Rev. Fleck’s journey

There was something striking about him. I’ve seen many depictions of Jesus… too many to count; but this one was pulling me closer. In all honesty, it was God calling a process into its next steps; I just didn’t know it yet. It was August 31, 2020. A board member and I were touring Historic Vernon Chapel AME Church in Tulsa, OK to record footage for the Interfaith Youth Tour. By this time, I had spent at least two and a half years journeying into the bottomless pit that is systemic racism in this country. I kept waiting for this experience of being “woke,” of reaching the foundation of the problem so I could begin addressing it “correctly,” whatever that meant.

It had been three years since I made the suggestion to the OCC Board that we add Race and Anti-Discrimination as an area of focus to our work. Three years since Charlottesville. Three years of growing rhetoric and hate that was approaching its inevitable tipping point. Three years since the unanimous vote to add Race and Anti-Discrimination to the platform of OCC, and still no Theological Statement had been composed. I had made attempts to start writing. I even did a classically pastoral move and called a committee together to give input. But I consistently could not find the words; so, it was set aside while I went to work on myself.

I dove headfirst into my whiteness. Everything is contextual after all, and my context was white. Truthfully, that was enough to occupy many lifetimes. I learned about unearned privilege (probably just touching a surface of the inequity). I listened to the vulnerable stories of those brave enough to trust me with their most exposed truths. Before I knew it, two and a half years had gone by and I still didn’t feel like I had reached all levels of this thing called systemic racism and discrimination.

That’s when this bold and open Jesus called out to me in the middle of the Greenwood District of Tulsa. In the last remaining structure from an atrocious massacre that I was never taught, I could feel the holy all around me. I didn’t fully grasp it in the moment, but I sat in front of the portrait and tapped into the feelings it gave me as a white person.

This depiction of Jesus was fully and unapologetically black. My internal response to it was immediate feelings of what can best be described as resentment. I knew the feeling immediately. It was an honest reaction from a place of being white, because this depiction of holiness left me out. Jesus did not look like me, and after a lifetime of Jesus being just like me, this was quite a noticeable difference. What did it mean that what is “holy” did not look like me?

The sincerest answer I can give is that it meant that I was removed from holiness. That if what is holy didn’t encompass the way I looked, then it must mean that there was something “off” about me. Click. There it was. So much of what had been read about, and explored, and heard, was suddenly felt.

For centuries, white culture has done this exact thing to people of color. In our country, this began with the colonization of the Indigenous population. It was then used to justify the belief that enslaved people were of less value than the white people who held them in bondage. And it is used now, to tell a multitude of individuals that they are left out of access to holiness. That was it. That was when I found my words, when I was finally able to write a statement that I felt just might be worthy of all those who have felt left out. That’s who Jesus cared most about, after all - those who have been left out.

I have relinquished the notion that there will ever be a moment of arrival at a station named “woke.” Instead, I know that we are all on a journey of waking and will be on that journey for the rest of our lives. That is what OCC hopes to be going forward - a partner along the journey of awakening.

Rev. Shannon Fleck