I didn’t know the story. Most of us didn’t know the true story of 855 black women who served as the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion during World War II, dramatized in the recently released film entitled “The Six Triple Eight”. The well-trained battalion was given the impossible job of sorting through 17 million pieces of mail that had been stockpiled in English warehouses, most of which had not been delivered – to either the troops or their loved ones back home – for up to three years. The lack of mail created a morale crisis for families and soldiers. Eleanor Roosevelt insisted that the mail be delivered, and strongly recommended that the 6888th, waiting for an assignment, be given the job. The army brass didn’t think a group of black women were capable of taking on such a task, and they did as much as they could to set the project up for failure. They were unsuccessful. The women were more than up to the challenge, and they completed their work in half the allotted time. Precious letters were delivered and read on both sides of the ocean.
I didn’t know this story. Like many of us, I do know countless stories of wartime heroes, especially from the Second World War. Yet – as the movie implies, many of the wartime heroic exploits that we grew up on have been curated. There are lots of stories we don’t know, either because the cultural zeitgeist won’t include them, or because people won’t believe them, or because some influential people may not want us to know them. These explanations, along with some others, partially explain why I — why most of us, didn’t know the story of the 6888th.
A story that I do know, and have known since I began remembering stories, and which is celebrated on January 6, is the story of the Wise Men (the magi) bringing gifts to the infant Jesus. (Matthew 2:1-12) The presence of the three Kings announces the transforming importance of the arrival of Emmanuel – God with us. Most of us love the story, or at least the picture of the story – which is displayed in thousands of creche scenes that dot the landscape all over the world, and have honored places on mantlepieces or under the Christmas tree. Many of us curate the story, particularly the part of a moving star. We either leave it out or dismiss it because it doesn’t square up with what we know about astronomy.
But there is another curated part of the story. We don’t know what happens when the Magi leave. The text tells us that a dream warns them about the viciousness of King Herod, which causes them to go home by “another road.” T.S. Eliot fills in the rest of the story in his classic poem, The Journey of the Magi, written in 1927:
Were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
What the Magi saw when they left their gifts in Bethlehem radically changed their lives. They couldn’t unsee what they had seen. Their old lives were over. Dead. A new life emerged, but it was hard and “bitter agony” for them.
And it can be for us. Transformations are hard. We want to leave them out. We curate what we don’t want to know. We train ourselves to not see what we don’t want to see. For most of us, we want things to be different, but don’t want them to change.
There is a temptation in all of us to freeze life as if it were an unchanging creche scene. If it gets altered in any way, resentments, blame and vicious accusations emerge. I see this playing out in two very different ways. The term “woke” has become a political slur for a large part of the American public. ‘Woke’ people are criticized for their arrogance and unyielding self-righteousness. In a similar way, people who claim to be “born-again Christians” are often ridiculed and critiqued for their spiritual arrogance and unyielding self-righteousness by those who do not make the same claim.
Both critiques have some merit. Arrogance and self-righteousness are often demonstrated by people who claim to be woke, and by those who claim to be born again. That said, there is a tendency on the part of those who demean the woke and the born-again populations to curate the mindset of those they denigrate by insisting that their perspectives are frozen. That they are locked in. Unwilling or unable to change. That all woke people have the same opinions and all born-again people have the same faith.
That makes it too easy. And wrong.
A way through this frozen way of thinking and living is to move. Move out of the familiar, which is what the Magi did. As did the women of the 6888th, who moved from their homeland to take up residence in a foreign country and take on a problem thought to be impossible to solve. We can follow their example. We can start by revising our language. We could substitute “waking” for woke, suggesting that people are daring to see things they have been taught not to see, or to see things in a different way – which is an ongoing process. We could substitute “coming alive in a new way” for born-again, suggesting that the spiritual journey involves discovering new horizons of faith – an ongoing process. This mitigates the tendency for woke and born-again people to insist that others adopt their same mindset.
We are called to move – our hearts and minds – in order to see and feel new things. To experience epiphanies, which we celebrate today.
