Dear Doubters of Great Faith,
I write from the beautiful confines of our St. Thomas the Apostle inner courtyard on one of the rare August “chamber of commerce” days when the heat and humidity abate, ever so slightly, a bit of crisp freshness hovers briefly in the air, and the hopefulness of fall begins to stir in my own heart. The promise of new beginnings lifts me upward from the heaviness of “Corona-tide” that so often these days seems to keep me moored solidly earth-bound. A hope found birthed in the simplest of locations has, after all, provided the impetus for an entire faith movement!
The advent of COVID-19 has borne witness to the confluence of several crises simultaneously, and our mutual isolation, quarantine time, continues to provide us front-row witness to a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a crisis of social injustice. Each is intimately interwoven within the other, cleverly concealed in our ordinary, everyday life, only to be revealed in events of “Hurricane Katrina-like” proportion.
Would we have seen, or been so moved, by a knee in the neck of George Floyd, or the senseless murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, or any of the others, had we not ourselves been held hostage to and by COVID-19? If nothing else, quarantine time has given us the moment to come to a broad, community-wide realization, awareness, and questioning of systems that continue to oppress some in favor of others. And we as Christians must continue to ask ourselves how these systems can possibly square with our own baptismal covenant (To seek and serve Christ in ALL people, respecting the dignity of EVERY human being).
I believe we have a unique opportunity as we prepare to step off into the upcoming fall programming year, a new beginning, to consider how we, as individuals, and as St. Thomas the Apostle, our beloved Doubter community, engage this conversation. One of the best ways to do this is to develop a common starting place, an understanding and setting, from which to begin the journey. I have decided we will do this with the study of a gripping book that is new to the scene. It highlights some of the deeply-ingrained, systemic issues that plague society around race, oppression, and social inequality.
The book we will study is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson. It is an engaging and compelling read that I believe will help provide us a structure to give voice to some of these systems of injustice, a starting place for dialogues of change.
The course will run 9 weeks, in Zoom, on Monday evenings, September 14 – November 9, from 6 pm – 7 pm. It will be facilitated by seminarian Allen Junek, Mother Sandi Michels, St. Elisabeth’s/Christ the King, Fort Worth, and me.
I encourage you to read the New York Times book review of the book, and to read the book in advance of the course. Please join us in this. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/books/review-caste-isabel-wilkerson-origins-of-our-discontents.html
For those of us who have weathered so many North Texas summers, it can seem as though they will last forever. But we know that they won’t. We share the hope borne in faith that the long days of summer will soon pass into the new beginnings of fall. September will be here, and we will do a new thing, you and I, together, as the Doubter community of Great Faith.
I am looking forward to it!
I hope you are as well.
Yours faithfully,
Fr. Christopher+
