Rosa Parks, the World Series, and justice

When Rosa Parks was a young woman, lynching was still practiced as a public diversion in Texas. Today during Game Three, 40,000 Texans, including Barbara Bush, bared their heads in her memory. (If Mrs. Bush is sure that Rosa Parks is better off where she is, and wants to stay there, the former First Lady might be keeping her mouth shut about it this time, but she’d be in good company.) The little American-heroes chapter book that taught me about Rosa Parks painted her as a merely coincidental witness, a popular myth, apparently. What I didn’t know until today is that Rosa Parks was already deep in the struggle for civil rights when she sat down and refused to get up. According to the Chicago Tribune, Mrs. Parks’ NAACP chapter had already been planning a lawsuit around a similar story, but the push fizzled when it turned out the central figure, a teenage girl, was pregnant (a multilayered case study for a moral theologian or an activism theorist.) When the bus driver approached her threatening arrest, Mrs. Parks said an informed “yes” to her moment of witness.

While I’m sitting here with my blue corn chips and my premixed cosmo (because this is how we rock the Series chez Theologienne), my roommate, also a divinity student, comes out with a sermon she’s writing for her preaching class. Now preaching is one of those skills about which well-meaning folks ask you, when you’re female, Catholic, and a divinity student, “What are you going to do with that?” Catholic women do preach. I heard a beautiful reflection by a laywoman this Sunday, actually—she and the pastor shared the homily time, I suppose to confuse any liturgical hardliners. (Interestingly, however, he did not introduce her, a canon law requirement for non-ordained speakers that I’ve seen done well, and seen turned into an ostentations creation of two classes of preacher.) Catholic women do preach, but the proportion of opportunities to Catholic women who are trained and gifted for preaching is small. My roommate is one of these women. She delivered her sermon movingly, believed in its theme, and hit the one difficult verse in the readings, the one that would’ve stuck in your throat had it been ignored. She seemed more confident in her preaching than she always does in normal conversation, a sure sign, I think, that you’re doing something you’re meant to do.

So I was thinking about how doing the only, natural thing for you to do automatically becomes radical when others are threatened by the fact that it’s you doing it.

Did you look at the lynching postcards on the link I put up there? Look at the people who appear in the photos with their victims. Some of 'em are proud; some look like they're just there. You know, business as usual, no real choice about it, no reason you'd change direction. Like President Bush as he set records for capital punishment, killing mostly nonwhites, some people who were mentally retarded. Like the Republicans trying to cut social programs Katrina survivors will need and talking about Iraq instead of Katrina's victims.

For whom, though their story's forever linked to the name of the Astros, nobody removed a hat tonight.