Beyond White

Published in slightly edited form Dec. 6th, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     A friend and I were laughing last week about the insidious antics of someone, and the words “Oh, that’s beyond white!” came out of his mouth.  I don’t remember who we were laughing at.  It could have been something from the current slough of national politics.  Maybe it had nothing to do with politics whatsoever.  It could have been anything, anybody.  Outrageous arrogance associated with whiteness is a contagious disease in our culture, and it takes conscious effort to resist.  No one is immune, not even people from other races.

           

     Last Friday night Nikiko Masumoto performed her one-woman play “What We Could Carry” for the Reedley Peace Center.  I’d been wanting to see this play since I first read about it in the Fresno Bee five years ago, when she returned to the Valley to farm with her family.  The play is a re-creation of the 1981 testimonies of Japanese-Americans who suffered the WWII internment, testimonies which led, eventually, to formal apologies and minimal monetary restitution from the federal government.  It was one of the dark chapters in U.S. history, but, as one of her characters says in the play, this chapter, in terms of how our country has dealt with other (i.e., non-white) races, is not the exception, but the rule.  From that point onward in the play, we listened to their testimonies differently.

           

     Mas Masumoto, Nikiko’s father, has been a friend to me since he performed in my first Humanities event in Parlier, early in 1991.  He was teamed with the poet Omar Salinas from Sanger, a town which is less than 5 miles away from the Masumoto’s farm in Del Rey, but the two writers had never met.  Race and social inequality associated with different occupations can create divides “below” white, as Mas testifies in a beautiful short piece called “In the Fourth Grade” published in his first book, Country Voices:  The Oral History of a Japanese American Family Farm Community (1987.)

           

     I have always loved watching Mas give presentations, but Nikiko’s performance was something else.  It was breathtaking.  With only a kitchen stool and battered suitcase as props, she created times and places of the evacuation; with just a music stand and microphone she transported us to the hearing rooms where the testimonies were first given token (and only later serious) attention.  The civic necessity of a whole community speaking up in their own defense was overwhelming, as the different people who did so showed up in Nikiko’s body, came out of her mouth.  Her passionate representation of those people, men and women, young and old, quietly respectful and righteously outraged, gave me new respect for the power of theater, of face-to-face communication, however ephemeral it might seem.  In the blink of an eye, that woman can change hearts.

           

     And changed hearts is what we’re going to need if we’re ever going to move beyond white, beyond the supposed superiority of that race of people and the privileges still associated with it.  Beyond white is where we need to go.  And as we move into the season where Joseph and Mary take their historic, arduous trip to Bethlehem, where they, as swarthy folks of Jerusalem, would be counted and taxed for the white folks in Rome, we have yet another opportunity to move in that direction.  Peace unearth.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rowdy mixture of European peasants who writes.  You can send her your beyond white experiences c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 03247 or leave a comment below.

Imagining Justice

Published August 2, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The good people of Exeter United Methodist Church celebrated Christmas last Sunday, July 30^th.  It was a beautiful service.  The bulletin bore a nativity scene on the cover, with shepherds and angels and wise men surrounding the holy family under the signal star.  We sang “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” and “Joy to the World.”  The children lighted a pint-sized Christmas tree, and in his sermon, Pastor Mark Smith excitedly ripped the ribbon and wrapping paper from a box, the forgotten present under the Christmas tree, the gift of faith.  “Be like little children with that gift,” he encouraged us, demonstrating the idea beautifully.

           

     I was grateful that I listened to my inner adult that morning and took myself to their church.  It was the perfect antidote to last week’s toxic news.  Between a truckload of dead immigrants from south of the border discovered in a Texas Walmart parking lot, the political MADness in Washington over healthcare, and North Korea’s ICBM, my faith account was overdrawn.  Being among people of faith celebrating their creation story was cleansing.

           

     I also learned that this coming Sunday, the 6^th  is the day I get to fill in for Mark, not the 13^th like I thought.  Although the fewer days for preparation might seem like an inconvenience, the timing couldn’t be better, because the message I want to bring is about the work of Christmas.  Now we can have Epiphany in August!

           

     My epiphany occurred back in April, a day or so before I ran into Rod Capps at RN Market.  “What are you up to these days?” he asked.  “I just discovered I want to preach the Gospel according to John – John Pitney,” I said boldly, surprised at the words that came out of my mouth.  “I have some pulpit vacancies I want to fill,” he said, getting out his calendar.  And here we are.

           

     Now, I’ve preached the Gospel of JP here in this column many times.  He’s the Methodist minister songwriter from Oregon whose body of work on land, the church, and the common good allowed me to see the faith dimension in my socio-economic research on agricultural communities.  His songs buttress me as I drive around our region, watching almonds replace stone fruit and vineyards, watching mandarins replace navels and valencias, watching small towns erode and small farms disappear.   They buttress me in my belief that we can find a better way to produce food and an economy,  a better relationship between ourselves and land which will produce more neighborly relations with others and fulfill our covenant with God.  They keep me imagining justice.

           

     And that’s the epiphany, really:  that there could be more justice in this world, and that the people of faith could be instrumental in bringing that about.  There could be more justice in our towns and our countryside, in our land relations and our politics.  And though the prospect seems daunting, claiming that truth begins with imagining.

           

     Come join us for Epiphany in August, Sunday the 6^th at 10:30 a.m.  All are welcome.

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Trudy Wischemann is a small town researcher who writes – and prays.  You can send her your land epiphanies c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Bethlehem

Published Dec. 9, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Slouching, walking, riding a donkey, we’re moving toward Bethlehem in these last weeks of lengthening nights.  We deck the halls with garlands of evergreens and strings of lights, maybe even a little mistletoe to celebrate that first Coming, the immense journey from Nazareth to the City of David, from peasant child to newborn King.  But we also do it to ward off the dark until we can see the days lengthening once again.

     Bethlehem.  All I have to do is hear the word or see that sacred place name to feel the roots of my belief, my faith.  It marks the time as well as the geography of that turning point from old testament to new, the moment when some of God’s children added the word “forgiveness” to their vocabulary.

     How far is Bethlehem from Damascus, I wonder, or from Jerusalem, for that matter?  From Beirut?  Cairo, Baghdad, Istanbul?  In the Bethlehem of our hearts and minds, it is much further than miles.  It is the place where “fear not” was spoken and heard by shepherds and wise men, a plain carpenter and his child bride.  Fear not, because a new way of living together has just been born in this stable, a new, upside-down order where the poor will not be hungry and the rich will slink off into oblivion if they don’t learn to share.  Where the kings of countries will not slaughter their own people, where little children will be suffered instead of die in suffering.

     Some of us are innocent bystanders in this long, wide story.  Others are soldiers in God’s army, at least in their own eyes.  Then there are the nurses and chaplains, the generals with their strategies and the presidents with their real job, to make peace where there is no peace, and none desired.  There are the arms makers, arms sellers, arms negotiators, arms detonators.  There are arms in the hands of innocents and sinners alike in this long, wide story, this historic sweep.  Back and forth we go, corner to corner, dust pans in hand, removing the debris until the next government bombing, the next terrorist attack.  Back and forth, over and over.  The sound of broomstraws is everywhere.

     Bethlehem.  I could not call myself a Christian if it weren’t for the Christmas story.  It entered my heart as a child, long before I would learn about the faith, decades before I discovered God, the Great Spirit, the Light.  Images of Mary astride the unshod donkey in the cold night, finding shelter with the animals instead of humans, the cattle lowing in approval and welcome – those images tell me who I am in ways the cross does not, at least not yet.  The cross is a harder lesson to learn.

     But now is the season of Bethlehem, and making that journey could be the best therapy of all.  When our cities and small towns appear to have been infiltrated by citizens of Damascus and Beirut set on keeping the old, cold war going into eternity, let us mentally follow Joseph and Mary into the unholy world of Herod and Caesar.  Then, following instructions, let us slip away with them unscathed, the infant safe in our arms.  Let us dig in with them for the long haul, keeping watch over our flocks and discerning God’s direction in the constellations, taking heart from the angels and preparing for the cross.

     Bethlehem:  you couldn’t have come at a better time.

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Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte shepherdess who writes.  You can send her your star and angel sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Here, Now

Published Dec. 31, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Here we stand, 10 days into the new solar year, 7 days past the miracle in a manger, now ready to turn the page on December, close the calendar on 2014.  It’s a threshold, a movement away from honoring continuity with the past with gifts and traditions, through a doorway toward self-conscious resolutions and hoped-for newness.  What lessons of Christmas will we take into the new year?


     We live in a Post-Manger world.  Pastors in some of our churches will continue with the Jesus story: the warnings in dreams, the trip to Egypt as a refuge from homeland insecurity, the massacre of all Jewish male children between the ages of 1 and 3 ordered by their king.  The dark night in Israel that forced God’s hand to deliver his Son through the womb of a teenage peasant girl, the lowliest of the low, continued for another 30 years while the boy grew into a man, a lifetime for some people.  Indeed, the darkness continued after his death three years later and continues to this day.


     We are not there in Judea, some of you might say, that flash-point, hot-bed Middle East.  We are here in the Tulare Lake Basin, in the central, holy portion, neither on the forested upland slopes with thin soils in the headwaters, nor in the swampy end-point full of tules and cattails.  Especially here in the Kaweah’s drainage, we’re in the fertile section of the sweetest, most productive watershed in California.


     And it’s not then, you might say, when Caesar and Herod rode roughshod over everything and everyone.  It’s now, when we have law and order and a democratic system to keep things functioning properly, an economy that produces the good life for many.  It’s not there and then, it’s here and now.  What lessons apply?


     Water is one.  When Caesar built an aqueduct to serve his new city of Caesarea on the coast of Israel, it deprived lands of water in the surrounding countryside and impoverished the peasants who depended on that water for survival.  The inability of Tulare County’s Board of Supervisors to come to the aid of those whose wells were drained by the CEMEX mining operation demonstrates that our democratic law and order needs some fine tuning.  Citizen participation is needed in 2015.


     Land is another.  Near the end of his ministry, Jesus warned the daughters of Jerusalem that their good life was coming to an end, that they would be moaning before it was over.  The complicity of the Jewish kings and priests with the Romans, forgetting their compact with God and impoverishing their own people, would bring an end to that urban religious fortress.  The impetus for the good life that deprives others of life whatsoever won’t be tolerated, Jesus was warning.  Inequitable relations between people and land, people and natural resources, people and the good life, result inevitably in destruction.


     If that babe in a manger means anything, it is that we must seek judicious distribution of the earth’s resources, must find ways to share the wealth.  Here, now in the Tulare Lake Basin and in the entire state, we are ‘way overdue in addressing imbalances of power over water and land, and facing more enormous challenges than ever before.  In 2015, let us resolve to take this birth more seriously and bear upon our administrators and representatives the crux of its message.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Methodist Quaker who writes for Tulare County.  You can send her your interpretations of the Christmas/New Years threshold c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

           

Earth and Heaven

Published Dec. 24, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     For the past month, as the days have marched quietly toward the Solstice and the Manger, I’ve been reading two experts on the relationship between earth and heaven to keep me centered on the realities of this season.


     Eugene Peterson, a Presbyterian pastor and scholar who translated the Bible into contemporary language in The Message, has a book of daily reflections called Living the Message.  The December 15th entry was particularly meaningful for me, because he wrote about the importance to his family of the book by Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It.  He said they loved it because “it gave dignity and a sense of holiness to our place, a place that was home to us....We already knew it was a holy place, but the book confirmed and deepened our reverence.  The book functioned as a shrine, calling attention to this place:  this is holy ground -- worship God here.”


     Walter Brueggemann, also a Presbyterian and theologian who wrote The Land:  Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith in 1977 (reissued in 2002 in an expanded second edition,) has become the grandfather of a growing movement in land theology.  Briefly, he has reinterpreted the Old Testament message from a placeless chronicle of God’s acts in history to one of “storied place” in which the main theme becomes the covenant with God in the land (a state of landed-ness) and the movements to and from land-less-ness when God’s people weren’t holding up their end in covenant.  The refocus of the connection between God and Earth is radical, but heaven-sent.  It’s a window on a new faith relationship with land and place which is long overdue.


     In this season we’re keenly aware of the journey of Joseph and pregnant Mary from their rural home village, Nazareth, to Bethlehem.  And it’s not because they had better hospitals in Bethlehem, but so that they could be counted and taxed for the new cities the Roman Caesar was building in their country with the complicity of the Jewish priests and King Herod.  In effect, Joseph and Mary and the majority of the Jewish people were in exile in their own country, occupied by urban foreigners who extracted the wealth of the land through the fingers of the rural peasants.  The night the star shone bright and the angels came down singing hosannas to this newborn child and scaring the wits out of some innocent shepherds who went away singing - that night was not dark just because it was winter in Israel.  It was a dark time in the history of God’s people, and he was shining a light on that, too.


     And who were God’s people?  In the Christmas story we see that being Jewish did not ensure that status.  Herod was Jewish, but he’d broken his covenant long before the angel Gabriel gave Mary the good news.  The Wise Men were not Jewish, but they listened and followed God’s instructions, tripping Herod and saving the infant Jesus from the king’s murderous scheme.  My reading of Brueggemann suggests that God’s people were those who kept covenant in the land and the poor, those who had been dispossessed of land but still honored their Maker, having faith that sooner or later, God would redeem his people and restore them to land from which to make their living.


     In the Lord’s Prayer we say “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  I pray that message will become bright and clear this Christmas:  that this means here, now.  Watch for the light tonight.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Quaker writer who worships with the Methodists in Lindsay, where there will be a Candlelight service tonight at 6 p.m.  Send her your starlit sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.