Mother Emmanuel Taught Love That Cast Out Fear

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.

Obama Speaks On Grace, Race In Pinckney Eulogy

At last, black foke got the speech that they've been waiting for.

In reality, it was always unrealistic for blacks to expect Barack Obama to survive two terms in office being the head Nigga in Charge, given the level of opposition that faced him from day one.  He's done his best to add a little Al Green and a significant ebonic drawl to his eloquent speaking, but his policies have left most left leaning blacks wondering if any politician is much different in the long run.

In reality, Obama has done so many good things for America that it is hard to accept them in the face of the things he didn't do that you were hoping for, whoever you might be. So he might not complete immigration during his 2 terms, and he hasn't championed the cause of racial equality, yet most rational thinking people realize that any good leader is probably pissing off everyone on an equal level.  So far, Obama has done this too well for his own good or for his own public opinion polls.

President Obama's greatest strength is in line with a quote of Rev. Clementa Pinckney that the president himself used during his eulogy of Pinckney.  The quote went as follows: "Around the south, we have a good understanding of history.  Unfortunately we don't often have a good understanding of each other's history".

Barack Obama not only recognizes the power of history, it seems to be a guiding force in each of his decisions and his speeches.  Because of a keen sense of history, Obama's done a great job at limiting the big errors that would have impeded his ability to accomplish so many big things. At the same time, he's seen as way to cautious by those who felt he was purposed to create a new history while blazing new trails. You will never be able to deliver your song if you can't find a way to get and stay on stage. That's what I took from MSNBC host Al Sharpton, who was able to recall a story in which the great James Brown told him that,(paraphrased) no matter what you do in life, fight like crazy to get on that stage.  But once you're there, you gotta sing.

Today Obama sang.  Well technically, he sang again, but this time it was different.

He sang amazing grace, but he hoped to remind the world of the power of grace.  Knock on wood, because it was probably grace that allowed Sasha and Malia to avoid the front row of a funeral as someone else eulogized their father while residing as president.  Had Obama assumed a posture of black power and retribution for the years of mistreatment, he might have shortened his tenure in Washington and on earth.  Until today, Barack Obama stayed far away from the raw truth of race in America, fearing no one wanted to really deal with it in the first place, so why make his wife a widower?

Today, he said it the way blacks have been trying to say it for so long that we started to sound like that proverbial wolf crying little boy.  It took one too many recorded killings of black people- including the recent loss of the Emmanuel 9- to free this president to point out the obvious.  Confederate flags don't cause deaths, but they might cause hiring managers to "give a call back to John instead of Jamal" as the president reminded us in his eulogy.

We've come a long way, but moments like these are divine blessings- grace if you will- to press further into the struggle of decency, or return to the status quo.  In this address, president Obama urged America to seize this opportunity to advance our conversations, but most importantly advance the cause of decency towards one to another.  Mother Emmanuel is a shining example of  what it means to give undeserved decency, or grace if you will, much like the kind that Mother Emmanuel extended to the same man that terrorized their church.

Through the death of these 9 people, the confederate flag will come down and president Obama was finally given the reason to be black without excuse.  No one could question the vulnerability that this act of terror caused, even to those who don't stay in church a little longer than normal.  If the black church is the spine of black people, it could very well be the spine of America given the role blacks have played in advancing the cause of freedom's flag. Today was another chance for black people to advance the cause of freedom in America
, and our president stood up.

Freedom has a flag already, and it isn't the one that sought to maintain slavery.  However courageous the effort of any soldier, some of them are enlisted in the wrong army and for the wrong cause.  The only guilt and shame any person should feel towards the error of their ancestors should come from the persistence in that error.  Confederate flags are the height of a persistent error masquerading as family pride, and any state that sponsors the confederate flag is trying to mask the insecurity of shame and guilt with immense pride, yet, at the expense of those who have been oppressed by this symbol, and at the expense of our actual flag which stands for freedom and unity and decency as a birthright for all.

Does The Flag Stand For Grace?

Today our president gave a passionate address about the importance of being unified and decent towards all American's after the Supreme Court invoked federal right's allowing same-sex couples to marry.  And then he flew to South Carolina to eulogize a young black community leader, slain as a political act of terror.  The grace to be free and honest about race and grace was given to Barack Hussein Obama today, and he did not waste the moments.