Sabbatical Reflections Rev. Dan Smith September 16, 2018
Remembering Slavery’s Living Legacy Background • Discovery of First Church’s Slaveholding History • Ongoing Beloved Community Racial Justice work • Civil Rights Tour of the South with Youth Group • Idea for Public Remembrance Project and Sabbatical • Annual Meeting Vote in January 2018 to explore PR project • Sabbatical Learning and Grounding (Isaiah 58) • Summer Internship
Sabbatical - Personal • Daily Walks and Prayer • Time Alone and on Silent Retreat • Time with Family and Friends • Ping Pong, Movies, Lectures, Plays • Living Question: What do I need give up? What am I receiving? • Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Narrative and Storytelling Public Narrative Workshop with Marshall Ganz • Story of Self • Story of Us • Story of Now And God’s Story for Us
Sabbatical – Project • Reflection on themes of memory and grief in my story • Ancestry Research • First Church Research, mostly 18 th century • Travel to Sites of Public Remembrance • Montgomery, AL and New Orleans, LA • Berlin, Germany and Krakow, Poland (Auschwitz)
Ancestry Research Ancestry.com, family albums, online records, histories of New Amsterdam, Central NJ and Rutgers • 8 th Great Grandfather Thomas Applegate (reprobate, tried in Cambridge in 1635-6) • 10 th Great Grandfather, Wolphert Gerritse VonCovenhoven, in New Amsterdam (hired by Dutch West India Company c. 1625) • 7 th , 6 th , 5 th Great Grandfathers Covenhoven, slaveholders in Central NJ (Deeds of Manumission, 1817 and 1823), Conover House still stands • Grandmother Daisy Smith worked in silk (once cotton) mills in Paterson, NJ • Elias VanBunschooten (my dad’s scholarship to Rutgers and Seminary)
Travel Some questions: • How can memorials help us to look at and reflect on painful parts of our past? • How are memorials sites where stories of self, us and now intersect? • How have others remembered and publicly shared their stories of racial terror? • How, in the case of Germany, does a ‘memorial culture’ develop?
Memorials and Museums Visited – April 2018 • Montgomery, Alabama • Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial • Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and MLK Parsonage • Equal Justice Initiative • The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration • The National Memorial for Peace and Justice • New Orleans, Louisiana • WW II Museum • Whitney Plantation (Wallace, LA)
Memorial and Museums Visited – May 2018 In Berlin, Germany and Krakow/Oscwiecim, Poland • Museum and Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau • Book Burning Memorial German Resistance Memorial Center • Rosenstraße Memorial • • Topography of Terror • Neue Wache • Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe • Trains to Life – Trains to Death Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered • Gleis 17 Memorial – Berlin Grunewald • Under the National Socialist Regime • New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum Foundation • Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime • Stolpersteiene-Berlin Jewish Museum Berlin •
Slideshow of Sites
Take Aways about Memorials • Importance of Individual Story and Broader Context • Importance of Site and Land • Four Different Words of Memorial in German, Post-war • Mahnmal - memorial for event • Ehrenmahl-memorial for person or small group of individuals • Denkmahl- supposed to make you think-art and abstract • Gedankstatte - combo of all above - memorial and museum • Prompt acknowledgement of all groups • Provoke backlash, counter narratives • Language of Victims and Perpetrators
Next Steps • Next Week – Story(ies) of Us • James Ramsey’s Meditations on “Stories Impossible to Tell” • Preface • Cicely • Titus • Mark and Phyllis • Small Group Discussion Sign up • Public Remembrance and Repair
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