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We record the Presbyterian Sunday service on Saturday. Their fine pastor, John Gibson, is an expert at many things and is able to edit and post a church service which is a reasonable facsimile of being there. Today he brought a special guest with him: an effigy of a black man with a noose around his neck. This man with no name has lived with John for a number of years now. He was found by the toll road between Siloam Springs and Tulsa, and rescued by John, living in his home as a reminder of how far we have to go in this quest for civil rights. At the time John saw this image hanging high from a tree, he was teaching school. Coincidently, they were studying the civil rights movement, so he took the faceless black man to school. I hope the students in that class forever remember what so many seem to have forgotten: We are all the same. We all hurt the same, we all love the same, we all want security, we all want happiness. The reason we don't all have these things is because some of us feel others of us haven't earned it. Where did we get this idea, that some are more deserving than others? I admit to finding prejudices within myself all the time. I want to recognize them, face them, release them by replacing them with Love. Just like tending a garden, it's a never-ending process. Those weeds keep coming back unless we get to their roots, expose them, and let them wither away in the light. We can do this.
"The history of our country, like all history, illustrates the might of Mind, and shows human power to be proportionate to its embodiment of right-thinking. A few immortal sentences, breathing the omnipotence of divine justice, have been potent to break despotic fetters and abolish the whipping post and slave market, but oppression neither went down in blood, nor did the breath of freedom come from the cannon's mouth. Love is the liberator." Mary Baker Eddy -- circa 1865
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