December 25, 2000
© 2000 Grant M. Gallup
Isaiah 52:7-10 - Beautiful feet
Psalm 98 - Cantate Domino
Hebrews 1:1-12 - Long ago God spoke to our ancestors
John 1:1-14 - The Word becomes flesh and lives among us
I went out to the west side of Chicago as a mission priest forty years ago, to St. Andrew's church, which was listed in the diocesan directory with the letter "(c)" in parentheses, to indicate it was a colored congregation. Not "B" for Black, or "AA" for "African American," but a little "c" for "colored." People of all colors came to St. Andrew's -- from the light skinned old Southern ladies to the dark black priest from South Africa who was getting his Ph.D. in the United States. "White" folks, too, who lived in Chicago's suburbs and drove into the City on Sundays for worship in our ghetto, an Italian word imported and translated from its original, which defined a Jewish ward, to USA language for an African enclave. Color requires the spectrum of all shades of light for its definitions. (Thus my old friend Paul Goldman, a Jewish gentleman married to a Roman Catholic Irish girl, always referred to "people of color" and of so-and-so as a "man of color" or as a "colored woman."
But we are all people of color, of some tint or hue from the palette of amplitude.
Then came the sixties and the civil rights revolution and Black became the right word to use. My eighty year old dentist, Dr. Brown, objected; he declared that he had been born a Negro and a Negro he would remain. There was an incident one summer, when the teenage son of a Hinsdale family came to work as a volunteer supervising our church playground. Some of our kids took umbrage when the suburban lad referred to them as "Black youth", for they had not yet been notified of the change in our parlance, that "Negro" was out. It was a while before "Black" took root. In 1988, at a conference in Chicago, the Reverend Jesse Jackson (whom I had met when he was a seminary drop-out working with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the long hot summers) said that it was time again for a change in our terms. The word Black had not worked very well, and the preferable term now was to be "African American." Not "Afro-American," as it had been for a very brief time--because "Afro" was already the name of a popular hair arrangement. People have, within reason, a right to be called what they want to be called, so the old term "African American" should be quite acceptable now in our culture and in our country. But the NAACP didn't ever drop "colored" from its name. And Dr. Brown died a Negro.
Our culture, indeed most cultures, have associated the color Black in so many ways with evil, misfortune, death, disaster, that the experiment of applying it to an ethnic group was a risky usiness. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has dozens of entries for pejorative uses of Black. The church used Black for funerals, and along with the color of the unbleached candles used at All Souls masses, we got the matching Hallowe'en colors of orange and black. In recent times we switched to white as more appropriate of life and resurrection. The use of Black at funerals, however, had not been a Christian invention--the church borrowed the idea from ancient Roman custom, and the Romans had taken it from the Egyptians. The pejorative uses of Black included Black Ball, Black Mail, Black Death, the pirate's Black Flag, a sad day as Black Monday or Black Friday, criminal societies as the Black Hand, a family's shame as the Black Sheep, a withering glance as Black looks, and so on. Black got associated with Dark, as well--deprivation of light: thus, "black as the inside of a cow, tail down and mouth closed." Even the Muslims claim that the great stone at Mecca, called the Kaaba, which every Muslim hopes once in a lifetime to kiss, was white when it fell from the heavens, but turned Black because of the sins of humankind.
So the word Black for all the many colored and various-hued peoples of African descent was a word already in trouble. In the Scriptures, the word "Black" is not associated with sin, but the color "red" is indeed so. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as wool," God promises by the mouth of Isaiah. We will all do ourselves a favor if we disassociate Black as color from darkness as absence of Light or Enlightenment.
And now I come to the one point of this homily for Christmas day. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . in him was life and the life was the Light of humankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it."
LIGHT is the major symbol of Christmas time, not White. "I'm dreaming of a Light Christmas," is the song I sing today. Light is the presence of all colors, and brings all together. It's the chief metaphor for this cosmic event wherein truth, the meaning of existence, the purpose of life, is made clear, visible, palpable among us, and we need to have everyone participate in the metaphor that fully embraces it. In the Spanish language, the very word for giving birth is "dar la luz" to give light to. The Quakers speak of divine guidance as the Inner Light. The Buddha is referred to as the Light of Asia, Jesus is called the Light of the world, and so on. Light is not the opposite of Black or of Negro or Colored, but it is the opposite of Night, and Obscurity and darkness and confusion. At Christmas the metaphor of light surrounds us, sparkling on our Christmas trees and wreaths, shining on candles amidst the poinsettias, glowing in the sparkling eyes of childen. John's gospel begins with this Light. The metaphor is sustained throughout his evangel: "The Light shines in darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." The shadows have not engulfed, surrounded or extinguished the Light that comes into the world with Jesus Christ. Light is beckoned out of the noonday sun onto the toreador's costume--the "trajes de luz" -- and sequins glow on the old nun's Christmas gown in Managua: "Sister Sparkle Plenty" we call her. Light is the chief ornament of humankind.
The Light of Christ is not delimited by the edges of European Christian culture, by the borderlands of Caucasian dominance, and cannot be. St. John says that "the true light which enlightens every person was coming into the world" in Jesus Christ at Christmastime. This remarkable statement means that Jesus was not born here as a "fenómeno" or a freak, a space cadet or stranger to our species, but came to be at home in every human venue, in every culture, and wears the skin and bone, the brains and beauty, of every ethnicity, every people. The light of Christ, the light of Christmas is the light that enlightens every person, and there is recognition here that all humanity has the gift of light, and all in their own ways radiate the truth that is from God. Jesus was not born in order to become the emblem of cultural imperialism for the Western world, the first "Roman" catholic or the first European anything. John tells us that he has come to all, and to all that receive him, this Word gives the strength to become children of God.
Th Word becomes flesh, not the other way around. The flesh does not transform itself into Logos, into Ideas, into Tenets, into creedal statements. We do not need to take our life, incarnated as White, Black, Yellow or Red people, and make it our identity. The Words we use to describe ourselves will not outlive our Flesh. They are inappropriate to become the Truth about us. So Christmas comes to celebrate the Light that is in each one of us, and all of us, by becoming Flesh. It's already there, given by God with every human being. God does not enter the human family in Nazareth as a stranger to us, but as one of us: our brother, sister, sibling--who empowers us to become children together of One God, to come home to that family at Christmas.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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