- Autobiography
- A Break in Family
- Childhood Years
- Judging People on My Experience
- At Home
- Parents, Home, Neighbors
- Early Lessons about Race/Ethnicity
- Early “Organizational” Life
- Church and Christian Contradictions
- Silent Prejudices
- Classes and Class
- College & the Beginning of the End of Innocence
- War without War
- A Lesson in Manipulative Power
- Decision for Ministry
- Preparing for Ministry
- Academic Major at Amherst
- Extra-Curricula Learning at Amherst – Enter Bill & Alice Wimer
- Unrecognized Introduction to Feminism
- Sylvia
- Andover Newton Theological School
- Church Pastorates
- Denominational Staff Ministry
- Wakefield
- From “Black Problem” to “White Problem”
- Stealth-Like Learnings: “Sexism”, “Racism” and Institutions
- Shifting Sands of Faith Demand Action
- Advancing “dis-ease”
- Changing View of the World
- The New Beginning
- Genesis of Community Change, Inc.
- The Early Years at CCI
- Boston’s Struggle for Equal Schools
- Attention to National Issues
- People Participating = Hope
- Enter: James Baldwin
- White Identity Challenged
- Urgency Requires Anti-Apartheid Action
- Suburban Operations Simulation
- Police Brutality
- Local Organizing and Seeking Ways to Combat Racism
- The Move to Boston
- “People”, “People”, “People”
- Moral Man and Immoral Society
- The “office” not an “OFFICE”
- Probing History Moves to the Center of Work
- Affirmative Action
- Little GIANTS
- Expanding the Work
- National Day of Mourning
- Chinatown and Beyond
- “People” not “leaders”
- 1492 Becomes 1992
- Harassment of Black Leaders
- Immigrant Action
- The Photography Collective
- Following (not very well!) Freire
- Enter Derrick Bell
- Using “Privilege to Subvert “Privilege”
- Becoming a Historian
- On the Trail Where Yesterday Inspires, Challenges Today
My major study at Amherst was in English literature. There I was introduced to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. His work left me then and now, puzzled, confused, wondering, inspired. I have returned often to his poems, and have found one to have particular meaning and relevance for my life. Yearly at the time of Christmas, and often during other seasons I remember and recite for my personal spiritual uplift, his Journey of the Magi.
At the end of Journey of the Magi, one of the wise men contemplates the meaning of the recent visit to Bethlehem:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth
and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Wherever my life takes me I must return to my “places”, to my “Kingdoms”, to the places of dispensations where I have known life. But I am “no longer at ease here”. What I have seen, heard, otherwise experienced …. Birth/Death, Death/Birth .. returns me to those places where I can no longer be “at ease”. I am forever in a “place” where “alien people” clutch gods I can no longer worship. Always I ask myself if it is other people who are “alien”, or is it I who am “alien” among them? In either case I am “no longer at ease here”, and can never be so. Reflecting now, I see that the disillusion I was experiencing then also included a slowly eroding “Christian” view of divinity.