Tag Archives: religion

 
Blog

Finding God online


"It is technology which is enabling us to reach the Gods at the click of a mouse." —Mervyn Jose, an employee of Saranam.com, a website based in India which charges a fee for performing prayers, blessings, and offerings at Hindu temples on behalf of clients. Saranam effectively offers religious outsourcing, and it’s services are apparently most popular with a tech-savvy demographic of the diaspora: according to The Washington Post, approximately 60 percent of the company’s clients live abroad and are Indians in their thirties who work in the technology industry.

The site sometimes looks like a Best Buy, with advertisements for services that read: “Saranam is offering a new subscription service called Club Saranam that gives you an incredible 15 pujas per month for just $15.00. This price is inclusive of shipping to any part of the world.”

Not everybody is skeptical about phoning it in. Gopal Pujari, a priest at the Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu and Kashmir, in northern India, noted: "Time is changing and so are devotees; they don't have so much time and they live very far… But they have devotion in heart and despite all the constraints, they still remember God in any which way they can."

For some, religion by proxy is infinitely preferable to no religion at all.

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Blog

Christians and yoga


Demonstrating an intolerance that is noxious, bizarre, and antithetical to living in a globalized world, the founder of PraiseMoves – a recently concocted “Christian alternative to yoga” – is demonizing yoga, of all things. PraiseMoves founder Laurette Willis was, apparently, stunned to learn that yoga was related to Hinduism, and now decries the practice, suggesting that the mental components of yoga can lead, apparently, to something approximating possession: “If there's nothing in your mind, you're open to all kinds of deception… While I don't believe Christians can become possessed, I do believe we can become oppressed by demonic spirits of fear, depression, lust, false religion, etc.”

While the movement’s idiocy may neuter its effectiveness, the motivations for PraiseMoves are both destructive in its encouragement of religious division and demonization as well its curious inability to acknowledge religious dialogue and shared religious practices that have evolved through inter-religious contact. If Ms. Willis were to be told that the Christmas tree is a practice that has rich pagan roots, she might be nudged to reconsider her intolerance. Although factionalization and the rhetoric of religious and ethnic division has gained currency and publicity, Ms. Willis would do well to be reminded that religious practices neither developed in a vacuum, nor are they static: they are dynamic processes that have developed through intellectual exchange – polemic and violent as well as syncretic and peaceful – both within and with other faith communities.

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San Francisco
News

Let the Rhythm Soothe You

Best of In The Fray 2002. Transforming a neighborhood through art, love, and mindful drumming.


Group of people sitting behind drums

It’s a part of Oakland the kids call ‘Ghosttown.’ They give various explanations for the name: bad things happen here; the streets are vacant, without the hum of thriving businesses; the black people who walk the streets at night look like ghosts. In other words, West Oakland isn’t exactly a destination. Cars may pass through here, but they stick to the interstate freeways along the edges of the neighborhood.

The corner of 33rd and West, however, is a different story. Here, in a duplex that used to be a crack house, the Attitudinal Healing Connection has opened up shop. On any given day, this non-profit community center is a hub of activity. People are constantly going in and out of the front door for after-school art programs or around back to check on their squash in the garden.

The AHC, simply put, is a nontraditional arts center, a school where you can take classes in painting, photography, and African drumming. But it is much more than that. It is a local effort in a national movement called attitudinal healing, which seeks to help people find inner peace by changing their attitudes toward personal problems. It is the most passionate of personal crusades—one family’s effort to transform a blighted city neighborhood, one heart at a time.

Whatever optimistic energy the center exudes, it has apparently been contagious. Near the house, where bougainvillea climbs up the porch posts and young trees sprout out of recently laid sidewalk, the neighbors have been cleaning up their property, too. All this fixing of fences and planting in yards to keep up with the Joneses.

Or, the Clotteys, to be exact.

Before we came here, it was like a Third World country,” says Kokomon Clottey, who opened the AHC in this neighborhood in 1994 with his wife Aeeshah and Aeeshah’s daughter Amana Harris. He points to the house across the street. “In 1994, that house didn’t sleep. They were always drinking or selling drugs. There was always the TV, partying, friends, cars—all kinds of madness.”

A white family, the Belknaps, used to own the house. Though it had a security system and bars on the windows, people still raided the house easily, even hauling a refrigerator out the front door once. The Belknaps were desperate to sell it. They even offered to loan the Clotteys the $10,000 needed for purchase and renovation if the Clotteys would use it for their arts center and live above it. The Clotteys were hesitant at first; it didn’t help that a man was killed across the street as they were considering the deal. But finally they decided they couldn’t refuse the opportunity to get to work in a neighborhood that so needed change.

Eight years later, the Clotteys have not only survived their stay in Ghosttown, but their center has thrived and its offerings have greatly expanded. These days Oakland residents can participate in a variety of programs that include a well-known racial healing circle, an ArtEsteem after-school program for children, after-school mentoring, and personal development retreats that can be counted for credit in some educational and vocational programs. The center’s staff also visits local schools on occasion, where they put on assemblies mixing together storytelling and African drumming.

In those eight years a lot has changed in the neighborhood, too. Prostitutes used to walk the streets nearby, but after Aeeshah insisted on inviting them in to sit for a spell, no one dares to troll for business in front of the AHC. The house also hasn’t been robbed since they moved in—even though the Clotteys have forgotten to lock their doors several times. Once Aeeshah left her purse on the back step and someone brought it around the next day with the contents untouched.

Above the center’s entrance is a saying that sums up the general attitude: “Expect a miracle.”

“The center has a lot to do with pulling the community together. People go into the garden to pick fruits and vegetables. It’s much quieter now and people seem friendlier,” says Robert Ervin, who lives right behind the AHC on 33rd Street. When he moved here in 1990, Ervin says the neighborhood was “pretty raunchy,” with drug dealing and other crimes taking place in the open. But now, he says, “We’re more of a community.”

Lucille Walker, who lives two doors down from the center, plants tomatoes in the AHC’s Forgiveness Garden. Since she arrived in 1973, Walker has seen the neighborhood go through a lot of changes—but nothing, she says, like what has happened since the AHC moved in. A woman of few words, she pats Kokomon on the shoulder, saying, “Since you’ve been here, everything’s been real nice.”

The AHC is an unusually successful example of a community-based program, says Breonna Cole, a nonprofit consultant. “What makes this place very different from other nonprofits that I work with is the ethos that they work from,” she explains. “They’re not afraid to be spiritual and pull together the pieces. This is evident in the work they do, especially the racial healing circle, which seems to benefit especially white people in asking what each of us brings to the table.”

Many city officials, including Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, have commended the center’s efforts. “The AHC’s programs have clear goals and are open to all Oaklanders,” Brown writes in an endorsement letter. “Their approach is innovative and their programs are sorely needed in the communities they serve.”

A Course in Miracles

I visit on one summer afternoon, to check out for myself exactly what’s so “innovative” about the center. Kokomon takes me around back. “We don’t put a padlock on this gate,” he says as he leads me into the Forgiveness Garden. “We want people to feel welcome and to come help us.” It’s clear, by the look of the place, that the people are coming. Tomatoes, squash, and peppers sprout everywhere. Children have painted portraits of heroes such as Mahatma Gandhi and Congresswoman Barbara Lee on stacks of tires.

As we sit down on chairs built by the East Bay Conservation Corps, Kokomon explains the nontraditional mental health principles behind the work that he, Aeeshah, Amana, and their volunteers do. There are twelve principles of attitudinal healing, he explains, that flow from a book by Helen Shucman, A Course in Miracles, as well as psychiatric research by Jerry Jampolsky. Almost three decades ago, Jampolsky found that children with catastrophic illnesses improved when they changed their mental outlook. Attitudinal healers believe that we are not only responsible for our thoughts, but also for the feelings we experience. Our pain stems from our own thoughts, guilt, and judgments about people, experiences, and events. By exploring these feelings, and coming to terms with them, we can eventually heal them and find inner peace.

“It’s easy to point a finger and say B did that to me. But if you hold onto this, you don’t feel good. You won’t feel well. You have to be responsible for your thoughts and your own feelings,” Kokomon says.

The Clotteys’ contribution has been to take this specific message of love, forgiveness, and the need to let go of fear, and to apply it to the problem of racial healing. “It’s easy to say, ‘Hey, I’m poor,'” Kokomon says. “What are you going to do about poverty? Yes, the government did this to you, but are you going to sit there and let the government put madness on you the rest of your life? If you eat food that is not good for you, it will make you sick. You are responsible.”

Kokomon and Aeeshah make shared stories the cornerstone of the monthly racial healing circles. “Many times we don’t know each others’ stories because we’re afraid of being the recipient of fear, rage, guilt, or shame,” Aeeshah says. Because conversations on race can be incendiary, she believes we must start racial dialogue by connecting all the people in the room through a common ritual. This is the reason that the Clotteys begin their circles with drumming and a reading of ground rules of respect.

“That puts us all on the same page, with the same rhythm,” Aeeshah explains. Adjusting everyone’s sense of rhythm—which affects not just the way you keep a musical beat, but also the way you talk and walk—is important to creating an expressive, honest atmosphere, the Clotteys believe. It brings all of the participants into the space of the room from the various places they have come from and untangles them from their everyday uncertainties—what Kokomon calls the “tapestry of madness and fear.” As he explains: “When we’re in trouble, our rhythm changes. Mindful drumming is about letting go of stress and putting the body, mind, and spirit in alignment. Then, we are really ready.”

This basic work of talking, listening, and (literally) harmonizing with each other, the Clotteys believe, can ultimately heal racism. “You can’t legislate people learning to accept each other,” says Aeeshah. “That requires heart work.”

“We define racism as a life-threatening disease,” Kokomon says emphatically. “It’s killing people. We don’t want to wait until people are dying, but try to take a different angle, with prevention. This is for the people who are living so they don’t get to that point.”

According to Kokomon, committed participants of their racial healing circles have made lasting changes in their lives. White people especially respond to the circles, often working out guilt about their privileged pasts. In their book Beyond Fear, Aeeshah and Kokomon recount the story of Gerd, a German-born engineer who spent many years in Liberia. As he was mourning his status as a childless and single older man, he woke up to the realization that he had fathered a mixed-race daughter in Liberia whom he had turned his back on, more than three decades earlier. “Now, all I have of her are two pictures and three strings of beads—a very personal souvenir of her mother and a whole new way of hearing the country song ‘I’m in love with you, baby, and I don’t even know your name,'” Gerd says in the book. He started searching for his daughter, putting together a computer picture of what she would have looked like at thirty-four years of age. To the Clotteys, Gerd’s story shows the timelessness of all things and the need to face the past to move on into the future. They write: “He spoke of learning more about love and forgiveness in the last few months than in the previous fifty-eight years of his life. He is now actively involved in human rights work in Liberia, with the understanding that Africa is a deeply personal matter for everyone and that every human being is someone else’s daughter or son and deserves love, attention, and respect.”

Though Aeeshah and Kokomon insist their methods have achieved tangible results, it’s also easy to see how people might respond to their unconventional beliefs with skepticism. I raise my doubts with Kokomon at one point. “Spacey? People think it’s more than spacey,” he says. “They often think it’s a cult.” He laughs; it’s hard to think of Kokomon Clottey as an evangelical zealot. Even though he and Aeeshah and Amana live by these twelve principles and hope others will live by them, too, they say their work isn’t about indoctrination. “There’s a difference between being spiritual and being religious or dogmatic,” Kokomon says. “If you’re dogmatic you separate people. We’re nonpolitical and include everyone and everybody.” In his view, the principles of attitudinal healing are nothing more than ground rules for human decency in people’s everyday lives. “We just want to give them tools to improve their life. That might just be planting tomatoes in the garden.”

Amana sees their outside-the-box thinking as an advantage in these times. “Traditional methods and standard thinking are not working for our kids. They’re not living in standard homes. The question is how we support children for these conditions,” she says.

Once they get to know what really goes on at the center, parents seem to support the Clotteys’ methods. Anthony Hall said he hesitated before sending his eight-year-old daughter Kenya to the AHC because he worried that its nontraditional principles had something to do with cult-like behavior. But he eventually came around. “The AHC’s principles are humanistic. They don’t contradict our Christianity,” he says.

Interestingly, both Aeeshah and Kokomon grew up in Christian households—Aeeshah in small-town Louisiana and Kokomon in Gamashie, Ghana. It took them time to come around to attitudinal healing. Aeeshah’s early frustration with the racism she felt as a student at the University of California at Berkeley led her to the Nation of Islam in her search for racial uplift and support. But after seven years with that black nationalist group, she wasn’t sure she had found the answers to her questions. “I had an enormous amount of love in my heart,” she writes in Beyond Fear. “However, it was only shared with a portion of people on earth, and I added to my confusion by teaching this lesson to others. I taught love and fear.” Then Aeeshah attended a seminar where she was introduced to Helen Shucman’s book, A Course in Miracles. She suddenly felt as if she had found her spiritual path. She headed next to Tiburon, California, to meet with psychiatric researcher Jerry Jampolsky, and decided then that she was going to begin a new line of work.

Aeeshah introduced Kokomon to the ideas of attitudinal healing in 1990, as the two of them were collaborating on a tape of spiritual poetry set to African drumming. Kokomon, who was born in Gamashie as a member of the Ga-Adabe people and came to America as a musician in 1977, soon found that the principles of attitudinal healing resonated with the experiences of his own life—in particular his encounters with American racism. He brings all his talents to his work at the center, weaving the principles of attitudinal healing into what he has learned as a medicine man, modern interpreter of the Ga-Adabe’s wisdom and rituals, and master drummer.

Right now, the AHC keeps going through the full-time efforts of Kokomon, Amana, and several dedicated volunteers. Aeeshah’s salary as an assistant program director at Casa de la Vida, a residential psychiatric treatment center in Oakland, forms the basis of the center’s $100,000 annual budget. The AHC also receives substantial supplemental grants and some local contributions, but is still actively looking for other sources of income to expand their programs and their staffing.

Building a Better Oakland, One Popsicle Stick at a Time

In their version of West Oakland, the fish market is in-between the fire station and the senior living facility. A movie theater, bowling alley, pet store, and farm are near the AHC. Hoover Elementary School is on the next block, near the community garden, toy store, clothing shop, and arcade.

It’s a Friday afternoon, and I’m sitting in on a session of ArtEsteem, one of the AHC’s after-school programs. The twenty kids in attendance are busy building a community—one made from popsicle sticks, foam, paint, bits of wire mesh, and glue. These 3-D models are the culmination of fifteen weeks of learning about Oakland’s government, settlement history, sewage and water systems, demographics, and regional ecology under the guidance of ArtEsteem’s director, Amana Harris.

As part of their latest project, the children conducted videotape interviews with local residents, including a social worker, the owner of the liquor store on the corner, and a former drug dealer. After color-coding plots of West Oakland “beautiful,” “ugly,” or “interesting,” the kids decided what to keep, eliminate, or transform. It’s about allowing these kids to dream about a better life in the here and now, explains Kokomon. “We ask, ‘What do you want to do?’ now and plant the seeds. ‘Do you want to be a lawyer? Well, what does it take to be a lawyer? Work on it.'”

Even this little bit of daydreaming can be quite a luxury on the tough streets of Oakland. The city has already seen eighty-four murders this year; in 2001, there were eighty-seven murders. Drugs, prison, and materialism—and music that worships these things—are pervasive in children’s lives here. “The guys want to go to jail even if they’re from decent families,” Amana says. “Here, skills for boys are being able to count money, counting how many crack rocks you have, and standing on your feet for a long time.” While boys are running in the streets learning to be drug dealers, girls are shouldering the burdens of teen pregnancy.

“There are so many forces here that set kids up to fail,” Amana says. “It’s not like school gets closed down if there’s a shooting. Nobody’s really protected.”

That grim reality is all too clear to ten-year-old Tyrese Johnson. “People are already starting to do doughnuts,” says Tyrese, a veteran of the ArtEsteem program. “And there was a shooting near my school a year ago. I didn’t really want to walk home. I was afraid they’d start shooting again.”

Through painting, photography, and other creative outlets for their energies, ArtEsteem seeks to soothe the fears that afflict kids like Tyrese. “This climate is full of conflict,” says Amana. “It’s at school. They bring it over here. But we’re teaching them how to perceive negativity so it doesn’t penetrate them deeply.”

Program graduate Kamilah Craword says ArtEsteem changed her life. When she started attending sessions back in middle school, she had an “attitude” in class. “I was talking back, not doing what I was supposed to … I put all my negative energy on everybody in the class,” she wrote in one of the center’s newsletters. ArtEsteem helped Kamilah to get “back on track.” Now, rather than taking to the streets or sitting at home bored, she volunteers at the center almost every day. She helps Amana run ArtEsteem as the organization’s secretary, and swears by its effectiveness. “If this program wasn’t here I wonder where the kids would be right now. Would they be in jail? Would they be on drugs?”

Tyrese knows what he would be doing: “I’d be sitting at home, looking at the TV, getting fat. Or maybe riding around skating and stuff. But nothing artistic like this.” He gets very excited when talking about his favorite project, the kids’ larger-than-life portrait of themselves as superheroes saving West Oakland. “Super T,” he explains, has laser vision, super-strength, and, most importantly, “the power to change people’s minds, to make bad people good.” You could say that ArtsEsteem has had a similar effect on Tyrese. “I used to litter, but I don’t do it anymore,” he points out.

Breonna Cole, the nonprofit consultant, praises the AHC’s use of art to change children’s attitudes. The center, she says, has become a “place of last resort” for students who have been neglected by the school system. “The schools have no money or resources to invest in the kids,” she says. “The critical issue in Oakland public schools is that we have violence in schools and a disastrous lack of art.”

Parents also respond favorably to the program. Oakland resident and parent Anthony Hall says he particularly appreciates how ArtEsteem grounds art in the community, connecting the children to a larger sense of what it means to live in Oakland. “Here, the kids also develop friendships and relationships with other kids who are not going to the same school. They get to share common interests,” Hall says.

Kids who come to the program are sometimes labeled as troublemakers by their schools. Amana prefers to see them as “incredibly neglected, but full of love.” She has had to deal with so-called “kings of conflict” many times over the years, and under her close care, problem children often calm down and end up having perfect attendance. She remembers one boy who started out belligerent and, after she worked to win his trust, eventually confided in her, telling her in a note: “I need help.” But he later turned out to be too much for even Amana to handle. This boy’s defense mechanism, as she puts it, was “to be as offensive as can be,” and he would constantly antagonize the other kids. In the interest of keeping the program’s atmosphere as positive as possible, Amana had to expel him.

Amana herself grew up several blocks from where the AHC now has its office, and she still lives in the neighborhood with her husband and her daughter Sabah. The curriculum she is developing for ArtEsteem is part of her graduate work in multicultural education at the University of San Francisco’s Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice. Amana says she began working at the AHC because she wanted to put her art school degree and teaching background to work for the community. Her belief is that a program like ArtEsteem can help combat the negativity that she says is swallowing up young people.

At the end of each ArtEsteem class, Amana and the children join hands in a circle and observe a moment of silence. Then Amana leads the kids in their daily refrain: “We are a community. We support one another. We are willing to listen and learn and absorb all goodness as we breathe.” At the end of the circle, she asks, “Okay, who’s mature enough for extra responsibility?” If all goes well, everybody.

Skin on Skin

For an hour, no one in our circle of ten spoke. Kokomon’s hands kept moving, weaving in and out of different rhythms, leading us in the weekly Mindful Drumming session. Sometimes our fingers beat the skin of the handmade drums at a feverish pace; sometimes our palms just brushed the surfaces. We were a motley bunch—Latino construction workers seated alongside white and Asian American professionals, gay men jamming with straight women—but we were all keeping time together.

This was my first taste of the AHC’s programming. Much of the power of the center’s curriculum comes from the experience of the activities since, as one participant explained, they don’t aim at the head so much as the gut. So I wanted to make sure I’d taken part in at least one activity.

I was hesitant at first—mostly because I hadn’t ever participated in a drumming circle. But it turned out to be surprisingly easy—or perhaps surprisingly welcoming. There was a clarity to my thoughts as my hands drummed away. The action seemed to work out any nervousness or fatigue. I worried that my drumming sounded different from everyone else’s, but I came to appreciate that this was as it should be. Every set of hands produced a different sound; but we could be one orchestra, sharing one score. I noticed how individual each one of our hands were, yet they were made out of the same gristle and bone and had the same purpose. Hands make and remake constantly, in this way telling others that we exist. Wherever we had come from, whatever our story was, in this room, this evening, there was the fact of skin on skin.

I admit I had been skeptical about how much could be accomplished by sitting around a room beating on animal hide. But then I saw for myself the powerful effect that participating in a common activity and creating something collectively could have on people. After the drumming had ended, we sat in our circle and talked. People very openly shared how their weeks had gone. No one rolled their eyes, but listened with sincerity and patience. An hour of nonverbal expression had suddenly made the mouth and language seem like miraculous things.

Nothing shifted cataclysmically that night, but it seemed very possible that, if people kept coming, longtime frustrations could be vented, priorities reoriented, and habits changed. It seemed very possible that the Clotteys’ vision could come true. I felt much calmer leaving their house than when I had walked in. And stepping outside, I noticed the streets were also calm. A feeling of warmth and goodwill was palpable in the air.

In the distance, cars whizzed by on the freeways. Had their drivers stopped for a second to look toward West Oakland, they’d have seen that one street corner, 33rd and West, shone particularly bright.

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Features

The Twelve Principles of Attitudinal Healing

1. The essence of our being is love.


1. The essence of our being is love.

2. Health is inner peace, and healing is letting go of fear.

3. Giving and receiving are the same.

4. We can let go of the past and of the future.

5. Now is the only time there is, and each instant is for giving.

6. We can learn to love ourselves and others by forgiving rather than judging.

7. We can become love finders rather than fault finders.

8. We can choose and direct ourselves to be peaceful inside regardless of what is happening outside.

9. We are students and teachers to each other.

10. We can focus on the whole of life rather than the fragments.

11. Since love is eternal, death need not be viewed as fearful.

12. We can always perceive ourselves and others as either extending love or giving a call for help.

Go back to Let the Rhythm Soothe You.

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A mural two blocks south of New Song suggests black/white partnerships within the community, July 2001.
Baltimore
News

The Most Segregated Hour in America

Best of In The Fray 2001. A look at three churches that worship the multicultural way.


People laughing in front of church
Left to right, Kenny, Rachel, Quinlin, Bonnie, Nicole, and Tim gather outside Faith Christian Fellowship after a Sunday service in July.

In 1968, four days before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon in which he called eleven o’clock on Sunday morning “the most segregated hour in America.”

Over thirty years later, even the most integration-minded churches still struggle to cross the cultural divides that keep Christians worshipping apart.

Last summer, I spent time among three mixed-race congregations in Baltimore, hoping to understand the challenges that today’s multicultural churches face. Baltimore, it seemed to me, was a good place to look. According to 2000 census estimates, Baltimore is 64 percent black and 31 percent white, with growing populations of Latinos and immigrants—a diverse metropolis, whose friendly atmosphere makes it the most Southern of Northern cities.

I soon found out, however, that the multicultural church movement has more than a few obstacles to overcome here. Many residents today describe Baltimore as a black and white city, not just for its demographics, but also for its history of racial conflict, which still plays out today in segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools, and segregated churches. Mutual suspicions run deep. Riots rocked Baltimore after King’s assassination, accelerating white flight. Renewal programs supported by the city government have rejuvenated areas such as the now-touristy downtown harbor and nearby Fells Point, but have generally failed to improve life in many black neighborhoods.

Three decades after the civil rights movement broke the color line at workplaces and lunch counters, the designation “multicultural” still raises eyebrows in Baltimore’s Christian community. The three congregations I got to know were fighting against this attitude, and were finding, despite all their good intentions, that building a racially diverse church is still no easy matter.

Not a ‘White’ Church

On a summer Sunday morning in Pen-Lucy, a struggling neighborhood on the northeast side of town, two thirty-something women walk down the sidewalk, arms encircling each other’s waists. One is black, the other white. They enter the church’s foyer through a stone archway built long ago, by a wealthier congregation. A tacked-on sign in upbeat, modern type announces the building’s current occupancy by “Faith Christian Fellowship.” The two friends stand in line to fill out nametags before searching for seats in the nearly full sanctuary. The music kicks in, and the multicolored “worship team” leads a gospel rendition of “Like A River Glorious.” The crowd of about 250 begins to respond, as variously as their many shades. Some clap and shake their hips, while others sit calmly nodding their head in time to the drums.

Pastor Stan Long says services weren’t always so inspiring. Visiting Faith in the early 1990s, he found the church “still struggling to get it together.” But he was greeted with change when he visited again, in 1999: “There were a lot more people, a lot more mixed people, the music was clearly more alive.” Long was so impressed that he quit his job as head pastor of a predominantly African American congregation across town to become co-pastor at Faith, which is explicitly multicultural, with an emphasis on racial reconciliation. It was good timing, as the church needed a black leader.

He and Craig Garriott, his white co-pastor, ask to meet with me as a pair. Long, whose curly hair is just beginning to whiten, is genial, quick to talk and laugh at the frustrations of running a multicultural ministry. Garriot’s thinning hair is blond, and he draws out his words, sometimes pausing to peer through his glasses. Both are in their late forties; both have five children. They’ve known each other for twenty years: Long was working for InterVarsity, a national Christian organization that focuses on college students, when he met Garriott, whose college group was doing a summer urban project at Faith. That was 1981; Faith was founded just a year before. But their current partnership is barely two years old. It is part of Faith’s attempt to attract more blacks to what some from the African American community call “a white church.”

Garriott calls the staff of Faith “intentionally diverse.” Indeed, he uses the word “intentional” like a mantra. It explains Faith’s struggles to address racial disparities by carefully monitoring the church’s leadership, worship styles, and even small group demographics. Before they got “intentional,” the church found that the covenant groups were self-segregating along race and class lines. So the church broke up the groups and started over, emphasizing the goals of reconciliation and diversity. Garriott insists there was “no quota system, [no] engineering system.” Now, the groups can no longer be characterized as white intellectual, African American, or blue collar. They’ve achieved a mix of people that’s echoed in the larger congregation—about 30 percent black, 30 percent Asian, and 40 percent white.

Garriott is surprised when Long says that black churches in the neighborhood don’t appreciate Faith’s multiculturalism. “You think they see us as a white church?” he asks.

“There’s no category for multicultural churches,” Long says. Even if a church has both black and white leadership, he explains, the tendency is for the black community to see the white person as the real leader. When sharing the platform with whites, he says, African American leaders are suspect—ingratiating Uncle Toms.

This barrier of historically unequal black/white relationships is why Long is excited to see the middle-class black families who’ve started coming to Faith. “You can’t have a church that’s truly a diverse community where there’s real dignity if the middle-class community is white and the blacks are poor.”

When they bought the current building in 1983, Faith’s founders felt its location on the border of two very different neighborhoods in North Baltimore would provide valuable racial diversity. Long’s concept of “true” diversity has become a concern only more recently. Because the church draws from both prosperous Guilford, near Johns Hopkins University, and distressed Pen-Lucy, examples of economic parity between the races are hard to come by.

In part because of its strong contingent of people from “outside,” the church is still struggling to attract members from the Pen-Lucy community. Faith’s Christian elementary school and sports programs are major avenues of recruitment for neighborhood kids and their parents. Faith also recently created a non-profit organization to focus on community development projects.

One of the biggest draws, however, is the music. Though the mix includes classical and contemporary, gospel is clearly the most crucial in attracting and retaining black families. The biggest problem facing an upcoming move to two services was scheduling so that the drummer could play at both.

Patty Prasada-Rao, a member of Faith since 1994, worries that the church is still not doing enough to locate itself as a community church: “It can be discouraging if … you see mostly white faces or Asian faces because it draws a lot of Hopkins students.” Because of these “outsiders,” she describes it as a regional church focused on community development rather than a community church.

A former Hopkins student herself, Prasada-Rao is now director of resource development at the Sandtown Habitat for Humanity, an organization struggling to define itself as community-based. The Habitat where she works was started by another multicultural church in Baltimore, a much smaller one called New Song.

Multicultural mural
A mural two blocks south of New Song suggests black/white partnerships within the community, July 2001.

Singing a New Song

Pastor Thurman Williams likes to joke about meeting people and explaining he’s from New Song, a church of about fifty members in West Baltimore. New Psalmist! they exclaim, and pile high praise on the gifted brother.

There are many reasons to mistake him for a preacher from one of the oldest and most prestigious black churches in the city. Though only in his early thirties, he has the charismatic presence of a seasoned minister. And though he grew up in middle-class, suburban D.C., he exchanges greetings easily as we walk the streets of Sandtown. He calls, “Hey ladies,” or “Hey bro’, how’re you?” as he passes people cooling off on their stoops.

He’s made this neighborhood—one of the poorest in the city—his home for almost two years. He lives in the row house where the church was founded in 1988. (New Song has since moved to a larger building three blocks away.) It’s there that I meet his wife Evie, toting infant son Joshua. Williams’s family itself is a multicultural church success story. He met Evie, a member of New Song, before becoming pastor there in 2000. Although she is white, her presence in the mostly black neighborhood is accepted, and Joshua is passed from lap to lap at church. In a neighborhood where Williams says most churches are “comprised of folks who drive in and drive back out—people that grew up here and left,” his commitment is a cornerstone of New Song’s plan. “We wanted to be a church for people right here,” he explains.

Across the street is the neighborhood pool, thronged with kids battling the summer heat. Pointing up the street, five houses down, Williams shows where, just yesterday, men shot at a church member’s home. The kids at the pool dove to the ground in fear. But the streets are busy again today, the pool is full. Business is as usual at the nearby Habitat office, Health Center, and Learning Center, all established by New Song with numerous grants.

These neighborhood resources are all part of New Song’s three R’s: Relocation, Reconciliation, Redistribution. The first principle can be especially challenging. When New Song’s white founders, Allan Tibbels, wife Susan, and friend Mark Gornik, moved to Sandtown fifteen years ago, people were not welcoming, believing them to be narcs, or maybe just crazy. Now, after earning the trust of the community and bringing millions of dollars in resources and services, their own kids have the neighborhood lingo down.

Sylvia Simmons is a black church member who moved her two daughters from East Baltimore to Sandtown; she became a Habitat homeowner there in 1992. Now in her mid-thirties, she’s seen a man shot and killed, escaped gunfire next to her house, and had a co-worker injured by crossfire while making a phone call—all since the move. Yet she remains committed to the neighborhood, arguing, “When will the rebuilding start, how can it start, if we all run away?”

Simmons’s loyalty stems from her close ties to New Song. Her current job as a medical assistant, as well as her home, were gleaned from close ties to the church. “I saw the good that was being done and I was a recipient of that,” she says. Yet when her small Pentecostal fellowship decided in 1992 to combine services with New Song, a Presbyterian Church of America, it was difficult at first. “We were used to the shouting and the jumping and being very active in the service and this was totally different, very reserved,” she says.

The process of both congregations adapting to each other was gradual and difficult. “I cried through it and I prayed about it and was puzzled about it and I looked at my pastor initially like, ‘Why did you do this? And why are we here?'” she says. One of Simmons’s greatest and most difficult realizations, she says, was that “God has other sheep.” Her denomination was not the only one that was Christian. She refers to Acts 2, describing the day of Pentecost, on which tongues of fire appeared and a crowd of men speaking different languages miraculously understood each other. This scene is the model of many churches attempting to claim a multicultural status, and is often cited as Biblical proof of God’s approval.

“The racial thing is what will continue to eat at you ’til you leave here, if you’re allowed to,” Simmons acknowledges. New Song’s leadership still struggles with mistrust. Placing more power in the hands of community members and addressing longstanding inequalities are constant issues. “We want to feel as blacks in this community that we have the freedom still to know what’s best for us and have that respected,” she explains.

At Habitat, Prasada-Rao sometimes groans under the burden of black/white misunderstanding. Indian American and dark-skinned, Prasada-Rao often finds herself in the position of mediator, a bridge between black and white in Baltimore.

There’s not a day that goes by at work that’s free from racial issues. Disagreements may not get trumpeted in church on Sundays. But during the week, at the various centers started by New Song, hurt feelings and resentment announce themselves. At times Patty wishes reconciliation didn’t take so long. “I wish I could say to the white folks I know, ‘Because you come from this perspective you have no idea what it’s like,'” she says. “I wish I could say to the black folks I know, ‘Not everyone has it out for you … not every comment that is made is a racial slur.'”

Getting beyond Color-Blindness

But patience is crucial in the multicultural church business. So is a large measure of forgiveness. Michael Coles has learned both lessons, the hard way.

Coles, in his late forties, is the first African American pastor at Seventh Baptist, a browning church on the corner of St. Paul and North Avenue. Seventh Baptist is not his first multicultural flock. After graduating from seminary, Coles and his best friend at the time, who is white, started a multicultural church in Columbia, Maryland. When his co-pastor was disqualified for misconduct, Coles found that some members of the congregation were not ready to accept him as the sole leader of the church. Though they were willing to hug him on Sundays, Coles says, “I had people come up to me and say, ‘I just can’t sit under a black preacher.'”

It took Coles time to get over his bitterness, especially toward white Christians. But since 1996, he has taken pride in leading Seventh Baptist, a church that didn’t allow black people to sit on its outside steps in the 1930s and 1940s. Warm and voluble, he offers an easygoing pat on the back and sometimes a grandfatherly “Be good” as he says goodbye to congregants. At the same time, he responds to questions with take-it-or-leave-it candor. Some white members of the congregation have found his coming unpalatable. He is not surprised.

Coles chuckles at the rhetorical questions put by those advocating color-blindness, mimicking their air of innocence with a smooth drawl: “Why can’t we all just get along together? Why can’t we just be Church?” He responds, “I believe one of the most racist statements that anyone can say is that God does not see color, because if God does not see color, then he made an awful mistake.” His laughter booms—”an awful mistake.” For Coles, seeing and acknowledging differences is a first step toward tolerance.

Coles’s anti-color-blind approach is to discuss divisive subjects in the open and to challenge perceptions. He replaced the old Sunday School curriculum with texts targeted at urban and African American congregations. He brought up the O.J. Simpson trial in a sermon, before an audience that is usually about 60 percent black and 40 percent white.

Betty Strand, seventy-nine, has been going to Seventh Baptist since 1940, when it was almost entirely white. Since then, whites have fled Baltimore, and the area around the church has grown darker. Strand, who is white, approved of hiring of a black pastor to attract more people from the surrounding neighborhood.

She knows some people who left because of Coles’s race and because of the church’s changing worship style, with its new emphasis on gospel. Of those who remain, she says, “We think an awful lot of Pastor Mike. He’s a down-to-earth Bible preaching minister, who doesn’t mince words.”

Coles will need all his evangelistic skills to face the challenges of staying multicultural on North Avenue, a street many associate with abandoned homes, drug deals, and even homicides. He will have to hold on to a nucleus of white families, even as he convinces neighbors that Seventh Baptist has divorced its racist past, and that the local rumor, “Mike is pastoring a white church,” is simply not true.

He accepts the challenge with a certain enjoyment, and sees his unique position as an advantage. When white folk, interested in helping, ask, “What can I do?” he sees other black pastors responding, “We don’t need you.” Coles is happy to end the impasse and accept resources from outside his church and city. In return, he offers suburban congregations the opportunity to overcome their negative perceptions. He describes a recent visit by a white Baptist congregation: “We had a group come up, their expectation was that someone was going to get hurt, someone was going to possibly die, their things were going to get stolen … at the end of the week, they were so blessed to realize there are good people here. They went back home with a 180-degree [different] idea of what the city was all about.”

In Baltimore, integrating the most segregated hour in America remains a sought-after dream. “It’s just not very clean or smooth, it’s very messy,” says New Song’s Thurman Williams. “There’s always something coming up that let’s you know there’s issues that haven’t been dealt with.” Patty Prasada-Rao agrees. “It’s hard, it feels impossible, but I believe that it’s important, it’s what God wants. If you can’t do it in the church, it’s going to be hopeless to do it anywhere else,” she says.

I visit New Song’s service on a hot July Sunday. Two blocks from a basketball court where men are warming up for a game, I find a small congregation of about thirty-five people. A third are white, a third are kids of both colors talking intently or teasing each other. A doctor from the Health Center, her daughter, and her husband are the lone Asian family. Sylvia Simmons has promised me an un-Presbyterian style of worship: “Lots of upbeat music, clapping and stomping.” The low hubbub quiets for a moment of silence. On the front wall, behind the electronic keyboard that serves as an organ, there is a sentence spelled out in puffy, sparkling letters: “Nothing is too hard for God.”

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The Ganges River in Varanasi, India.
Commentary

Burning the Stones

In a place without memory, life becomes art.


People bathing in the waters of the Ganges
The Ganges River at Haridwar, India.

They come here from all over India to wait for death, in the most auspicious place for dying. This is the holy city of Varanasi, in northern India. Here, the eyes can witness the crimson sun rising from the Ganges’s waters at the break of day. Here stands Manikarnika, the burning ghat, a stone crematorium built on a massive bank over the River, right at the point where she finishes her bend to the north and once again turns to the east.

Here, men burn away the dead, and burn away history.

I stand at the third-floor window of a hospice building in the city’s center, watching Manikarnika. It is the hour of dusk. The heat of the day departs, leaving thin mist and burning stones behind. The sweet fragrance of sandalwood ascends from four funeral fires below. Boats loaded with firewood are roped to the bank. Boys shout and spring from them, swimming and playing catch in water murky from the ash.

Hindu men, most of them dressed in the mourning color of white, surround the fires. Women are not permitted at the cremation site, for their cries would taint the soul’s journey. In Varanasi, death is the ticket to liberation, an ending to the painful cycle of rebirths.

The corpse in the pyre on the far left has been completely consumed by flames. A man with a shaven head, the deceased’s eldest son, turns his back to the fire and lifts an earthen pot filled with water from the Ganges. He throws it over his right shoulder. The flames hiss. The vessel shatters. Men collect the smoldering ashes, and cast them into the river.

In the brownish water millions of lives merge into one. And from this Mother, lives are born again. How many generations have been carried away like this?

From a narrow lane stretching to the ghat I hear a chant. The words accompany the procession of a colorful bier as it makes its way to the fires.

“Raama naam satya hai, Raama naam satya hai.” God’s name is truth.

I had come to Varanasi from the former Muslim capital of Delhi, a city dotted with tombs, both splendid and ruined, that stand and fall as the legacy of the Mogul rulers. The beauty and size of the tombs testify to the greatness of the rulers interred within, and their determination to mark their lives for posterity.

After arriving in Varanasi, I met up with my Hindi teacher, Abhiji. We talked about Indian history, and soon started discussing an essay I had just read. The article, which was written by an English scholar, said that the Aryans came to India from Central Asia and laid the foundation to what became the upper tiers of the caste system. The former inhabitants—both indigenous and recently arrived—evolved into the untouchables.

When I mentioned the article’s thesis to him, Abhiji erupted. Foreign historians were propagating lies in order justify invaders of their own kind, he insisted. “The Britishers could never accept that the Aryans, including the English, originally came from India.”

I had little reason to doubt the English scholar’s account, but Abhiji’s outburst troubled me. It reminded me of the agenda-loaded history books I had skimmed despairingly in a Delhi bookstore a few days earlier. History for Indians, even educated ones like Abhiji, appeared to mean advancing their own political objectives. Perhaps it was a legacy of the colonial era, when rejecting the doctrines of their British rulers was a matter of liberty or oppression. In any case, it seemed that I could rarely find a book or enter a debate in which a genuine attempt was made to find the truth about past events.

Later that day, however, I realized that I had misunderstood the reasons behind Abhiji’s belief. In the shadow of Manikarnika, I watched ashes being poured from the pyres. I watched those human remnants as they dispersed on the water surface, slowly drifting downstream and then vanishing. In the emptiness left behind, I imagined the gorgeous tombs of the Mogul rulers in Delhi, and the simple gravesites clustered around village churches back in my homeland, the Czech Republic.

The ashes and the tombs. Compared with the fire-drenched stones of Manikarnika, the memorials of my Catholic and Czech culture and those of the Muslim culture of the Moguls are much alike. They both speak to the same need to remember, to preserve and magnify the memories of life. And yet here was a culture that had always dissolved the material remains of man—the stuff upon which any factual history is based.

The divide that separated me from Abhiji suddenly became clear to me. I remembered working as a tour guide in Prague, and taking Americans through Czech graveyards in search of their great-grandfathers. In the Western cultures, history is the words written on a stone, the lives carved into a tombstone. Abhiji, on the other hand, once explained to me how his caste is defined by a common ancestry from one rshi, or semi-divine sage. For Abhiji, there is no chronology to say when that sage existed, and when his great-grandfather lived, and so the two men merge in his perception; imagination creates history.

This difference between his view and mine appeared stark and irreconcilable. If the two of us differ so fundamentally in our conception of what constitutes our own past, how can we argue about history?

Abhiji has always struck me as a much-contented person, blessed with a happiness that comes from his strong faith in his gods and his ability to feel the divinity within himself. Perhaps the divine spirit pulses in his veins precisely because the tales of the past that he hears and tells are of gods. He grows into what his roots are. What is the point of forcing him to think “historically,” to separate myth and history, to argue about stones instead of relying on his own imagination?

In the past Abhiji imagines and lives by, the sacred Ganges is the womb from which all men once came and to which they return. The threat he hears in the English historian’s article is not so much the argument itself, but the habit of looking for concrete evidence to support an objective explanation. By defining Abhiji’s past for him, the historian also shapes what Abhiji believes himself to be.

In Abhiji’s perspective, history is part of one’s own belief and each individual has the right to create or choose his or her own. Thus, each individual also accepts that another person may choose a completely different version of the same story. The true origin of the Aryans is irrelevant. What is really at stake is how much claim the objective historian has over an area that is inherently private.

The dusk had deepened in Varanasi. The smoke-curtained sunset dazzled me. By and by I forgot both Abhiji and the Aryans, and another thought occurred to me: never before had I appreciated how much history defines who I am. I had seen the past as something that could be dug up and analyzed by others for me. I had seen the past as a stone. But perhaps if I considered the past to be a stone, I would become one, too. By surrendering to objective “truth,” I might forfeit the freedom to create and recreate myself.

Inside, I rebelled against the heaviness of that truth. There was an art to this act of living, I thought, and my life was too precious to be dictated by fossils.

Perhaps it was this thought, or just the evening sun, but the Ganges suddenly seemed to be more than the river I observed. She was vast and ageless and powerful. In her waters millions of lives merged into one.

I walked down along the river to a stone square where boys played cricket. Not ever doubting the superiority of soccer among games, I had never stopped before to watch a cricket match. That evening, however, I enthusiastically joined the youngsters in chasing wickets.

Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

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