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A UMNS Commentary
By the Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell Jr.*

4:00 P.M. EST Oct. 6, 2010

Leaders march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln
Memorial during the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.
A Web-only photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Ten years ago, I was pastor of Park Hill United Methodist Church in Denver. While sitting in a staff parish relations committee meeting, I had a TIA (transient ischemic attack), a pre- or mini-stroke. Although the attack ended the meeting and sent me to the emergency room, I do not suggest that active pastors replicate my experience as a way to end difficult or boring church meetings.

Before the surgery, I shared with my family my hopes about the results of the operation. I wrote, “If it appears that the surgery will result in some residual disability, I want primary attention ... given to the preservation of my capacity to think, speak and write.”

Through the years, as I participated in and wrote and spoke about the black quest for equality and justice through the Southern freedom/civil rights movement, my sons had suggested, “Dad, you are out of your mind.” This time, with twinkles in their eyes, they said gently, “Dad, we hope the surgeon will find that you have a brain. Sometimes we are not sure.”

Since those surgeries and after my early retirement from the active United Methodist ministry in 2001, many people have received my unsolicited written musings. I have written so much since 2000 that a colleague from "back in the day" said, “Gil, while we heard and sometimes said, ‘Right on’ in the ’60s as a way of affirming what someone said or did, you seem to think it meant, ‘Write on.’” So be it!

Who will tell the story?

Pat Schneider of Amherst, Mass., a writer and teacher of writers, wrote what has become a guiding light for me. “The issue is not whether our writings will be political. If we are silent, our silence is political. If we write, our writing is political.

“No one has seen the night sky exactly from your trajectory. No one has loved exactly the people and places you have loved. Who will tell that part of the Earth's story, if you do not?”

In his last book, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. asked, "Where do we go from here—chaos or community?” That question and the answer are more relevant today than ever before. It has become clear, although we have not found adequate words to describe it, that there is much unfinished business of the mind and heart that requires work and commitment. We have changed without changing.

The Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell Jr.

Many of the attitudes and actions directed at the poor of all colors and at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people reveal that—consciously or unconsciously—some believe certain people do not fit their vision of what the United States is, or should be. We have been accomplices to or silent in the presence of those who intentionally screen some folk out and invite others in.

Time for the church to speak

United Methodist pastor and author Kent D. Moorehead’s words resonate with me: "There is a new world being born before our very eyes. There is no such thing as a Buddhist sky, a Muslim moon, a Jewish ocean, or a Christian Earth. God is not the exclusive property of any one faith.”

If religion and the state affirm the human equality and right to equal justice of all people—persons born to Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, fundamentalists and atheists, those of every faith and non-faith tradition—we also should be able to engage in the mop-up work of dealing with the residuals of the other “isms.”

Many persons have an intellectual and insightful depth that I lack; yet they remain silent on today's issues. I fear that our religious and other institutions are becoming “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1). Thus, here I am, one of the old men who “dreams, dreams” (Joel 2:28), who writes with the hope that the church and the institutions of all faith traditions would lead rather than follow.

*Caldwell, a retired elder of the Rocky Mountain Annual (regional) Conference, lives in Asbury Park, N.J.

News media contact: Barbara Dunlap-Berg or Tim Tanton, Nashville, Tenn., 615-742-5473 or newsdesk@umcom.org.