To Crush the Serpent

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? --Psalms 2:1

I was a young evangelist, preaching in Harlem and other black communities for about three years: Young means adolescent. I was 14 when I entered the pulpit and 17 when I left.

Those were very crucial years, full of wonder, and one of the things I most wondered about was the fellowship of Christians in the United States of America.

My father and I were both black ministers working exclusively in black churches, which was due primarily to the fact that white Christians considered black people to be less human than themselves and certainly unqualified to deliver God's Word to white ears. (This fact was more vivid for my father than for me--at least in the beginning.)

Mountains of blasphemous rhetoric have been written to deny or defend this fact, but the white message comes across loud and clear: Jesus Christ and his Father are white, and the kingdom of heaven is no place for black people to start trying on their shoes.

White people justified this violation of the message of the Gospel by quoting Scripture (the Old Testament curse laid on the sons of Ham--which curse, even if conceivable, had been obliterated by the blood of Christ) and the Pauline injunction concerning servants' obeying their masters.

It was impossible not to sense in this a self-serving moral cowardice. This caused me to regard white Christians and, especially, white ministers with a profound and troubled contempt. And, indeed, the terror that I could not suppress upon finally leaving the pulpit was mitigated by the revelation that now, at least, I would not be compelled--allowed--to spend eternity in their presence. (And I told God this--I was young enough for that and wondered where He would be.)

Adolescence, as white people in this country appear to be beginning to remember--in somewhat vindictive ways--is not the most tranquil passage in anybody's life. It is a virgin time, the virgin time, the beginning of the confirmation of oneself as other. Until adolescence, one is a boy or a girl. But adolescence means that one is becoming male or female, a far more devastating and impenetrable prospect.

Until adolescence, one's body is simply there, like one's shadow or the weather. With adolescence, this body becomes a malevolently unpredictable enemy, and it also becomes, for the first time, appallingly visible. Everybody sees it. You see it, though you have never taken any real notice of it before. You begin to hear it. And it begins to sprout odors, like airy, invisible mushrooms. But this is not the worst. Other people also see it and hear it and smell it. You can scarcely guess what they see and hear and smell--can guess it dimly, only from the way they appear to respond to you.

But you are scarcely able to respond to the way people respond to you, concentrated as you are on the great war being waged in that awkward body, beneath those clothes--a secret war, as visible as the noonday sun.

It is not the best moment to be standing in the pulpit. Though, having said that, I must--to be honest--add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by giving me something larger than myself to be frightened about. And it preserved, as it were, an innocence that, in retrospect, protected me.

For, though I had been formed by sufficiently dire circumstance and moved in a severely circumscribed world, I was also just another curious, raunchy kid. I was able to see, later, watching other kids like the kid I had been, that this combination of innocence and eagerness can be a powerful aphrodisiac to adults and is, perhaps, the key to the young minister's force.

Or, more probably, only one of many keys. Certainly the depth of his belief is a mighty force; and when I was in the pulpit, I believed. The personal anguish counts for something, too: It was the personal anguish that made me believe that I believed. People do not know on what this anguish feeds, but they sense the anguish and they respond to it. My sexuality was on hold, for both women and men had tried to "mess" with me in the summer of my 14th year and had frightened me so badly that I found the Lord. The salvation I was preaching to others was fueled by the hope of my own.

I left the pulpit upon the realization that my salvation could not be achieved that way.

But it is worth stating this proposition in somewhat harsher terms.

An unmanageable distress had driven me to the altar and, once there, I was--at least for a while--cleansed. But, at the same time, nothing had been obliterated: I was still a boy in trouble with himself and the streets around him. Salvation did not make time stand still or arrest the changes occurring in my body and my mind. Salvation did not change the fact that I was an eager sexual potential, in flight from the inevitable touch. And I knew that I was in flight, though I could not, then--to save my soul!--have told you from what I was fleeing.

And, at the same time, the shape of my terror became clearer and clearer: as hypnotic and relentless as the slow surfacing of characters written in invisible ink.

I threw all my anguish and terror into my sermons and I thus learned nearly all there was to know concerning my congregations. They trusted me because they sensed my anguish--and my anguish was the key to my love. I think I hoped to love them more than I would ever love any lover and, so, escape the terrors of this life.

It did not work out that way. The young male preacher is a sexual prize in quite another way than the female; and congregations are made up of men and women.

So, in time, a heavy weight fell on my heart. I did not want to become a liar. I did not want my love to become manipulation. I did not want my fear of my own desires to transform itself into power--into power, precisely, over those who feared and were therefore at the mercy of their own desires.

In my experience, the minister and his flock mirror each other. It demands a very rare, intrepid and genuinely free and loving shepherd to challenge the habits and fears and assumptions of his flock and help them enter into the freedom that enables us to move to higher ground.

I was not that shepherd. And rather than betray the ministry, I left it.

It can be supposed, then, that I cannot take seriously--not, at least, as Christian ministers--the present-day gang that calls itself the Moral Majority or its tongue-speaking relatives, such as follow the Right Reverend Robertson.

They have taken the man from Galilee as hostage. He does not know them and they do not know him.

Nowhere, in the brief and extraordinary passage of the man known as Jesus Christ, is it recorded that he ever upbraided his disciples concerning their carnality. These were rough, hard-working fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Their carnality can be taken as given, and they would never have trusted or followed or loved a man who did not know that they were men and who did not respect their manhood. Jesus made wine at the wedding, for example, by way of a miracle or otherwise--anyone who has been to a black fish fry knows how miraculously wine can appear. He appears not to have despised Mary Magdalene and to have got on just fine with other ladies, notably Mary and Martha, and with the woman at the well. Not one of the present-day white fundamentalist preachers would have had the humility, the courage, the sheer presence of mind to have said to the mob surrounding the woman taken in adultery, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone," or the depth of perception that informs "Neither do I condemn thee: Go, and sin no more."

It is scarcely worth comparing the material well-being--or material aspirations--of these latter-day apostles with the poverty of Jesus. Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist.

They are aided enormously in this blindness by the peculiar self-deception the American poor white applies to his own poverty. His poverty afflicts him with an eerie and paralyzing self-contempt, but he denies it: Poverty is meant for niggers. And, at the same time, he is aware that the ministers he sees on TV and to whom he sends his nickels and dimes were, once, no better off than he: He recognizes each as kin, so to speak.

These ministers, however, are of no interest in themselves--at least of no more intrinsic interest than any Deep South sheriff. And, indeed, the ministers remind me of sheriffs and deputies I have encountered: the same lips, the same flat, slatelike eyes, the same self-righteous voices.

Now, I find it somewhat disturbing to mention the minister and the sheriff in the same breath, but I am black and they entered my life in the same breath. Both the white fundamentalist minister and the deputy are Christians--hard-core Christians, one might say. Both believe that they are responsible, the one for divine law and the other for natural order. Both believe that they are able to define and privileged to impose law and order; and both, historically and actually, know that law and order are meant to keep me in my place.

Or I can put it another way, make another suggestion. Race and religion, it has been remarked, are fearfully entangled in the guts of this nation, so profoundly that to speak of the one is to conjure up the other. One cannot speak of sin without referring to blackness, and blackness stalks our history and our streets. Therefore, in many ways, perhaps in the deepest ways, the minister and the sheriff were hired by the republic to keep the republic white--to keep it free from sin. But sin is no respecter of skin: Sin stains the soul. Therefore, again and again, the republic is convulsed with the need for exorcism--sin has not only come to town but is in bed with us, churning out white niggers.

So something must be done. And what must be done, each time, is to attack the sexual possibility, to make the possibility of the private life as fugitive as that of a fleeing nigger.

The fundamentalist ministers remind me of my time in the pulpit, of ministers I have known and of my own choices. In some of my encounters with ministers, I found myself dealing with people from whose lives all possibility of earthly joy had fled. Joy was not even, to judge from the endless empty plain behind their eyes, a memory. And they could recognize, in others, joy or the possibility of joy only as a mighty threat--as something, as they put it, obscene.

The very first time I saw this--without knowing what I was seeing--was shortly after my conversion. I was not yet in the pulpit, so I was still 13.

The deacon of the church in which I had been converted was leaving to go to another church. This deacon's youngest son was my best friend, and this family had become my second family. They had been accused by the elders of the church of "walking disorderly." I had no idea what this meant, but I was told that if I did not stop seeing these people, I, too, would be walking disorderly. I concluded that walking disorderly meant that I had to choose between my friends and this particular church, and so I decided to walk disorderly and leave with my friends.

As I was leaving the church that night, the pastor's aide, a woman from Finland and the only white woman in our church, grabbed my arm as I started down the steps. She was standing just above me, leaning on the railing, dressed in white.

I was standing at the top of a steep flight of steps, and she had me off balance.

I knew that she knew this.

Her face and her eyes seemed purple. I could not take my eyes from hers. Her lips seemed to be chewing and spitting out the air. She told me of the eternal torment that awaited boys like me. And, all the time, her grip on my arm tightened. She was hurting me, and I wanted to ask her to stop.

But, of course, she knew that she was hurting me. I wonder if she knew she knew it. She finally let me go, consigning me to perdition, and I grabbed the banister, just in-time.

Quite a collision between a 13-year-old black boy and an aging, gaunt white woman--all in the name of Jesus and with my salvation as the motive.

But Jesus had nothing to do with it. Jesus would never have done that to me, nor attempted to make my salvation a matter for blackmail. The motive was buried deep within that woman, the decomposing corpse of her human possibilities fouling the air.

I was in love with my friend, as boys, indeed, can be at that age, but hadn't the faintest notion of what to do about it--not even in my imagination, which may suggest that the imagination is kicked off by memory. Or perhaps I simply refused to allow my imagination to wonder, as it were, below the belt.

Judging from my experience, I think that all of the kids in the church were like that, which is certainly why a couple of us went mad. Others simply backslid--went "back into the world." One relentless and realistic matron, a widow, determined to keep her 18-year-old athlete in the flock, in the pulpit and in his right mind, took him South and found him a bride and brought the son and the girl--who scarcely knew each other--back home. The entire operation could not have taken more than a week.

We went to see the groom one morning and, as we left, my friend yelled, "Don't do anything we wouldn't do!"

The groom responded, with a lewd grin, "You all better not be doing what I'm doing!"

Which suggests that we endured our repression with a certain good humor, at least for a time.

The Bible is full of prohibitions, tribal, domestic, practical, profound or seemingly useless; so the way of the transgressor is hard, is it? Thanks a lot.

We are not told that the way of the transgressor is wrong, nor are we told what a transgression is.

This means that I was challenged to discover for myself the meaning of the word transgressor: or the meaning of the Word. This challenge became the key to my journey through the Bible.

For example, it seemed to me that those people in Hitler's Germany who opposed the slaughter of, among others, the Jews, were transgressors. So was Mrs. Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, on the day she refused to surrender her seat on the bus to a white man. Where were the white Christian ministers then? (Christ was there. Mrs. Parks will tell you so.) A transgressor was the one white woman out of a white multitude who sat on the busstop bench in Charlotte to console the lone black girl whose life had been threatened by a mob of white Christians because she wanted to go to school. The South African horror was perceived and confronted by very few people: The Christian church cannot be numbered among those few. The Christian ministers who perceived the moral and actual horror of apartheid were transgressors. So are certain Catholic priests today, and so, for that matter, was the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Bible is not a simple or a simple-minded book, and it is not to be reduced to a cowardly system of self-serving pieties.

The most crucial and celebrated Biblical prohibition, "Thou shalt not kill," is observed by virtually no one, either in or out of the Bible; and Christ recognizes--in ways having nothing to do with his desire or intention--that he brings not "peace but a sword."

In other words, you can glide through the Bible and settle for the prohibitions that suit you best.

The prohibitions that suit the fundamentalists best all involve the flesh.

And here I must, frankly, declare myself handicapped, even, or perhaps especially, as a former minister of the Gospel.

Salvation is not precipitated by the terror of being consumed in hell: This terror itself places one in hell. Salvation is preceded by the recognition of sin, by conviction, by repentance. Sin is not limited to carnal activity, nor are the sins of the flesh the most crucial or reverberating of our sins. Salvation is not flight from the wrath of God; it is accepting and reciprocating the love of God. Salvation is not separation. It is the beginning of union with all that is or has been or will ever be.

It is impossible to claim salvation and also believe that, in this life or in any life to come, one is better than another.

Or, let me try to put it another way: Salvation is as real, as mighty and as impersonal as the rain, and it is yet as private as the rain in one's face. It is never accomplished; it is to be reaffirmed every day and every hour. There is absolutely no salvation without love: This is the wheel in the middle of the wheel. Salvation does not divide. Salvation connects, so that one sees oneself in others and others in oneself. It is not the exclusive property of any dogma, creed or church. It keeps the channel open between oneself and however one wishes to name That which is greater than oneself. It has absolutely nothing to do with one's fortunes or one's circumstances in one's passage through this world. It is a mighty fortress, even in the teeth of ruin or at the gates of death. It protects one from nothing except one thing: One will never curse God or man.

Salvation repudiates condemnation, since we all have the right, for many reasons, to condemn one another. Condemnation is easier than wonder and obliterates the possibility of salvation, since condemnation is fueled by terror and self-hatred. I am speaking as the historical victim of the flames meant to exorcise the terrors of the mob, and I am also speaking as an actual potential victim.

Those ladders to fire--the burning of the witch, the heretic, the Jew, the nigger, the faggot--have always failed to redeem, or even to change in any way whatever, the mob. They merely epiphanize and force their connection on the only plain on which the mob can meet: The charred bones connect its members and give them a reason to speak to one another, for the charred bones are the sum total of their individual self-hatred, externalized. The burning or lynching or torturing gives them something to talk about. They dare no other subject, certainly not the forbidden subject of the bloodstained self. They dare not trust one another.

One of them may be next.

And this accounts for the violence of our TV screen and cinema, a violence far more dangerous than pornography. What we are watching is a compulsive reliving of the American crimes: What we are watching with the Falwells and Robertsons is an attempt to exorcise ourselves.

This demands, indeed, a simple-mindedness quite beyond the possibilities of the human being.Complexity is our only safety and love is the only key to our maturity.

And love is where you find it.