Today on the east side of Detroit, God had Her water shut off.
Today on the north end of Detroit, God lost His home to foreclosure.
Today in Southwest Detroit, God was handcuffed at Their door by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents bearing deportation orders.
Welcome to Detroit where an ascending white supremacy supported and financed by intractable powers and principalities is celebrated as the “New Detroit.” A whited sepulcher of a city that looks beautiful on the outside but is sullied on the inside by corporate schemes and well-heeled deals that are leaving its black and brown sons and daughters in the dust through displacement and the creation of a new diaspora that is driving residents to distant parts of the city and ring suburbs.
A Detroit that shamelessly shuts off water on people in neighborhoods while downtown fountains splay. A Detroit that values high-rise buildings over low-income people. A Detroit that, in many ways, is a microcosm of a global economy that is crushing the poor with structural adjustment plans and austerity measures that rely on board rooms and bullets to keep people in line.
Here we live under what could be called a Pax Detroita, a carefully-crafted illusion of peace and order kept in place by private security agencies and an Orwellian surveillance system that monitors the public’s comings and goings. This is done from the Quicken Loans command center located deep in the bowels of billionaire Dan Gilbert’s Chase Tower – a sophisticated spy operation that keeps it omniscient eye trained on downtown protesters and the homeless poor and anyone who would dare take to the streets to pray for justice.
Welcome to Detroit. A place that will seize your heart if you allow yourself to touch both its beauty and its brokenness. A place that will grab at your guts if you have the courage to look and listen deeply. A place surrounded by water and rooted in the strong black soil of resistance and struggle.
I have titled my reflection tonight, Behold, I Make All Things New, words lifted from the Book of Revelation. I chose this title at a time when many are singing the praises of “New Detroit,” a new Detroit that is celebrated as a hip city on the hill – a Rust Belt mecca for wealthy speculators, young white seekers, and suburban sports fans. A new Detroit buzzing with bike lanes and bistros and investment bankers.
It would be easy to offer those of you who are attending from out of town an introduction to our beloved city that highlights only the sparkling trappings of this new Detroit while ignoring its ugly underbelly, but that would be disingenuous and an insult to our prophetic calling – a form of “cheap grace” that would keep the pharaohs in place while the poor stand outside of door waiting for a few crumbs to fall from the corporate table. While the powerful genuflect before the golden calf of gentrification disguised as development, the poor are sent away hungry in the shadow of ever-taller towers of commerce and entertainment.
But all that glitters is not gold and to see beneath the glitz, to really let our hearts be broken, we need to dig far beneath the surface to the place where something really new and far more precious lies buried. A buried treasure that is far more valuable than the latest craft beer brewery or high-end restaurant. A place where we discover the pearl of great price – deep community and thick faith. A place where people have embraced the vocation of waging love with a fierce and tender tenacity.
It is to this deeper Detroit that I invite you this weekend.
If you have eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart willing to touch both the wounds and the wonder of this city, you will get a sense of the grace of this place – a place where sacred struggle and deep-souled solidarity and movement and music speak truths so old they look new. Truths that are desperately needed at a time such as this. If you allow yourself to get quiet and drink in the deep, strong spirit of Detroit, you will hear a whispered invitation to sit at her feet and learn these truths from her elders and saints . . . from her prophets and poets . . . from her Anishinabe ancestors on whose holy land we stand.
The invitation then is to enter into this place as contemplatives and companions on the journey who bring your own sacred stories from your own beloved communities. My hope is that you experience both the comfort and challenge of this place and that you let the hospitality for which we are known wash over you like the lapping waves of our Great Lakes.
We are a place of water and rivers, of welcoming tables and trees – all themes I hope to touch on briefly tonight as we look at Detroit as the context for this conference.
We are also an incarnational people, not afraid of getting our hands in the dirt.
Children of factory workers and farmers, we come by faith that has been tried in the fire of a hard-fought and complex history. A history that is being erased as we speak by the promoters of “New Detroit.” By those who are “disappearing” the past and the people who created it – most often people of color – by renaming entire sections of the city to reflect the narrative of Detroit as tabula rasa – a blank slate in need of salvation by outside developers and a new settler class. Hence, historic Cass Corridor is now given the bland moniker Midtown while the Hubbard-Richard neighborhood not far from here is being marketed as Corktown Shores.
Here history is being hijacked to such a degree that the mayor has hired the nation’s first official storyteller at a salary of $75, 000. Meanwhile the stories of elders living without water go unheard. While stories of the “new” Detroit are spun by a paid public relations employee in the mayor’s office, no one listens to the man who sleeps on the steps of this very church. No one listens when he tells his story of being picked up by the police and dropped off in a distant suburb during high-profile downtown events that can’t be tarnished by the sight of a homeless veteran begging on the cold winter streets of “New Detroit.”
I will speak of Church tonight, to be sure, but want to place it in the context of where we will be standing for the next couple of days. For many of us in this room, the world is our church, but sadly, the Church proper too often sees itself as a gated community more grounded in propriety and piety than in the prophetic.
That said, I speak tonight as a daughter of a Church that is as broken and beautiful, as wounded and wonderful, as the place where we stand. And as one who holds the same paradoxical tendencies within herself, I am the first to confess that I stand in need of mercy for my own complicity in injustices great and small.
The injustices in the Church, like the injustices that plague Detroit, the nation, the planet, are legion, scandalous, and breathtakingly biblical. I hope that in naming and decrying those injustices, my words come from a place of compassion, humility, and a genuine desire for healing, recognizing that all of us are ensnared, to one degree or another, in systems and structures of oppression that militate against what Dr. King called the beloved community.
In the time we have left tonight, I am hoping we can reflect on the broader signs of our times through the more focused lens of Detroit and then reflect on how we can respond as people of conscience, as contemplatives in action, as Church.
To do that, I am going to lean into the book of Revelation.
Although I am as ecumenical as they come, my basic turf is biblical, especially the Hebrew prophets, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Apocalypse. I know many recoil at the mention of Revelation, but that is probably a result of bad literalist theology and popular end times literature that is, in part, contributing to the worldview of despair and disengagement that informs so much of this nation’s political ideology . . . but that is another topic for another time.
Tonight I am inviting us to wrap ourselves up in the big story and the dramatic symbolism of Revelation as a way of understanding and navigating both place and the present moment.
Despite some serious issues in the book around gender, its symbolic depiction of nonviolent steadfastness overcoming the violence of imperial domination and its apocalyptic assurance that love wins and healing happens is a solid place for us to plant our feet at this time and in this place.
The themes of resistance and hope in the face of empire and unrelenting oppression that run through the book of Revelation is meant for a time such as this. A time that has so many collapsing in despair and hopelessness at a moment that demands something else.
The rampant use of opioids, the soul-numbing addiction to electronic games and social media, the vapid escapism of mindless television shows, and the embrace of hard-edged religion bereft of spirituality, compassion, myth, and metaphor are signs of the times, sign posts along a bleak and desolate landscape of despair.
Given the times, one can understand the temptation to despair. We are living in a time of hard revelation, a moment when lies are being unmasked and the spiritual gloves are coming off. On the national level, hibernated hatred has awakened like a sharp-clawed bear in this time of Trump. The disdain for the poor, the scapegoating of refugees and Muslims, the misogyny, the contempt for the LGBT community, a reckless regard for the planet, the saber rattling, and a complete disregard for the dignity of the human person is on full display from morning ‘til night when we turn on the news.
As a nation, we are soul sick and lost, bamboozled and beaten down, in search of scapegoats to assuage our fears and terrifying sense of powerlessness. We find it easier to lash out at others than sit with our own pain. So many dance on the knife’s edge of despair.
We have our own local sign posts of despair here in Detroit as well. Our own apocalyptic beast symbolized by corporate entities that run roughshod over the poor, gobbling up anyone or anything that gets in the way of their rapacious appetite for more money, more land, more power.
It’s the oldest story in the world. The beast of empire violently asserting its dominance and power. Babylon Detroit. The place where the dragon of emergency management does battle with democracy and human decency. Where the grief of displaced Detroiters driven into exile from their own homes and neighborhoods find their voice in the words of the Psalmist: By the rivers of Babylon we say and wept. Where “New Detroit” is used as a dog whistle phrase similar to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” which really means “Make America White Again.”
One of the signs of the soul sickness here is the retreat into bread and circuses evident downtown, while only a few miles up the road families struggle without water in the shadow of schools that are neglected and underfunded in neighborhoods that see few if any of the resources directed to the downtown area.
There is something tragic and utterly joyless about the expensive and mindless diversions that mark the new Detroit: oversized adult sand boxes, garish and ostentatious art installations, bicycle bars, the Q-Line to nowhere – a 3.3 mile downtown rail that makes a mockery of real mass transit – and the loss of public space now that virtually every inch of downtown has been privatized.
Our Women in Black group which for decades has marched silently behind a puppet of a grieving mother and a steady drum beat on behalf of peace has been told we can no longer walk along the river or Campus Martius Park in the heart of downtown.
If the loss of public space for protest weren’t bad enough, there is almost nowhere left to pray. Our annual Good Friday Stations of Cross walk through the city that begins here at St. Peter’s is a sober reflection on the ways in which Jesus is crucified in our city. For example, we stop to lament the sin of militarism at the federal building, the careless treatment of the planet on the shores of the Detroit River, and the idolatry of money at local banks. This has been a tradition in Detroit for over 35 years. The last few years, however, we have been harassed and threatened by corporate security forces outside buildings owned by Dan Gilbert and inside Campus Martius.
Yes, the grass may be manicured and dotted with cute little café tables, but there is no room at the inn, as it were, for people who want to pray or protest publicly. People whose presence may disturb the other adults having fun in the oversized sand boxes or pedaling down Woodward at their moveable bar. The commons are shrinking and virtually gone.
Whenever I am downtown these days, I lament the soullessness of the place and feel profound grief as I ponder the lack of real community, the superficial and contrived sense of fun, the appropriation of the Detroit brand coupled with the removal of its people. My heart breaks as I witness the gentrification that is displacing seniors living on fixed incomes in order to pave the way for upscale lofts.
There is a sense of decadence and death in the air despite all the activity.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at the new Little Caesar’s Hockey Arena which opened only weeks ago. Yes, you heard that right. Little Caesar’s . . . as in “Hail, Caesar.” As in, “We are Rome.” In this case, an imperium built on pizza profits.
Detroit’s new hockey coliseum was built by the Ilitch family on ill-gotten land and partially funded with public monies by citizens who will never be able to afford the price of a ticket to a Red Wings game. Gone is the former hockey arena, named after the “Brown Bomber” and Detroit hero, Joe Louis. Out with the old, and in with the new.
We are Rome.
To add insult to injury, the Ilitch family christened the arena by holding a series of grand opening concerts by Kid Rock, a white Michigan rocker known for his confederate flagwaving, enthusiastic support for Donald Trump, and for telling Colin Kaepernick to go “F” himself during a recent concert at the Iowa State Fair. Never mind that the Ilitches could have invited local musical heroes such as Stevie Wonder, Bob Segar, Aretha Franklin, or Jack White. They chose instead to send a stinging message to the people of Detroit that this corner of the city is now occupied territory.
I was present at a protest march on Kid Rock’s opening night and was sickened when a crowd of white folks eating and drinking on the rooftop deck of the Hockeytown Café a block away from the arena began chanting, “Go Back Home, Go Back Home” to the marchers below who were overwhelmingly black. It was a stunning show of blatant white supremacy that gave angry voice to the new Detroit. This was followed by a massive show of bikers decked out in American flags revving their engines in the lane next to the march in an intimidating show of aggression.
It was horrifying, utterly horrifying . . . but yet . . . the story is not over.
Caesar does not have the last word. We know that empires crumble. Hope is not lost. Something new is being born. As the old hymn goes, “This I know, for the bible tells me so.” As indeed it does.
I said earlier that we are a place of water and rivers and welcoming tables and trees. It is in these that we find our hope and strength. These are the places where something really new is being born. Far away from the precincts of worldly power and downtown diversions, we are regaining our humanity and expanding our souls as we stand shoulder to shoulder with one another against the indignity of water shutoffs, one of the empire’s cruelest plagues.
Like many, my heart has been deeply broken by the water shutoffs here in Detroit. I have many stories I can share about elders bathing with baby wipes and families trying to hold onto their kids who can be taken by the state when the taps are dry. Stories of the infirm collecting rain water to flush toilets and stories of kind-hearted neighbors sharing outside hoses that deliver water that is received like manna from heaven. Stories of prayers and protests and courtrooms and community organizing. Stories that break the heart.
The temptation to despair is always there, but the psalmist reminds us that, in the end, tears shall turn to dancing, a promise echoed later in the words of Revelation where we are assured that God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old order has passed away . . . Behold, I make all things new.
The promise of something new takes on even greater meaning in the following verse, given our situation here in Detroit:
To the thirsty I will give a gift from the spring of life-giving water.
Here in thirsty Detroit, the vision is not one of a “new” Detroit, but rather, the beautiful vision of a new heaven and a new earth. A vision in which water is a human right and the dignity of the human person is upheld.
But we have work to do in bringing this promise this to fruition. We are a town of workers who are not afraid to labor on behalf of a better world. We know that the harvest is great and that the task before us daunting. We have learned to develop spiritual tools for the long haul and to pray with our feet.
And here I want to say a few words about Church.
It breaks my heart to report that the institutional Church has been silent on the issue of water shutoffs and, as far as I know, all the other injustices that are the offspring of “new” Detroit. I have been embarrassed and angry when my friends from other faiths ask me why this is, especially since the Cathedral is literally a stone’s throw from one of the hardest hit neighborhoods in the city, a neighborhood populated by seniors whose pensions were cut as a result of the bankruptcy.
I reflect often on the marriage of religion and empire with profound grief, turning often to the prophets to remind myself that as it was then and in the time of Jesus and beyond . . . so it is now.
The silence is both biblical and predictable.
I do not condemn the Church, nor do I allow myself to become overcome with bitterness over its shortcomings and silence. Over its complacency and cowardice when it comes to standing with the poor beyond the confines of charity. As a convert, I come to it a bit differently.
I was drawn to the Church as a young girl when I read of a Jesuit priest and his brother who burned draft cards during the Vietnam War in an act that incarnated the Word in imitation of the Jesus whose own love for humanity compelled him to turn over tables in the temple. In these priests and their friends, I caught of glimpse of the Jesus I had met in my own reading of the bible but never seemed to connect with in Sunday School – the One who dared to love boldly in a world that was not yet ready for love. I always had a fire for justice that burned in my bones and this brand of Catholicism fanned those flames.
I was also strongly attracted to the sacramental aspect of Catholicism as a result of hanging around a religious goods store that doubled as a candy store a few blocks from my home and across the street from the local Catholic Church – a place where rosaries and red hots and incense and licorice combined in an irresistible blend of a hands-on religion that valued the sensual. The concrete. A place where statues of the saints and St. Joseph competed with bins of chocolate and where the kind woman who worked there welcomed me, a pagan child with a sweet tooth, into the fold.
Neither of those early attractions has left me.
I was raised in a strict Protestant tradition, but my imagination and senses found a home in the Catholic church.
Although I wrestle with this church every day of my life, it is a wrestling match steeped in an absurd and inexplicable love grounded in what we are called to be, what we could be, and what I long for us to be. I teach Catholic Social Teaching and still believe that its principles – were they to be put into practice – have the power to turn our world upside down.
I have long given up the illusion that those in leadership will embrace, much less enflesh, the radical message of our tradition. Letting go of that illusion, surrendering to a God of surprises, and then giving myself over to the work at hand has enabled me to act out of a freedom that comes from many years of sitting at the kid’s table in a Church that sends people like me down to the basement away from the fancy table where the adults get to sit.
I don’t know about you, but as a child I resented being assigned to the kid’s table with my siblings and cousins during holiday meals. For me, it felt like a demotion from the real table where the grown-ups sat. In fact, the opposite was true. The kids’ table was the fun table, the subversive table, the place where pranks on the adults were hatched, the place of freedom and equality.
This is all a way of saying that if we accept the traditional metaphor of Church as Mother, we have to admit that she has been a complex, fickle, conflicted mother who is sometimes abusive out of her own brokenness and hurt. A mother who has internalized the oppression of patriarchy. A mother in need of healing. A mother who has sent most of us to the kids’ table, reserving the grown-up table for a handful of men.
We have been sent to the basement to sit at the kids’ table, and while we may resent it, we have learned some things there about community and creativity. About table fellowship. About feeling compassion for the family members upstairs who are missing out. About Jesus who loves hanging out in the basement where things are a lot less uptight.
We’ve made the best out of a situation rooted in disdain and disrespect and most especially fear, but the fact is that we are not kids.
Being at the kids’ table has served us well, but perhaps it is time to retire the parental metaphors and imagine another way of being Church. Since we are in Detroit, maybe we could imagine Church as water – fluid, fresh, flowing, prodigious. Indiscriminate, Unmanageable. Wild. Healing.
Imagine Church that flows as it will. As water from the skies that falls upon the worthy and the unworthy. Water that runs through our bodies and connects all of life.
Church as water will take us much further than a hierarchal and anthropomorphic metaphor fraught with baggage and pain that denies so many a place at the table.
I would suggest that when we despair of the hurt and pain inflicted by an institution that is so often tone deaf to the demands of justice and dismissive of its members’ gifts, we dive more deeply into the saints, the mystics, the “angelic troublemakers,” and the spirit-driven lovers and ancestors who form that great cloud of witnesses that hovers over our heads like a halo. That we remind ourselves that yesterday’s heretic is today’s saint. That we respond to the invitation to become prophets-mystics-contemplatives called to fashion something beautiful out of the broken shards of our own lives and the broken world in which we live.
I want to conclude by sharing a sacred story set here in Detroit on Belle Isle, an island not far from here that sits in the Detroit River, halfway between Detroit and Windsor. The island has now been taken over by the state and a big chunk of it is being used for auto racing, yet another sad sign post of “New” Detroit, but historically, the island was always a mecca for Detroiters, especially black Detroiters. A laconic, laid-back place where people would come to fish, read, hold family reunions and church picnics, and hold hands with summer lovers.
On the island there once was a special tree known to many in the black community simply as the Medicine Tree, a tree revered and visited by many who sought its healing properties.
Tragically, the tree was cut down when the island was taken over by the state, a thoughtless act that was violent, traumatic, and deeply disturbing to the community.
I am sure that Bill told you the story of Charity Hicks earlier today. Charity the gifted environmental activist known as the Rosa Parks of our Detroit water movement. Arrested and jailed for trying to alert her neighbors about imminent water shutoffs and then, months later, struck by a hit-and-run driver in Manhattan where she had gone to speak at a conference. After languishing in a coma for almost two months, Charity died. On the day before her memorial service, thousands marched in the streets of Detroit and nine of us were arrested after blocking contractors from shutting off water in a nonviolent direct action. We dedicated the action to Charity.
Later that month, a tree was planted on Belle Isle in her honor to replace the Medicine Tree. The new tree is called the Charity Tree and it has become a place of gathering for prayer, meditation, discernment, and healing.
Shortly before Charity was killed, she spoke in this very church about the need to resist, but her call to action came with very clear marching orders. We must resist in every way we can, she said, but in doing so we must WAGE LOVE. WAGE LOVE. WAGE LOVE.
Since that time, this has been the rallying cry of the beloved community here in Detroit. A holy mantra calling us to our better selves.
When I think of the Charity tree, I am drawn to the powerful final chapter of Revelation that depicts something that is truly new . . . a new heaven and a new earth:
Then the angel showed me the river of life-giving water, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the street. On either side of the river grew the tree of life . . . the leaves of the tree serve as medicine for the nations.
Let’s close by singing together “We Shall Not Be Moved,” a song that resonates deeply here in Detroit with its references to water and trees. Let’s sing with a surety that love wins. That justice prevails. That healing happens. With confidence that God is creating something new and that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Let’s leave this place and wage love!
We shall not, we shall not be moved
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
Just like a tree that’s standing by the water side
We shall not be moved
Waging love together . . .
We shall not be moved
Waging love together . . .
We shall not be moved
Just like a tree that’s standing by the water side
We shall not be moved
We shall not we shall not be moved
We shall not we shall not be moved
Just like a tree that’s standing by the water side
We shall not be moved.
Talk given at Call to Action Midwest Regional Conference in Detroit, Michigan – October 20, 2017