Meanderings, 28 December 2024

Our last Meanderings of 2024. About twenty years ago I began blogging, and this Substack is the last iteration of the changes that have occurred to blogging. It’s been a good ride, and I’m honored so many have chosen to accompany us.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Pondering the gifts of Christmas, here’s one:

INDIAN LAND, S.C. (WBTV) – A Lancaster County church gave an early Christmas gift to families with medical debt in North and South Carolina.

Transformation Church’s lead Pastor Derwin Gray made the surprise announcement on Sunday, Dec. 22, during services at the church’s Indian Land location.

“Transformation Church, because of your generosity, we are going to alleviate, eradicate, and erase $10 million of medical debt for people in North Carolina and South Carolina,” Gray shared.

The announcement comes as the church has been celebrating the Christmas season by announcing donations to local organizations. Over the last two weeks, the church announced an $80,000 gift to the Women’s Enrichment Center in Lancaster and $50,000 to A21 in Charlotte, an organization that works to end human trafficking.

Transformation Church partnered with the organization “Undue Medical Debt” to help with medical debt relief. It gave $50,000 to pay down the outstanding debt.

Pastor Derwin Gray said the church recognizes many people who deal with medical debt are underinsured, disabled, or have low income. He believes it’s the church’s job to help them in any way they can.

“No one should be saddled with medical debt. It’s hard enough to be sick as it is, and so we want to bring some grace during the Christmas season and show them that Christ does indeed love them,” added Pastor Gray during a one-on-one interview.

Gray said the church, which has a location in Indian Land and one in Lake Wylie, has paid off more than $25 million in debt since 2020. He said he hopes to keep working with organizations to eventually pay off at least $100 million for families across the Carolinas.

In Evanston, too, only here it is systemic giving:

EVANSTON, Ill. — Kenneth Wideman has lived in Evanston his entire life, in a neighborhood bordered by a canal and elevated railroad tracks called the 5th Ward.

His parents moved there from South Carolina, part of an exodus of 6 million Black people fleeing the Jim Crow South over a 60-year period known as the Great Migration. By the time Wideman was born in the 1940s, Evanston was the state’s largest Black suburb, and 95% of the city’s Black population lived in the 5th Ward.

The concentration of Black residents in that neighborhood, however, was no accident.

The city began pushing Black residents out of neighborhoods outside the 5th Ward through targeted zoning in 1919. Later, federal agencies facilitated racially restrictive housing rules and banking discrimination, discouraging lenders from making “risky” loans in predominantly Black neighborhoods such as the 5th Ward.

In 1969, after the federal Fair Housing Act prohibited housing discrimination based on race, Evanston city officials passed local fair housing ordinances. But decades later, the 5th Ward had the lowest property values in the city, median income below the city’s average, and is Evanston’s “only neighborhood with areas classified as food deserts,” according to a 2019 report by the city clerk.

That year, the city set out to create the country’s first reparations program to atone for its history of racial discrimination. Since the program began in 2022, Evanston has awarded $25,000 checks and in-kind financial assistance to more than 200 people.

In May, a conservative legal group sued the city, arguing that the program is unconstitutional, violating the Equal Protection Clause because it discriminates against applicants based on race.Although reparations payments are still being dispensed, the lawsuit aims to stop the program in its entirety by preventing the city from using race to determine eligibility.

A ruling from a federal judge is forthcoming.

Wideman was part of the first cohort of recipients, selected by age. To be eligible, a person has to be Black and prove they lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 — the period when state-sponsored segregation and redlining were rampant — or be a direct descendant of someone who did.

“I’m very fortunate and blessed to receive the reparations,” he said. “I think it could have been more. But I’m happy.”

Wideman is one of three Evanston residents who sat down with NBC News to discuss their experience of growing up in the 5th Ward, applying for and receiving reparations.

Daniel K. Williams’ reflection on a century of Christmas Eve presidential addresses, and I turn to President Biden in 2022 (near the end of the post):

For Joe Biden, the first president in two decades to preside over a nation that was not officially at war anywhere in the world, the conflicts among Americans at home seemed more urgent than conflicts overseas. He therefore used his 2022 Christmas address to call for peace in the midst of partisan rancor.

Christmas belonged to all Americans, regardless of their faith or their partisan allegiance, Biden reminded his listeners. “The Christmas story is at the heart of the Christmas — Christian faith,” he declared. “But the message of hope, love, peace, and joy, they’re also universal. It speaks to all of us, whether we’re Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or any other faith, or no faith at all. It speaks to all of us as human beings who are here on this Earth to care for one another, to look out for one another, to love one another.”

“So my hope this Christmas season is that we take a few moments of quiet reflection and find that stillness in the heart of Christmas — that’s at the heart of Christmas, and look — really look at each other, not as Democrats or Republicans, not as members of ‘Team Red’ or ‘Team Blue,’ but as who we really are: fellow Americans. Fellow human beings worthy of being treated with dignity and respect. . . I hope this Christmas season marks a fresh start for our nation, because there is so much that unites us as Americans, so much more that unites us than divides us. . . .

“As we sing ‘O’ Holy Night’ — ‘His law is love, and His Gospel is peace’ — may I wish you and for you, and for our nation, now and always, is that we’ll live in the light — the light of liberty and hope, of love and generosity, of kindness and compassion, of dignity and decency. . . . Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. And all the best in the New Year.”

It might be easy to be cynical about Christmas Eve presidential addresses and imagine that they’re simply one more opportunity for presidents to promote their own political agenda – or even, at worst, an attempt to invoke the name of the Prince of Peace as a blessing for their current wars. But even if that cynicism might be warranted at times, I think that such a cynical approach would also miss the genuine hope that has united Americans around the “Christmas spirit.” We know that we don’t live up to the promise of the Prince of Peace, but the fact that we return to this theme year after year, seeking a cause that is larger than ourselves and hoping for the reality of a world in which wars finally cease, is something to celebrate.

As a Christian, I know that Christmas is about a lot more than civil religious proclamations of peace. But it’s not about less. Even at their best, presidential Christmas Eve proclamations are not the full gospel of Christmas, but they’re still a light of hope in a world of darkness – an indication that for one moment, we would like to put aside our conflicts and believe in the promise of peace. Presidents have probably often been too quick to misuse that promise as a justification for their current wars. But perhaps our presidents have also genuinely seen something in the story of Christmas that inspired them to call Americans to seek peace and “goodwill” for all people. And if so, that’s something worth celebrating this Christmas Eve.

Good news in 2024, by Natalie Escobar:

To put it mildly, 2024 did not hold back on grim news. One could be forgiven for looking at headlines from this past year and wondering whether they should throw their phone into the nearest body of water.

But let's not allow that gloom to eclipse the joy that 2024 also contained — for instance, when millions marveled at a total solar eclipse! A steady drumbeat of good news has carried on across the country, whether we were paying attention or not. And in case you weren't, NPR's member stations have been keeping track.

Here are some of the stories from coast to coast that made us smile in 2024:

An Iowa boy wanted to ride a motorcycle for his 11th birthday. Over 250 motorcyclists came to his party to grant his wish.
Dallas Grave became obsessed with motorcycles after he met a group of bike riders while running a lemonade stand, Iowa Public Radio reported in October. So when he asked to ride one for his birthday, his mom, Ashley Kirkes, figured she'd put out an open invite on Facebook to any motorcyclists who might want to drop by and give him a ride. She didn't imagine what ended up happening: scores of them showed up, with gifts to boot.

A Missouri school district named a school building after its beloved custodian.
Claudene Wilson started off at the Swedeborg School District in 1992 as a custodian, according to KCUR. But over the years, she started wearing more and more hats, like bus driver, lawn-mower or office phone-answerer. Generations of students came to know and love her as the reliable cornerstone of their school. So at the start of this school year, the district decided to name its K-8 elementary school after her, celebrating her 30+ years of dedication. … and much, much more!

Christmas art, saying “Pick me up, pick me up.”

Starting around the year 1400, a new kind of Nativity Scene began to grace European art – and Italian Renaissance art, particularly. Before, Nativity scenes often featured Mary holding a swaddled baby Jesus and surrounded by animals and worshippers in a stable. The new formula, however, showed the baby Jesus lying naked on the ground, his mother and father at a distance. Sometimes, the customary animals and shepherds were not present at all.

This new visual schema, so captivating to the Renaissance imagination, came from St. Bridget of Sweden, a redoubtable nun and mother of eight who had died in 1373. (After raising their children, both Bridget and her husband retired to religious orders.) On a pilgrimage to Bethlehem, it is said, Bridget saw an apparition of the vulnerable infant Jesus on the dirt. Afterward, some historians believe, she relayed her vision directly to the Italian painter Niccolo di Tommaso, who made the first painted version of this strange Nativity.

Soon the new Christmas formula became wildly popular, and it changed, for a time, the way Renaissance Europeans thought about the birth of Christ. Famous versions of Bridget’s vision can be found in great churches and museums all over the world, including in London’s National Gallery, where generations have admired Piero della Francesca’s celebrated Nativity of 1475. Here, with his characteristic austerity and dignity, the celebrated Tuscan artist depicts a wriggling child on rocky scrub; though it seems Piero couldn’t bear to place Jesus directly on the hard ground. In this oil painting, therefore, the Child lies on an opportune blue cloak. Still, the baby Jesus feels bereft and desperate, and one can’t help but reach for Him, at least in spirit. His vulnerability beckons us to a new tenderness and intimacy. …

t’s hard to know what Jesus’ birth actually looked like, back in the first century. Maybe Jesus lay on the ground at one point, maybe not. Regardless, when Bridget of Sweden “saw” the baby Jesus lying on the dirt of Bethlehem, and then related her vision to an artist, she helped Renaissance audiences have a new kind of contact with the holy. Within the imaginations of the faithful, in fact, Bridget summoned an “icon” of unprecedented, aching vulnerability that helped viewers internalize some paradoxical things: the absurd generosity of the Incarnation, the preposterous recklessness of God’s salvation plan, and the heart-melting softness of Jesus’s vulnerability – a vulnerability not only of the flesh, but of the spirit. (Jesus, after all, had no “hardness of heart” and felt every sting of evil to the core.)

Indeed, in the written account of her vision, Bridget related how the baby “crying and, as it were, trembling from the cold and the hardness of the pavement where he lay, rolled a little and extended his limbs, seeking to find refreshment and his Mother’s favor.”¹ From his very birth, according to Bridget, Jesus felt the coldness and alienation of our fallen world.