A Palm Sunday Reflection on Jonathan Daniels, Ruby Sales, & Jesus
If you have been to the Abbey of Gethsemani, then you know that across the road from the monastery are woods which are intended for silent, prayerful walks. A modest path opens from the road into the woods, and by the path there is a sign with an arrow that says, “to the statues.” If you follow that path—and you had better stay on the path, unless you want to be covered in ticks by the time you leave—you will make your way through those quiet woods, along a trail here and there studded with stones and overhung with branches, speckles of sunlight chasing through the shadows, deer grazing in the clearing just beyond the woods. You’ll pass a little prayer hut peppered with notes and rosaries, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, before you exit the woods briefly to climb one final hillside. Near the top of the hill, you’ll enter the woods once more, and this is where you’ll find two sets of bronze statues – at the bottom, the disciples of Jesus, sound asleep, lying all over each other, willing but unable to keep vigil with their friend in his hour of need. Then, up a little ways along the path, at the crest of the hill, atop a pedestal of laid stones, you will find Jesus, fallen to his knees, face upturned to the sky, hands over his eyes.
If you’re the observant and curious type, you’ll also notice a small plaque, and reading it you’ll learn that the statues were commissioned by a Massachusetts benefactor and donated to the Abbey. The inscription reads, “The Garden of Gethsemani / In Memory of Jonathan M. Daniels, Episcopalian Seminarian, Martyred in Alabama, August 20, 1965.”
This is the story of Jonathan Daniels.
He was born in New Hampshire in 1939; after graduating from Virginia Military Institute, Daniels went on to graduate studies in English at Harvard before eventually landing in seminary. At the age of 26, his faith journey led Daniels down to Alabama, where he felt called as a white man to join the marches for freedom and equity being led by people of color.
On a sweltering day, August 20, 1965, in Hayneville, Alabama, a town nearly unmatched for its history of lynching Black men, Daniels and three of his activist companions walked up to a rickety shop called “The Cash Store” to buy cold drinks. They were met at the door by Tom Coleman, a white construction worker and part-time deputy sheriff. Coleman recognized the group, some of whom had been arrested during protests six days earlier. Enraged and armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, he said, “Get off this property or I’ll blow your goddamn heads off, you sons of bitches.” Coleman aimed his shotgun at Ruby Sales, a 17 year-old Black girl. Realizing what was about to happen, Jonathan Daniels shoved Sales aside and stepped into her place as Coleman fired. The shot flew into Daniels’s abdomen, killing him instantly. At his murder trial, Coleman pleaded self-defense and was acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. He never spent a single day in jail.
After testifying at the murder trial, Ruby Sales went on to college, then to graduate studies at Princeton and to divinity school in Massachusetts. She would become a professor at the University of Maryland and Spelman College, and a legendary activist for civil rights for Black Americans, women, and gay and lesbian people. Ruby Sales is now 69 years old and thinks often of Jonathan Daniels, wondering whether he might have become a lifelong activist, or a “starchy bishop.”
Since I too am a white man who cares about racial justice, of course I wonder what I would have done in Daniels’s place. Would I have run away? Held my hands up in the air? Or would I also have found the courage to give up my life to protect my friend?
It is appropriate that the Gethsemane statues were dedicated to Daniels, because, much like him, Jesus found it within himself to enter into Jerusalem and chase exploitative money-changers out of God’s house, to question the legitimacy of Caesar’s oppressive power, knowing that in so doing he was obviously marking himself for death. And, we know, Jesus had the courage to go through with it. His companions did not. They fell asleep. They denied him. They betrayed him. But I also want to remember that in order to fail Jesus so spectacularly, the disciples first had to become disciples—they gave up three years of their lives to follow him, this itinerant preacher and healer who spoke in paradoxes about the Reign of God. They journeyed through villages all across Palestine, in which they were mocked and ridiculed; they begged for food and slept in whatever spare quarters were available—given that their audience was first-century Palestinian peasants, this probably meant that they slept huddled together on dirt floors with their hosts, the hosts’ children, and possibly animals. So James and John could never have fallen asleep, nor could Peter have denied him, nor Judas betrayed him—in a moment of panic, for which he was afterwards so consumed with guilt that he hung himself—none of these failures could have happened had not each of those people first taken the extraordinary step of setting their lives aside and making a radical change to risk everything for what they felt was right. So let’s not judge Judas too harshly. After all, even Jesus, at the last minute, was begging God for a way out.
For me, then, it is not just a question of whether I would have stepped in front of a bullet. But would I have ever been there in the first place? Would I have ever put down the newspaper, turned off the television, closed the Facebook tab, and joined the struggle? I cannot say now that I have done this much. I have not even reached the level of “disciple” yet, so far be it from me to look down on Judas Iscariot.
As an admirer, then, a “fan” aspiring to discipleship, I return for sustenance to the stories of Daniels and Jesus, Dr. King, Ella Baker and Ruby Sales—people who lived and risked death for the sake of solidarity, which is just a fancy way of saying “friendship.” I do not find anything inherently good about suffering—as Karina reminded us last Sunday, the supposed virtues of suffering and obedience, service and sacrifice, have often been foisted upon women and people of color to persuade them to accept their conditions of oppression. So I do not think Jonathan Daniels was a hero because of the suffering he endured or the sacrifice he made. Instead, I look to him because as a white man in America I need models like that to teach me that in the midst of overwhelming brutality, it is possible not to sink into cynicism, because we are not in the end absolutely alone. There are others like Ruby Sales and Jonathan Daniels who are with us and who are going to sustain radical loving relationships in community, no matter what. And as this week cops in Sacramento shot a Black man 20 times who turned out to be holding a cell phone, and as one white man was exploding bombs in Austin while yet another white man was shooting up yet another school in Maryland, I do not know that I could ward off despair were it not for Jesus and Jonathan Daniels and Ruby Sales.
Jesus’ death is so meaningful to me, not because it magically expiated human sin or satiated an angry God’s lust for blood, but because it demonstrates a timeless lesson—in first-century Palestine, in 1965 Alabama, and in 2018 Louisville—when you tell the truth in public, you risk bringing down upon yourself the ruthless cruelty of oppressive power, for whom your truth represents an existential threat. If you care enough to show up, again and again—and if, in the moment of truth, you somehow find deep inside the courage to stay true to yourself, to your friends and to your God—you will very likely pay dearly for it. Whether all of this is somehow worth it—whether we will be rewarded with eternal happiness in the next life, or whether at the moment of our death our souls will dissipate, recede into an endless silence deeper than the quiet of those dark Gethsemani woods; whether it will have to be enough that while we were here, we lived honestly and loved one another fiercely; whether suffering or redemption will have the last word—no one knows. And that is why faith is so hard.
Sources
Ruane, Michael E. “Black civil rights activist recalls white ally who took a shotgun blast for her.” Washington Post 16 August 2015. Accessed 23 March 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/black-civil-rights-activist-recalls-white-ally-who-took-a-shotgun-blast-for-her/2015/08/16/4e562dd8-3b74-11e5-8e98-115a3cf7d7ae_story.html?utm_term=.878f52db08c7
Goodson, Bill. “Jonathan Daniels and Thomas Merton: A Meditation.” The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. Accessed 23 March 2018. http://merton.org/ITMS/Seasonal/30/30-2Goodson.pdf