Month: June 2020

Lord, you have been our refuge through all generations. Psalm 90:1

Very few times in my life have I experienced long moments of peace and joy. Prior to this point in my life, those moments were very brief.

But now, the sense of joy and peace in my life are becoming the default and it has been a little strange in figuring out the new emotional normal, and it has been extremely distracting.

Learning about Tulsa, almost a decade ago, shook me to my core. It caused me to take a good solid look at myself, and my political leanings at the time.

Learn about the history of this country before you judge what has been going on.

Learn about Tulsa,OK; about Rosewood, FL; about post civil war Wilmington, NC.

We tell the black community to “be moral”, “work hard”, “own your own house, business”, “obey the law” and when they have – the white community has bombed them, lynched them, set fire to their churches with their children in them and tried to eradicate the forward movement and betterment of the black community by red lining communities and making home loans more difficult to obtain. 

We need to take a look at why the black community has so many problems. And I am going to say it out loud, it is the WHITE community at its origin.  

The argument is made about strong families: how can the black community have strong families when they were shown that their families aren’t important for the first 400 years they were in this land? Slave brokers and owners frequently broke up family units. Yet we tout the importance of families for a healthy society. Then there are groups who have targeted black families in other ways, forced sterilization, syphilis experiments, eugenics based reasons to target the black community as undesirable and that barely gets us to the Civil Rights movement and desegregation.

The notion that black men are thugs, perpetually angry or behaving criminally. Usually for no other reason than the color of their skin. Many black defendants receive higher sentences as shown in Florida. But more over blacks are stopped for ‘suspicious’ behavior, by even being in their own homes .

We tell them to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and when they do, we do whatever we can to pull them down and destroy what they built. We did it in NYC see Seneca Village where we decided Central Park was more important than a prospering, safe black township. How about Wilmington, NC where blacks were murdered because they were elected to office, over 2000 whites participated in a coup d’état of the legitimately elected government. Tulsa, Ok: A long standing animosity between the white and black communities ignited on an allegation of a black man assaulting a white woman – for this an entire community was wiped out by fire and 36 people died though that number is thought to be too low today. These are just a few

We have lynched, burned, and terrorized the black community since 1565 if you include the Spanish colonies, 1619 if you only consider Jamestown. And we expect them to “get over it” when school desegregation only happened in 1955. This was 65 years ago when legally the Supreme Court handed down their decision in Brown v. Board of Education. However we still occasionally hear about white only proms, racial discrimination in Greek organizations in colleges and other incidents that can be easily googled. Schools, streets, military bases, etc. are named after confederate generals and plantation owners – icons of slavery and brutality. Imagine a Jew having to go to a school named after Himmler.

We expect them to “get over it” when the black community is forced to see the vestiges of Jim Crow every time they look around their cities where there are confederate statues, plantations used as wedding venues where slavery is glossed over if not presented with rose colored glasses, and the confederate battle flag is accepted as “southern pride” or “heritage” where for the black community its a reminder of over 450 years of brutality, degradation and dehumanization.

And yet we cry “never forget” about 9/11.

How do we “fix it”: We don’t. We give them the tools to fix it themselves. We stop over policing/patrolling black neighborhoods we afford black defendants the same determination as white defendants for the same crimes and fines and then we LET THEM “fix” their own communities after leveling the playing field in Education, business and home loans, etc. We stop making school funding be based on property taxes and instead even the funding playing field.

I don’t have the answers but I empathize with the black community and my heart breaks on your behalf.

We all either have had or will have someone who will speak out to others against us falsely in order to detract from us. Who knows why. Calumny is an attempt to murder the spirit of another by false words – it is related to the Jewish term Lashon Hara, they mean the same thing.

Many times it comes from a place of anger, you see someone do something or express an opinion so you go to another person and you call them names, you detract from their value as a Child of God, you attack them and engage in gossip and detraction. It is a pretty grave sin.

I recently encountered this in my own life, I have a former friend who, because I spoke out against the President, his policies and words of late, the police brutality and denouncing my past involvement in groups that I left and quietly distanced myself from over the space of a few years. This person in turn spoke against me to others and I then received messages calling me a liar for exposing what I saw. I was then told by another that I had issues with relationships/treating people and I interpret from other things mentioned that I am supposedly toxic ??? Not entirely sure. I’ve blocked the person I think successfully so I don’t think I can still access the messages to verify exact wording.

Here is where it gets weird. I have spent the better part of the last two years solidly addressing my issues and past trauma, something I have never done quite as intensely, some in the several years before that. And intermittently as I could afford it for previous years. But it is extremely interesting that as I started growing and forming my own opinions and being more confident in speaking up with those opinions, As I grew in self esteem and I deal with my past trauma, As I grow happier and my relationships with those I am around daily grow stronger, and I have actually been forming intentional friendships – Because I disavowed a toxic time in my life and the toxicity I was seeing and didn’t want to become a part of any further then I already had that I am somehow this awful person that needs to be torn down???

I kept my mouth shut for years because I valued my friendship more than the truth because I was extremely weak in my spirit, and the truth is I saw one friend become more and more radicalized, angry, and polarized. I saw her slam Muslims, call into question Obama’s birth certificate and a thousand other typical Tea Party/right wing/extreme right wing items- and man can she argue a point – she has a silver tongue. I have seen her support the actions in Charlottesville, tell me she participated in other right wing protests in other states, that she is building an AR-15 etc. and there is more I won’t go into.

Multiple times over last year and this year, I warned a lot of people I was isolating a bit because I needed to work on my issues, I needed to fix me. That I didn’t have the emotional energy to put out and that I was sorry, that I still cared I just needed to focus on the fact in the last year I lost 2 pregnancies (3 babies) within a few months of each other – one in January and again during Holy Week of last year. And that I had basically had the wall around my heart that held so much anger broken down so that things that had shaped my (almost) life long battle with anger and rage could start to be healed.

Every person who is active in my daily life and daily encounters has said the same thing, I am so drastically different than I was 2 years ago. I am happier, I am able to say “these are my boundaries” and why. I am believing in myself, I am finding my own foundation and learning to see value within myself, and most of all I form my own opinions – I don’t parrot what the strongest personality in the room states just to not have an argument (the term for that is fawning it is a CPTSD response). And most of all I am HAPPY and my marriage is stronger than it has ever been. These folks hadn’t bothered to put energy into me once I stopped doing all the work or check on me during those two losses without me begging for support and love in my grief and pain – I was supported once and briefly and when I tried to reach out at several other times I was not responded to.

Beyond the work on my trauma, CPTSD, other elements in my past on an emotional level, my relationship to God has grown and deepend in ways I can’t quite put into words. As Catholics there is an antiphon “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Hebrews 3:15 and Psalm 95:8). I prayed 2 years ago to the month for Christ to break down my hardness of heart and to teach me how to let him love and heal me and to guide me to people who will help, love and support me. Yes as emotional and cheesy as it sounds. From there I found an awesome therapist and a pretty darn good Spiritual Director/regular confessor who gives a good swift kick when I need it along with others who love, care for and pray for me.

But most of all, I PRAY again. Y’all —– I can call God FATHER from my heart in prayer. That – that small piece of healing is worth losing a thousand best friends on this Earth. I find love and joy in talking to God. I find peace in going to Adoration. But I talk to God & Christ and Mary and the Saints multiple times a day in prayer and that prayer is from the heart and I can finally let it touch my heart in return. This is where all my emotional energy has been for the last two years.

While I am still incredibly hurt by the loss, I wish everyone well and I hope that they grow in their love of Christ and that their relationship with him is paramount to everything of this world, I want for each of them to be happy and to have the best in their lives and endeavors and relationships and for them to seek God in all things and pursue him as he pursues each of his children. I hope for heaven for them.