Editor’s note. Copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director, lightly edited for clarity and to remove an ill-chosen metaphor or two. I’ve been saving them to the blog for two or three years now, and taken together they serve as kind of a spiritual journal. This month’s comes as the state where I grew up punched me in the gut by adopting Jim Crow redistricting at a time I was already reflecting on my role here with the Dominican Associates’ Antiracism Committee (AARC).
Fri, May 15, 8:58 PM
Hi Sister —
Pulling some of my thoughts together here for our spiritual direction Zoom call for May. We haven’t received a Zoom link at this time — did we get the schedule confused? In the meantime, since I’m writing you anyway, I may as well mention what I’ve been up to — this month it has more than the usual chance of coming up when we meet.
I’ve actually posted something to my blog. For the first time in two or three months! Perhaps a sign of progress? The whole parade of horrors from the Trump regime has just kept me off balance, and I can’t get anything written before another nasty tweet or performative outrage changes the subject and renders my first draft out-of-date. It’s like trying to keep your balance when you’re getting sprayed by a firehose. But since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 went down, I’ve been able to focus better.
That’s too many mixed metaphors bang bang bang in a row, but the open, hypocritical, dog-whistle racism of it all clears my mind. (Another metaphor!) It’s all the more upsetting because I started my newspaper career 30-40 years ago in Tennessee, where so much of the mischief has been taking place. A fair amount of the videos I see on YouTube have a backdrop of the legislative chambers, hallways and committee rooms I visited at the State Capitol in Nashville as a newbie reporter. It hurts — literally, viscerally — to see what’s become of the space where I began to learn — and cherish — the ins and outs of the legislative process.
So I guess maybe the Trump regime and the US Supreme Court are turning me into a single-issue voter, and the issue is race.
For a long time I’ve been arguing that American culture is fundamentally (even if subtly) racist, and the only thing that gives me hope for the future is the transformative witness of the Black church. Aided, of course, by its allies of other races and religious backgrounds. So earlier this week I snapped to attention when Rep. Alexandria-Cortez spoke at Sen. Raphael Turnock’s (and Dr. Martin Luther King’s) Ebenezer Baptist Church. Is this what I’ve been looking for? Well, maybe not quite. There was a lot of “horserace” speculation about possible presidential runs in an Instagram post I quoted; I admire Ocaso-Cortez and Warnock, and I would happily vote for either in a New York (or Atlanta) minute, but I have bigger fish to fry. (Yet another metaphor!) I wrote:
For her part, AOC said recently at the University of Chicago, she doesn’t aspire to a specific higher office. “Presidents come and go. Senate [and] House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever,”she said, ticking off a series of public policy issues. “All of that,” she concluded. “When you aren’t attached. When you haven’t been like fantasizing about being this or that since the time you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating.” A deft, and highly traditional, answer for aspiring presidential hopefuls (and one that was cited by theGriot in its writeup of AOC’s visit to Atlanta).
Warnock, for his part, is mentioned from time to time as presidential timber. Another ritual for elected officials of great promise. But that’s missing a larger point, one that AOC alluded to when she said she stood on “hallowed ground” at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
For several years now, as our inside-the-Beltway national politics have taken on the atmosphere of a semi-autocratic, proto-fascist crocodile pit, I have argued the only way to lift us out of the partisan fever swamps is a politically diverse, interracial mass movement of “We the People” that combines the moral clarity and organizational skill of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black church.
[Link: https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2026/05/12/warnock-aoc/]
Like so many people, I’ve been watching the Trump regime destroy the values I believe in and wrestling with the question “What can I do?” Maybe there’s an answer there. Especially since I’ve gained so much from wrestling with the same question as I take oart in the Dominican Associates’ Antracism Committee. I’ve considered racism a moral, not political issue ever since I attended a mass meeting opposing a KU Klux Klan rally at the Illinois Statehouse back in the 1990s. I forget exactly how the subject came up, but one of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis said, “Why, it’s a sin.”
Very matter-of-fact and utterly convincing, but I’d never thought of it that way before. I’ll always consider that moment in a meeting room at the Springfield Public Library a small example of the transformative witness of the church.
[Uplinked May 16, 2026]
Ordinary Time 