Mornings in Selma

Each morning, about two hours after the sun has peeked over the towns of Dallas County and when we have just concluded Morning Prayer, Fr. Steve and I get in the car to head to daily mass. Each morning, about two hours after the sun has peeked over the towns of Dallas County, we turn right on L.L. Anderson Ave and drive past houses—houses run down, boarded up, houses with shattered windows, rusted roofs, and walls caving in. Some of these are no longer occupied, they have been abandoned for years. Yet many of them, yielding no more than two or three small, dilapidated rooms, are what countless people in Selma refer to as home. Each morning, about two hours after the sun has peeked over the towns of Dallas County, we see our black brothers and sisters sitting on their porches. Not just because this is the South and that's what people do here, but because that is so often all they can do. There are so few jobs, so few opportunities, and so often no hope.

For most of Selma's history the public school boards were run solely by white people. They had the jobs, the power, and the money. In the 1960s, when the government mandated that schools be integrated, the whites in charge pulled all the state funding to public education, took their children out of the city schools, and opened up private schools that blacks could not afford, nor would be admitted to in the incredibly rare circumstance that they could afford tuition. Segregation laws did not apply to private institutions, only public. As a result, the education system in central Alabama, with extremely meager funds to pay teachers and provide resources, flopped. Segregation may have become illegal at the state level, but institutional racism took on a new face. What was the point in trying in school, when there were few competent teachers and those who were competent could not attain the proper means to adequately address their field of knowledge? What was the point in trying in school, when white people had all the jobs and governing positions, and thus even if you succeeded academically you may well never find respectable work? This reality has pervaded Selma and the surrounding areas for so long.

Yet the times are changing, albeit slowly. There are many blacks on the educational board now, the mayor of Selma is an African-American, along with much of the city council. Tonight we went to a beautiful gathering, a graduation ceremony from a leadership conference for Selmians. The class consisted of 19 people, almost split dead down the middle between white and black. The folks came from all different work areas and backgrounds—electricians, ministers, teachers, lawyers, you name it. And they all had one common goal: to help unite and renew Selma in the face of centuries of opposition. It was such a joy to see brothers and sisters in Christ, from different denominations and different races tearfully embracing each other in joy and gratitude for the work they accomplished together over the past year and for the the work that they will help accomplish together in the future. It is those little events, gathered around deep-fried catfish, coleslaw, and homemade lemon pie, and the people who make them possible, that give hope to this little city scattered along the Alabama River.

Each morning, about two hours after the sun has peeked over the towns of Dallas County, we drive past the run down houses, the faces of our neighbors, of Christ's beloved, and we go to celebrate Eucharist. For it is there, at the Eucharistic table, that the love of Christ gathers us into one, to learn what it is to receive. It is there that we learn what we receive: Christ, who is the loving act of self-gift as re-presented to us in Word and Sacrament. Christ, who nourishes us in the sharing of a meal too quantitatively insignificant to be confused for satisfying our physical hunger. It is there, in learning to receive Christ, that we learn to be Christ's body—how to become the offering of our ourselves, our very gift of life, back to God through self-gift to others. It is here that we learn to receive ourselves over and over and again.

This is nothing other than our very vocation: to become together the love that we receive in Christ, the self-emptying love that gives itself even unto the point of death. And even then, death does not have the final say, for this love can be destroyed no more than can God.  We are called to be a people who come together to be what we receive; to be taken, blessed, broken, and given; given for a world that is all too broken and ever in need of blessing. This, as the Second Vatican Council document Lumen Gentium says, is the “source and summit of the Christian life.” Then, and only then—through Christ—can we be the voice, the hands, the eyes that speak to the racism which has torn this city apart for so long. And we will speak, we will challenge, we will encounter that hatred.  Yet we will do that through, with, and in love. The love that cannot be destroyed even by death. That is why we are here. That is why we will remain.