Texas

1985 was a big year for me.

That was the year I fell in love for the first time, or so I thought.

That was the year we moved from tiny Skellytown, population 800-and-something, to its sister city of White Deer, population 1200-and-something.

That was the year I had one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life.

That was the year I became a PK (preacher's kid).

That was the year I started my never-ending climb up the family tree.

And that was the year James A. Michener published Texas, his largest work ever, which befitted the largest state in the continental United States.

I don't recall how I first found out about it, but I remember reading a brief (very brief) excerpt in Field & Stream, of all places.  It was taken from one of the middle chapters, the tale of young Texas Ranger Otto Macnab's courtship with the beautiful German immigrant Franziska Allerkamp on the banks of the Pedernales River.  I remember the excerpt left me with the impression that this was going to be some kind of sappy love story instead of a sweeping epic about my home state.  To my great relief, it was both.

Skellytown had a small library with an equally small budget.  They weren't going to get a copy of their own; I had to order it through inter-library loan.  I signed up as soon as I knew the novel was out, and waited patiently at the beginning of that summer to receive it.  I remember the anticipation of going to the library every day to see if it had arrived.  I remember my excitement when the answer was finally yes, the care with which I took the 1096-page tome in my hands, and the overwhelming awe I felt in opening the hard-cover to the dust-jacket blurb and the front-and-back-piece maps.

Keep in mind, I was twelve-almost-thirteen years old.  Through the course of the previous year I had read Centennial and Chesapeake.  I'm pretty sure I had also read The Covenant and Space, and I might have even tried my hand at Poland by then.  I was nothing if not precocious, and daring in my reading adventures.  Each huge historical novel took me about six weeks to read.  And I read faithfully every day, thought without much understanding beyond the basic plot points.  It would take me another twenty-five years to discover there was a deeper message proclaimed through the perspectives of the various characters in those novels.

Michener didn't start writing those large historical novels until he was nearly fifty.  By the time Texas was published, he was almost eighty, and after it he wrote two more epics and a handful of other fictions before he died at age ninety.  What did an adolescent know about life and the world, an adolescent form Skellytown, Texas, no less?  I didn't understand that then that Centennial was about the conservation and preservation of what God had given us, about being takers or caretakers.  Or that Chesapeake was about cycles in nature and in life, generation after generation having to face the same decisions again and again with either courage or cowardice.  The Covenant was about cultures in conflict, with every one believing themselves to be the one's ordained by God to be in the right.  Poland demonstrated all to well how the more things change, the more they stay the same; poor people.

A couple months ago, I picked up Texas again.  In the thirty years since its publication, I've probably tackled the enormous story ten times.  I have four copies of it--two worn paperbacks with the covers taped on, and two hardbacks--including a first edition.  I read it again as if it were the first time, and tried to give those characters new life in my Technicolor imagination.  And I was pleasantly surprised to find myself touched on so many levels--intellectual, emotional, and spiritual included.

There are images burned into my soul from those 1000+pages (the paperback has 1320):  The tragic loves of Trinidad de Saldaña in early Spanish San Antonio, culminating in that desperate, daring, and devoted ride of Domingo Garza save her; Mattie Quimper's struggle to carve out a life and a future on the banks of the Brazos River, ending in her defiance of Santa Anna's army on their way to San Jacinto; the brave sacrifice of the Immortal 32 from Gonzales at the Alamo as seen through the eyes of the infamous antihero Zave Campbell, and stirringly retold by Miss Barlow 130 years later; the lifelong love story of Otto & Franza; the terrors of Indian captivity experienced by Emma Larkin, and the tenderness of the foolish Earnshaw Rusk that brought her back from it; the oil boom; the preservation of the Longhorns; the armadillo invasion; the real-estate game of getting in, getting rich, and getting out; the outrageous escapades of one outlandish character after another; the ups and downs of a Texas millionaire who became a Texas billionaire, and then became a regular human being; the two things most seriously Texas, football and religion; and that final chapter about academic endowments, bull auctions, and art galleries.  Let me tell you, there is no adequate way to sum up in just a few words how awesome this enormous book really is.

Texas Monthly awarded Michener one of its famous Bum Steer of the Year Awards for what they saw as a stereo-typical misrepresentation of the great state of Texas.  But as much as I like the magazine, I'm afraid I have to disagree.  James Michener did as much justice to the state of Texas and its history as one volume would allow.  It's a big state; he couldn't tell every story.  But what an overview of the life of wonder one can live in places as diverse as El Paso & Brownsville & Fredericksburg & Houston & Dallas & Lubbock & Waxahachie & Jefferson & Austin... 

If you love Texas, if you love history, if you love reading...tackle this book!  I even have a couple of copies I can share if you need one.  You won't be disappointed.

Black and White

I am not now, nor will I ever be a black man, nor will I ever have complete understanding of the black experience.  I'm just a short, chubby, curly headed white guy in East Texas.  But my great-grandmother's great-great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather's great-grandfather was born John Gaeween in Angola.  In 1619 he was kidnapped by Portuguese slavers, who were raided by English privateers, who took the boat load of Africans to Jamestown, Virginia, where they were sold into indentured servitude to pay for their passage.  Welcome to America.

John served his seven years, married a black slave woman named Margaret Cornish (from whom he was later divorced), and fathered at least two sons before he died.  His two sons were taken into custody by the colony of Virginia, placed into indentured servitude to one of Jamestown's leading families, to be released upon their twenty-first birthdays.  When their "masters" refused to release them, they fought and won their freedom in the courts, and moved away from Jamestown into the mountains, where they intermarried with others of Black, Native American, and Portuguese descent.

Five generations later, they were labeled in early American records as "free colored".  Five generations after that, they were wealthy "white" slave-owners in Mississippi who made up stories to cover up their black heritage.

So I may be a short, chubby, curly headed white guy in East Texas, but part of my heritage is African.  I am part black.

I wasn't raised with this knowledge; it's something I discovered while climbing my family tree.  I was raised as a white boy, in a small rural town in Northwest Texas that within recent memory had a sign at the city limits encouraging people of color to be elsewhere before sunset.  My parents weren't anything close to racist, but my grandparents could be heard to say things like, "Not ALL black people are bad.  I worked with one back in 1957, and he was a decent fellow."  I went to High School in White Deer, Texas, and I quote, "Emphasis on the WHITE."  I lived seventeen years on the border with Mexico, where I was a minority in an 85% brown majority.  I led a pretty white-washed life.  When I moved back to Texas in 2006, it was the first time I had ever lived around black people.

It was then that I realized how racial my vocabulary actually was.  How I freely used terms like nappy-headed and pickaninny without a thought to how it might sound.  The infamous "N-word" was not part of my vocabulary, not really, not seriously, though sometimes it might be used as a joke.  Not around my black friends, of course.  But then again, I didn't have black friends.  I didn't even have that one token black friend that so many white people point to as proof they aren't prejudice.  I never gave a thought to whether or not I was prejudiced.  I wasn't.  I don't hate anybody.  None of my feelings about any person are determined by the color of their skin.  I love all people.

There have been black people in the churches I have pastored.  Not many, mind you.  They have their own churches after all, or so I've been told.  But I have always welcomed anyone of any color into my church.  We still sing, "Jesus loves the little children...red and yellow, black and white" when our kids march out for Children's Church.  But where I pastor, there are white churches, and there are black churches.  I can't speak for any of the black churches; I've never been in one.  But I asked a couple of white pastors of white churches if they had any black people in their churches, and I didn't receive a really clear answer.  I do have a black family in my church.  In fact, last year, we elected him as a deacon, the first black deacon in a white church in probably this whole town's history.  And we didn't do it because he was black; we did it because he was a wonderful candidate for the office.

It's the 21st Century already!  Emancipation was proclaimed 150 years ago.  The Civil War was fought.  600,000 Americans died to decided the issue of American slavery.  The 14th Amendment was passed, codifying in our national documents that phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson that all men were created equal.  Skip forward 100 years, and there were still Civil Rights issues to be settled.  Before I was born, schools were integrated.  I never knew a time when water fountains, restrooms, lunch counters, and upfront bus seats weren't available to everyone.  And now we have a black man elected by an overwhelming majority of people in this country to the highest office in the land.  We are as socially advanced as we have ever been.

But we still have racial issues in this country.  We still have vast racial divides, even in our churches and among brethren.  Right here in Houston County, I'm told there are white supremacist groups.  Maybe there are black power groups, too.  And the only question I have is, what is wrong with us?

Reader friend, you might be asking, "What bee is in Casey's bonnet?  What burr is under Casey's saddle?  What brought this on?"  I'm so glad you asked, because I'm going to tell you.

Bishop Charles Blake, leader of the Church of God in Christ, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the US, has called upon the 12,000 churches he oversees to observe Sunday, December 14th, as "Black Lives Matter Sunday".  He reached out to other denominations, my own Assemblies of God included, and asked them to do the same.  So yesterday I received an email from my denominational headquarters asking me and 12,000 other pastors to join the COGIC in declaring "Black Lives Matter."  I got a phone call about it moments after it was sent, before I had even read it.  Then I read it.  And I read the knee-jerk reactions of lots of my friends and peers in the AG.  And I followed multiple FB threads about the issue.  I witnessed a lot of division between brethren.  I had a knee-jerk reaction too, but now I've had nearly 24 hours to think about it.  I've been involved in lots of private conversations.  And I have to tell you, I'm still trying to determine what I think. 

Black Lives Matter is apparently a copyrighted phrase, the chosen moniker of a group organized after Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in 2012.  The website plainly proclaims what they are about.  And that particular group is into more than just keeping black kids from being killed unjustly by white cops.  Want to know what they are about?  Go to their website and read it yourself.  But by using that phrase, the COGIC and the AG and others have, perhaps inadvertently, aligned themselves with that group. 

I don't know what I'm going to do or not do on Sunday.  I don't know what to say or what not to say about the racial issues.  I don't want to be associated with that group and it's political leanings.  But I don't want to be insensitive to the need for racial harmony in this country either. I don't know how to solve the world's problems of injustice and bigotry and oppression and slavery that is still ongoing in other parts of the world.  I don't know how to make white people stop hating black people.  I don't know how to make black people stop hating white people.  I don't know how to make everyone believe in Jesus and start acting out of the Savior's love for one another.

What I do know is this:  Of course black lives matter--their families, their situations and circumstances, their souls matter.  They matter to God.  They matter to black people.  Why shouldn't they matter to me?  And white lives matter.  And yellow and brown and red lives matter.  I wasn't aware that they didn't matter.  I'm not here to debate Trayvon Martin, or Michael Brown, or Eric Garner, or even OJ Simpson.  I'm not here to defend George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson  I'm not here to discuss white-on-black, black-on-white, white-on-white, or black-on-black crime.

I am here to declare that God so loved the world...and so do I.  And that is the message that needs to be proclaimed from our pulpits this Sunday.  God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  The answers that we are looking for will only be found in Jesus.