January 13

Today is the Feast Day of Berno of Cluny, who died on this day in 927. During a time when feudal lords had taken over monasteries and turned them into extensions of their avarice, he instituted reforms that called monks back to their Benedictine vows. 

Today marks the death, in 1940, of Matilda (Abake) McCreer, the last surviving passenger of the human trafficking ship Coltilda, which was re-discovered recently. She was enslaved in Africa as a toddler and survived the Middle Passage, arriving in Mobile, Alabama in 1860. She survived slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow, and in 1931, she hiked to the Selma, Alabama courthouse to demand reparations. Though the judge dismissed her case, it remains in the legal record as a witness to the atrocities she survived. 

Today also marks the signing, in 1997, of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction. 193 Nations are party to the treaty, and all had (allegedly) destroyed their stockpiles of chemical weapons by July of 2023. 

Reflection: 

The discovery of the Clotiilda, in 2018, is a reminder that our date conventions obscure how recently slavery—and its partner systems, like mass incarceration and white supremacy—hurt(s) people. Matilda died in 1940, less than a century ago, and was the last survivor of this particular form of kidnapping, torture, and human trafficking. 

The policies of our current fascist regime extend slavery, which is still legal to impose upon imprisoned people. They build upon white supremacy and Jim Crow through redistricting, the removal of voting protections, the unlawful arrest and imprisonment of immigrants, and mass incarceration. This criminal administration even celebrates a return to the immorality of the KKK, posting white supremacist-coded language and imagery on social media.

Much of this white supremacist backlash is a response to our election of a Black president, but it is also rooted in white anxiety over exactly what Matilda hiked to Selma to demand: reparations. 

The only way to repent of white supremacy is for us, as a society, to implement society-wide reparations: for slavery, for anti-queer discrimination, for ableism, for classism, and for the damage we have inflicted on the planet. And the only way for us to enact those reparations is to embrace and advocate for massive, planetary redistribution of wealth. 

Prayer: God, we know that talk is cheap. Your Word took on flesh. Help our words about repentance and justice also take on flesh, and be incarnated in policy. Amen.