identity as an Episcopal priest.
Since much of Malcolm’s life has been devoted to the civil rights of African Americans, I think it appropriate that this biographer is an African American who is different from Malcolm in age, race, and sexual orientation and yet resembles Malcolm’s identity as a writer, anti–war activist, theologian, civil rights advocate, and Episcopal priest in the institutional church.
Being gay in the institutional church made Malcolm “black.” Malcolm’s identity as a gay white man remains a stumbling block for many, especially those in institutional religion and more communal societies that socialize their members to see gay identity as an aberration. Such communities are often patterned around ethnicity and socioeconomic status. I also think it profound for me as a black heterosexual male to reflect upon Malcolm’s life in that much of the current tensions in religion are between more ethnic-minded identities—such as black and brown people—and white, liberally minded people who tend more to accept gay and lesbian people.
Malcolm taught me that all institutions are about self–preservation and perhaps this why he has been such an apocalyptic figure in relationship to what counts for religion today. “I don’t know why I am that way,” Malcolm told me (April 9, 2009). Being an institutional person myself (and in need of the epiphanies that Malcolm offers), I should not offer literary analysis or ruin your own epiphanies with my own; however, I have learned from Malcolm not to conclude from the demise of institutional religion that life is bleak and deterministic. Appropriate to Malcolm’s own character, there is an inherent optimism or hope in these pages. Like rigorous archeological digging, we may need to unlearn a lot of our own caricatures and stereotypes in order to see the hope in this book, but it is here. We need only to let God be God in order to escape the famine of institutional religion.
Pale Green Horse
In my fifth chapter, I describe the last horseman that Malcolm resembles, the fourth horseman who rides on a pale horse explicitly named Death. However, the Greek word translated in this context as “pale” is elsewhere in the New Testament translated as “green,” leading to some confusion. Such confusion fits Malcolm nicely. As one columnist wrote, “Malcolm is fast. Very fast. For 10 years he spins and fakes and breaks into the open field, fist clenched and the muse throbbing in his heart. The crowd cheers wildly as he sprints toward the goal, but just as he is about to cross the line, it evaporates.” Another columnist describes Malcolm’s ambiguity this way, that his “manner suggests the turbulent waves of the storm breaking over man, church and the American life.”17
Such confusion is normal, however, when you deal with Malcolm. When death occurs, you inevitably bear the brunt of chaos. The writer of Revelation explains, “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see.’ And I beheld, and lo a pale green horse; and he that sat on him was called Death, and Hades followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, and that they (the four horsemen) should kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth” (6:7–8).
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Hours, Michael Cunningham writes, “There is something worse than death, with its promise of release and slumber.” After reading the book and this particular quote, Malcolm writes me, “Incredibly painful and revealing work! I find this significant but I disagree with Cunningham’s conclusion. Is this relevant to this book?” I think this indeed is relevant. First, Cunningham provides the most remarkable performance piece about growing up white and gay in South Africa. Such crosscurrents of being gay in apartheid South Africa was indeed relevant to Malcolm’s own life.
Second, the quote from Cunningham initiated one of Malcolm’s deepest insights that runs through this book, that there is something worse than death. In death as in Malcolm’s life, he believes there is a peace that contains a deep restlessness. In other words, the goal of life is not a death in which people find static peace. In Malcolm’s Christian worldview, the goal is not for such peace. He likes to recall theologian Karl Barth’s words that there is sinking and suffering, and being lost and rent asunder, in the peace of God. He writes about this in “To a Prophet Dying Young.”
It wasn’t easy knowing you, or even hearing you. I felt, in fact, that you were often strong–willed, uncharitable, and impolite.
I saw you pouring out your life. I resented that, too, as I safely clutched my own. But I did see you, though I sometimes didn’t want you to know it.
Yes, I heard the criticism–and joined in. At times I thought I hated you, because what you said and did cut so painfully against my mask, my security, my being.
I miss you very much. Thank you–for who you were and whose you were. You wouldn’t want me to wish you “peace,” and I could never think of you in any misalliance with a false truce or easy compromise.
But I do, with all my heart, wish you peace with deep restlessness, a cock crowing at dawn to announce battle, and love to heal the necessary wounds.18
Malcolm rides this Green Horse of Death because of his deep spirituality in which at some point in his life he was no longer afraid of death. Being eighty–six years old, Malcolm has cheated death and offers the reader the wisdom to do the same. Malcolm’s wisdom concerns the paradoxes that we all must face of gaining our life by losing it; and losing our life to find it. Having cheated death, Malcolm offers twenty–first–century people deep wisdom. To begin with, nothing can be resolved regarding racial, religious, and sexual identity until we can all confess the absurd. How does one confess the absurd?
When I was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, I heard a fellow seminarian preach in a maximum–security prison unit in Trenton, New Jersey, when an inmate interrupted the sermon to rebuke the inconsiderate inmates talking in the corner. “Shut up!” he growled, while staring at them with wild eyes. The others laughed while he gritted his teeth. This was the same inmate I saw earlier beating the top of his head with both hands to the beat of Blessed Assurance. A black man, ill-clad, wearing white and faded blue jeans, he lived in a different world than the rest of us and he wanted to get on with “church.” But his interruption did not seem to stop the others from talking.
With peculiar gyrations he continued his command to “shut up,” his arms flinging like a symphony conductor. This black conductor looked at the other black men, a majority of whom continued to talk, and screamed at them in the middle of my friend’s sermon, “Are you in church or where you at?” A peculiar question I thought. How could he really expect others to believe this was a real church service in the middle of a maximum–security prison unit? Sure, they had sung hymns, there were ministers in the room, there was a lectern posing as a pulpit, there were musical instruments for praising God, the chairs were lined up in the room for an assembly of people, and they even prayed to God as if God were truly there. But how could he really expect to be “at” church when an armed guard stood by the door? The rational explanation is that he does not fit in the normal world. The prisoner’s world is intentionally meant not to be a free person’s world; however, I soon discovered that the world within that prison that can make room for a “church service” can often do it better and more meaningfully than the world outside the prison walls.
Malcolm’s life facilitated my reflection on my own normality of trying to fit my vocation with my identity. I seek to do that by making peace and revealing truth and reconciliation, which for many is absurd. In a world full of elite survival and business skills, my vocation of making peace and revealing reconciliation is as unlikely to succeed as the prisoner’s church is to fit into a maximum security unit. Malcolm’s life helped me to see how the prisoner’s command to “shut up” and his question, “Are you in church or where you at?” is a challenge to analyze the nature of what absurd and bold things we are all called
