Staying A Woke
Being Woke is banned where I live. So I guess I am out. But I am still here.
We are so hell-bent on equality and fairness based on merit that we forget, if we ever knew it, that the God we Christians purport to love and serve threw all meritocracy to the wind and gave privilege to a rebellious and stunningly woeful and wayward tribe of people for hundreds of years and then, in the Nazarene, displayed unqualified abandon in the preference and privilege for the least, the last, the lost, the little and the dead. God was, and is, so Woke that it killed Her/Him/They.
Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane in that dreadful night asked his companions to stay awake. It was the least they could do. They could not save him. In fact, he did not want them to save him. Not because he was a self-consumed martyr but because, think of it: had he fled with them the Roman Legionaries would have caught them within 24 hours and slaughtered them all, not just him. And, if he had stayed and fought with them the killing of them all would have been in minutes, not hours. No, Jesus gave himself up because by doing so he saved his friends and followers (Rome’s modus operandi for killing violent uprisers was to kill them all, but for non-violent uprisers it was to just take out the leader and the rest would scatter and all would quiet down).
They could not save him, but they could stay awake, hold vigil, or, as we like to say it “hold space.”
You have to be asleep to not recognize white privilege in America. Asleep, you call it “equality and fairness” and living by merit. Awake, you call it position and power because of the color of your skin [and then, add in the money you own and the sexual identity you claim (of course, “at birth!”) and you have the perfect status trifecta: race, class and gender that is as old as time].
I don’t know why it was that those disciples of Jesus could not stay awake. Maybe it’s because they had not yet been given the Holy Spirit! That came later, after the Resurrection (see The Book of Acts)! I jest, but I say that to wonder out loud about why it is that I cannot go to sleep.
In the Christian tradition when a person is baptized they receive the Holy Spirit of God, the very Spirit of Jesus Christ. And with and in the Holy Spirit you cannot sleep walk the trauma and the tragedy. When one suffers, all suffer (and, when one rejoices, all rejoice!). When baptized you stay awake. You are Woke. I woke up on January 8, 1956, 33 days after I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I haven’t slept since.
