Being the Beloved Community with Selma

A small shift in practice can cause a seismic-level shift in perception. We in the Diocese of California have been practicing being the Beloved Community – showing forth that reality which God made in Jesus Christ – for years now.

 

A brief look back at something that happened during the 40^th anniversary of the Selma March might help us in this moment as week seek to learn and grow around the Beloved Community.

 

Every August there is a pilgrimage in Hayneville, Alabama to celebrate Blessed Jonathan Myrick Daniels and All the Martyrs of Alabama. That long title is how the pilgrimage is named today. It was only the Jonathan Myrick Daniels Pilgrimage back in 2002 when I became Bishop Suffragan of Alabama.

 

Thanks to inspired work by Zara Renander, the Rev. Kerry Holder, Tom Poynor, Deacon Adele Stockham, Sheila Andrus and others, particularly a young woman intern we came to celebrate all the martyrs who gave their lives in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s in Alabama. The intern took on the project of finding pictures of many of these martyrs - Blacks and Whites, women and men, Christian and Jews, young and old – and making big posters of them, with biographies of each on the back of his or her picture.

 

Teenagers became holders of the sacred stories of each martyr’s life, carrying the poster in the pilgrimage, and in the concluding Mass. During the Prayers of the People, each martyr was named, and the young person holding that commemorative poster would say, “Present.” The Beloved Community as diverse, and crossing the borders of time and space.

 

Then, in 2005, during the Selma March 40^th anniversary, when 10s of 1000s of marchers crossed the Pettus Bridge, the teenagers were among them, carrying the posters of the martyrs. Something beautiful happened on the bridge; people approached the young people and said, “That was my mother,” “That was my friend,” “I didn’t know anyone remembered.” There were tears of joy and gratitude, shed by those of us who marched in the steps of those who had gone before us, and shed by those who were overjoyed to have their loved ones remembered. I choose to think that we were beholding a fruit of being the Beloved Community.

 

+MHA