James Baldwin?  Most famous for his memoirs articulating the African-American experience in the Sixties, Baldwin's unfinished memoir was recently made the basis for a movie, I Am Not Your Negro.  For those of us who lived through the civil rights movement of the Sixties, Baldwin's recollections and observations ring frightfully true.  It was a highly tense and volatile time in America.  Too many people died, too many people were hurt, too many people lost everything.  And regrettably, way too many people emerged unchanged, racists still, even today.


     Although the whites who participated in the movement were thoroughly committed to its goals, they--and they readily admitted to this--would never be able to fully understand what it felt to be a black person in America.  Nor do they today.  People who are born into what I will call white privilege, though they may do their best to expunge it from their psyche and worldview, will never be able to shake it off completely.  Like it or not, its legacy endures.
     When we therefore consider Baldwin's points about the African-American experience, we do well to view them not through the prism of our often mishapen perspective, but through the lens of a God who loves all people in equal measure, a God who enabled and encourages genetic and cultural diversity, a God who dearly wishes for all people to come together in loving community.  Would it be that we, all of us human beings, all of us who find outselves living together on this often bewildering planet, look beyond ourselves to the transcendence that defines, undergirds, and frames the rhythms of the cosmos.  That we set our hope in something bigger than ourselves.

     And see the movie:  you will not soon forget it.