What Love Looks Like in Public

I am among what must be the last generation of former kids to have learned to read with Dick and Jane. The editions we studied–I was in first grade in 1970–gave Dick, Jane and younger sister, Sally, black friends.

Michelle Martin a professor of Children's and Adolescent Literature at Clemson University whose research focuses on African American children's picture books, wrote this about those readers:

"The Dick and Jane readers that most baby boomers and pre-boomers learned their alphabets from first appeared in 1930. …

"Two decades later, over three-quarters of America's first graders were reading the Dick and Jane books. … But it wasn't until 1965, a year after the Civil Rights Act, that people of any color other than pink appeared in the series -- in the form of an African American family with a mother and father, the twin girls, Pam and Penny, and an older brother, Mike… Mike was the same age, size and temperament as Dick–in fact, as the historians of the Dick and Jane books have pointed out, he's Dick's first real friend. Pam's and Penny's and Mike's family have the same values, the same work ethic, the same material things [as Dick’s and Jane’s and Sally’s]. Their dad is a white collar worker too; and their mom is a housewife. Perhaps the only major difference lies in the fact that their grandparents live in the city in an apartment, not in the country, like Dick's and Jane's. The text designers clearly were careful in their demographic research. And Pam's and Penny's and Mike's family brings something wonderful to the street -- a sense of style, of energy, laughter and joy. Despite what was going on in the world outside, in these sheltered pages, there was complete harmony and perhaps, too, a hope."

Copyright 2006© Michelle Martin

Martin’s article, on the website recess.ufl.ed is accompanied by an illustration from one of the readers, showing Mike and Penny and Pam watching delightedly as their father, dressed in a gray suit, tie and hat, carrying a brown briefcase, pushes himself along the sidewalk, one foot on the back of a tricycle, hands on the handle bars, the other foot waving behind—the style, energy, laughter and joy Dr. Martin described.

There was one African American kid in my kindergarten class and he had disappeared by first grade. If I thought about it all—and I don’t remember doing so—I probably assumed that Peter’s family life mirrored mine in the same way that Mike’s, Pam’s and Penny’s life mirrored Dick’s, Jane’s, and Sally’s. And maybe it did. There wasn’t a lot of diversity in 1970s suburbia. At least not visible diversity.

The point is, I don’t know. And I don’t know because I didn’t know Peter’s family. I didn’t know who else was in Peter’s family. Where they lived. If they had any pets. If their grandparents lived in an apartment in the city or on a farm in the country. I didn’t know any of these basic facts about Peter’s life, and certainly not anything of greater significance—did they go to church and which one, how had they come to live in that suburb, what was it like to be the only African American child in the whole kindergarten, why wasn’t Peter there after that one year—I didn’t know anything about Peter’s life because, in the words of Bryan Stevenson, I never got proximate to Peter.

In his 2017 Ware Lecture to the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending the poor, the wrongly condemned, and those trapped in the furthest reaches of criminal justice system discussed

“four essential things that we must do to create a more just and equal world…[g]et proximate to the poor, the excluded, neglected, and abused; change the narratives that underlie racism and other inequalities; stay hopeful about creating justice; and be willing to do uncomfortable things.”

This morning I’m going to talk about getting proximate. I’ll consider his other three essential things at another time.

In the excerpts I read this morning from Mr. Stevenson’s book, Just Mercy, we learn something about the genesis of his sense of the importance of getting proximate. We learn that in his very first, awkward, life-altering visit with a death row inmate, his grandmother’s words “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan” became gospel— good news that convicted him to a life of getting close to important things, and set him on his very specific career path.

Do you remember that scene in You’ve Got Mail when the Tom Hanks character writes to the Meg Ryan character that the answers to all life’s questions can be found in The Godfather? I beg to differ. To Kill a Mockingbird is the true source of all wisdom. Consider this passage from the final pages of Harper Lee's classic:

“'Whatcha reading’?' I asked.

"Atticus turned the book over. 'Something of Jem’s Called The Gray Ghost.'

"I was suddenly awake. 'Why’d you get that one?'

"'Honey, I don’t know. Just picked it up. One of the few things I haven’t read,' he said pointedly.

"'Read it out loud, please, Atticus. It’s real scary.'

"'No,” he said. “You’ve had enough scaring for a while. This is too—'

"'Atticus, I wasn’t scared.'

"He raised his eyebrows, and I protested: 'leastways not till I started telling Mr. Tate about it. Jem wasn’t scared. Asked him and he said he wasn’t. Besides, nothin’s real scary except in books.'

"Atticus opened his mouth to say something, but shut it again… I moved over and learned my head against his knee. 'H’rm,' he said. 'The Gray Ghost, by Seckatary Hawkins. Chapter One…'

"I willed myself to stay awake, but the rain was so soft and the room so warm and his voice was so deep and his knee was so snug that I slept.

"Seconds later, it seemed, his shoe was gently nudging my ribs. He lifted me to my feet and walked me to my room. 'Heard every word you said,” I muttered. “…wasn’t sleep at all, ’s about a ship an’ Three-Fingered Fred ’n’ Stoner’s Boy….'

…

"'Yeah, an’ they all thought it was Stoner’s Boy messing up their clubhouse an’ throwing ink all over it an’…'

…

"'An’ they chased him ’n’ never could catch him ‘cause they didn't know what he looked like, an’ Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things… Atticus, he was real nice….'

…

"'Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.'"

It doesn’t always happen that way, of course–that most people are real nice when you finally see them. It didn’t even always happen that way in Harper Lee’s novel. But it often does happen that when you get to see someone, you come to understand them and learn from them in a way you never could from a distance.

Finally seeing people, eliminating the distance, getting proximate, breaks open our understanding and changes our relationship to our neighbors, our enemies, our classmates, our kin upon the earth. But getting proximate means more, of course, than simply reducing physical distance. It requires more of us even than repeated exposure or familiarity.

During my year at Yale Divinity School I had an experience that highlighted how inadequate close physical proximity and even repeated exposure or family can be, in our quest to expand our understanding of the important things–the things that empower us to help bring about equity and justice. Following an incident of vandalism of the chapel Bible prior to the memorial service for a gay student, we had a community-wide discussion about diversity and inclusion. During one conversation in a crowded room, I sat literally cheek-to-cheek with a classmate and friend, sharing a piano bench with him. When the question was raised, what’s more important, our differences or our similarities, my friend said, “We already know we’re all Christian.”

Well, we weren’t all Christian, and he knew that about me, that I’m not Christian, and he could hardly have reduced the physical distance between us any more than it was already reduced. But he hadn’t gotten proximate. He hadn’t gotten so close to me that he could feel my experience or understand what it meant for me to be the sole non-Christian in that community of learning and faith.

When Bryan Stevenson suggests that in order to create a more just and equal world, we must [g]et proximate to the poor, the excluded, neglected, and abused, he means get close in such a way that even when we’re not close to them we still feel them, as he could still feel his grandmother’s hugs when she finally let go. Get close in such a way that our lives are changed forever. In such a way that from then on our decisions, our words, our actions, our prayers, our expenditures of resources, are all shaped and informed and directed in some way by that proximity. That we won’t tolerate language, won’t patronize businesses, won’t consume media and entertainment that harm, exploit, denigrate or otherwise belittle the humanity of any segment of our society.

Or rather, to phrase it in the positive, getting proximate to the poor, the excluded, neglected and abused means getting close in such a way that our lives are changed forever. In such a way that from then on our decisions, our words, our actions, our prayers, our expenditures of resources, are all shaped and informed and directed in some way by that proximity. That we do use language and patronize businesses and consume media and entertainment that recognize and lift up and celebrate and honor and support, (financially, too), the humanity of segments of our society too long burdened and threatened and broken by indifference, intolerance, fear and hatred.

Our American society is segregated across all sorts of divides—race, class, education, politics, religion, gender identity. Getting proximate to those excluded, neglected and abused as a result of these divides is challenging. I’m not an expert on how to make it happen or what it looks like when it does. I commend to you any of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, from which I read this morning–or any of his other works and talks that can be found online. If there is sufficient interest we can read Just Mercy together and discuss it in an adult RE program. In the meantime I offer a couple thoughts to start us on the right path.

First, getting proximate to the poor, the excluded, neglected and abused doesn’t mean setting out to help or rescue or save any person or group of persons. Stevenson’s story shows us clearly that his first visit to death row rescued him as much or more than it rescued Henry. Once the anxiety of both men subsided, they encountered one another as men with families, histories, tastes in music, dreams and questions. Henry may have gone back to his cell, heart lifted by the knowledge that he had at least a year in which to invite his wife and children to visit him, but Stevenson too walked out of that visitation room with a gift–a vocation calling him. Surely he feels that visit in his bones and in his soul even now, some forty years later.

Getting proximate doesn’t mean setting out to save. It means setting out to encounter. To set aside assumptions—what we know or think we know about a person or group. To be curious and to be open to the curiosity of the other. I once sat next to a white South African woman on a bus ride from Aberdeen, Scotland to London, England. And during that interminable ride, I failed to engage her in conversation. It was a lapse of courage I still regret. Her country was just emerging from apartheid, and I was full of questions and judgements and ignorance. Those hours were an opportunity to be changed that I’ll never get back.

But getting proximate need not be as dramatic as engaging the devil incarnate in conversation (which was, I admit somewhat shamefully, how I thought about that woman in the moment—and that is precisely the assumption that conversation with her might have challenged). Sharing a meal, telling a story or better yet listening to one, preparing and serving at meal at Strengthening Families, sitting next to someone new at a board or committee or club meeting and being curious about them, working side by side on a community project—these are all ways of opening ourselves to the deep knowing that might change us and our part of the world forever. And while it would be great if we did those things with folks across one of the great segregated divides of our society—race, class, religions, gender identity, political affiliation—even if we stay on what we perceive to be our own side of those lines, we might discover along the way that even the neighbor we thought we understood has a story the telling and hearing of which changes us forever.

Secondly, getting proximate to the poor, the excluded, neglected and abused doesn’t have to mean occupying the same geographical space. If constraints of time or mobility or simple uncertainty about where to start seem insurmountable, here’s one suggestion: the CLF, Unitarian Universalism’s congregation without walls, has a robust prison ministry and is always in need of pen-pals. That might start out feeling like helping or rescuing but I can almost guarantee that it will end up feeling like transformation–of your very being.

My brother directs a program that came about like this: once upon a time an attorney in Minnesota was sent to prison. Like many, perhaps most, incarcerated people, this attorney lost friends and family members and colleagues. But another attorney–not a close friend, just someone in the first man’s large circle of legal colleagues–decided that the incarcerated man shouldn't be abandoned, so he sent him a letter, and another, and eventually visited him in prison. Today, more than sixty years later, the program that grew out the friendship that developed between the two men matches volunteers on the outside with incarcerated men and women in almost every correctional facility in Minnesota, and has expanded to provide a range of re-entry support and services to ex-offenders.

At the beginning of the story the second man was, technically speaking, proximate to the man who was in prison–that is to say, they knew each other in the most superficial of ways–but his decision to get more proximate–to engage with his colleague despite the awkwardness of the circumstances–transformed the lives of both men and birthed an organization that has transformed the lives of incarcerated folks and folks on the outside for more than half a century.

Consuming media and entertainment across lines of race, class, and culture is another way of beginning to get proximate that doesn’t require sharing geographic space. This is a growing edge for me. I’m happy to read books and articles by writers from just about any group that can be named. But I only reluctantly listen to music that’s outside my comfort zone. And I have definite tastes in television shows and movies that reflect my education and my class and my race. I have to push myself to expand these boundaries. And while not really media or entertainment, but along the same lines, I have to be deliberate and work a little harder than I’m accustomed to in order to include voices of color in my worship resources–from texts for readings to selections of picture books.

Pushing boundaries of entertainment and worship might begin to draw me into proximity with folks unlike myself, in ways that might begin to wrap me in an embrace of understanding that I’ll never shed and that will inform my life choices forever after. Begin, but only begin, because life is going to demand of me person-to-person encounters if it is going to reward me with transformation for myself and my community.

Peter, back in Ms. Hinz’s morning kindergarten at Nelson Elementary School. That white South African woman on the bus. These are my reminders that I lose something when I allow my natural introversion and my Minnesota aloofness and my social anxiety to keep myself at a distance from the gifts life drops into my path in the form of strangers, neighbors, chance encounters along the way. These are my call to continually seek out and welcome and take up ways of getting proximate with the poor, the excluded, neglected and abused. You’ll have your own. Your own stories. Your own lost opportunities and, perhaps, if you’re fortunate enough, you have your stories of the opportunities you didn’t lose. The times you yourself were wrapped in an embrace of knowing that you’ll never shed and that have informed your life choices forever after.

I wavered long and thought hard before I included Sherman Alexie’s poem Hymn in this morning’s service. It’s long, even after I cut some of it and cut some more of it, and I already had another long reading, that I also cut and cut again. But Mr. Alexie’s is another voice of color that we need to hear. And his hymn, his anthem, reminds us what’s at stake and what’s in store and how we might be called into the glory of our better selves, if we dare to answer Bryan Stevenson’s call to get proximate:

"I am one more citizen marching against hatred.

Alone, we are defenseless. Collected, we are sacred.

We will march by the millions. We will tremble and grieve.

We will praise and weep and laugh. We will believe.

We will be courageous with our love. We will risk danger

As we sing and sing and sing to welcome strangers."