style="font-size:15px;"> I think what sets this book apart is that it’s NOT a biography per se, it’s a dialogue, and it stems from spiritual direction. It’s two people engaged in both life and discussion. Yesterday you seemed to feel chapter 1 might be on race, chapter 2 on gay. BUT I think chapter 1 MUST be on celebrity. It’s the driving force in a global dance with celebrity in the media age. Also we have my utterly unique engagement with celebrity: first with Mary Pickford, second with a best-selling book and resulting celebrity. This is NEW for a spiritual or religious kind of book. Race is no longer new, nor is gay. They are of central importance but, for an opening chapter, I think celebrity cries out to be the theme. (Can you manage this in terms of your plan for the book as a whole?)
If we set up celebrity at the outset, and pursue it, you have—and hold—wide reader interest. Celebrity is an enigma. It can be considered a curse, it can be considered a blessing. Certainly, it’s unfair! If you make chapter 1 on celebrity, then making chapter 2 race and chapter 3 gay follows logically. (Both are areas in which I have encountered, and worked with celebrity.) My life with celebrity has overlapped my life with both race and gay (and, indeed, contributed to it).
In this sequence, does “the anemic church with its institutional structures and lacking religion” follow logically? (Does it follow for you?) I want to avoid the pitfall of our ending up with “an Emerging Church experience” which I feel is a decoy or simply misleading. Do you remember a book called A Generation of Vipers? It was big when I was a kid. I remember it very well. It cut through all the bullshit. It just said, correctly, that we ARE “a generation of vipers.” It didn’t come up with a Disney ending. I feel this book can be honest with itself and end with the right questions instead of the wrong answers. In fact, “it is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
Anyhow. Chapter 1 can be celebrity, 2 can be race, 3 can be gay, and 4 can be the well-meaning but out-of-touch institutional religion that is failing to connect with people caught in the crisis of living. Glory be, have we avoided a Polyanna ending offering palliatives? Frankly, I have no answers. I have questions. You don’t have answers either. You have questions.
Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God touched many lives. So did my groundbreaking book of prayers Are You Running with Me, Jesus? There aren’t many books in this category. Let’s stay in this category. BUT this means ASKING THE QUESTIONS everybody has but no one is being listened to. This means opening up all the closet doors. This means dealing with reality. (And there is no more persistent reality in the world today than the reality of celebrity, warts and all.)
Does this give you your 4 chapters? Can you wrap yourself around these 4 related themes? Finally, when the smoke clears, there can be a short-but-smashing post piece (just possibly written by someone else if we feel the Spirit so moves).
>Above are thoughts for the day. For chapter 1, I’d tear into celebrity—its rawness, its tears and laughter, its relentless presence. This should give you the gift of your readers’ rapt attention. When you’ve looked at the photos, please just give me a reaction as to their usefulness. Ditto when you’ve broken into the box of memories. . . .16
This is not a static biography in which the biographer is objectively removed from his subject matter. On the contrary, this is written in my experience of looking for God and finding Malcolm. Although the sequence of dialogue and chapter flow is written primarily to reflect my encounter with Malcolm’s voice, it should be noted that my voice as the biographer has not been co-opted by my subject matter. In other words, I do not present to you a flowery work that only sings Malcolm’s praises. Malcolm’s own nature and particular voice would not allow such a biography anyway.
I am a Christian, and I care deeply about this identity. But I am also aware of how such identity has colonized and subjected others to horror and bloodshed. Likewise, I am an African American, and I care deeply about this identity. But it is an amphibious identity that I actually discovered when I went to Africa and discovered that I was an American; and yet, being in the United States made me feel more like an African. In order to understand my own development, these two identities have to be interrelated.
Most of my life has been spent in the discovery of how African-American identity and Christianity help us better see practices of peacemaking and reconciliation. I started this discovery with Desmond Tutu, an exemplar of someone who lives African and Christian identity together. In white society, Tutu profoundly negotiated how Christianity helps us better see practices of peacemaking and reconciliation. Such an exemplar has led me to think that one of the unnerving issues of contemporary theology is how scholastic and separated from the actual lives of people theology has become. This leads me to the organizing theme of my spiritual development: the formation of self through communal prayer. This is where Malcolm enters the picture. I needed a spiritual director. So, I have taken to heart the advice of the true sages of our day to make my own spiritual journey. I needed a spiritual director who could resist the pathologies of religion and help me not repeat the same old mistakes of religious oppression.
One of my chief concerns is: what is my particular vocation? What this question implies for me is the difficult matter of measuring what it is that I do when I lead in a religious world. Am I a dispenser of information? Do I disciple others into a communal theology? Am I a coach, coaxing the less enlightened into maturity? Or am I, simply, a mentor? Parker Palmer’s insight into these matters is helpful.
Then I ask the question that opens to the deeper purpose of this exercise: not “What made your mentor great?” but “What was it about you that allowed great mentoring to happen?” Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student. In this encounter, not only are the qualities of the mentor revealed, but the qualities of the student are drawn out in a way that is equally revealing.17
My answer to my opening questions about identity is to begin with my understanding of being a black Christian. It is this being that is crucial because it is a “being” in community. In sum, Malcolm helped me make sense of my amphibious-self through how I have been formed to be an African-American scholar, a priest, a professor, and a spiritual guide. The following is a statement of such development.
A Complex Self
To understand how my character corresponds with Malcolm’s, one must understand two particular identities: African and Anglican. In my African-American identity, I challenge some of the divisions that characterize theological and religious discourse today. One may see this challenge in my books on Archbishop Desmond Tutu.18 Tutu’s thought is grounded by religious experience in which God creates what is good by creating what is different. Consequently, there is no legitimacy in an apartheid narrative (itself a homogeneous theology) which forms people into believing that otherness—for example, racial difference—is the foundation by which one race may dominate another. Relating my African identity to my Anglican identity proves to be another challenge. Having lived for two years in residence with Archbishop Tutu in Cape Town (1993–1994), I, as an African American, experienced Tutu’s mode of theology firsthand. I was given the unique research experience of having complete access to Tutu’s personal writing archives. Having such access and living in an African community afforded me the opportunity to present African Christian thought and practice from original data. This was one of my formative experiences as a scholar to understand myself as an authority in African Christian spirituality. This profound experience, however, provides its share of curse in the midst of blessing.
The curse entails two aspects. The first is the difficult process of synthesizing African and Anglican identities in light of colonialism. This is an acute concern since I was ordained a priest in a colonial church, the Anglican Church, by Archbishop Tutu in Cape Town at St. George’s Cathedral on my birthday, December 12, 1993.
In
