12-Step Spirituality in this time of Tragic Awakening

We white people need a change of heart.

As I watch and read the horrific news of the murder of George Floyd this past week, I am reminded of my recent trip to Minneapolis. This March, I met the Visitation Sisters, who have been called out of their convent to make a home in a Minneapolis neighborhood. Whenever the doorbell rings, they answer to Jesus.

The most moving part of the day I spent at their urban monastery was meeting their eldest member, Sister Mary Margaret. Though into her nineties, Sr. Mary Margaret leads a 12-step group for overcoming addiction to racism and white supremacy. This is work she commits to for the rest of her life.

As I learn more about 12-step spirituality through Richard Rohr’s book Breathing Underwater, it makes incredible sense to frame my racism as an addiction. From what little I understand of 12-step spirituality so far, I realize it is a journey. It requires recognition of failure to begin; realizing I have failed to manage or eliminate this addiction on my own. So I must turn to a Higher Power. And what better day than Pentecost Sunday to reflect on the ability for the Holy Spirit to make us new?

I do not mean to suggest that being born again can in any decisive moment turn one “non-racist.” I do mean to draw resonance with Sr. Mary Margaret’s knowledge that the rest of her life will be spent cycling through the twelve steps, surrendering her white supremacy to her Higher Power and asking to be transformed by the grace of God.

A reading for Pentecost Sunday

John 20:19-22, NRSV

“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’

After he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.'”

We white people need a change of heart. We need to recognize the presence of Jesus among us by grieving the immense and constant loss of life in the communities of our black brothers and sisters.

We need to act, not from a place of fullness, but from a place of emptiness.

We do not have the answers. Clearly we do not know the way. We must submit, surrender, to be born again. To die to our heart of stone and beg God for a heart of flesh.

Right now this means grief, exasperation, allowing our hearts to be broken by the truth. Jesus is among us, standing with those oppressed and terrorized and killed, bearing in his body their trauma. Jesus is among us, those addicted to systems of white supremacy and racism, begging us to leave this heavy burden and repent.

The first step is failure and powerlessness. The second step is coming to believe that a Higher Power can change us. The third step is surrender to this Power.

Here is my adaptation of the Step Three Prayer for this moment (or era):

God, I offer myself to Thee to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt.

Relieve me of the bondage of white supremacy and racism, of my ignorance and ego, that I may better do Thy will.

Take away my complicity with the structures that make it so that your people cannot breathe– that freedom from these may bear witness to those I would love of Thy power, Thy love, and Thy Way of life.

May I do Thy will always!

(I also think this prayer could and perhaps should be imagined collectively.)

Come, Holy Spirit. Come.