Dear Friends,
A friend recently loaned me Jodi Picoult’s latest book, Small Great Things. It’s the story of Ruth
Walker, a licensed labor and delivery nurse and Turk Bauer, a skinhead whose
son dies in the hospital shortly after birth. Turk blames Ruth and a court case
ensues in which Ruth is tried for murder. The significant part of the book for
me is the daily, sometimes subconscious, racism that pervades the culture as
seen in many of the characters in the book. Racism lives in America today.
While Small Great
Things ends with a degree of resurrection, not all stories of racism end
that way. Hatred has reared its ugly head in Charlottesville, Charleston,
Dallas, New York and other cities. The list goes on. Do we feel hopeless in the
face of the American tragedy of racism or do we take small great steps at a
personal level to examine and root our racism in ourselves and our environment?
Cardinal Donald Woerl of Washington, D.C. recently released a
pastoral letter to his archdiocese that’s good for all of us to read. He notes
that “without a change in the basic attitude of the human heart, we will never
move to a level of oneness that accepts each other for who we are and the
likeness we share as images of God” – a contemporary way of expressing Jesus’
own words “That they may be one in us.”
Pope Francis continues by urging us to “combine our efforts
in promoting a culture of encounter, respect, understanding and mutual
forgiveness.”
The work is ours, but how do we do it? How about gathering
some people together for a reading of Small
Great Things, with an emphasis on
seeing into the characters what we ourselves have said, done, ignored,
encouraged? If not this book, surf the web and find a video to view and discuss,
or go to a talk or a workshop that gets at the heart of the fact that hatred
destroys the hater as well as the hated one. Exploring racism together helps keep us on point.
The work of overcoming racism at a personal level requires the
awareness and compassion of all of us who live in a self-centered culture. The
current phrase is that “we need to get out of our comfort zone.” Only then, do
truth and unity have a chance to ripen in us.
When faced with the world’s most awful problems, I often
think of the symbol of the Easter candle from which our baptismal candle was
lighted. It is by that candle – the Light of Christ – that we see into
ourselves and around ourselves. Stand next to that candle in your imagination,
close your eyes and be in the Godspace where you can see the procession of
people coming to that candle. They are black, red, yellow, brown and white
skinned. They come from Mongolia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Bronx. They stand
at the borders of countries and at the edge of slums in Chicago and Sao Paulo.
If God is for them, how can we be against them?
~Sister Joan Sobala
