Dismissals

I carry in the glove box of my car a point-and-shoot 35mm camera. It is old and rough and precisely the right camera for photos I take from the driver’s window at red lights or pulled over on a gravel road. I am drawn, with this old camera, to photograph the wreckage and disarray of cities, abandoned homes and farms. I do no more with the printed images than stick a stamp and my name on the back, add an address and mail them. These are postcards from out there, pictures from the margins. A great fire now burns across Yosemite, combusting the old, reducing all in its path to ash. Yet we know that new life will follow the…

I recall those grainy, black and white television images of Martin Luther King standing at the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963, fist raised, animated, speaking to that great assembly. So many had come from across the country to hear Dr. King’s words but the television in my home had only the picture. Were the words too dangerous? It was some years later that I heard the words spoken that day, words about broken promises to people of color, words about the “fierce urgency of now. Words that said not to “satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” The time is not yet here – but it is…

When I was a boy my family lived on the British island of Antigua. I recall Dr. Lucius Wynter, an ophthalmologist who could set broken bones. He was of African descent and a Knight in the Order of the British Empire. With a fine baritone that moved between proper British and island patios, he greeted everyone, even this small boy, in the same way: “Good day, my Lord.” When the conversation was done, Dr. Wynter parted with the words “Go in peace” and all who were with him were dismissed. To dismiss means to send away. The deacon’s dismissal, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord” sends us away, into the world. It is fitting to be dismissed…