Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream.
For our grandsons and granddaughters remember to remember the dream
Welcome to Songs and Stories from Home as we continue to Remember the Dream. This week The Bombing of the 16th Avenue Baptist Church and the violent murder of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.
This country has a history of bombing and burning Black churches, of violence against houses of worship and those that call such places home. Newsreel footage of nighttime Ku Klux Klan meetings appears incomplete without images of crosses set ablaze. It is not enough to make up a lie about where the first black President was born, we have to question what he believes because it’s somehow okay to say out loud we believe he looks more like a Muslim than a Christian.
In 2015 when President Obama spoke in Charleston at the Emanuel AME church after the basement assassinations there, he quoted the writer Marilynne Robinson, about a reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things. Obama went on to repeat those words, reservoir of goodness. Saying if we can find that grace anything is possible. If we can tap into that grace everything can change. – amazing grace – and then he began to sing and the congregation rose as one to join him
In an interview in Time magazine in 2018 Marilynne Robinson proclaimed she wants to live in a country where the basic rights of everyone are simply acknowledged as part of the life of the whole country. She went on to say it’s against her religion to think otherwise.
Our country is having a moment where we are deciding if we can discover together a reservoir of goodness if we are together going to help bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. We are having a moment.
Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream.
For our grandsons and granddaughters remember to remember the dream
