This is an excellent and much needed article. I hold a vision in
which every religion and spiritual tradition will increasingly embrace, own,
heal, and transform it shadow - meaning the ways in which we become
indoctrinated into belief systems which cause harm rather than healing,
separation rather than connection, judgment rather than understanding and
forgiveness, scapegoating rather than compassion, and fear rather than love,
wisdom, and a deeper consciousness. So often we grow up being taught stories and
see modeled actions that are deeply out of alignment with the original sacred
teachings and the values we believe we need to be living by. I imagine a world
where the core of what emerges in all religions and spiritual paths are
teachings of love, awareness, compassion, connectedness, and caring. Just
imagine a time where what we are all taught is to remember - and to recognize
and see - the Sacred within ourselves and all of life. Just imagine... It is up
to us.
Bless us all ~ Molly
By John Pavlovitz
Growing-up I had an image of
Jesus; I’m talking about a literal picture that graced our family room, my
Catholic school hallways, and the homes of most of the Christians I knew.
With angular features, blue
eyes, and flowing golden hair, this Jesus was attractive,
dignified—and decidedly white.
And it was this depiction of
Christ that quietly shaped my faith and my understanding of the world in ways
I’m only now just beginning to understand and slowly learning to jettison. This
is the subtle racism so many white Christians are born into and the one
that runs silently in the background of our spiritual operating systems.
Often we’re completely unaware
of it, but when the Jesus you see in your head looks like you it’s almost
impossible not to view yourself and others with a distorted lens; one where you
are more in the image of God than another, more possessing of dignity,
more deserving of respect, more worthy of love.
While I would never have
taken ownership of any overt bigotry as a young man, (and certainly would have
violently rejected the label ofracist), looking
back I’ve been able to see how my whitewashed portrait of Jesus told
me a false story about God and about people of color. It made me more fearful and less
compassionate.
I’m beginning to realize
the invisible barrier it has often been to me more clearly
seeing and being moved by the inequality around me. Sure, I’d say that God so loved the world and could recite that Jesus
died for all people, but
subconsciously believing that I was what God looked like
insulated me from the suffering outside my window when it proved too
frightening or inconvenient.
And the saddest thing is
how many people there are like me, who should know better. In
these days of such pain and division and grieving, the silence of so much
of the white Christian Church here has been conspicuous and damning, especially
from limelight-chasing Evangelical pastors and preachers who always seem
burdened to comment on every real and manufactured tragedy. They’re
normally never at a loss for words.
Now… nothing.
And the defiant refusal of
so many white Christians I know to even utter the phrase “Black Lives Matter”
or to recognize the disparity of experience across color lines or to
name the violence against black men by police, even armed with crystal
clear video evidence, tells me that they still unknowingly worship
and serve a very White Jesus and still probably see God as ultimately in
their image.
And this is rendering too much
of the white American Church a quiet, complicit spectator right now, when it
should be fully engaged on the front lines of the messy
work of peace and justice. It should be confronting its own. It should be
facing itself.
I’ve never believed in
the flimsy narrative of our country as a “Christian nation”, but from
its very inception power and privilege have been in the hands of religious people with a white Christ. These folks
have written the story of faith and race in this country—and it isn’t
pretty. It needs to be rewritten in realtime right now and this is the critical
work to which we are called, and the work I want to be part of.
The more I seek to be a
pastor to all people and the more I try to fully reflect the character of
Jesus, the more I’m convinced that I have to reject and discard this image of a
Caucasian Christ, not because I’m ashamed of my whiteness but because I don’t
want to make an idol of it.
Please continue this article here: http://johnpavlovitz.com/2016/07/12/im-saying-goodbye-to-white-jesus/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=John+Pavlovitz
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