Michael B. Curry - Love is the Way

O ne of my daughters asked me as I was working on this book, What are you writing about? I answered, Some of what Ive learned from faith, family, community, and ancestors.

She said, So youre writing about life lessons?

I guess so, yes, I replied.

I dont think of my life as particularly extraordinary, unusual, or even interesting, or at least not any more so than anyone elses. But then theres the wise Frederick Buechner quote from his book Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Buechner is actually right about anyones life, if you listen. Love Is the Way, then, is a journey into the holy and hidden heart of my own lifethose people and experiences that led to my conviction that the way of love can change each of us, and all of us, for the better.

I was born, grew up, and came of age in the United States of the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s. My sister, Sharon, and I were both born in Chicago, where our father pastored an Episcopal church, St. Simon the Cyrenian, in Maywood. We moved to Buffalo, New York, when I was three. There we grew up in the African American community of East Buffalonot just raised in the community but by it. Like many in our community, we lived in the urban North, but our roots were deep in the soil of the rural South, and deeper still in time in the ancient soil of sub-Saharan West Africa.

My grandparents came from eastern North Carolina on my mothers side, and on my fathers side, from rural Alabama, a place the family referred to as Midway, located midway between Birmingham and Montgomery. They had names like Nellie and Hezekiah, Theotis Calhoun and Carrie Estelle. They werent unusual. They were part of what the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called the Great Migration, one of the largest movements in human history, which is powerfully chronicled in Isabel Wilkersons The Warmth of Other Suns.

They migrated from the South; more accurately, they fled the South, not unlike migrants, immigrants, and refugees of all human generations, as far back as the Hebrews fleeing famine and settling as immigrants in Egypt, or Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus generations later fleeing persecution in Palestine and finding refuge in Egypt.

They fled separate bathrooms and water fountains. They fled separate and unequal schools. They fled being segregated, separated, cast down, and cast out. They fled the place where old men were called boy and old women were treated with disrespect. They fled the terror of hooded night riders and legalized lynchings and the subtle slavery of sharecropping.

These ancestors fought in the Great War, World War I, to make the world safe for democracy. My wife, Sharon, proudly has the discharge papers of Troy Rufus Clement, her grandfather, who fought in that war to make the world safe for democracy. But when he came home to North Carolina, that democracy didnt apply to him.

They fought again in World War II, in segregated units, to stop oppression and injustice and evil overseas. And yet again, it didnt apply to them when they came back home. I remember hearing my family on my fathers side, in the empire of rural Alabama, talking about how Nazi prisoners of war were treated better than they were.

And yet, in spite of it, they believed in America, in its ideals of freedom and equality, with liberty and justice for all. They believed in the dream of America. So they proudly sang the national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, and James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnsons Negro national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing.

They loved America and taught us to love Americato work to change it for the good, not just for our people but for all the children of God, no matter their color, class, caste, or creed. All! They loved America in spite of the fact that America didnt love them. My father used to say that his work in the community for civil and human rights was so that his children and others like them would not have to live as second-class citizens.

They taught us, and would say often, quoting the old King James Version of the Bible, that God is no respecter of persons. And the Lord God made of one blood all the peoples of the earth to dwell upon the face of the earth. In other words, God doesnt discriminate. The love of God, which is the source of and key to life, is an equal-opportunity employer.

I remember them saying over and over again, possibly quoting Booker T. Washington, Never let anyone drag you so low as to make you hate them. It is only by discipline and mobilized love, as my colleague Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington calls it, that we shall all overcome.

So while this book is about me, its really about the folk who raised me, and the community and church that formed me. First and foremost, they taught that the way of Jesus is the way of love. And that the way of love is the only way to freedom.

They were not at all unusual in African American communities, longing and laboring for freedom, as folk said in those days. In many respects they were representative of the most profound yearning of the human heart: the universal hope for a better life and a better world.