“Let Justice Well Up As Water”

Rev. Rali Weaver

A few years ago I was in Montgomery, Alabama for an interview and was able to squeeze in a visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Church and see the path the Civil Rights March took from Selma, past the stores that used to be segregated, past his church steps to the Historic Montgomery State House.

The lunch counters that King dreamed would allow “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners to sit down together at the table of brotherhood” are no longer segregated because they stand empty. Issues of poverty as evidenced by little investment in low cost housing, as well as, high rates of homelessness still plague Montgomery, Alabama -- and our whole nation.

As we approach this 22^nd Martin Luther King Junior Day and the 40^th year since his assassination, I believe it is important to acknowledge that some of the dreams of the 1963 Civil Rights movement have been realized. While many Civil Rights dreams for equality in our country still have not.

At the end of the path to the State House in Montgomery stands The Civil Rights Memorial which was designed by Maya Lin who also designed the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington DC. It is a beautiful Granite structure with water flowing over it. The memorial is meant to be a place of reflection and relaxation.

The granite holds a timeline of events of the Civil Rights Struggle and the words

…Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream..

These famous words are found in the book of Amos and were used by Doctor King on several occasions. Dr. King was famous for preaching about the liberation of fair treatment and right relations as coming like water rushing down and a mighty stream.

These are powerful metaphors for justice work.

Water rushing down denotes revolutionary change – purity visited upon us from the sky as water rushing down.

I should note here that for our discussion today I took the other translation of the Hebrew, as my title because I believe that may be a more apt distinction of the Civil Rights movement today.

In the Hebrew the word for rushing down and welling up are nearly the same.

Water welling up around us seems a much slower process. While some who were active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s reflect on how far the nation has come since the days of police brutality and bus boycotts, today's activists seem quieter and without much drama.

The waters of justice that surround us sometimes feel stagnant and unchanging and we need the stream of righteousness to keep us going. But when there are so few blatant egregious acts against a people and only countless intangibles it is difficult to find that rage that motivates change and we swim in the waters of complacency.

The other reason I believe that we as a nation are swimming in the waters of complacency is because the black and white descriptions of racist and non racist no longer fit and there are various gradations of thought and perception that permeate our relationships with others that create the gradations of wealth and poverty and affect the quality of life for everyone that is at the heart of our problems but is difficult to pin point.

It is these limitations of the way we see others and the way others see us, as well as the obstacles that these perceptions create that I want us to explore today.

As many of you know before I was a minister I worked for many years as a teacher for children with severe emotional and behavioral differences. What brought me to that work and what brought me to the ministry is a deep desire to help to liberate others from the obstacles in their lives and give them new opportunities.

I believe it is because I was born with learning disabilities and had other difficulties in my childhood (that through patience and practice and determination I moved beyond) that I have a strong desire to help others do the same.

The problem when I was teaching was that no matter how many skills I taught my students, no matter how much they changed and grew, no matter how many months they were able to behave at our special school, when a student returned to their local school and to their family of origin, and the teachers that knew them, the old behaviors would often return.

You see the parents, and teachers and friends that knew them from before always expected the old misbehavior. In fact sometimes they would be so sure that the child would revert to their old ways of doing things they would unconsciously set them up to behave in those old ways.

For a couple of years I worked as an Integration Specialist, and my job was specifically to soften those transitions. I would work with children to manage the obstacles they would encounter and I would work with the teachers in the returning school to recognize the changes in the student (and to hopefully respond with increased compassion).

This is probably the hardest work I have ever done because no matter how much the student had actually changed, and no matter how much the student and I were able to translate these changes to the local school, the teachers could only see the misbehaving student they had sent to us one or two years before.

Short of moving to a new town where no one knew them, when a child returned to the school and family where they grew up there was little anyone could do to change the expectations of the people who had witnessed the child’s behavior or heard about it second hand in the past and help them to see the transformation of the present.

It is a difficult truth that the first impressions we form and the ways we behave often affect our interactions with people for the life of our relationships.

And even our families, those who know our faults and mistakes, unless they change as well, can rarely recognize transformations in us.

The first book I read from this morning-- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell describes this problem of first impressions in detail. In Blink he points out that we make split decisions that effect every moment of our lives. He calls these influences "thin slicing". Thin Slicing is our ability to gauge what is important from our experience in a flash. Some people call this instinct.

He reports that, spontaneous decisions are often as good as - or even better than carefully planned and considered ones.

Gladwell goes on to explain that a person’s ability to "thin slice" can be corrupted by their likes, dislikes, and unconscious prejudices and stereotypes. His research then explains how an individual’s instinct can be overridden by too much information. He uses this to explain why police might react more to a dark skinned man out at night, when other signs would indicate that he poses no threat.

This also explains why my students were sometimes targeted for their misbehavior when they had done absolutely nothing wrong. And may explain some of how the waters of Justice today have become stagnant.

We stand in water of our own perceptions and those perceptions can liberate or limit others in powerful ways.

In my years as a teacher I have countless examples of children who were pigeon holed by teachers due to their appearance, or manner of being or past history.

Sadly I have few examples of children who were able, either due to their circumstances or the internalization of these negative expectations to overcome the obstacles in their paths.

One student however, stands out because due to his circumstances and the conditions of the environment he was liberated from constricting expectations.

Joe was 11 years old when he entered our school. And he spent six months in a classroom across the hall from mine but when his teacher went on Maternity leave they decided to move him to my classroom because the administration believed his behavior would be too disruptive for a substitute to manage.

When he arrived in my classroom though his file had been lost. Either his teacher had taken it home or put it away where no one could find it in her absence.

At that time when I met a new student I almost always started with the file.

The file would tell me what that student knew already, and what their capacity of learning might be. The file would give me a past history and help me to understand the brain of the student I was meeting for the first time.

Without that file though I had to get to know Joe in a whole knew way.

The first thing I noticed was that at 11 Joe did not know how to read. So without the complicated reading testing and knowing what his ability level was I signed him up with the reading specialist and started systematic phonics based reading instruction in my classroom. In a very short time Joe was sounding out words and making sense of short sentences.

Joe also seemed a bit depressed and unmotivated, so we worked to find him a hobby. Before long my assistant was teaching him to play the guitar and we had him outside playing football once a day. These breaks of “school” time appeared to lift Joe’s spirit and encouraged him to focus more in class.

We continued in this way with Joe-- witnessing a great deal of improvement with very little disruptive behavior over the six months I had him before his file turned up.

The file turned up just after his teacher returned from maternity and when I sat down to read it I thought I was reading about a different kid. In the file it explained that Joe was severely developmentally delayed. The file explained that Joe did not have the cognitive ability to read and that Joe was too depressed and aggressive to manage a full day of instruction.

I was stunned.

These words did not describe the child in my classroom because by this time Joe was already learning to read and by this time he was focused for more than three quarters of the day in order to earn time playing football and guitar.

I remember taking the file across the hall to his previous teacher and asking if perhaps she had made a mistake and the files were switched. She checked it and said no. I explained what I witnessed in Joe and she asked if she could come and observe.

She did and by the end of her observation we were both shocked.

From the time that Joe had been 5 years old and tried to burn down his public school, he had been put into a special school for kids with special needs with a label of cognitive impairment. In that school they had put him in a classroom of students with similar disabilities and over time he had learned their behavior.

Not only that but as he transitioned out of that environment to a new place with new expectations, the expectations of that school had followed him, and so the environment was set for him to behave in the same way.

Nothing short of his teacher being on Maternity leave, and the file being lost would have changed his behavior.

But once it changed it was remarkable how far Joe went.

By the end of two years in my classroom he was reading at grade level, and began taking classes at the local High School. By the fall of the following year he returned to his local high school and was playing on the Junior Varsity football team and had joined the choir. By the time he went to High School he was singing in the Latin Choir and playing varsity football and had started a band that had gigs around town and was earning Honor Roll. He was the first person in his family of any generation to graduate from High School.

To my chagrin it took the file being lost for me to see past Joe’s diagnosis to his possibility. And after that I rarely read a file before meeting a student again.

This experience makes me wonder how many times having too much information creates an environment that limits others? It also reminds me that it is only through real personal relationships that anything can ever change.

If Justice is ever to well up like water around us, if the river of change is ever to pass through we must be in relationships with others and fully examine our preconceptions and expectations of them.

I believe that the first step toward ebbing ever closer to Doctor King’s vision of a just society --is to examine our own perceptions and how they limit progress. There is much to be done, but if we do not start here with ourselves in relationships, if we do not change the waters that surround us we may drown in the complacency of our times.

But if we can begin to examine what we believe and create space for new perceptions and possibilities create that new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds- that Albert Schweitzer is talking about (in the centering thought today)-- what new truths might be liberated?