Dear friends, If you spent any amount of time with Vincent Harding, you might have experienced the way he would ask people to introduce themselves: he would ask us to start by talking about our “mother’s mother.” For Dr. Harding, honoring our maternal grandmothers was a remarkable and tangible way to remind us that our lives are lived in relationship to those who came before us. Whether reflecting on the good that sprang from their lives — or the pain that their decisions caused, he was reminding us that we are connected across time. This week I want to point to two efforts to orient us towards a different sense of time in this moment. As a part of our public life work, we've come alongside two efforts in Georgia to honor desecrated Black cemeteries and the stories of lives lived yet disregarded. On December 21st, as part of our accompaniment alongside those efforts, we presented “Antigone in Savannah” in collaboration with our friends at Theater of War Productions. We highlighted the work of Mamie Hillman in Greensboro, Georgia, of Patt Gunn in Savannah, and of the people around them who are giving us an opportunity to look squarely at our past — with an invitation to heal, and to re-member ourselves to each other. (If you'd like to learn more about that good work, you can read my letters in preparation for the production here: On our need to mourn; On a different sense of time; On what we must recover.) “Antigone in Savannah” was a remarkable intersection of time and place. The beautiful city of Savannah is a place through which we can see and more deeply understand some of the human questions so alive at the heart of the past and the present. These questions are at the center of how we in the United States would shape our social and institutional life as a country. But they’re also questions that are deeply resonant for us all, in every context and every time. With Theater of War Productions, we allowed the timeless resonance of ancient Greek texts to help us consider ourselves anew in history. As an immersion into this experience and the relationships that surrounded it, we've crafted a short offering with behind the scenes footage of some of the people and places at the heart of this production. We planned for this to be a live broadcast via Zoom for the world to see. I think we succeeded in traveling through time, in a way, as we connected ancient Greece to colonial and present-day Georgia. Marty McFly would have been proud. Unfortunately, it was a very 21st-century problem that was our undoing: the Zoom connection failed just as we were getting the performance underway. If you were on that journey with us, we offer our sincere apologies! Whether you were watching that night or not, we happily include the link to the full event. The link will take you directly to the start of the Antigone performance, with incredible actors and a perhaps even more incredible choir (based in Ferguson, Missouri, and with participants from Savannah). And you’re welcome to take in the full, 3-hour recording, which included a procession from the former Calhoun Square in Savannah and ends with a discussion with those gathered in First African Baptist Church of Savannah that evening — a discussion which will give you hope for our capacity to meet this history that is in all of us and carry it forward reparatively. Dr. Harding really wanted the contributions of his beloved friend, Martin Luther King, Jr., to be understood in the context of the community that poured love, hope, and strength into him. Dr. King had remarkable moral courage and a charismatic power to invoke that courage in others; he believed in an interdependent world and was a product of a deeply connected community. This weekend, let us consider how we honor our connections across time as we reflect on the contributions that have shaped us and our "muscular hope" — to use an On Being phrase — for a better future. |
