Hope Sings, So Beautiful Graced Encounters across the Color Line Christopher Pramuk A Michael Glazier Book LITURGICAL PRESS Collegeville, Minnesota www.litpress.org A Michael Glazier Book published by Liturgical Press Cover design by Ann Blattner. Cover art: Ruby Green Singing, 1928. James Chapin, American, 1887–1975. Oil on canvas, 38 X 30 inches (96.5 X 76.2 cm). Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. Bequest of R. H. Norton, 53.29. ©Estate of James Chapin, James Cox Gallery at Woodstock, NY. Excerpts from documents of the Second Vatican Council are from Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents, by Austin Flannery, OP, © 1996 (Costello Publishing Company, Inc.). Used with permission. Scripture texts, prefaces, introductions, footnotes and cross references used in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. © 2013 by Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights re- served. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, microfilm, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any other means, known or yet unknown, for any purpose except brief quotations in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint John’s Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pramuk, Christopher. Hope sings, so beautiful : graced encounters across the color line / Christopher Pramuk. pages cm “A Michael Glazier book.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8146-8210-4 — ISBN 978-0-8146-8235-7 (e-book) 1. Spiritual life—Catholic Church. 2. Church and minorities. 3. Christianity and the arts. I. Title. BX2350.3.P725 2013 241'.675—dc23 2012046001 Contents Acknowledgments ix Foreword, M. Shawn Copeland xi Introduction xv 1. Entry Points 1 2. Awakenings 17 3. Interruptions 35 4. Crucifixions 53 5. Silences 69 6. Streets 87 7. Presences 105 8. Differences 123 9. Song Circles 143 Afterword, Edward K. Kaplan 161 Notes 165 Index 203 8 Differences For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ Theology makes progress by being always alive to its own fundamental uncertainties. ~ John Henry Newman Few have captured the heart of the Christian and Catholic sacra- mental imagination so vividly as the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins’s luminous vision of the Christ who “plays in ten thousand places” is not an exercise in literary fantasy. It begins, like all authentic Christian hope, with the world as we encounter it, the world in which God became flesh, “a broken world with many broken people.”1 It is there, through eyes of faith, that we meet Christ, “lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.” Authentic Christian hope—in this respect no different from Jewish hope—begins with the real and refuses “to let go until one goes beneath the surface.”2 But alas, how difficult The Passion of Matthew Shepard, Fr. William Hart McNichols. www.frbill.org. Used by permission. 123 124 Hope Sings, So Beautiful it is to get beneath the surface of people, especially those whom we are inclined to identify ahead of time as suspect, dangerous, dangerously different. How often do we presume, without benefit of encounter, that what lies beneath the surface is not trustworthy? We might ask ourselves honestly: In whom are we least prepared to meet Christ, the incarnate face of Love? The Jew? The Muslim? The young black man from the inner city? The “welfare mom”? The gay couple down the street? The atheist? The priest behind the altar? This chapter builds on the previous by wrestling with the question of difference, and the ways we handle racial, biological, and cultural differences theologically, in relation to God or the divine realm. The intuition I wish to explore in greater depth has been implicit through- out this book: namely, that theology requires a method and a lan- guage, above all an imagination, that does not seek to manage or erase difference out of the gate, but is committed to listening to the other receptively, contemplatively, as “an other with words to speak— words of his or her own that may challenge from difference and may love with freedom.”3 Indeed the question at hand is not only how we relate to all manner of differences—racial, cultural, sexual, bio- logical—but also God’s freedom to love in and through all of God’s creation, not least those we hold apart and demonize as different. Theology, for the sake of love, must interrogate the ten thousand ways we cut ourselves off from the unfamiliar or feared other and, thus, from the hidden Christ who plays in all things. I begin with a montage of contemporary realities that serve to illuminate the challenge of difference in society and church. Like any recitation of images or examples, it is highly selective and leaves aside a great deal of contextual nuance, not least any silver linings or graces that may be hidden or yet emerge in each of these contexts and the different worlds they represent. What follows are only partial snap- shots of reality, yet, together they suggest a society and church in- creasingly, sometimes dangerously, impoverished of theological imagination and hope. Language, Reality, and Difference • An unarmed, seventeen-year-old black man named Trayvon Martin, wearing a hoodie and walking in a gated community Differences 125 in Florida, is identified as “suspicious looking” by an armed twenty-eight-year-old Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer, then confronted and shot to death as a 911 operator records his screams for help. The shooter pleads self-defense under “Stand Your Ground” laws, and is not charged with a crime for five weeks. Americans are divided along racial lines as to whether racial profiling is self-evident in the case. • Black parents everywhere describe the ritual of sitting down with their sons to teach them the “Black Male Code,” i.e., the rules of how to act and not act in public and in the presence of white people, and above all, how to act when—not if—they are pulled over by the police while driving.4 • Analyzing thousands of music videos played on MTV and BET in the last thirty years, media critic Sut Jhally describes the domi- nant portrayal of young black men as possibly “the most racist set of images ever displayed in public” since D. W. Griffith’s white supremacist film of 1913, “Birth of a Nation.” The por- trayal of women in music video, and black women especially, is almost universally dehumanizing and objectifying, “their value often reduced to a single part of their anatomy.” Several infamous hip-hop videos, for example, feature the male star running a credit card through a willing woman’s buttocks. Jhally describes the dominant lens or narrative through which men and women have been portrayed in music video since the early 1980s as the “adolescent male heterosexual pornographic imagi- nation,” a narrative now so dominant in American popular cul- ture as to be widely considered normal. Jhally’s critique presses well beyond the artists themselves or any single musical genre to indict the powerful and mostly white male record company executives behind the camera who envision and dictate the con- tent of music videos for public consumption.5 • A 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation survey reports that children between age eight and eighteen in America spend an average of fifty-three hours per week (nearly eight hours per day) en- gaged with television or some form of electronic media. African American and Hispanic kids spend nearly one-third more time than white kids. Jesuit ethicist Fr. John Kavanaugh describes the consumer society and the advertising imagery driving 126 Hope Sings, So Beautiful these media as the dominant form of education and moral formation in our lives, preaching a gospel of unrestrained in- dividualism, consumerism, and militarism, and crippling our deepest capacities for social empathy and loving, committed sexual relationships.6 • A study commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops reports that between 1950 and 2002, approxi- mately 10,667 children were sexually abused by clergy in the United States. The revelation of widespread sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church and ongoing systematic denial and obfuscation by bishops around the world continues to this day.7 • Several African American Catholic eighth graders in a Midwest- ern parochial school habitually refer to one another in casual conversation as “niggers.” Their white classmates understand that they are never to use the term, but confess bewilderment as to why the black kids, and presumably their parents, would use it. • Federal statistics report that one in five college women are vic- tims of sexual assault, most often during the first few months on campus. College women express conflicted feelings about reporting sexual assault in the face of enormous pressures not to do so, especially where incidents involve alcohol (as most do) or high-profile male student athletes. As a University of Notre Dame professor sees it, “Most of my colleagues and al- most all of my students tend to be very protective of the institu- tion and our image, and they’re not eager to look too closely at anything that might raise questions.”8 • A best-selling video by rap superstar Snoop Dogg features an “interview” with an admiring female “journalist.” Draped by dozens of nearly naked women throughout the film, he sings “You gotta’ break these hoes for Snoop.” The interviewer herself finally succumbs to Snoop Dog’s charms, as he smiles into the camera and says, “Yeah.