Chronic Grief Process
On our second day at The Intersection of Race and Poverty, a number of my colleagues shared with us their anger and sadness about the systemic racism that has us all in its grip, and the denial we so often face in attempting to address it back home in our congregations and communities and in ourselves. I began to realize as never before how deeply I shared that anger and sadness; how isolated I’d felt when attempting to struggle against the systemic racism around me and of which, willy-nilly, I was a part; and the depression I’d felt as self-punishment for my sense of powerlessness.
Suddenly, as my grief poured out beyond my control, it struck me that we’re all in a chronic grief process – constantly cycling back and forth through the initial stages and never fully able to come to a resolution. This insight struck me deep in the gut, bringing back a host of memories I’d never been able to deal with.
Ever since I was a young child in New York City –
living with an all-white family in an all-white church and an all-white neighborhood in Queens, but riding the bus and subway into Manhattan once a week for practice with the Metropolitan Lutheran Children’s Choir – I had been torn by the conflict between the deep love taught to me in church and at home and the deeper pain and division I saw whenever I ventured outside my little neighborhood. Long before I realized the even more painful implications of my privileged life, I could see the emotional, economic, and spiritual havoc wreaked on people of color by a system which they could not escape – and neither could I. I thought of myself as a fervent anti-racist, but took full advantage of the benefits accorded to me by the system.
Later in life, I learned that the comfort and safety of my summers at a family cottage on Long Island had bee
n governed by a restrictive covenant specifying that my parents would never sell their property to Jews or black people. I also learned that my 4D draft deferment as a pre-ministerial student not only exempted me from an ethical decision about the Vietnam War but also made it likely that some person of color from a different neighborhood would die in my place. (When I mailed my draft card back and requested a 1A so I’d at least have to face the same dilemma as anyone else, they simply issued me a new 4D by return mail.) Later, when I was an Instructor in English at Valparaiso University, I was asked to chair a committee on black literature – even though, like another character in today’s film (Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible), my acquaintance with black writers was limited to one short list of books I’d read in a graduate seminar. In eight years of parish ministry, I preached against racism but nothing much changed.
Leaving parish ministry to head the Lutheran Office for Public Policy in Wisconsin, I helped lead Lutheran support for a bill to divest the state pension fund from companies doing business in or with apartheid South Africa and fought the good fight for economic justice, but saw racism in this country grow worse while my first wife and I put two children through Yale with very little debt.
And, in my eighth year of professional advocacy with a human rights organization in Washington, D.C., just seven years ago on 9/11, I watched a group of 85 single parents (most of them people of color) file out of the Rayburn Building in an emergency evacuation, their three-day witness on welfare reform blown to smithereens by the attack on the Pentagon and New York’s twin towers. Their lapel buttons shouted “Hear our Voices”, but their voices were stifled as pundits insisted that “everything has changed.” For the poor and for people of color nothing material had changed, except that the 9/11 attacks had dashed their hopes for change and provided an excuse for Washington to ignore the twin perils of poverty and racism for yet another decade. The welfare mothers spent days in Washington waiting for a way home, while advocates like me went home by Metro, our salaries and our private lives virtually intact.
While there is plenty of guilt to go around, my pain today in reflecting on these things comes more from a deep sense of loss – the innocence of childhood, the idealized image of parental integrity, the idolatry of a country “with liberty and justice for all,” the quality and trustworthiness of a good education, the confidence in the power of democratic action, all shaken to the roots. Where there is loss there is grief, hence denial, anger, depression. Can there be some sort of resolution, a coming to terms with reality and a rebirth of life and hope?
Our predecessor Paul wrote to the struggling church in Thessalonica about the coming return of Christ “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Can we too learn again to trust in the Lord of Life above the lure of Empire? Can we recapture the discovery that we are not alone? Only as we go about this work together can we know the rekindling of our hope and the restoration of our trust in the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps, but who waits in love for us to open our eyes, acknowledge our hunger for justice, and painstakingly remind each other where to find bread.
Ted Steege
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