Thursday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
If anyone wonders what it means to follow Jesus, the text before us today from Luke makes it clear. And it is one tall order.
Last Thursday, my husband, Bill gave the inaugural Humanities lecture in the Roger Glass Concert Hall at the University of Dayton on the Ku Klux Klan in Dayton in the 1920s. The setting was perfect, seeing as how the Klan held its rallies (in which it inducted tens of thousands of women and men into the Klan) at what was then the Montgomery County Fairgrounds, just kitty corner to the Concert Hall. The photographs of those rallies, as well as the various parades down Main Street with all the Daytonians watching from the sidewalks and rooftops, give one pause, to be sure.
The Klan was huge in Ohio in the 1920s and targeted Blacks and Jews, of course, but in Dayton the focus was on Catholics. Catholics were their target because they were seen as not White, not American, and not Christian. And a threat—so many of them coming to the US from Eastern and Southern Europe. Crosses were burned in the NCR neighborhood. Crosses were burned on the campus of the University of Dayton. And in 1923, the KKK even bombed the campus.
In my favorite part of the lecture, Bill tells the story of then football coach Harry Baujan who, upon hearing that the Klan was preparing to light a large cross just across from campus, sent his football players out to challenge them, telling his players to do whatever they saw fit to do. They ran off the Klansmen, tails between their legs.
After Bill’s talk, Natalie Hudson (a member of Immaculate Conception Parish and professor at UD) led a conversation with a panel of speakers who know something about this kind of hate: Father Satish Joseph who is pastor of the Bread of Life family of parishes, David Whitehead of the NAACP, and Kelly Fishmen of the Antidefamation League.
It was a candid and inspiring conversation. Father Satish shared something of his experience as a man of color serving as a priest in the US. No simple task. He talked about how White folks feel free to say things to him that they would never say to a White priest. He even played a voice mail on his phone from someone who advised him to go back to India. Sounded so much like what a lot of White folks said to Black Americans, who had built so much wealth for White folks while enslaved: “Go back to Africa.”
Natalie Hudson asked the panelists how they deal with the discourse of hate that is so rampant in his country. Here is how David Whitehead responded. First, he recounted the fact that he gets a fair number of calls from folks with hateful things to say. This is just part of his job—to get calls like that. Wow.
And then he said this: When I get a call like that, I always ask the caller, “How can I help you?” Sometimes he asks that question multiple times in a call. “How can I help you?” He reported that asking that question again and again is surprisingly disarming.
Jesus gives his disciples a tall order. Turn the other cheek. Give up your cloak. Love your enemies. And to his credit, David Whitehead has figured out how to do that. “How can I help you?” That’s gonna stay with me. Asking that question is the very least I can do as someone who likes to think she follows Jesus.
—Susan Trollinger