​Breaking Open: To Be Transformed

LauraSue Schlatter, Beloved Community Communications Team

George Floyd Square Photo credit: Jen Ackerman/The Guardian

News of George Floyd’s lynching came on a perfect spring afternoon in 2020. Following surgery for breast cancer and during chemotherapy I had a long-lasting respiratory virus with high fevers, sore throat, and headaches, likely COVID. Feeling shaky, but better, with only a couple of weeks of radiation to go, May’s blooms and walks brought hope. Then I heard and saw George Floyd calling for his Momma and plummeted into dark waters. 

Three nights later, I huddled in the basement of my home with Lou, my older child. Home from grad school to help care for me, Lou would have been with the protesters but for my fear of getting sick again. As we watched on our cell phones, we saw our local businesses, post office, and police station fall as Black and white ally protesters confronted law enforcement. Protesters were thrown to the ground, injured and bleeding. A conflagration, torched by inflammatory white outsiders come to take advantage of the pain roiling our city, sent acrid smoke into the air. Some of the worst of the chaos and flames were less than a mile from our home. I shivered in the dark, eyes pasted to images of people wrestled to the ground, library windows shattered, store support beams twisted. Lou’s reassurances failed. I had never been so afraid. 

In the morning, I braved the kitchen window to see unscathed yards outside. Despite reports from neighborhood watchers of white people with out-of-state license plates driving through our neighborhood overnight, the mainly-Black church two doors down stood untouched. My heart pounded in my throat. I was afraid to step out. The radio played voices of Black neighbors in north Minneapolis mourning the loss of local businesses, speaking of fear that was not new to them, of anger at another lynching. That was how many saw George Floyd’s death — yet another execution, without judge or jury. A lynching.
Something inside me broke open. The Black voices touched the fear at my core. Hiding in my home, a “go” bag packed in case I had to flee, the fears that BIPOC neighbors had carried for centuries were manifest in me. While mine were new and small in comparison, I understood at my core what it might be to live with this fear every day of my life. I understood that all the antiracism work I had done in the past had not taught me to feel fear this way. I broke open and was transformed. The transformation was a somatic understanding that my BIPOC neighbors, friends, co-workers, people of my city, all were caught in a vise of fear. 

My underlying faith allowed me to break open, and to be transformed. Our new ends statements tell us to “understand the interconnected roots of oppression and yoke ourselves to the demands, sacrifices, and hard work of antiracism, multiculturalism, and climate and economic justice . . ..” They also exhort us to “practice lifelong faith formation. . . that breaks us open and allows us to be transformed.” 

On that day in 2020, I knew that my faith had taught me that we are all inherently worthy, and that babies are born with a divinity that entitles all of us to love. I had practiced prayer and silence enough to have found ways to allow myself to open to what, for me, feels like a divine presence. I had experienced hearing the still small voice within and allowed myself to follow its wisdom. I had an intellectual understanding, from participating in antiracism workshops, of the causes and effects of systemic racism. I thought I had done what I could to point out systemic racism at work in the world.

But before George Floyd was lynched and I was terrified of the uprising so close to my home, I did not understand how oppression is a Human problem. The people who are oppressed are not the only victims of oppression. We are all victims of oppression. The difference is that the people who are the oppressors have the power to change the status quo. Isabel Wilkerson has said, “We are all one race. The Human Race.” We Humans created and interwove oppressions ingeniously — to benefit some at tremendous cost to others. As we did so, we lost control of the weaving. Cost and benefit can no longer be controlled. We all lose now. Using some of us to benefit others at a cost to the ones being used is a loss to all. Pull one thread and the entire piece unravels.

Since that day at the end of May in 2020, my focus has changed. I was able to experience, if only for a moment, how it feels to be a BIPOC person in this country. That transformation released me to transform further. I am grateful for the underlying faith that continues to inspire me on this journey.

LauraSue Schlatter is a longtime member of Unity Church. She has recently joined the Beloved Community Communications Team.