PLEASE PLEASE read all of this on the jump, it's so important, and it's not just "religiosity," it's pure Hippy Jesus stuff, it's good, hard-core, people helping people save the world stuff. Mario Powell, S.J., the president of Brooklyn Jesuit Prep is going through it:
<< // As a 38-year-old black Jesuit priest, this is a familiar smell for me. It stinks. Its smell and the reactions it provokes in black Americans is impossible to avoid. It is a strange and bitter fruit. //
... After the death of yet another black man [Psalm 13] are my words as well. The psalmist is angry, questioning why God has not acted. Yet in days of old, the stench of sin filled the nostrils of God. God smelled it, tasted it. As of old, it is again today.
... But there is something new to me in this experience. It is the fear I feel not just for myself or for black Americans in general, but for the 80 young black children who are students at the middle school I have been asked to lead: Brooklyn Jesuit Prep. I fear what this summer has in store for them and other black children of central Brooklyn. I fear that without summer jobs or camps, and faced with over-policing, more black youths will have encounters with police—encounters that often do not end well for people who look like them.
... And let me be clear: This is Christianity. This sharing in the experience of others is what it is to be one body in Christ. I am not inventing this. Here are Pope Francis’ words: “Christian doctrine...is alive,” he insists. “[It] knows being unsettled, enlivened.” This means Christianity has flesh, breath, a face. In the pope’s words, Christianity “has a body that moves and grows, it has a soft flesh: It is called Jesus Christ.”
It is also called George Floyd and Sandra Bland and Trayvon Martin.
It is the soft flesh of these black bodies that America must grow close to. It is Jesus in the soft flesh of the black and brown children at Brooklyn Jesuit Prep and schools all across this land that this country must come to know ...
...Until you grow close to our suffering, until it fills your eyes and ears, your minds and hearts, until you jump up on the cross with black Americans, there can be no Easter for America//>
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