battle had been fought there, too.
The monastery had been founded the year I was born and the first time I was there . . . and every time since I was very amazed to know that people had lied there in that holy silence during the whole span of my life.
If you want some quiet time for an hour or an evening, a weekend or a week, please go there. You will love it.
One of the monks is a not-very-amateur archeologist and he has found relics not only of the battles, but back to the stone aged people there.
At the point that the mother of the bride mentioned that about interracial relationships, I wasn't sure what to reply. Some of my best friends in college, in the Air Force, and especially at Seminary were African American, Hispanic, Korean . . .not "white." And, wanting to serve in the former Soviet Union . . . and with a background in the Urban Ministry Track, I had given the Lord a BIG fuss when I found out that the Bishop's Cabinet was sending me up to that rural backwater.
You can't be an American without dealing with the horrible issues and relaities of racism. I grew up in an all white town in NE Illinois wiht only one black family and some occasional Hispanic migrant farm workers during the "White Flight" era of the 60s when many neighborhoods in Chicago were drained of white people, etc.
we saw the towers of the vertical ghettos rise along Lake Michigan and passed Comiskey Park and had Mahaliz Jackson's house pointed out to us. Our high school had exchanges with predominantly black high schools and the speaker at my high school class' graduation was the founding president of Malcolm X College. Not a few people left the audience when he stood up to speak.
As Baby Boomers we weathered our childhood times as kids and grand kids of the Greatest Generation . . . the civil Rights Movement, the Viet Nam era, the assassinations of John, Martin and Bobby, and all that.
So my first reaction to the accusation that I believed in interracial relationships was to say something like, "If you don't believe in them, don't have them."
But I started to defend a friend of mine from my Air Force days who was staioned in New Jersey in an anti-terrorist unit.
I stopped.
People believe what they believe and decide what is right or wrong for lots of reasons.
Later I heard that she had been very friendly with a "mixed-race" couple during her first marriage, but her second husband was opposed to that kind of company.
Since then, a lot has changed and people have grown and opened their hearts. Not everyone was racist, and I realized that the Lord was helping me confront my judgmental attitudes toward people with prejudices. I can be quite a know-it-all and sometimes live deeply out of insecurities and a very well developed "scarcity model."
We all have to deal with something or another.
When we get to heaven even more surprising than the people we see there that we didn't expect will be the expressions on the faces of a lot of people when they recognize us.
Truly.
Someone once called heaven the place where the counsel fire circles in the midst of the tents or hogans or yurts was . . . you find your own counsel fire and are welcomes home with a feast and a dance and many songs about your life.
I like that one and would like to visit some of those.
Wouldn't you?
The end of the Daniel Day Lewis versions of "The Last of the Mohicans" has a scene that reminds me of that.
"The Last of the Mohicans"
(Please don't mind the commercials that might come with the videos.)
<3 <3 <3
[Disclaimer: I love and try not to judge all the people I am writing about in this. Please don't be offended or please forgive me if you are. This is just a musing about a part of my life. Thanks.]
If you call someone in DC you can figure that it might take up to three days for someone to get back to you if you left a message. When I was pastoring three rural churches in WV the average time for someone to get back to you was 45 minutes.
This was only one thing that I needed to adjust to after living in the DC area from June of '88 to July of '96.
Theme . . .
The parsonage I lived in was a beautiful red brick salt box style on two and a half acres of land in a small town pretty much right across the street from a CSX rail line and in the midst of apple orchards and dairy farms.
One of the first car race tracks in the US was a little ways down the road, and between Charles Town and Summit Point, the small town, was the property that George Washington had bought for his first plantation after he finished going with Lord Fairfax, who was like a father to him, up to the Canadian border to survey what the Thirteen Colonies could really claim at that time int he 18th century,
George and his brother Charles were half-brothers to Lawrence, the heir of their father, so they needed to strike out and find their own way. George told Charles he should buy some land, too, so he bought the land to the north east of George's land and named it after himself.
The second county courthouse in the US was built there . . . John Brown was tried there and hanged down the street and most of the roads and streets were named after members of the Washington family (George, Muriel, etc).
The Lawrence up and died and George inherited Mount Vernon.
Change of fortune.
The valley is about 2000' above sea level and sits in between two ranges of the Appalachians -- the BlueRidge and the Adirondack, if I remember correctly.
When settles left the east coast for the interior, they approached the Cumberland Gap and headed to Ohio, but some of them just decided to stay there and many of the parishioners of the three congregations I served were descendants of these people.
Light Horse Harry Lee from the Revolutionary War was given property up there and his grandson Robert E. stayed in his brother's stone house on the plantation oon his way to the battles at Antietam and Gettysburg. And by the way, Robert E was still a colonel in the US Army when John Brown and his buddies attacked the armory in Harpers Ferry and captured John Brown.
Ghosts of slaves and solders were just EVERYwhere.
Once upon a time I drove the mother of a bride home from a wedding rehearsal on a Friday night but she didn't get out of the car right away.
"We think you are very strange," she opened the conversation.
I thought . . . "This can't be good."
But I answered, "Yes?"
"First of all you have been to so many places and we mostly only go right aorund here."
Granted. I have been to every state except South Dakota, to ten countries on four continents.
"No argument."
"And have an Italian grandfather with 20 grandchildren," she continued.
Now a lot of them have big families, so it took me until Tuesday to realize that from her perspective the problem was that he was Italian.
"Okay."
And the last thing she pronounced was, "And we don't believe in interracial relationships."
Now I had kind of gotten that idea already since there were very clear areas where Hispanic fame workers and "people of color" lived and worked. The people on the edge of Summit Point lived int he area that had been the old slave quarters for the plantation. The manse that was visible from the upstairs office in the parsonage even had two slave cabins kept up like new.
(Unfathomable.)
And the Methodist Church was built with $2000 in funds given to the Methodists of Summit Point in 1888 by the US government in reparations because General Sherman's troops had burnt it down. (Please correct me if I don't have the general right.) The manse had been his HQ.
One of the farmers told me that if it rained a lot they still picked up relics from battles.
There is also a Cistercian Monastery 12 miles from the parsonage set on the banks of the Shenandoah. It is Holy Cross Abbey and has a Berryville, VA address.
A battle had been fought there, too.
The monastery had been founded the year I was born and the first time I was there . . . and every time since I was very amazed to know that people had lied there in that holy silence during the whole span of my life.
If you want some quiet time for an hour or an evening, a weekend or a week, please go there. You will love it.
One of the monks is a not-very-amateur archeologist and he has found relics not only of the battles, but back to the stone aged people there.
At the point that the mother of the bride mentioned that about interracial relationships, I wasn't sure what to reply. Some of my best friends in college, in the Air Force, and especially at Seminary were African American, Hispanic, Korean . . .not "white." And, wanting to serve in the former Soviet Union . . . and with a background in the Urban Ministry Track, I had given the Lord a BIG fuss when I found out that the Bishop's Cabinet was sending me up to that rural backwater.
You can't be an American without dealing with the horrible issues and relaities of racism. I grew up in an all white town in NE Illinois wiht only one black family and some occasional Hispanic migrant farm workers during the "White Flight" era of the 60s when many neighborhoods in Chicago were drained of white people, etc.
we saw the towers of the vertical ghettos rise along Lake Michigan and passed Comiskey Park and had Mahaliz Jackson's house pointed out to us. Our high school had exchanges with predominantly black high schools and the speaker at my high school class' graduation was the founding president of Malcolm X College. Not a few people left the audience when he stood up to speak.
As Baby Boomers we weathered our childhood times as kids and grand kids of the Greatest Generation . . . the civil Rights Movement, the Viet Nam era, the assassinations of John, Martin and Bobby, and all that.
So my first reaction to the accusation that I believed in interracial relationships was to say something like, "If you don't believe in them, don't have them."
But I started to defend a friend of mine from my Air Force days who was staioned in New Jersey in an anti-terrorist unit.
I stopped.
People believe what they believe and decide what is right or wrong for lots of reasons.
Later I heard that she had been very friendly with a "mixed-race" couple during her first marriage, but her second husband was opposed to that kind of company.
Since then, a lot has changed and people have grown and opened their hearts. Not everyone was racist, and I realized that the Lord was helping me confront my judgmental attitudes toward people with prejudices. I can be quite a know-it-all and sometimes live deeply out of insecurities and a very well developed "scarcity model."
We all have to deal with something or another.
When we get to heaven even more surprising than the people we see there that we didn't expect will be the expressions on the faces of a lot of people when they recognize us.
Truly.
Someone once called heaven the place where the counsel fire circles in the midst of the tents or hogans or yurts was . . . you find your own counsel fire and are welcomes home with a feast and a dance and many songs about your life.
I like that one and would like to visit some of those.
Wouldn't you?
The end of the Daniel Day Lewis versions of "The Last of the Mohicans" has a scene that reminds me of that.
"The Last of the Mohicans"
(Please don't mind the commercials that might come with the videos.)
<3 <3 <3
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.