The Golden Threads
A response to the Pastoral Letter from the United Methodist Bishops
I find myself on a small, barren island on a dark night in a troubled and dark sea. There are no trees or rocks, only a frail tin shed to protect my bald head from the cutting rain in the dark. Distressed and afraid, that’s when I notice the infinitely fine golden thread that surrounds me, folding at my feet, floating into and out of my tiny shed, through my hands, before me, behind me; it connects my forlorn island to the rest of the world. It’s too fine to touch or hold, but it glows with enough light to dispel the darkness, creating a warmth that, if I close my eyes, makes me believe I’m home again.
If I’m still, all the threads in my life come together, and I realize they are one.
I try to write openly about my religious life. I try to be honest about my doubts and my struggles. My faith is the shed on the island. It preserves me when nothing should. It’s the principal gateway I use to connect my isolation to the larger culture.
On Thursday of last week, I received a Pastoral Letter from the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church. That sounds like something that happens so often that you ignore it or something that happens once or twice in a lifetime, and you struggle to understand it. This is both. It didn’t come to my mailbox but to my email. We’re a very modern church. There was no wax seal on the letter with an impression from someone’s ring, but it was genuine.
In response to last week’s presidential election, the United Methodist Bishops wrote, “The lessons of history teach us the dangers of silence in the face of threats to human rights. Therefore, we cannot remain silent. We call upon all United Methodists to exercise their faith and to pray, speak, and act for justice and peace.”
Their instructions continued, “Our baptismal vows call us “to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.” We, therefore, reject rhetoric, policies, and actions that demean or discriminate against any of God's children and will be vigilant in defending the rights of the vulnerable and speaking out against oppression.”
The Bishops of the United Methodist Church ask us to “be vigilant in defending the rights of the vulnerable and speaking out against oppression” in a letter inspired by the results of an American Election. “
I was born into a Methodist Church, literally tearing itself into pieces over issues of inclusion and oppression. Fifteen days after I was born, Dr. W. F. Selah, who had been the lead minister at my church since before the war, resigned his position from the pulpit of Galloway United Methodist Church because the laity of the church refused entry to those who would celebrate with us, but weren’t white.
Four days before I was born, Medgar Evers was murdered in front of his young family because he worked to register non-white people to vote.
Over the next five years, Galloway would lose over two hundred members, who formed a new “Independent Methodist Church” on Riverside Drive, where they wouldn’t be forced to comply with the Bishop’s orders to open their doors to anyone who came. The tiny, two-room church my great-grandfather built in Hesterville, Mississippi, also voted to become “Independent” rather than integrate.
On the very last Sunday of 1963, I was baptized by Minister Cunningham, who came to replace Minister Selah but wouldn’t stay very long. The associate pastor was a man a few years younger than my father, who would become one of his closest friends.
Everyone has someone they consider “their pastor.” In my family, that’s Clay Lee. He buried most of us and baptized most of us. He married two of us. He offered us the Lord’s cup and visited us in the hospital.
Concerned that the troubles in Jackson at Galloway might have a negative impact on his young career, the Bishop moved Lee from Jackson to the tiny town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964. I’m sure the Bishop meant well; the Lord had other plans. A year and ten days after I was born, three young civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia and buried in an earthen damn. Clay Lee’s flock would face one of the most troubling times a Christian congregation can imagine. His hand would steer the ship, and his shepherd’s crook would protect the flock. In 1988, one year after I graduated from Millsaps College, my minister became Bishop and was invested with the Bishop’s staff.
Bishop Lee didn’t vote on this Pastoral Letter I got in the mail because his health had been failing. This week, he passed from this world to the next. On Friday, my church will gather to remember his life. The golden threads converge again.
Although I always knew that my parents lived through a time when our community was split in half over issues of inclusion and oppression, I spent most of my childhood blissfully unaware of it. Every day, I would encounter people who were on our side of the issue and people who were on the other side, but it would be decades before I was aware of which was which.
As I became a man, I began to wonder what it must have been like for my father and mother to live in a world where so many people they knew, considered friends, and shared the lord’s table with would split themselves from my family and divide our community over issues that can only be described as hate. I was twenty-one before either of my parents would tell me who in our city was on which side of the argument. They meant to protect me from an unpleasant truth. The golden threads coiled around me to protect my gentler nature from reality.
Six years after Galloway split itself in half, the issue returned when half of Jackson decided they could no longer support an Integrated School System. My father’s head was on the chopping block now. This was how he made his living. While we stood to make a great deal of money by equipping dozens of new schools that didn’t exist the year before, we’d also be selling to people with no visible plan to pay us back. The pressure I would learn was immense. I would learn this long after my father’s death.
I spent something like forty years educating myself on what happened here. I wanted to know how people who considered each other neighbors could end up on opposite sides of what was so clearly a moral issue. People would die over this. People who didn’t die would wear scars on their faces for the rest of their lives, and others would wear scars over their hearts. The golden threads became tangled, strained, and tainted but not torn.
I wrote a book about what I found—the story of my community from the months before I was born through the years I learned to read. By the time it was actually a book and not just a collection of notes, impressions, interviews, newspaper clippings, and ideas, nearly everyone in the story was dead. Reading what I wrote, I realized I could never publish this book. The golden threads that connected me to the people in the book also connected me to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
The world already knows what happened here. It’s not exactly a secret. Nobody needed my perspective on this. I wouldn’t be the man to call someone’s dead grandfather a racist and a divider, even if he was. The golden threads restrained me.
The Bishops, including one who had been my pastor and married a boy I knew who thought he wanted to be a lawyer before he realized the Lord wanted something else, have asked me to defend the weak and guard the oppressed because my community, which I once believed had healed found itself again divided over issues of who to love and who to cast out. I can’t imagine that Jesus would ever do that, but that’s the issue that last summer split the United Methodist Church into those who remained loyal, those who became independent (again), and those who would join the new “Global” Methodist Church. The threads of the past returned to remind us that they never really went away.
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
It’s hard for me not to feel responsible when the world returns to the spot where it was when I was born. I squandered my gifts and didn’t resist with enough vigor; now all I have are glowing threads. I will do as the Bishops charge me. I would have done the same had they not asked.
The church is my home. It’s my tiny tin shed on a desolate island in a dark and comfortless sea. The threads provide light, comfort, heat, and love. There is more than just vanities in the world.
