I was only about thirteen when I first came across a bigoted, racist attitude. No doubt I had met such a person before but in my youthful shyness I had not noticed but then this lad at school came over my horizon. Looking back I realise that he was being fed lines by his father but he spewed them out as though they were his own. I have no wish to repeat them now but I have not forgotten.
A few years later at college I met some white Rhodesian (now Zimbabwean) farmers’ sons whose view of their coloured country people was extraordinary to my still youngish ears. Those encounters were partly responsible for making me inclined to say what I think about things that upset me. They were difficult experiences.
On a far less raucous but still discordant note, my grandfather used to tell of the time when, wounded and rather a mess after the first world war, he went to church when away recovering and noticed that people stepped back from him in shock.
Human reactions to difference come in many guises but this week, on Racial Justice Sunday, Churches Together in Britain and Ireland remind us the ‘Racial Justice Is Everyone’s Business.’ Part of the problem, as I see it, is that while we feel the need to talk about racial difference and racism we are contributing to the problem. I may be contributing to the problem by writing this at all.
Going back to my school days again, I remember that on Thursday mornings a voluntary communion service was held by the chaplain for those wanting to attend at the early, pre-breakfast hour of 7:15 am. Only a small number of the 350 boys who could have attended ever did so; a regular communicant was a lad from Sierra Leone who I knew well. That was the environment that taught me the truth of the lines of William Dunkerley (John Oxenham)’s hymn ‘In Christ there is no east nor west’. One verse says, profoundly:
‘Join hands then people of the faith
What’er your race may be;
Who serves my father as his child
Is surely kin to me.’
That is quite personal. In his hymn, ‘The Church Is like a table’, Fred Kaan broadens the sentiment to make it more general and in so doing makes it challenging to all who wrestle with prejudice:
‘The Church is like a table
Set in an open house;
No protocol for seating,
A symbol of inviting,
Of sharing, drinking, eating; an end to ‘them’ and ‘us’.’
Racial Justice is everyone’s business; I wonder how good I am at doing that business.
A Prayer
God my father, and everyone else’s father too, help me to challenge my perceptions of people and if I subconsciously make value judgements based on what I see. Help me to be open and welcoming to all, keen to join hands in faith with any of your children. Amen.