Free at Last
When I worked at St. Aidan’s Church in Tulsa, I
remember a beautiful woman in her 90’s whose soft, radiant presence
used to enchant me when I saw her in church. Mary Randall invited
me to coffee one morning in the tiny three-room house she and her
husband had shared for decades. And she told me about her
life. Her grandmother had been a slave, and this was true for a
number of the elders at St. Aidan’s. Mary’s mother had encouraged
to use her freedom to the utmost – to give her life in service.
Mary had become a teacher and had worked to uplift others - a very
different kind of service than what her grandmother had been forced
into in chattel slavery. Mary, amazingly, not only finished high
school, but college and then went on to earn a Master’s Degree from the
famous Tuskegee Institute over the course of several summers of study
while she continued to work as a teacher during the school year.
This was in the 1920’s when Tulsa’s black community was devastated by
the infamous race riot – a massacre in which armed white citizens of
Tulsa invaded North Tulsa, killed hundreds, burned down homes and
businesses, schools and churches and destroyed the infrastructure of a
flourishing African-American neighborhood. It was not a time when
a young black woman found it easy to attend graduate school, but Mary
did this and in her telling of the story there was no trace of
victimization, no trace of resentment for all the evils she and her
neighbors had suffered. Instead she told her tale as one of
amazing blessings – she had been able to attend Tuskegee and to devote
her life to teaching the young. She had studied art and, as she
said, in those days art was about recognizing and bringing a
sensitivity to beauty into the everyday activities of life: the beauty
of making and repairing clothes, quilting, making and repairing
furniture, building homes, gardening, dressing oneself and one’s
family. The domestic arts were taught as disciplines that enhance
beauty in the world, as she told it, and I longed to live in such a
place – where art was the most practical thing in the world.
At the end of our first conversation Mary turned to me with the utter
sincerity that so many who knew and loved her remember and said, “If
there is anything I can ever do to help you, please let me know.
And I want to help in any way I can at the church.” Mary, in her
90’s, was still volunteering in the public schools, where she had
taught for over 40 years, she was still helping out with story-hour at
the neighborhood library branch, she was still teaching Sunday School,
and she still lived in the neighborhood she had invested her life in
improving, even as that neighborhood disintegrated into mindless
violence, drive-by shootings, drug dealing and other sad signs of the
confused times in which we live. Her life had a true aim – it was
about service, service to help to uplift others. Living with such
singleness of purpose had refined her into a woman of great spiritual
beauty and power. There is no one who attended St. Aidan’s who
does not remember her and sigh with inspiration.
My time at St. Aidan’s began in 1991, and this was the era when a thing
called “political correctness” was sweeping the nuances of language
away. Any word that might cause any fragile ego to react was
being removed from everyday language. Words like slave, servant,
and service were up for revision and being argued about hotly among the
seminary set. It was as if we had all forgotten what the elders
in the African-American community knew so well – these words came out
of a culture where slavery was common and were addressed to a people
who had had to endure terrible oppression. If they found the
deeper meanings of these words and the deeper truths communicated by
this language, why couldn’t we? And indeed, slaves in the United
States and their descendants did appreciate the depth of these words as
they are used in the teachings of Jesus. Spiritual giants like
Howard Thurman knew the difference between service in the Kingdom of
God and slavery to this world of selfishness. He wrote about it
eloquently in the book Jesus and the Disinherited, as well as other
places. A chattel slave could be more free than the wealthiest
man on earth in terms of the freedom of his spirit, but he, like any
other man, would have to free himself internally from the bondage to
sin and selfishness.
Like the disciples of Jesus, we waste lots of time arguing about how to
be greater. And all these arguments come out of
selfishness. Unfortunately, if we never surrender to a higher
wisdom, there is no one who can challenge us to observe the silliness
of this. If all our time is wasted in not offending the fragile
ego, well, we’ll never get anywhere near the Kingdom of God, even
though that kingdom is deep within us. We have to get over the
offense of the fragile false self and look much deeper, look inward,
ask the question: what is the beauty of service? What is the
meaning for me of Jesus’ constant teaching to become an anonymous
servant? Is slavery to the greed of another (chattel slavery) or
slavery to the greed I feed in myself any different? Why would I
call slavery to my own greed “freedom” and slavery to another’s greed
“slavery”? Perhaps when we are asked to give our service to God
and to one another we are being asked not to serve any such false
master as greed, vanity, or the rest. Perhaps service to God and
the neighbor is an entirely different kind of service, one that uplifts
both my neighbor and my true self, my deeper, spiritual self, even as
it challenges the false selves of greed and vanity and all the
rest. Willingly giving one’s life in service of one of the seven
cardinal sin states is what constitutes the most horrid form of
slavery. In fact, slavery to one’s own state of sin is much worse
in the spiritual sense than external slavery, for there is no inner
freedom there. A chattel slave can find inner freedom, can grow
in love and truth, because he or she is not inwardly bound (only
outwardly bound) to the state of sin s/he serves. But when we
take selfishness as our purpose in life, we are internally bound,
slaves to sin. Finding freedom from that is our aim, and we find
that freedom in willing and anonymous service of one another.
So Jesus was quick with his disciples, always pointing this out.
And again and again he had to teach about this, because this is where
the rubber really meets the road. Every time we want to get it
for ourselves, every time we mire ourselves in the “kingdom of me,”
every time we justify and defend our selfish thoughts, words and deeds,
we take ourselves far from the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God
is a place of concern and care for others, a place of living service to
uplift others. And this service calls no attention to
itself. It is anonymous. It is not concerned with
recognition or reward of any kind. It is not enslaved to any of
the many masks that our selfishness wears. And this service of
the Kingdom is within us – we can get there, we can find this place, we
can act on a daily basis out of this place. It is truly
possible. We feel as if we are losing our selves when we do
it. It is the cross that Jesus spoke of, where the false self is
sacrificed. But in this same place, the true self is FREE AT
LAST!!!! The paradox is that it is this anonymous service that
truly uplifts us also. It refines us into people who can enter
humbly into God’s presence at the end of life and say simply, I have
only done what I was asked to do for the sake of your Love and Truth,
Lord. I have only done my duty.
Amen.
The Rev. Edie Bird
October 22, 2006
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