Sorrow

I've been thinking about something a lot the last couple of days and wanted to write about it here. It is something that fills me with great sorrow honestly.

Monday morning I was reading an editorial piece in the New York Times online edition. The name of the piece was "The Disciples of Hatred, in Their Own Words and Images" and was about how "a lynching exhibition puts the civil rights movement in the context of the reign of terror that gripped black Southerners." The article talked about this exhibition of photos from a point in our countries history that were taken of lynching deaths throughout mainly the southern part of the United States ranging from the late 1870's to 1960.

This exhibition is to go on display most likely in 2011 when the Atlanta Center for Human and Civil Rights opens. Here is the thing about this exhibition, called Without Sanctuary, that really caught my attention and get me to check out what it was all about. The article mentions that many of these photos were sent openly through the mail as postcards. If you look at the website linked above, you will be able to see the photos that are to be a part of the exhibition. Some of these pictures were done by professional photographers and sold to people. This blows my mind.

I have known what lynching was for years, but to be honest I had never really thought about it until I looked at the Without Sanctuary site. As I looked at these photos over the last couple of days, I was filled with sorrow. It took me a while to figure out what the right term was for what I was feeling.

As I thought about it, it made me want to apologize for the things I had seen. Because even though this is not in my personal past (that I am aware of at least) it is a part of our collective past. There is no way for me personally to make any kind of restitution for what happened and yet I feel a need to do something. It makes me think of one of the chapters in Donald Miller's book Blue Like Jazz. He tells a story about he and some Christian friends setting up a confessional booth at Reed College in Portland, OR and when people came in to the booth, Miller and his friends made confession to and more or less apologized to non-believers for the bad things that have been done in the name of Jesus, such as the Crusades. Even though this was not part of their own personal history, it is a part of our collective history.

Seeing how lives were thought of as being expendable or less than others was horrible. One of the most tragic things to see in the photos was to see the children that were taken to see the results of these acts. Young men and women standing in the front rows looking on as people are brutally beaten, shot and/or hung. Pictures of men holding up their kids in the back of the crowd so they can get a better view.

The problem is that there were people who were supposed to be in charge of protecting these folks from this kind of thing and they could not or in some cases would not. The most recent photo in the exhibit was from 1960. 1960!!! Yes that was nearly 49 years ago, but still it was only 49 years ago. These kinds of atrocities were still taking place that recently. Granted I am able to look at this through eyes that see 49 years of progress and forward thinking, but I would hope that I would be able to feel the same way then that I feel now.

As I was thinking about some of this last night I was listening to a song by David Crowder. The song is called Remedy. As I listened I thought about how the only remedy for all of this is the Grace and Love of God through his son Jesus. That is the only chance we have of things being made right in this life and in the world. We must pray for God's Kingdom purpose and his Grace and Love to flow in this hurt and broken world and be the remedy for us. Peace and Love y'all.