Service of Repentance
story by Ed Godden; photos by Adora Mack
The event began before the service. I’m referring not to the excellent workshops and presentations the Friday before the October 4 Service of Repentance at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas (AECST), Overbrook-Philadelphia. I’m talking about the gathering of penitents and celebrants in the hour before the procession started.
In some ways, it was like that time before any big Episcopal service or diocesan event. Scores of acolytes, banner bearers, communion assistants and visiting clergy got their instructions and marching orders in gestures and hushed tones. People you could tell were members of the congregation by the way they moved through the building greeted one another. The smell of incense wafted in. Seats were staked out.
But in most other ways this was different. The AECST Gospel Choir rehearsed to ‘Amens’ and applause. Friends who live half-way across the country and serve the church at a provincial levels greeted one another in the aisles with hugs, and faces you see in Episcopal Life were evident in every nook and cranny of the oak, stone and plaster gothic-revival nave. This service would have an international, Episcopal Church-wide impact.
Everybody I saw seemed happy to be there. But it was not an unalloyed happiness. The silent procession, to the ringing of a bell, underscored serious sadness. The things for which we then asked forgiveness, the sins for which the church begged pardon were horrors. The long series of petitions in the litany re-gathered us, and turned our faces to the past, the Episcopal Church’s participation in slavery, and its collusion with the subjugation of black people after slavery was abolished. The music throughout the service, which I had expected to be a blow-out, turned out to mostly somber and reflective.
The Presiding Bishop’s sermon was a real keeper; click here to read it. Her two best lines for me actually contain a homonym: “The prophets are often unpopular, but rarely wrong” and “That search (in which we, the Church, colluded with businesses and industries) for profit at all costs is not just greed but idolatry, and we are being reminded of its consequences in our own day.”
For Delaware Episcopalians, who were present in gratifyingly high numbers, the long-planned service came on the heels of two diocesan showings of Traces of the Trade. In that family documentary, narrator Katrina Browne says that we whites - who can so easily insist we had no personal part in slavery and turn a blind eye to its continuing consequences - might, after a process of conversion, wish to face the true history and redress its tangible injustices out of a sense of grief, if not guilt. To me, that was a bulls-eye. But how can I enter grief over horrors and misdeeds I do not know about, which are very hard to hear about? As a middle aged white man, I can get started only by hearing and learning another history than the one I was taught.
It’s amazing what we can look at, and not see. I grew up in the last gasps of the Jim Crow south. I remember being taught that racial prejudice was both ugly and wrong and I should not practice or even harbor it. But I honestly do not remember being taught I had a responsibility to challenge it in others. I remember being handed on a myth and attitude that with the civil rights movement, the “playing field” had been leveled, and if everyone would just be fair-minded and cordial, racism would disappear.
The truth was more complicated. In the early ’80’s when I was a young curate in Portsmouth, Virginia, I served a congregation whose members were among those who could still call the shots in local government, business, and society. In an arc from that corner, white residents were outnumbered by black residents, by as much as eight or nine to one. We didn’t think we discriminated; that was for red-necks. We were a largely segregated congregation and a distinct numerical minority, and we were still able to think of ourselves as a kind of ‘majority’! Decades upon centuries of racism had made the whole system so insidious, that when it was just beginning to budge, we could think it was gone. And of course it was just as hard for us to see how we had benefited, and continued to benefit from what had happened 30, 60 and 100 years before, as it was for others.
Back home at Immanuel on the Green the next morning, I found myself struggling to preach about that grief Ms. Browne invoked; about what I had seen in Overbrook and heard in Traces of the Trade, relating it to Paul’s dramatic insistence in Philippians 3 that after all he himself had once harbored plenty of religious, academic, moral and ethnic pride ... “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” that he had been led to give it all up, and to even “regard these things as rubbish” because he had known Christ Jesus.
I told the congregation that for me discerning racism had become a matter of discerning what “I don’t know that I don’t know.” That’s the crux of it. Not that I can possibly have overcome all the racism handed down to me, and in which my society steeped me, but that even when I have the will to overcome, I still have these vast areas of life experience in which “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
So for me the call now is not to talk, but to listen and learn.
The Rev. Edward E. Godden
Prayers, tears and song mark Episcopal repentance for slavery by Daphne Mack, October 04, 2008
Presiding Bishop's Sermon at the National Service of Repentance