'The waters have risen up to my neck' - September 16
Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 69:1-23(24-30)31-38; PM Psalm 73; Esther 1:1-4,10-19 or Judith 4:1-15; Acts 17:1-15; John 12:36b-43
Today’s Reflection
This past Saturday, a friend and I drove down to Montgomery to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which are part of the Equal Justice Initiative. I am embarrassed to say that it took me over two years living in Alabama, only an hour and a half away from Montgomery, to make the time to visit these two very significant places. It was on my mind to visit when I first moved here in 2020, but soon I got swept up into the busy-ness of my work and daily life and the hopes to make pilgrimage there kept being put off.
The Legacy Museum traces the history of people sold into slavery in West Africa, forced to make their way across the Atlantic shackled in the holds of ships in what historians call the Middle Passage, and then make their way onto dry land as enslaved people in South America, the Caribbean islands, and the United States. This history should be important to everyone, regardless of race, whether your ancestors were enslaved, slaveholders, or people with no seeming connection to it all. This history is especially important to me, whose family has lived in the South since the 1600s, because I see that whether my family were slaveholders or not (some were and weren’t), no one in the United States at that time was untouched or unaffected by the holding of other people in forced labor. This history is so important to me that much of the teaching and writing I did as a professor focused on understanding the continuing legacy of ‘the Peculiar Institution’ on our sense of regional identity and on how we get along with people across difference—racial, gender, socioeconomic, and otherwise—moving forward.
When you enter the museum space, you are oriented to follow a chronological path through the museum—and once you begin, you must keep moving through the heavy and painful history portrayed. There is no escape. There is no turning back. This seems apt in light of the fact that once people were swept up into this history and sent across the Atlantic as chattel slaves, there was no escape, no turning back—at least not without severe consequences. I don’t want to give too many of the details away in this reflection, as I feel it’s important for you to experience the museum and memorial for yourself. Today’s psalm reminds me of a powerful artistic installation, early on in the path through the museum, which I hope you will experience for yourself if you haven’t already.
As you enter the museum, you come into a room with large screens that envelope you in the waves of the Atlantic—you see them and you hear them, in all their vastness and power. You see screens on the side walls of the room that show the movement of enslaved people from West Africa across the Atlantic over the centuries of the slave trade, noticing the patterns of where the slaves were sent and how the flow of people increased over time.
From there you walk into a room that is also a depiction of the ocean—but in this next room, you are on the beach, where the waves have swept in people from across the sea. On each side of the walkway are many busts of individuals meant to depict enslaved people. You only see from the neck up, and they are down at floor level, with the lights and the setting evoking hundreds of people who are up to their necks in the water and the sand:
Save me, O God,
for the waters have risen up to my neck.
I am sinking in deep mire,
and there is no firm ground for my feet.
I have come into deep waters,
and the torrent washes over me.
I have grown weary with my crying;
my throat is inflamed;
my eyes have failed from looking for my God. —Psalm 69: 1-4
As you continue through the museum, you learn more—an overwhelming amount of information and images—about the history of African Americans and the many struggles they faced through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and with continued discrimination and race-based violence and inequities to this day. But you also learn about the ways that, in the face of all this suffering and injustice, many have held on tightly to their great faith in God. How in the face of such suffering and trauma, ongoing over lifetimes and generations of people, can there also be such undying faith in God? This is one of the many wonderings I held in my heart and mind as I left the Legacy Museum last Saturday.
Becky+
Questions for Reflection
When have you felt imprisoned by something? When have you seen no way out of suffering? How have you held onto hope when all around you seemed hopeless?
Daily Challenge
Learn more about the work of the Equal Justice Initiative and consider visiting the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery.