Sabbatical Reflections Rev. Dan Smith September 16, 2018 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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 18th 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

• 8th Great Grandfather Thomas Applegate (reprobate, tried in Cambridge in

1635-6)

• 10th Great Grandfather, Wolphert Gerritse VonCovenhoven, in New

Amsterdam (hired by Dutch West India Company c. 1625)

• 7th, 6th, 5th 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
• f 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
• German Resistance Memorial Center
• Topography of Terror
• Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
• Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered

Under the National Socialist Regime

• Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the

National Socialist Regime

• Jewish Museum Berlin
• Book Burning Memorial
• Rosenstraße Memorial
• Neue Wache
• Trains to Life – Trains to Death
• Gleis 17 Memorial – Berlin Grunewald
• New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum Foundation
• Stolpersteiene-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