Black and White and Grey

I locked the car and set out across the parking lot toward the church where others gathered in groups, greeting each other with warm embraces and subdued conversation.  

Family members, I figured.  

Well, maybe not all family members, I reasoned, realizing it actually included quite a number of small groups of people. 

For a fleeting moment, I thought how nice it would feel to be welcomed so warmly by one of the groups milling about outside the church.  

But only for a moment. 

I knew my place.  I was an outsider.  


I had come at the request of my friend and high school classmate, LeRoy.  

Only we’d known him as Leroy, without the capital R, back then.

We’d been a very close class.  More than just classmates; we had been family.
  
We went to class together, worked together, ate together in the cafeteria, voluntarily gave up our lunch breaks to form prayer groups where we would pray together – for the school, for each other, for the country….  

So over the years, it’s not a surprise that so many of us still feel a closeness to each other.  Our friendship lasted long after the tearful graduation, and even the adventures of college.  We were close before the advent of Facebook.


So when LeRoy spent his bedside vigil at his mother’s side in her last days, many of us were there with him in spirit, lifting him up in prayer and as best we could.  We loved him, and we carried his burden in our hearts.

And thus I arrived at a church I'd never been to, sixty-five miles away from my home, and made my way, invisibly, through the crowded front sidewalk and foyer.

Inside, I stood in line and waited my turn to sign the guest book.  A solemn, older, well-dressed woman with a hat stood behind the counter with the guest book, handing out programs.  

She greeted most of the people by name, or at least if she didn’t use a name, smiled and asked politely, “Would you like a program?”

When I signed the guest book, she stood there, clasping the programs tightly, almost protectively, to her breast saying not a word. 

I stood for a moment, caught somewhat off guard in the resounding silence, feeling suddenly off balance and vulnerable.  

She looked at me intently from behind the counter between us, and then just stood there staring off over my shoulder as though I wasn't there.
  

Awkwardly, I reached down to pick up a program from the stack between us on the counter top.  

But when I glanced at it, my confusion turned to embarrassment.  It wasn’t a program at all, but instead, a brochure for the mortuary.

“That’s for the mortuary,” the woman with the hat said, finally looking down her nose at me.  

She then turned, reaching around me, and offered one of her precious programs to the person who had been behind me in the guest book line.

I put the mortuary advertisement back on its stack and politely waited until the woman with the hat had finished her transaction with the person after me and apologetically asked if I might have a program as the next person in line wrote their address in the guest book.

The woman with the hat again held the programs close to her chest for a moment as though trying to make a decision, then very deliberately took one from the top of her stack and reluctantly handed it to me.  


I thanked her and she gave me a mechanical smile and nodded ever so slightly and then greeted the next signer of the book by name and handed her a program, commenting on her beautiful dress.

I walked into the sanctuary and stood quietly just inside the door, taking in the room – the area, the lighting… 

I looked across the wide space, deciding what angles would make good photos.  
I wanted to get a few photos before people came in and the service began.  








I had promised to take some photos for LeRoy to commemorate the day.

I stood in the back, northwest corner of the sanctuary behind the chest-high sound booth, where I was out of the way and not really noticeable from anywhere unless someone was looking backward from their place in the church.  

I could use the wooden railing of the booth as a level support for the camera in lieu of a tripod.

I was quietly caught up in catching the light and the lofty rafters when I noticed another photographer, a church member by the looks of him, had taken my lead and come over to my corner of the church and was mimicking my moves and catching some of my angles as well.

Just then, a middle-aged man in a suit approached me, cleared his throat to get my attention and said, “I see you are taking pictures.”

“Yes,” I said, giving him a brief smile before turning back to my camera.  

"There's lovely light in here."


He was the first person in twenty minutes who had spoken to me, other than the lady who didn’t want to part with the program.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“You mean taking pictures?” I asked.  


“Is it a problem, I mean, taking pictures in the church?” I asked, looking over at the other photographer standing not five feet away from me. 

I had never considered that there might be some problem with taking photos in the church, and I would be very quick to apologize had I stepped on some toes. 





But, he adjusted his tie authoritatively and said, “No.  I mean what are you here for?”

“I’m here for the funeral,” I said, somewhat surprised and confused.

I looked around the church, the pews that were now slowly beginning to fill.  Other faces had turned, some close by, some farther off, and many whispered quietly.  


Apparently Mr. Suit was not the only curious one.  

Then I noticed something that hadn't dawned on me earlier - in the flash of a moment before Mr. Suit continued - there was not another Caucasian person in the entire building.

"Why?


Who are you?” Mr. Suit challenged my authority to be here at the funeral of Mrs. Baker.



Are you serious?  We’re really going to go there? 

This really is what this is all about?  

It wasn’t my imagination.  


The being ignored at the door…  


The not being offered a program…  


And now the “Why are you standing in my church, white girl?”

Up until this moment, it didn’t occur to me that I was the outsider because I was the white girl.  

I’d been that girl before.  


I’d been beaten up and terrorized as a child in the school yard for being the only white girl.  


I knew all about being the outsider who is disliked, despised, beaten up, and shunned because of the color of my skin.

I knew I was the outsider when I came to this funeral.  I knew that I wouldn’t know anyone here but LeRoy.  But it never occurred to me that they would be offended by my being an outsider in their midst! 

It never occurred to me that I would be white and they would be black.  It never occurred to me in a million years.  

I guess I am just too long at this life’s journey.  I guess that after growing up in the islands, and then living so many decades in Southern California, I just don’t really ‘see’ people any more.  I guess I just forget that people have colors.  To me, they all look the same.

But for that moment, it all came back.  For just a moment I remembered the girl who had been so mistreated and beaten and even bloodied for the color of her skin and her pale green eyes.  For an instant my indignant anger flared. 

But just for an instant.  For a millisecond I wanted to lash out at this confrontational man.  But I took a breath. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do….

I held my tongue for a moment.
  
Long enough to pray for patience and understanding, and then I replied, “I’m an old friend of LeRoy Baker’s.  He asked me to be here.”

I’ve always hated name-droppers. 

But this once, I felt it necessary to be one.  

I just didn’t realize what a name-dropper I was being.

Mr. Suit literally stepped back and put his hands up, momentarily, in a "hands off" pose before telling me that no, it was fine; I could take as many pictures as I wanted if I was a friend of LeRoy's. Then he turned and walked away.

As I sat through the more than three-hour-long funeral, I learned that LeRoy Baker was the only child of an amazing man and woman.  They adopted him when they were in their forties - an amazing couple who devoted their entire life to the church and evangelistic efforts.

By the end of the nearly four-hour experience, I felt a longing for Peggy Baker.  I felt so cheated that I had not known this amazing woman in life, but felt blessed to have at least met her, in death, on this day.

Then one pastor got up and reminded us all how far ‘we’ had come; how far the church of today had come from the church that Sister Baker started out serving seventy-plus years ago.  

The church that was not always so accepting of her at times – back when blacks were openly persecuted for the color of her skin.

I let my mind travel back through the painful years of the civil rights movement and my heart ached for Ms. Peggy.  

Then I saw the chilly look of the woman clasping the programs to her bosom, and heard the persistent grilling of the middle aged man in the suit.

How would the beautiful, warm-hearted Mrs. Peggy Baker feel to see a white stranger within the walls of the church she had helped build treated like an intrusive gnat?

And for that matter, did Mrs. Program and Mr. Suit even know what they looked like in the mirror?
  
I doubt it.  


I am sure they both think of themselves as good, God-fearing, loving Christians who serve the Lord, and doubt that either realizes they came off as anything less.


Sometimes we all are so busy being important that we forget to be compassionate and kind.  I would like to think Ms. Baker would have been the type to have welcomed me warmly and invited me into her church.


In fact, it wasn't until just now, re-reading this that the comparison came to me.  And forgive me, LeRoy, but it seemed so fitting.

I can't help but compare my coming to the church to honor Mrs. Baker to a Christian coming to the church to meet God.  

So often they are put off by the flaws of human Christians (who maybe don't share their programs freely enough or don't welcome strangers with their cameras.)  

But all they need to do is to say, "I am here because the Son invited me."  


That is a name that is ALWAYS worth dropping.

But churches aside, I dare to venture a wager that many of us might not recognize the real us we would see if we were to glimpse ourselves in the mirror of honest reality.  


So often, the person we think we are gets lost in the persona we portray to the world.


We may think we are great, friendly people, but we get so stressed and busy that we get a little more prickly on the outside than we realize.
   

We might get so caught up in trying to get things perfect that we snap at our loved ones in our frustration.  Or so busy with what we are doing we don’t make time for our loved ones at all!




It's not always so intentional and clear as black and white, but sometimes smudges of grey.

This week's blog is dedicated to thinking twice, and acting once.

She Gave Me the Finger!

Aunt Louise, my dad’s only sister, was my favorite aunt as a child. She had grandchildren my age, but still always made time for us six Carson kids. In the summers she had us to the farm in shifts – the girls for one week, then the boys (or vice versa.) But either way, we all got a week with a trade-off trip in between where my folks would pick up one batch and drop off the next. (Here we are on the farmhouse steps in the summer of '62.)

Aunt Louise could do it all. She introduced us kids into Apple Jacks and cherry trees. She made the most marvelous applesauce from the apples she grew in the orchard on her farm, and buttered baby parsley-potatoes dug from her garden. She showed us how to draw fresh water in a bucket from the spring house and painted and sewed and knitted.

As much as I hated my middle name growing up, I felt honored to be named after her. She was amazing and invincible, but ever so warm-hearted and intuitive and kind. I longed to be like her.

It broke my heart when, in March of 1991, I flew back to visit my cousin (yes, the trip of the crystal dish bomb!) and went to see Aunt Louise in the nursing home. My heart ached to see her her marvelous mind now lost in a fog of incomprehension and unresponsiveness.

We sat with her for a while as I held her hand. We spoke to each other and to her as she sat in silence. Occasionally she would chime in with an observation or some childhood memory totally out of sync with what was going on around her; or speak to a childhood friend only she could see.

And as I sat there holding her hand, I noticed the slight imperfection of her middle fingers for the first time. Each middle finger rotated slightly outward so that the fingernail was on a different plane than the others. And each finger also bent outward slightly at the last digit, so the finger itself wasn’t straight.

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I turned to her daughter, Peggy Lou. “Have ever noticed her fingers?” I asked, perplexed and yet pleased.

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“Oh, it’s from the arthritis,” she told me.

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“No! It’s not!” I said excitedly as I held out my own hands, palms down.

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It took her a moment to understand what I was trying to show her. But she looked for a moment at each one, and then at her mother’s, then held her own fingers out as well. I realized for the first time that Aunt Louise and I shared something more than just the name Louise. I had her hands!

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If only my hands could be as amazingly creative as hers had been before time took her memory, I thought.

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On the plane ride home at the end of my way-too-short week’s visit, I contemplated my hands. I’d always been told I had my dad’s hands – long and slender – but never realized until that moment in the nursing home what that really meant.

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Growing up in various places around the world, I’d been denied the family connections that so many have. Though I had twenty-three cousins on my mother’s side and another eight on my father’s side, we grew up cousin-less. And moving around as we did, my parents didn’t have any family photos of cousins or ancestors hanging on the walls like so many folks do.

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So it never occurred to me that, other than having my father’s hands, I had family traits.

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My mother died when I was young, but I still remember the odd freckles on her forearms – the ‘normal’ brown freckles and the strange anti-freckles as I thought of them. Those white spots of no pigment that showed up only when she tanned. Then her arms were barely-tan with tiny brown and white spots confettied across the skin. I thought they were ugly. I also thought her legs would be prettier if she had smaller ankles and shapelier calves like other mothers had.

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Well, now that I am an old lady (well at least now that I’m almost ten years older than she was when she died), I have to smile. I have her both her anti-freckled arms and her “cankles” as I hear ankles like mine are called today - as they go straight from calf to ankle.

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My son always got joy out of comparing his summer tan to my freckled- and anti-freckled arms as a boy. And my daughters have both moaned and groaned over inheriting my “cankles," which will only get worse with age.

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Over the years, I’ve become very interested in genealogy and tracing my family tree. (Probably in part because of that dearth of relatives growing up.)

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And I’ve traced my family tree back to mid-1600 Germany, to King Edward I of England, King Philip I of France, William X of Aquitane (and his father, William IX of the Crusades), as well as numerous knights and barons and earls of Ireland, many of whom lost their lives (and their heads) in the Tower of London.

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But even more special to me are the many family ancestral photos I’ve been able to track down over the years.

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Through them, I’ve discovered that not only do I have my father’s hands and my mother’s anti-freckled arms (which all three of my children avoided thanks to their father’s Hispanic blood) but I was pleased to discover upon the brief reunion with my daughter Jen, in 2004 and 2005, that she also has the graceful Carson hands (and was slightly less enthusiastic to find she also has my massive rib cage and short waist.)

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I got my cheekbones and drooping eyes from my maternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Jane “Genevieve” (Maurer) Lee, who got them from her father, William.

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He apparently got them from his father, Johan Georg Maurer.

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(And I am forever grateful that I didn’t take after his mother, Libbie Bullinger - in the photo with her husband, above!)

But then, maybe the eyes came from her as well.

And I am glad that a small part of her devoutly spiritual nature (discovered in an old German letter from back in the 1840's) passed down through her offspring to me.

My non-existent waist line (my rib cage practically sits on my ilium – upper crest of my hips) may have come down from my Irish great-great-great-grandmother, Mary (McDonough) Golden (with her husband, Patrick Golden, left.)

She emigrated to America (via Quebec) in 1835 and actually met her husband-to-be while disembarking from that ship. (I’d have rather inherited my paternal grandmother’s famed 19-inch waist! Though I imagine that had to come with a corset, which makes it a lot less desirable.)

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I discovered that my brother, Tom, looks an awful lot like my maternal grandfather, Benedict Herman, who died before either of us was born.

And my beautiful cousin, Julie, is the spitting image of Grandmother Lee. (right)

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The lack of lateral incisors (the teeth between the front teeth and the pointed canine teeth) is apparently another family trait shared by many in the family.

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And my son, Nick got his tall good looks from my father and his father before him – minus their large noses (thank goodness!)

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And my daughter, Jen, has some of my mother’s stunning beauty. (left)

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I saw a photo of my younger daughter, Erin, recently and was startled by her comment about how she didn't like the way her pinkie finger always stands off to the side alone in photos. Mine does that too! (And I hate it just as much.)
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And it seems I come by my bent for educating from a long line of teachers. 

My mother Mary Catherine, her mother, Mary Elizabeth Jane (also known as Genevieve), and her mother’s mother, Mary Louise, were all teachers before me! Here’s my grandmother’s graduating class of teachers in 1910. (She's second from the right.)

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And yes, there is a point – other than the fact that I inherited my mother’s worst features and Aunt Louise's middle fingers, and am descended from royalty and lesser nobility.

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The point is that we are all recipients of so many gifts handed down to us from our fathers and their fathers back through generations. We all have qualities and traits that show we belong to them.

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The point is that as children of God the Father, we are all descendents of the King of Kings. And in His image were we all made. We've inherited so much from Him.
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He didn’t create us with anti-freckles or “cankles” or thick waists or droopy eyes or missing lateral incisors (and now wrinkles too.)

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He made us perfect, in His image. Sin has given us all the rest. And, short of braces and laser eye surgery and dental implants and plastic surgery, we are stuck with crooked or missing teeth, and other human flaws - at least for this lifetime.

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The point shines clearly in the moving lyrics of Dierks Bentley's song, My Last Name. He says it so well:

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...Passed down from generations, too far back to trace
I can see all my relations, when I look into my face
May never make it famous, but I'll never bring it shame
It's my last name....
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Daddy always told me, far back as I recall
Son you're part of something, you represent us all
So keep it how you got it, as solid as it came
It's my last name....

And it is encumbent upon us to "...keep it how we got it, and never bring it shame...His great name..."

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Liz Carson Rosas
20 Novermber 2009

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him…" -- Genesis 1:27

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"...for in the image of God has God made man." -- Genesis 9:6

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“But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” -- Matthew 5:44, 45.

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