Author Archives: Julian O. Long

blues man Lowery

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I missed reading some news yesterday because I taught school last night. Today I see that the blogs are full of righteous wingnuttery over Joseph Lowery’s benediction at Tuesday’s inauguration. Here’s a fairly mild little rant from Lewisville, Texas:

That’s not a prayer, that’s a travesty. If a white man had made similarly racial comments, there would have been hell to pay. Racism is truly stronger from black to white, than from white to black. They really need to get over the fact that their skin is black, and join the rest of the human race.

And in case anybody expected that the hate Obama campaign would go away or die for lack of participants, a look at this thread will be sobering.

I loved the Lowery prayer, and I particularly loved its weaving together of material from the history of the civil rights movement. Its peroration was a blues riff, embedded in the history of white privilege to be sure, but also embedded in the humor and toughness of the blues singer’s minstrelsy. It was a human prayer, and its closing call and response, “That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen” (a quotation from Micah), was exactly appropriate, I thought.

Here’s the apparent source of Rev. Dr. Lowery’s blues riff. Katie Sherrod has some background for the song, for which she depends partly on Louie Crew, in a reference I’ve not been able to track down. But here’s the song, “Black, Brown and White,” as recorded by Bill Broonzy in the nineteen fifties.

a new era of responsibility

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I thought it was a magnificent speech, not so much somber as sober — but radical all the same. The pundits are gradually parsing it–I’m listening to MSNBC as I write–and commenting on its challenge to a new assumption of responsibility for our public affairs by all Americans. Even Pat Buchanan seems to have been inspired. Of course Fox News has already panned the speech, so it must have been even better than I thought. Too bad about Michael Gerson–somebody should ask him to dance.

Then after all the flap about who was going to pray, Joseph Lowery stole the show, quoting James Weldon Johnson in the beginning and concluding with a riff that closed with a call and response. I watched in a room full of students and faculty at SLU who had gathered in the headquarters of the African American Studies Program. There were maybe a hundred of us, people drifting in and out listening to a panel at the beginning that included my beloved and some other faculty, eating snacks and lunch, some of them weeping, some laughing. Nobody was unhappy.

So — there it is. My guy is now the 44th President of the United States of America. I’m recalling the bicentennial celebration in the nineteen seventies when, for a while, it felt good to be a patriot. One thing that happens in such times is that the great clichés return from banishment and sometimes even comfort us. President Obama today evoked words of George Washington before the Delaware crossing: “Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].” For my ear the following passage was the heart of the speech:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

The event started for me when Aretha Franklin sang “America,” channeling Mahalia Jackson. I thought Professor Alexander’s poem was surprisingly good and loved the piano quartet (Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero, and Anthony McGill) that played an arrangement of a couple of hymn tunes by John Williams. It was a fine morning, and it made me think again that not the least accomplishment of the former junior Senator from Illinois is that he has begun to rehabilitate love of country for many of us who have felt that we were abandoned as Americans by the reactionary politics of the past almost forty years since the beginning of the Reagan era. He is telling us again and again that love of country is at one with our better angels, not the corporate egotism and jingoism of the recent past.

Perhaps patriotism doesn’t have to be the last refuge of a scoundrel. Perhaps it can again become a call to practice those habits of the heart that Tocqueville found among our ancestors almost two centuries ago: a self-interest understood to require concern for others and for the common good. “[H]ard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” as President Obama said today:

— these things are old. These things are true.

in the midst of life . . .

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Yesterday I attended a funeral.

I didn’t know the deceased, the father of a friend and colleague. I went to support my friend, to join with him and his family, many of whom I also don’t know, in paying attention, and in enacting the formal gestures by which we honor the end of a life.

All lives are significant. It’s not my purpose here to make any distinctions between persons. I was brought up to believe that one went to funerals, and I’m thinking here about what that may mean to me–now that I’m getting close enough to my own funeral that I can think about it as a palpable thing.

My companion on the 150 mile journey to Sikeston, Missouri, where the funeral was held in a Presbyterian church, was another colleague and friend, a member of the Society of Jesus who is more familiar with funerals than I am by virtue of his vocation as a priest. But we were both brought up to believe that you went to funerals, and as we talked about this shared experience, my friend remembered a little essay that he likes to use in classes sometimes. It’s called “Always go to the Funeral,” and it was written by Deirdre Sullivan as part of the This I Believe series on NPR.

I like the homeliness of Sullivan’s thoughts. Here’s the heart of it, perhaps:

Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.

“Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. . . . In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

For me, there’s still more. I remember a funeral years ago, when the priest (a man I loved) read the great prayer that opens the prayerbook service, with it’s solemn quotation from Job, from the back of the church — taking us all in:

As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.
After my awaking, he will raise me up;
and in my body I shall see God.
I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him
who is my friend and not a stranger.

Death is always inconvenient and sudden, even if expected. We who are not dead are called out of life to pay attention to a sudden absence. A certain one there was, and that one is no more. And so one goes the funeral–to bear witness and in the enactment know again and for the first time the age-old gestures of bereavement and consolation to the bereaved, who are also ourselves no matter we didn’t know the deceased.

The church was full for my friend’s father’s funeral. There was comfort in that beyond the familiar words from John’s gospel, “Let not your heart be troubled . . . ,” even for a stranger to the place and its community who were mostly to me just folks. Here’s how Sullivan describes a similar experience at her father’s funeral.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I’ve ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

Not friends, not loved-ones, not the communion of saints, just “folks in the church” gathered together — knowing what we know.

gumbobama – oui on peut!

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I looked for a new, small Bush countdown widget this morning and was amazed at the number I turned up in a Google search. They come in all sizes for all operating systems. Here’s one from Credo Action. I wonder if it will self destruct on January 20.

And somehow I missed this video during the presidential campaign. Thanks to Liberal Revolt for the reference. It’s a good reminder that my guy is trying to become the president of all of us, not just nerds like me.