Our Shared Black History
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
Matthew 12:46-50 (responsive reading)
While Jesus was still talking to the crowd,
his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him.
Someone told him,
“Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”
He replied to him,
“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”
Pointing to his disciples, he said,
“Here are my mother and my brothers.
For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven
is my brother and sister and mother.”
John 5:5-18
One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.” But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ” So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?” The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well. So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
Read the written message below with music videos
What we truly are is not describable as a thing or a limited entity – this is the truth that many of our awakened sages have shared, from Christ to Krishna. And yet, our identification with certain descriptions of ourselves and our personal histories seems unavoidable: I am a mixed (Black, perhaps Indigenous, and White) American male, currently residing in Ontario, Canada. But although we can speak this way, the heart of our teachers’ messages seems to point us back to our shared core of love and light. We are light because it is our open consciousness that perceives the world, dreams, and life, and we are love because our very nature accepts all as one with itself. However, we’ve lost these truths of ourselves by taking an entrenched stand with one in-group or another, finding that we feel separated from those outside of them and especially those who judge and reject them.
Coming into Canada’s Family Day, I can’t help but reflect on my American roots. Growing up in mid-Missouri in the ‘90s, I was acutely aware of race and racial biases and lines. My African American mother also believed that her grandmother was Indigenous to the Americas, and she celebrated both of these aspects of her being. My elementary school was named Robert E. Lee Elementary at the time, and although it was a school filled with many races and cultures thanks to the nearby post-secondary schools, it always seemed bent on stamping these out of us – being particularly cruel to its darkest Black American students. It was our teachers’ acute but often subconscious awareness of racial differences that brought out this tendency to be especially dismissing of Black kids (this seemed independent from the race of the teacher, although most were White), judging and condemning them for offenses and perceived offenses that they would ignore or even applaud from other children. These racist biases continue today, not only within the most privileged aspects of our own thinking, but also internalized as self-hatred, subconscious judgment, and shame within the oppressed.
And more recently, learning about how the New York Police Department and the FBI most probably orchestrated the execution of Malcolm X (as described in the death bed confession of an NYPD officer), I’m reminded of the history of the U.S. government infiltrating and corrupting Black power and community organizations, such as the Black Panthers. In released U.S. government reports, we can see how the FBI and other government organizations intentionally corrupted and criminalized Black power organizations in order to destroy them from within and send them into violence within their own ranks and with other African American organizations and the police.
But even if these outside forces were not actively working to corrupt Black organizations in the latter half of the 20th century, we could also look at the very well-documented history of criminalizing and institutionalizing Black Americans as the economic operative of the South ever since the Civil War. Or more currently, we could look at the clear statistical racial bias within police forces and in the courtroom (between perpetrators of the same crime). To me, talking about these truths is healing because it helps me heal from my own internalized trauma and biases, even toward my own people, and it’s also healing to help others see that their own biases are quite probably going beneath their notice and detection but still sometimes greatly impacting their judgment and actions.
Black History Month should serve as a call for us to heal from the traumas of our shared African American history. No matter our race or background, this history impacts each of us reading this today in more ways than anyone could fathom. From the workforce that built our infrastructure and the generational wealth of many of our elite, to the hidden bias in our own hearts telling us that, “I just don’t like him.”
The most healing approach to this kind of trauma and bias, I believe, is found from the mouths of our great spiritual leaders. Although religions seem to almost always become bent and turned away from the original teachings in a tradition, often the heart of our religions is a shared knowledge of our shared being. Christ said that he was one with Father God and asked us to find this unity within and to love others AS ourselves. The Buddha pointed to our shared being, the space of perception and love itself. Krishna depicted our true nature, how all phenomena arise within our light. Each of these teachers and many others pointed out our minds’ bias of believing that we are separate entities, that we are our minds’ whims and one with the limitations of our births and bodies and circumstances and feelings and beliefs. But your next thought will come as unbidden as the weather.
True freedom is found when we truly know our reality as the reality within which all things arise. When we find our unity with the Father, and Krishna, and Christ, we come to accept what is, accept “God’s will.” When asked about his mother and brothers waiting outside wanting to speak with him, Christ responded, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” Christ told us that true family is found with the love and being within everyone more so than anything else, in the part of us that accepts God’s will and does it naturally. And as we read in John 5 today, Christ also put little regard in what we consider “sacred,” indicating instead that true sacredness isn’t in traditions or a thing, which actually tends to eventually divide, but within our shared life itself and the care and kindness towards that life. It’s this misunderstanding that is often at the root of our unintentional cruelty, our misgivings, and our judgment.
Finally, I want to share about how, being raised in mid-Missouri by an African American mother, I can’t help but feel like the song Amazing Grace has always been close to my heart. Upon learning (originally, via TikTok) that the song was written by an ex “slave” trader, the eventual abolitionist John Newton, at first I felt a blow to my relationship with the song. In today’s (maybe overhyped) cancel culture, past offenses can easily destroy someone’s reputation, even if they’ve changed during their life. However, part of the beauty of this song is this testimony of God’s grace in the author’s life. The song itself is powerful partly because it depicts the power of Divinity at our core to open us to love and transformation away from our more divisive leanings. A song that once might have spoken more about the plight of Black America to me, now speaks about the healing from our oppressive modes of being, and specifically, about having light shine into our bigotry and judgment and allowing that insight to lead us back to the grace already within.
Peace is yours,
Cory