The Transformation Of Bishop Charles Jenkins

From the Times-Picayune:

They are an unlikely pair, chatting up people on porch stoops in the poorer neighborhoods of New Orleans: Bishop Charles Jenkins, 57, the son of white, rural north Louisiana and pastor to 18,000 south Louisiana Episcopalians, and Jerome Smith, 69, black and rumpled, son of Treme, a former Freedom Rider from the civil rights movement.

Before Hurricane Katrina, in the days when Jenkins says he was focused more on the well-being of his predominantly white church than his predominantly black city, they might never have crossed paths.

But since Katrina, they have forged a relationship in which Jenkins, now deep into a profound personal and spiritual transformation, said he has come to love and rely on Smith.

Smith, a sometimes fiery activist in whom Jenkins sees a gentle soul, has become one of the bishop's principal guides into New Orleans' poor African-American culture, a landscape Jenkins said he previously glimpsed but did not understand.

"He's my mentor, you know," Jenkins said recently. "It is a good day whenever Jerome Smith comes by."

For days, I've been wanting to write about this story, but life intervened, along with the inauguration of a new president and vice-president. (Oh happy day!)

Through his own trauma and suffering and from viewing suffering and trauma all around him, Bishop Jenkins life was transformed. How often it is that through the most difficult times of our lives, the greatest changes take place, for good or for ill.

"I don't know if I'm on the right road, but I think I am," he said recently. "I know that God is with me on that road. And I hope than in trying to please him, I do. I'm searching for God. And also searching for myself."

I think of Thomas Merton's prayer:

The Living Spirit

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Most times, that's the best we can do.

Before the storm, "I thought Christianity and priesthood were primarily about the cult," Jenkins said. "And doing the actions correctly -- holding my fingers correctly at Mass, not wearing brown shoes when celebrating the Mass. That it was getting all those right.

"And I was missing the larger picture of the dignity of humanity and the world for whom Christ died."
....

Jenkins' transformation began two or three days after the storm as New Orleans filled with water and the plight of tens of thousands of stranded residents horrified the world.

Having evacuated from New Orleans, he was alone at a friend's house in Baton Rouge when the televised images of exhausted evacuees begging for help at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center torched his soul, driving him to his knees in prayer.

What he saw, he says now, was not merely suffering blooming from decades of social and economic inequality. He saw sin itself: malignant, writhing evil, freshly troweled up from the soil of his very city; social sin, which, for all of his theological sensitivity, he had only dimly sensed.

It nearly broke him.

In the language of the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross, he entered his "dark night of the soul."

"I was overwhelmed. Absolutely. I knew that I did not have the mind or heart or spiritual depth to make an adequate response to what I saw happening to us," he said recently. "I began to weep. I moved toward despair."

After that trauma, Jenkins set out on what he and those close to him describe as a spiritual journey. As many do, it began with personal contrition.

Please, read the entire article. It's beautifully written and quite moving. I've probably gone beyond fair use, but I pray the Times-Picayune will indulge me. I make no profit from this blog, and my intention is to highlight Bishop Jenkins' transformation, Nolan's fine reporting, and the willingness of his newspaper to devote space to the story. Time after time, Bruce Nolan demonstrates what an excellent religion reporter can do. He does his homework in researching the background of the stories he reports, with the result that his reporting, especially in an in-depth article such as this, is as close to the truth as a reporter is likely to get.

UPDATE: I'm bumping this article up, because it's important to me, and I don't want it to be totally eclipsed by the inauguration celebrations.