HEARING OUR STORY NEEDS COMMUNITY
One of the powerful discoveries in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was the power of truth-telling. There was healing in the victims finally having someone listen to their story of suffering and honoring their pain. Desmond Tutu notes, “It may be, for instance, that race relations in the United States will not improve significantly until Native Americans, and African Americans get the opportunity to tell their stories and reveal the pain that sits in the pit of their stomachs as a baneful legacy of dispossession and slavery.
For a White congregation to move to the step of confessing that they are racist is neither an easy step nor does it, in itself, solve the problem of racism. To draw upon the truth discovered in Alcoholics Anonymous, White people and White congregations are always “recovering racists.” That is as much a given of our context as being an alcoholic is a given of their constitution. We did not create the history that shaped us, but we cannot escape it either. A critical step in our healing, however, is acknowledgment of the problem.i]
SAVED TO COMMUNITY
In God’s economy, we are saved to community. We not only need to confess, but we need someone to listen to our confession. Picture the power of members of a White congregation taking the sin of racism so seriously that they are willing to sit before a Black congregation and speak of their own complicity in the sin of racism as well as listen intensely to the pain that their African American neighbors experience in their lives. “True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible.”
