There are many who have said that certain people are “too hard” on the at-large Black community, and sometimes I concur that certain other people do go overboard from time to time. However, this morning, I woke up with an ‘epiphany’ … and all it said to me was “Tell my people they are ungrateful.”

I innerstand, as the young folk say nowadays. So when the Lord tells me to do something, I don’t question Him. I just act on it and ask Him what He wants me to say.

Children, by nature we are told, are born with a selfish nature. They have to be, “a closed mouth don’t get fed.” If they don’t cry, we think everything is okay.

Barely able to communicate with the adult world that they must depend on for their care and keep, the only way they know to tell us what they cannot yet speak out on is by different kinds of cries and coos; and by certain looks on their little angelic faces. There are certain physical capacities that they have no control over and most assuredly needs that have to be attended to whether they can tell us or not.

A young lady and I were into a conversation over the current standing of Black America, as it is now, and with regard and respect to our illustrious and glorious past.

The conclusion she had come to is that the corporate “we” are like an 18-year old being pushed out of the house untrained and unprepared to live in this world, but being forced to “go away” with nothing and to sink, swim, or fail – epicly and not ready. I likened it to more like a 45-year old who is pushing the 50s who had malfunctioned on the way out and refused to leave home, a “failure to launch,” so to speak. The grown able-bodied man who still lives with his Mama and has a suckling-type tendency that he can’t rid himself of, either because he is afraid to, or because he really doesn’t want to. Life is just easier if Mom and Dad pay all the bills and the not fully mature child can just stay home and party on endlessly with no real life responsibilities, even when they do work hard and have plenty of money.

Either way this conversation goes, I think the sum total of understanding is that we are still, as a race of people, too dependent on that which has done nothing but fail us in our entire 525-year slavery and post-slavery history in the Weird Weird West.

The ungratefulness is not as to them, they are not our benefactors–never have been, never will be. “They” have done nothing for us that God had not already done. The ungratefulness is as to Him, the Supreme Benefactor from whom we inherited the Earth, the Wind, and everything therein.

Keeping in mind that we were fine before the trans-Atlantic slave passages to America and that everything the Greater White Other has touched since then has turned into nothing more than ashes, dust and tears in our hands; so with that in mind, where is the Spirit of God and All Holiness and Right-Standing going with this conversation?

I took a moment out to pray on it, because the last thing I want to say in these matters is the wrong thing.

This is the conclusion of the matter from my favorite book in the Bible, Ecclesiastes, rumored to have been written by King Solomon, the Wise:

Ecclesiastes 12:13 “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. 14 For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

There are people who say that the writer of the Ecclesiastical Hebrew scrolls was a very troubled and depressed man who wanted to “cry a river” over everything in the world. I beg to differ.

That man (or that woman, should it be found) was no cynical pessimist, he or she was a very ‘clear-eyed realist’ who believed in the One and Only God of Righteousness. There is no other. Be very clear about that.

Be it for the case of fun or fury, triumph or defeat, ups or downs, ins or outs, light or darkness, in the very end this Writer knew that the empirical evidence of science itself negates the non-existence of God.

This Writer also knew that the world is nothing more than a ‘puff of wind,’ and that in the end we are fully accountable to no one but God/ Yahweh/ Allah/ Jehovah for the lives that we have lived on this Earth whilst we have lived here.

When the Lord says to us (to me in fact) that we are an “ungrateful lot,” and tells me to speak out in it; in that place where I once feared to speak out, I no longer fear.

I have come to understand that when He said He had come only to the “Lost Sheep” of Israel to dispense the Children’s Bread, He was talking to us. To those of us whose ancestors came through the trans-Atlantic slave passages and whose ancestry is found hidden in Judah and in all of Israel back in ancient Mesopotamia.

We are the ones who were called from the very beginning to found the root of the world, to birth it, and to bring it back to the place of ultimate redemption.

If we cannot or are unwilling to do it, someone else will; the Gentiles will be grafted in and we will be cut out. Period. It has nothing to do with race, it never did. It has to do with the original people of God’s creation and obedience. Period. And yes, there is such a thing as a “Black Gentile.”

However, this redemption -this salvation- does not come to us nor to the world through a religion or cult of any man’s making.

This redemption, or salvation, will happen only because of those who are actually CALLED and Chosen to do it, those within the Vine and those without the Vine who will be grafted in because this is where they know they belong, race be danged.

That said, the Bible itself was never a “white man’s book.”

It was not written by white people, it was only translated by them into Latin, and then British English and later, into American English, so that we would be able to read it in the only language that most of us know right now because of this translation to the West. That should be the end of that conversation.

Now…is the acceptable time, today is the honored day of salvation.

***

Many parents are afraid to speak out on the fact that their own children are often Ingrates, or an “ungrateful lot.”

We like to portray our sons and daughters as perfected, as ‘above it all,’ in order to parlay our feelings of inadequacy as parents into some pretense that our children are faultless and should not be held responsible for their errors. Even if they are fully to blame for their own sins, or misgivings as we like to say; we like to beat ourselves up with their guilt. We need to beat ourselves up, as if our own errors in raising them are the ‘be-all-end-all’ of their chosen existence. If they choose to behave badly, it is our own fault for being bad parents. Mom-and-Dad-blaming just makes the world keep spinning as it is.

The reality is that our children are often ungrateful to us just as we are ungrateful to God.

A Nigerian man that I was engaged to for a short period of time (another story for another time), said these words to me after I made a comment about my own mother and some of the misunderstandings that we had when she was alive.

He said “I will never understand you Americans.” “Understand what?” I asked him. “”How in the world do you question the love of your mother? She is the one who gave you life. I have never heard of such a thing and it is totally ridiculous.”

Almost without exception, and I do mean there are exceptions, mainly women who are guilted into having children that they really do not want, but almost without exception, any woman who sacrifices her life -on the birth table, and even by giving up her own needs to take care of the needs of her child(ren)- cannot be accused in any way, shape or manner of not loving her children, even the mother who may never get around to saying it.

The ugliness of it hit me when I read in the news that Tracy Morgan’s mother had been shut out of his hospital room when he was in that near-fatal accident in which another veteran comedian traveling with him was killed. No matter what happens in this life, when a mother’s child is hurt, that FLOOD and TIDE comes rushing back to her “My Baby!” and all she can do is blindly run through all of the years of fights and arguments trying to find her ‘lost’ child.

This is life, ladies and gentlemen.

At that moment, it occurred to me that no matter what difficulties Morgan had had with his mother, she was still his mother; and that was very wrong of him if it is true. He’s alive and healthy, and doing well for himself; that is all she needs to know, and most times, that is all she can do. And in my own remembrance, as I remember that, I also remembered that in the end, I was there for my mother in spite of herself; and in spite of me.

I was there when she had the stroke.

I escorted her to the hospital after enlisting the help of her next-door neighbor to watch my sons. I stayed there with her until another family member could arrive; I went and got my children and brought them back to the hospital -walking (I had no car at the time)- and from that day until The Very End a year later, I stayed with my mother every waking moment she had. I’d spent more time taking care of her than I remembered her taking care of me, but that was only because I didn’t remember anything that happened before I was five. Now I know why she left her husband, and I am glad she did. I hated her for that, until I found out why she did it, after she was gone. Our lives were in jeopardy in his hands, and we would likely not be here now if she had not done what she did, even though it cost all of us.

My face was the last one she saw on December 11, 1979; four days after my 20th birthday.

I brushed her hair, pulled the blanket up to her chin (she said she was cold), and said goodnight.

I told her I could not come the next day, but would be back the following. I don’t know what made me go back that night, but I ran back to her room at the nursing home as we were leaving the nurses’ station instructions for her care–they had neglected her in the past and we wanted to be clear about our expectations for that one 24-hour period. I leaned over and kissed her forehead for the first time since I was five, and for the first time in my short 20 years of life, the words “Thank you” actually came spilling out of her mouth.

At first, I thought I was hearing things, but I turned to see her peeking at me from under the covers, blinking. She looked all meek and innocent like a newborn herself; and all I remember thinking is “She’s never said thank you to me before. That’s a new one.” I didn’t respond, I just gave her a look, smiled, and kept it moving. On hindsight, maybe that was her way of saying “I’m sorry” without actually saying it. But I didn’t need her apologies, I needed her to know that I loved her, period. Regardless.

I had to take my boys to the clinic the next day for checkups and shots. Clinic was always a day long, so it was dark and time to put them to bed by the time I got home, to her apartment that I had taken over while she was rehabilitating; to her apartment that I planned to bring her back to as soon as I could position myself to take on another ‘child’ who was my mother. She would have to be cared for for the rest of her life and I steadied my mind to make yet another sacrifice and do just that. I had no life outside of my mother and my sons, anyway. But I planned for that clinic day with snacks, plenty of diapers and bottles, blankets, clean clothes in a bag, sippy cups and extra socks, just in case – coloring books, crayons, paper and pencils because my oldest son liked to draw.

My older sister, who was in college at the time, had mid-terms to study for; my younger sister, only 14 at the time, had a spelling test coming up; our brother was incog-negro -having never learned to be responsible himself; and our grandparents-her parents, that is-were old, sickly and pretty much tired and could not make it to the nursing home that day or night.

That was the day they chose to kill her, against the instructions that were left for them; and then tried to pretend that it was an accident.

Some time shortly after 6 pm on December 12, she was gone. Just like that.

That’s the day I learned that “ungrateful” I was not.

I do, however, know what an ingrate looks like. And smells like…cowardice. And acts like, insolent. And tastes and sounds like a lie on the scruffy edge of a whelped tongue. And feels like…a little bit of truth packed in with a boatload of lies.

If the Lord says we are “an ungrateful lot,” it won’t be the first time. Read Ezekiel 2:4 / Isaiah 48:4 / Ezekiel 3:7 / Deuteronomy 9:13 …and that’s just for starters.

***

The Sun, the Stars, the Moon, the Earth, the birds, the bees, the flowers, the trees, the universe, our blood, our hearts, our bodies, minds, all of which come together for this harmonious crescendo of music that beats in unison even if we so much as crawl on our scoured and svelte hands and knees into the woods and press our ears to the ground, get quiet, and simply LISTEN. Amen. Get grateful.

‘The Beginning’

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