Whenever I get too angry, there is an underlying fear driving me to focus on pain and not love that conquers pain. True forgiving, the kind that also forgets, is so elusive to the human experience that we often need reminders. Well, maybe that message was sent only for me to change.
Mother Emmanuel has changed America in a way that we are barely coming to terms with. Years of preaching and praying, protesting and prodding barely produced integrated schools or anything better than an offset confederate flag near the capital dome in South Carolina, but one reflective act of evil changed everything. Suddenly, every person who has a confederate flag or promoted its existence had to stop and stare in the mirror.
In retrospect, smart people can deduce that Roof did what he thought the Confederate flag told him to do just as it had inspired his white ancestors. It might make sense to keep your anger against racial mixing limited to your dinner table and weapon purchase 'just in case', but it never was reasonable for every young white southern confederate to assume the war against white people was over when the flag never came down, and when everyone they talk to, regardless of race, reminds them of their shrinking power in a world they once fully controlled.
The conditions that created the original confederate fear and the flag that followed are the same or worse depending on your perspective. White people, then and now, understand that they have never proven the dominant gene even if they dominate so many other things. Race mixing was a fear then just as it is now, because not a lot will change where the flag of fear flies freely.
White fear made race mixing illegal after all other measures were dismantled, and then it raised a flag as a reminder when freedoms weight proved too heavy for anything more politically overt. Every household might not have added the hate part into their explanation to the growing kids, but recognizing fear is inert just as patterning the behavior of fear is inert. Black families afraid of race mixing gave similar fear messages to their children until they started accepting that light skinned niggers are niggers just like them, and happiness in marriage is way too demanding to avoid testing the confines of segregation.
One day, those who don't love love unless it's conforms to their own sense of righteousness, must reconcile with the limited role of sex, especially when married with children, compared to all the other parts of life and family that don't demand one gender or the other, or care about bedroom behavior. Is a child raised by one parent who is occasionally promiscuous more healthy than a child of monogamous homosexual parents? Show me the love and I'll give you an answer. Love wins in life just as it does in any family structure, and will overcome the challenges of both family and parenting.
Period.
The evidence is clear. And whether we are fighting gay marriage today, or race mixing like the Confederate flag hoped to resist, we are focusing on fear and not the love that overcomes all circumstances including race mixing, if in fact race mixing is of divine concern in the first place. A combination of interracial marriage and the tanning industry have long since blurred the lines on race, yet, love has been working to fix that problem for man as well.
Love like Mother Emmanuel displayed to Dylann Roof and to the watching world. We Christian's understand that love can conquer anything but are increasingly amazed at just how HE gets it done. Does it require the loss of loved ones? Loss is relative, for God gave his only begotten son, not for a loss but as a gift towards everlasting life. If we give thanks for the gift of Christ, we might need also to thank him for the blessing of the lives he allowed to be taken to further this cause of freedom.
Our flag stands for freedom because the greatest gift of all is freedom, and there is no greater freedom than the freedom from fear. Mother Emmanuel didn't shrink in fear or reach for a gun. She stood in the face of fear and forgave. In doing so, she forgave every guilty white person who might have minimized the dangerous message of the Confederate flag and the fear it invokes in everybody.
EVERYBODY!!!
Absent the anger and fear, America would have never needed another flag. Emmanuel- God With Us- reminds each of us (not just me) to let go of fear, forgive and forget so that our hearts are a worthy dwelling place for the Lord and for the unity to truly call ourselves the United States of America.
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