Remembering December 1st, Rosa Parks Remembrance Day
“For those of you who have fallen into a level of cynicism, thinking that we “cannot” and “nothing will work,” let me tell you something about when you get up..in the morning of December first. That means nothing to you, but let me break it down because you should shout every December first. December 1 was the day … Rosa Parks sat down so you could stand up.
Rosa Parks. Peacock
When you get up this morning, you say, “God, I thank you for Rosa. That she could sit down so I could stand up.” And only God can teach you to do two things that sound contradictory at the same time, that she sat down and stood up at the same time. We must make our history sacred.”—Otis Moss III, Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World: Finding Hope in an Age of Despair (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 96–97, 102.
Richard Rohr introduced us to Otis Moss and his writings about how African Americans have a unique way of holding the tension between hope and despair. In the fall of 2014, shortly after the shooting of Michael Brown and weeks of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Rev. Dr. Moss preached about the tensions of being a Black American of faith and racism in our country.
“ Being Black means you are born with a Blues song tattooed on your heart, and at the same time, you still have a Gospel shout that is welling up in your soul about to come out.
Another way to say it is that we live with repression and revelation, simultaneously swimming in the same tributary of our spirit. There is nothing more confusing to the postmodern personality, to the millennial sojourner, than to have to exist between the strange life of dealing with your Blues and Gospel all the time: madness and ministry, chaos and Christ. My father heard an elder in Georgia say it this way. When he asked her, ‘How are you doing, Mother?’ she said, ‘I’m living between Oh Lord and Thank you, Jesus.”’
“The Gospel and the Blues,” Richard Rohr Daily Meditation, January 18, 2024.
Joanna Seibert. joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/