What Happened to Status Quo?

Memory lane is absolutely lovely, meandering through the recollections of how much better life was in the good old days full of traditional values when men were men and women were just women!  And if black lives did matter then, they didn’t have too much to show for it since they were not allowed to vote. And don’t forget those water fountains and segregated toilets. Those were also the good old days when northerners lived in the north before we ever had air-conditioning. As the country music sings it: “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be!”

In the church of my childhood in the fifties, there was a hierarchy of characters, including my grandfather and uncle, who were called Elders who did their duty in a very seemly manner.  They were the ones who took the white cover off the silver communion set and folded that linen cloth as if it were an American flag. [Later, I discovered that the theological reason for the covering was to keep away the flys.]  These Elders were all men, all white, and all old. And like the uncovering of those sacred sacraments of light bread squares and grape juice, they were the epitome of status quo.

If you were a WASP, you had status and had your way in running city hall as well as the local school.  In a parish in Mississippi, only protestant preachers could properly pray over high school football games, preferably the long-winded Baptists who proverbially ended everything “in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior”.  The principal called to ask if I would pray under the Friday night lights, and I told him I’d like to invite my good friend the rabbi to come in my stead. I was taken off the prayer list!

Maintaining status quo has been a mantra for many civilizations and organizations throughout our past. When I was growing up, we were taught that you just don’t mess with things that are status quo, even if you felt uneasy about “our way of life” in those old days where “Old times there are not forgotten.” That haunting phrase from the song “Dixie” formed the crypt in which we quietly stashed our racism and religious preferences and national resentments toward those patriots of the union who actually won that war we called the “recent unpleasantness”.

In the early part of this year, unexpected calamities turned our status quo upside down and inside out and spilled it all over creation.  Nothing seems the same as it was before the virus crept into our bloodstreams to remind us of the extremely fragile nature of our existence and how we are all part and parcel of each other’s well being. George Floyd’s helpless and senseless death right there in front of us all opened up another can of worms just waiting on that larger truth that is still marching on in spite of us. Status quo has gone with the wind.

At the end of June, the legislature of Mississippi removed the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag, a seismic shift of the needle in recognizing that such status quo needed to be changed for the greater good. In a little over a fortnight Georgia’s Congressman John Lewis died and left this holy hope for all of us to read the next day: “When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war.”