David:     Karen, you were in Texas on Saturday, May 14th. I was at home back in Illinois. Because of an ongoing heart problem, my doctor had made it very clear to me that I was not to be flying in a plane anywhere.

Karen:     Anyway, that Saturday, May 14th, something wonderful and exciting happened in my life, while something truly tragic took place for a number of people in another location. We’ll talk about these two extremes this visit.

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:     A year earlier, Karen, you had traveled for the first time to Lubbock, Texas, a city of roughly a quarter of a million people. What was that for?

Karen:     It was charming. There was a group in Lubbock, Texas called Christ in the Arts. It actually has grown out of the vision and expertise and gifts of one family. And so, I went down last year. They have a ballet school. They were producing the Tales of the Kingdom, which is the first book we wrote out of the Tales Trilogy, in a full-length ballet. So, I was eager to see what they had done. And I ran down and attended the performance and it was just, you know, wonderful.

David:     You said many, many times, “I so wish you could have come with me.”

Karen:     So, the first year was great. Second year running was professional.

David:     And this was two nights this time?

Karen:     Two nights. They have 300 people who were involved in the performance on all levels.

David:     That’s a lot of people.

Karen:     Moving the stage, making the costumes, which were just out of sight. And then all of the participants, and then ticket sales and everything.

David:     It’s a complicated procedure.

Karen:     The auditorium was the Civic Center Auditorium. So, it held about 1,400 people for each performance. The second time around, as I said, moved from being a great amateur attempt to something that was much, much, much, much more than that. You had on stage everyone from little three-year-old who did their ballet steps. And then all the way all through the age sets up to the ranger commanders who were played by a lot of their dance. But everyone danced. Every single person danced. And it wasn’t just one little group came out and did their thing on the stage. The choreographers in the stage production people had created this extraordinary event on stage where this little group did this little dance. At the same time that this group was doing this dance, at the same time this group was winding in and out.

David:     It was complicated and beautiful.

Karen:     It was very complicated and very beautiful. And this year they had a better narrative line. It was done by a reader. You couldn’t see the reader, but the voiceover was just really, really helpful to the performance and tied it in more to the book. I thought I could see the improvements in it.

David:     So, you came back high as a kid.

Karen:     I did. I talked about the adrenaline flowing. Well, you get these darling little girls in their costumes who are about eight or nine. And they come out on stage makeup on, and they want to have their picture taken with you. The thing that hit me between the eyes that this year was how important it was and how much it meant to them to have the author of the books there. I mean, we co-authored these books, but at that point because you couldn’t go, I was the author of the book. It affirmed them so much. I mean, they’ve read the book. They’ve practiced for months, literally months, maybe six or seven months, getting this very complicated thing all together. And to have the author there present to see their work and how much they honored their work was very, very sweet. And I really got that this time.

We had a book table, Randall Mains, and our oldest son, who’s really responsible for the book still being in the marketplace. He has taken this on as something he has been doing for years and his fiancé, Judith. So, they got to hear and see all of this stuff too.

David:     And the book table was big. I packed all the books that were sent down there and there are 17 large boxes of books and I thought they’ll never sell off these books.

Karen:     Well, they did. It was just a very affirming time. They asked me to do a little speech that the author is present. So, that means a lot to people, and I came out and gave a little two or three minute piece after each performance.

David:     You were pleased, yes.

Karen:     And I was extremely pleased. Most books written by authors are out of the market in five years. I mean, it’s just standard. If they last that long, I realize these books are going to go beyond our lifetime. They’re going to exist after you and I really do go on. And who knows what will happen that way.

We were talking about C.S. Lewis’ work and Tolkien’s work. Well, the great sales and movement of those books and the film work that Peter Jackson did on Tolkien’s books, The Return of the King, etc., etc., all of those books all happened after he had died.

As has most of the sales and C.S. Lewis books. So, it is a real privilege to be able to be in a place where all of a sudden you get this sense that these things are going to go places that you’ve never gone will outlive you.

David:     And that’s quite a privilege.

Karen:     Yeah, it is quite a privilege.

David:     Well, I know that you were very, very excited. Usually when you get off the plane when you visit somewhere and I pick you up, you’re kind of pooped out. But you were smiling and hardly waiting to get into the car.

Karen:     I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

David:     It was a wonderful, wonderful trip for you.

While you were away that Saturday, May 14, one of our grandsons was visiting me. He and his wife live in the Portland, Oregon area. Nathaniel was on his way home from attending a funeral in Indiana.

Karen:     A stand-up funeral. It’s a known in the extended family, not our side of the family.

David:     Yeah. You and I have been visiting various churches in our Chicagoland suburb to date. We’ve been to maybe eight or nine of them in our small area here. Anyway, that Saturday I invited Nathaniel to go with me to the next church on the list. And I told him what it was, the name of the denomination. And he thought that was fine.

So, we were looking forward to that. That same Saturday, May 14, earlier around noon in Buffalo, New York, a city just slightly larger than Lubbock, an 18-year-old white male shot and killed 10 adult blacks outside and then inside a supermarket. Some of his victims were Christians.

Karen:     Well, many were devout Christians, very active in their churches.

David:     Yeah, I was really distraught. But Nathaniel was here, we talked, and then the next morning we got up early, we went to the church. It was a good experience, Karen. It wasn’t a large church. I said to Nathaniel, probably 50, 60 people. He said probably more like 40 people. We were greeted just like we were the wonderful people in the whole world.

Karen:     Yeah, a lot of these churches that we have visited don’t, I think we’ve said this before in a podcast, don’t have that kind of understanding of greeting the visitors. Everyone going out of their way to do that.

David:     We did the podcast in the following week, Karen. We were welcomed very beautifully by the next church we visited. They knew nothing about us coming, but they were really ready to welcome visitors.

Karen:     But that’s one of the nine we’ve attended, then you went to this next one without me with it.

David:     This one really outdid it.

Karen:     Oh, it outdid it.

David:     They were absolutely phenomenal. That’s phenomenal. The music was good. They had a guest speaker who was a layperson from the church. Nathaniel and I went out afterward. Our community of West Chicago was over half Hispanic.

Karen:     He went to El Coco Loco, right?

David:     We got the big nacho plate. We never finished it. There were more nachos than we could.

Karen:     Two hungry men could finish it.

David:     Anyway, we talked about the service. Nathaniel, he was very kind in his comment. And I think he enjoyed the time. I asked him about the sermon. He said, “He started really well. He used an object lesson. Then he kept talking. He talked for a long time.” I said, “Yeah, he knew how to fly the plane, but he couldn’t land the thing. He kept coming in. Then he would take off again.”

Karen:     He was on the runway.

David:     It was a good time. And then Karen, what happened was that was Sunday. After lunch, we came home, and I turned on the TV and they were talking about the killings again. They interviewed one minister and he said to people who were white, he said, “If you were in church this morning and nothing was said about the shootings today, the slaughter that went on, you don’t understand what our pain is.”

It just hit me. We had been to that church, and they said nothing. Although there was a long extended pastoral prayer, very beautifully done, but nothing about what had happened the day before. It was hard not to know what went on because it was in all of the news. But even more than that, Karen, I had gone out to Nathaniel. We had evaluated our experience. I never once thought anything about connecting that to the shooting the day before. Nothing was said and then I thought to myself, “I bet of all the churches that we have attended here in our town, none of them said anything about the shootings that had gone on the day before.” I didn’t even notice it. I was oblivious to that.

Karen:     How many people were killed in that?

David:     In the shooting, there were 10 people.

Karen:     10 people.

David:     10 people and a couple who were wounded. The president actually went there.

Karen:     And his wife.

David:     And he did a beautiful job.

Karen:     The Bidens are good at that, I think. They have had enough loss in their own family that they understand that pain. And that was beautiful. In fact, I caught something on television where he named every single one of the people who had been shot and murdered and gave a little background on them. I thought, this is a beautiful thing for a President to do, my goodness.

David:     Yeah, and it said once again, I wish they had done that in the church, but on top of that, I wish I had been sensitive enough to say, “These are brothers and sisters, and we must hurt with them”. I’m not responsible for what went on, but there’s something in our land that needs to change because these things are not stopping.

Karen:     Well, at least in our churches.

David:     And Karen, it was not only in that given church. There was a church in the West Coast, an Asian church.

Karen:     There was a shooting there.

David:     There was one shooting, another wounded the Asians in this country. They’re beginning to feel that same kind of pressure. You are displacing us. That’s the white cry of these people. And I thought to myself, how insensitive for me. I was distraught one day and the next day I’ve forgotten about it. It’s not affecting me the way it used to. We spent 10 years of our life in the inner city of Chicago. And then Karen, our lives have been involved with this, but it’s so easy to pass it off. It’s like, “No, I’ve gotten used to it.” And that’s not a good thing. I’m not talking about anybody else. I’m just talking about myself. And so, I said to myself, “Lord, what do I need to do?” And it is very hard to figure out how in the world to respond to this hatred. I thought to myself, “I need to pray about it more.” And then I stopped and said, “Not more. I need to start to pray about it.” I’ve not even begun to do this. I just realized how deeply I feel and at the same time, how deeply rooted this problem is.

As a majority, whites, we are going to be replaced. That’s time. It’s just time and it’s going to happen.

Karen:     Demographically, there’s no way to keep that from happening.

David:     And I don’t fear that at all.

Karen:     No, I welcome. And I think diversity is wonderful. I just, you know, we learn from one another.

David:     There’s so much inner marriage. After a while, how do you sort out who is what?

Karen:     You cannot stop this. Nor should we want to. I mean, I think that’s one of the beauties of the American nation is we have so many people who have come here with backgrounds. And remember being on a ship in the harbor outside of Vietnam, interviewing people who had left their country, boat people.

David:     Fleeing by boat.

Karen:     And I said, yeah, “Why have you left your homeland, your language, your history, your family, everything you know that’s familiar to you?” And their word was “To be free”. So, that’s what America has represented around the world. What we need to do and what you’re talking about doing is how do we really sensitize ourselves to the racism that’s in our country? We’re part of the white majority. So, we don’t experience that. And how do we sensitize ourselves to it so that when these sorts of slaughters happen, it reaches the deepest part of our empathy and compassion and distress.

We need to be distressed about it. But you’re saying we need to incorporate it, all of us into our prayer lives. We need to cover our brothers and sisters with our prayers and then find the ways, the things that we can do that will educate ourselves but put us in a position where we really are anti-racist.

David:     I think it would be so moving if all across the country, in the church, people had said, “These are our brothers and sisters in the Lord. We are so sorry, Lord, help us somehow to know what to do.”

There would be a phenomenal new day. It hasn’t come to that place, but I don’t feel like I can finger point at others. I feel this is something that I’m struggling with myself. What do we do to begin to identify with this? I have one picture from watching the television with this black woman. She’s not crawling. She’s just flat on the ground.

Karen:     She’s writhing on the ground.

David:     Writhing on the ground. A young black woman.

Karen:     Her husband and daughter were in that supermarket. She had no idea whether they were alive or not. They had happened. I think the story was to find a freezer unit that they could hide in. I don’t know if it’s something that they went into and were able to hide. They were alive, but her pain was just, I mean, I’m weeping now because of it.

Well, let me make a suggestion because I think this suggestion is something that we all can do.

In 2018, I was laid low by an eating disorder, not of my own choice. A mesh implant had been put in and it filed up my digestive system because I had a hernia. So, I was dislocated from regular function or traveling or, you know, I just was out of the picture that way physically. So, I started to read books that would teach me about racism in our country. I saw an interview with Michael Eric Dyson. He’s the black pastor. I admire him very much.

David:     Very articulate.

Karen:     Very articulate. He’s the head of the poor people’s movement. He heads that up, among other things. But he’s written a book, Tears We Cannot Stop, A Sermon to White America. I heard him interviewed over PBS three or four years ago. So, I thought I’m going to take up that challenge. And his challenge was that we need to educate ourselves. So, I started to read, and this is with us. We’ve had a background in working cross-racially, so we’re not absolutely out of the loop on that. We understand some of the issues.

David:     What a privilege to hear his words.

Karen:     Yeah, to hear his words.

David:     The title of the book again is…

Karen:     Tears We Cannot Stop, A Sermon to White America.

David:     It sounds like you could be put back by that.

Karen:     No, it’s very tender, but truthful and honest. So, he also has a list of books that white Americans should read, people in the majority culture. And so, I did start on that. I have about 25 books that I’ve gone to.

David:     And you just read and read and read.

Karen:     I did. I read and read and read. So, one of the books I think that would be very helpful to folk, those of us who are in the majority culture is the sociological book. It doesn’t have a diatribe in it. It’s not trying to push anything. It’s just a sociological study. And it’s The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones. He’s the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute. So, we need to understand that this is sociologically an inevitability. It’s just going to happen.

David:     Yes, it will.

Karen:     And we’re very close to it, to that tipping point now, where we’re going to have an even amount of white majority, and then the cumulative minorities will make up their own majority. So, another of the books, a profound book that I read that season, was The Cross and the Lynching Tree. And this is by James H. Cohn. He was a black theologian. He died this year. And I read it over Easter time.

David:     Whenever you read it, that’s a very powerful book.

Karen:     Yes,

David:     It encouraged me to read it.

Karen:     Yeah, powerful, powerful book.

David:     I did, yes.

Karen:     So, he looks at the cross and the culture in which Christ lived, was a tool to humiliate those who had divergent voices very often. And Christ, certainly, his teaching was offending the power structure. Not maybe even deliberately, but it was. And so, he was crucified on that cross by the powers that be.

Well, Cohn relates this to the lynching tree. There were 4,000 some lynchings in America across our country. The parallels that he makes theologically are just, you’re weeping by the time you’re done with his book.

David:     Yeah, in a very sobering way. It’s not to make you feel guilty. It’s just to be able to…

Karen:     Well, it’s a reality.

David:     Reality and to empathize.

Karen:     Facing reality. The one I’m reading now is a sociological work called, A Study of Racism in America. So, my reading hasn’t stopped. I’m still trying to educate myself. So, one of the books I would recommend for anyone who’s really interested understanding racism in the States is this one by Abram X. Kendi, “How to be an Anti-racist.” And his point is, it’s not enough to just know about the problem or feel badly about the problem. We have to be activists. Well, and that’s exactly what you’re saying David here in this podcast with this slaughter that happened. It concerned you. You were distressed by it, but it didn’t go on in your life where you said, “What can I do practically about this?” And that’s where most of us are. So, I would recommend also Abram X. Kendi’s book, “How to be an Anti-Racist.”

David:     I’m going to do this sentence to me and then do it in a more general way. If I say it personally, I need to actively look for ways that I can identify more closely with non-whites and especially with those who are black.

Or if I say it more generally: white Christians need to actively look for ways they can identify more closely with non-whites and especially with those who are black. Anyway, sobering, but hopefully helpful visit together.

Outro:     You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters, hosts@beforewego.show.

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