Embarking on a 21st-century Freedom Ride in the southern United States, writer-activist Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove shares how civil rights icon Vincent Harding encouraged the riders to honor their own stories and those of others.
Vincent Harding [1931–2014] taught me to pay attention to the holy ground that we often forget in the American story. An African American colleague and co-laborer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Harding was also a historian who saw the world through the eyes of faith…. Dr. Harding believed, as Revelation reprises from Psalm 46, that “there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God” (46:4). That great river flows through history, connecting people of faith to the Christianity of Christ. Dr. Harding’s life’s work was to baptize people into that river….
Dr. Harding taught us that every pilgrimage toward freedom begins with attention to our basic identity. “Where did you spend your childhood?” he asked each person, even the ones who were still children. “And where did your maternal grandmother spend her childhood?” Each of us comes from a household and a story, Dr. Harding knew. “Tell me her name,” he said, leaning forward with his gentle smile.
Before our freedom ride was done, “Uncle Vincent” had adopted us all, inviting us into the freedom family that stretched from the Hebrew midwives in ancient Egypt to the enslaved mothers of Southern plantations to “Ella’s Song” in the twentieth century. [1] “We who believe in freedom cannot rest” became our anthem. But our voices, though they could be joined in harmony, were not the same. We had to wrestle with the stories we’d heard at our grandmothers’ knees—with the ways each of our fathers’ households had taught us something about who our people are.
I watched young white people on that freedom ride unpack their so-called privilege, questioning basic assumptions about success and faithfulness. Our liberation was tied to that of young undocumented sisters and brothers who were also questioning the American dream—how the future it promised did not include their own parents. A formerly incarcerated African American man stood tall, celebrating a newfound pride that he was the son of women and men who had shown America what freedom means….
The other half of history doesn’t erase everything we ever thought we knew about ourselves and our God, but it does invite us to see all things in a new light. As pilgrims in a strange land, we leave our people and place for a country as yet unknown in order to see and name the holy ground beneath our feet. This cannot be a solitary journey because it entails the sharing of very different and often painful stories. But in the people who bear those stories, we meet the beloved community that both prefigures and prepares us for the country we’ve not yet been. The other half of history is an invitation to live into another story.
From Nadia Bolz Weber
My trick for “increasing” your faith
(spoiler: it’s lowering the bar)
Dear Nadia,
Do you have uncertainty? I LOVE Jesus, but my faith is wobbly at best. Is your faith ever wobbly?
-Donna
Dear Nadia,
How do we increase our faith?
-Jason
Dear Donna and Jason,
For most of my life I thought that the only physical exercise that “counted” was going for a run, or working out at the gym – those sorts of things. And there were times in my life I would do just that for 30 minutes a day and then be sedentary for 23 ½ hours.
But I have started wearing a fitness tracker and am stunned to see how on days I don’t “workout” I still walk 10,000 steps a day just living my life. Just doing things like housework and grocery shopping – things I never thought counted as “fitness”.
So Donna and Jason, you probably have a lot more faith than you realize.
Because when it comes to spiritual fitness – sometimes in our lives we can hit the God Gym so to speak, and sometimes we just can’t and in thoseseasons, try and trust that there are a lot of spiritually unassuming parts of our lives that have an element of faith to them and that those parts really do add up.
Here’s an incomplete list:
If you dream about a good future for your children, that’s a form of faith.
If you are moved by the faith of your ancestors, that also counts.
If you have doubts – that is also a form of faith because at least you’re still engaged in the question.
Do you hold those you love in your heart when they are suffering? And even ask God to come to their aid? Faith.
Do you, as you say, LOVE JESUS? …totally counts.
Do you see the inherent dignity of other human beings – also faith.
Have you asked someone to pray for you because you just can’t pray right now? Faith.
Is there a feeling of gratitude for anything at all in your life – I mean AT ALL? That’s a kind of faith.
Here’s a good one: do you ever complain or tell God off? In the Bible, that’s called a lament – and you know what? It’s a form of faith.
All of that is to say, all the faith you need is already there no matter your thoughts and feelings at any given moment.
My own faith morphs and shifts into things that my Sunday School self would never recognize.
I guess I just no longer think of faith as intellectually assenting to theological propositions, or as regularly confirming in myself that I believe all the wildest stories in the Bible are literally, factually, historically accurate. Faith functions in my life as something closer to gravity than ideology.
So, as I’ve been known to say, if you are straining to touch a faith that feels out of reach and judging yourself for falling short please know this: God always puts all the best shit on the bottom shelf.
I promise.
So maybe your prayer for today doesn’t need to be Lord, increase my faith, but Lord increase my awareness of what faith already looks like in my life.
In it with you,
Nadia
