Forgiveness, today!'
By Brandon Astor Jones
What will it take for all of us to transcend ancient angers, hurts and assumptions? — Donna Britt in the Washington Post.
No-one in the USA knows more about how slow black people are to forgive one another than the black men who are in US prisons.
Most African Americans have a long history of forgiving white folk for the human tragedy of institutionalised slavery. Moreover, while in theory slavery is past in practice, in subtle ways there is still social/economic slavery throughout the Americas.
Unfortunately, some black people in America expend a great deal of energy needlessly outraged over one thing or another that some perhaps misguided person of colour has done in history.
Many years ago when I learned that the Haitian-American slave Pierre Toussaint, for reasons not yet clear to me, chose to raise money to start a white orphanage after he was freed by a dying slave owner, I was angry with that particular piece of history. After all, I mused, there had to be a more urgent need in the slaves' own unity.
I bristled when I learned that he chose to remain in a state of servitude to the very people who had stolen his freedom. I thought to myself, "Surely this man must have been the king of all 'Uncle Toms'". As I grew older and wiser I came to realise that the river of self-righteousness, while long and wide, is extremely shallow and that one ought not dive head first into it.
It was not long before compassion and forgiveness took hold. It occurred to me that my own grandchildren might lack the vision to compassionately understand why I had once walked past several empty restrooms marked, "for whites only" to get to a jam-packed restroom marked "colored" to change their mother's diapers. None of us truly knows what might have gone on inside the mind of a Haitian-American slave in 1803. Who are we to judge him?
A proposal to canonise Toussaint is under consideration by the Vatican. It has angered some black clergypeople. The Reverend Michael Pfleger, the pastor of Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago, Illinois, says, "It shows how out of touch the Catholic Church is with the African-American community. It is still a racist institution." Be that as it may, the good news is that St Sabina has adopted the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, for its saint of choice. I think that is a good idea. The bad news is that the late Reverend M.L. King Jr, is ineligible for Catholic canonisation because he was a Baptist minister.
I am neither a Catholic nor a Baptist but I do pray daily that we African-Americans will soon learn to be at least as forgiving of each other as we have been with everyone else. Saint Sabina's pastor would do greater service to his congregation, and the African American community as a whole, if he would spend some of his well-intended energies trying to change the absurd rules of Catholic canonisation that bar the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr from sainthood. A saint is a saint no matter what faith (s)he was. What we need is more people teaching a lot more forgiveness, today!
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]