After Transfiguration
...the struggle against silence.
Two Sundays past on the Christian calendar was Transfiguration Sunday. For those not in church regularly, or at all, or not in liturgical traditions, Transfiguration Sunday typically centers on an important story from the Gospels. Called, as you might guess, The Transfiguration, the story begins with Jesus taking three of his twelve disciples—Peter, James, and John—“up a high mountain, apart, by themselves.”
On top of the mountain, “he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such that no one on earth could bleach them.” Two of the most important ancestors, Moses and Elijah, appear with him, and talk to him. Then a cloud comes over them, and a voice from the cloud says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him!”
And then suddenly the whole vision ends, and the story is pretty much over. But it’s a powerful story. It is full of symbolism and religious meaning. It is the kind of story that needs to be heard and read and preached regularly over a lifetime.
As I’ve been writing, the story that I have used over and over to help make clear the meaning of Urban Renewal as a theo-political event has not been the Transfiguration, but the story that immediately follows it. You might hear the episode called “The Silencing Spirit,” but likely you won’t hear much about it at all. It is one of those Gospel stories that often gets overlooked. It is generally not included in the lectionary readings. Only a couple of powerful quotes from the story are common in Christian practice, and those are typically referenced without the context of the story. Here is a link to the text.
This is the basic action of the Silencing Spirit story: As Jesus, Peter, James, and John return to join the rest of the disciples, they walk into some hubbub. A father has brought his son to be healed. The son is possessed by a spirit that keeps him from speaking. When he tries, the spirit casts him into fire, or throws him into water, or otherwise causes him to harm himself. The disciples try to heal the boy, but they cannot.
Jesus arrives. He asks, in short, “what’s going on?” He gets a summary and castigates his disciples for being so woodenheaded. They’ve been around Jesus for quite a while, and still cannot perform this exorcism.
With the boy in front of him, Jesus asks the father, “How long has this been happening to him?”
“From childhood,” the father says. “…if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.”
I’m skipping a little, but Jesus heals the boy. Then the disciples pull him aside, their feelings hurt from Jesus’ rebuke and their own impotence. “Why couldn’t we heal this child?” they ask. They do not understand their failure. Jesus responds somewhat cryptically, “this kind can only come out by prayer.”
I tried to attend to all the little details of the text in the book, and I’m not going to extend it all out here. But the story in broad sketches is important. This exorcism, like all of the physical and spiritual healings in the Gospels (and Acts), is political. The story is political, its result is political, and the speech around it is political. By “political,” I simply mean that what is happening is not only, or even primarily, about the individual in the story. Exorcisms in the Gospels are about common life and the restoration of communities through the healing of individuals. “Political” is not “partisan,” but rather about the structures of common life.
You can see that in the language of the father. Jesus asks, “how long has this been happening to him?” The father helps Jesus—and the rest of us—to see that the boy’s condition does not only affect the boy. It affects others, probably many others, beginning with his family. “Have pity on us and help us,” he begs. The pronouns are the tell. And they are undefined as to their breadth. The “us” may be the boy and his father. But given the political nature of healings in the Gospels, I suspect it is broader. A possession like the one described would affect a household and a neighborhood. By the description that the text offers, the child’s gifts get withheld from the community because of the possession. Healing restores him not only to speech, but to a fuller participation in the common life around him.
In that light, even Jesus’s response to the disciples—“this kind can only come out by prayer”—offers a disorientation of the idea of prayer as quietude. Ched Myers shows that in Mark, Jesus’s calls to prayer are “ways of engaging the apocalyptic struggle over history.”[1] Far from a retreat, prayer places the faithful directly into the conflicts of our times.
What I’ve tried to track in Our Trespasses are two silences that brought Urban Renewal to reality. Those silences help to identify the simultaneous political, theological, and geographical nature of the struggle for justice in our cities and neighborhoods. On the one hand, there are those silenced. My project focused on the Brooklyn neighborhood in Charlotte, a Black neighborhood of enormous historical and cultural import. Like the Brooklyn neighborhood, at least 1,200 other areas in American cities and towns faced widespread destruction funded by their own tax dollars. Inevitably, these were poor neighborhoods, and disproportionately Black.
On the other hand, there were those who were silent about the actions they were taking, especially when they knew or could have easily known that they were doing so much damage to other people’s homes and communities. These actors in the story were white, they held or were adjacent to power, and they used the political moment for their advantage. In Charlotte, all of these actors were Christian. Their actions were both political and theological. I’ve gone to great lengths to write this history in detail because their silences continue to be repeated today. Urban Renewal had precedent in other efforts at conquest and has continuing antecedents in gentrification and other issues of displacement today.
The silenced and the silentious.[2] Both, in differing ways, in need of healing. More to come on this.
Above: The silenced of Urban Renewal. Members of the youth Sunday School at Friendship Baptist Church, formerly at 1st and Brevard Streets. Photo from 1963, just prior to the seizure and destruction of Friendship’s building. Used by permission of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church (with thanks to Brenda Porter-Dewitt).
Below: The silentious. Redevelopment Commission director Vernon Sawyer (left) observes Lee Kinney (next to Sawyer) sign over the first property sale of Brooklyn’s Urban Renewal project. From Charlotte Observer, August 11, 1961. Used by permission.
Happy Publication Day to Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes for her new book Sacred Self Care: Daily Practices for Nourishing Our Whole Selves. Dr. Chanequa is a brilliant thinker and writer whose recent Substack posts have been meaty, thick content for reflection. You’ll hear more from her in this space at some point, as she wrote a powerful foreword for Our Trespasses. I plan to share at least a portion of it before the book release.
Added Bonus: The British cultural theorist Stuart Hall speaks really clearly to continuity of the present and the past in this lecture. He says, “The object of my intellectual work…is what I would call ‘the present conjuncture.’ It’s the history of the present. It’s ‘what is the condition in which we now find ourselves?’ And how did we get there? And what forces are created in order that we might understand it and we might do something about it?” The longer lecture is terrific, but that part is especially important.
Next Week: Book news! I’ll have a cover to share, pre-order links, and a special offer.
[1] See Ched Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First-World Christians, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994, p. 101. The other two passages in Mark where Jesus calls his disciples to prayer are 11:24-25 and 14:32-42.
[2] That’s a 50-cent word that means “habitually silent.