A Song in a Weary Throat

Recently, there was a discussion on a UCC clergy Facebook page that I follow about the practice of celebrating feast days for saints. The pastor had been supplying at a Lutheran congregation, which was commemorating the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul that Sunday. She was raised UCC, and had not grown up with this tradition, but she wondered whether this practice had been followed in other churches in our diverse community. I reflected that it was also not practiced in the church of my childhood, but I had become familiar with the tradition in seminary and found much to appreciate about it.

While I don’t always pay attention to the liturgical calendar of other Christian traditions, I did happen to see that yesterday, our Episcopal friends were commemorating a feast day of their own. July 1 was the feast for The Rev. Pauli Murray, a pioneer in many arenas and an inspiration for so many in these uncertain days. I first read the story of this remarkable saint a few years ago, and have been inspired by their witness ever since.

Pauli Murray was a pioneer on many fronts, first as a lawyer—they graduated from Howard University School of Law in the 1940s, and then became the first Black person to receive a doctoral level law degree from Yale. Murray was a brilliant thinker who was able to imagine a legal strategy for tackling segregation that no one had thought of yet; the law school paper they wrote suggesting a way to challenge the doctrine of “separate but equal” would eventually be used by Thurgood Marshall’s legal team that won the victory in Brown vs. the Board of Education, overturning legal segregation in schools. Pauli Murray was also a devout Episcopalian, who found a second career and calling in the Episcopal priesthood; as the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice notes, they were the first African-American person perceived to be a woman to be ordained in the Episcopal Church. The Rev. Pauli Murray was also queer—someone who wrestled with their sexuality and gender identity, and had they lived in our time, might have identified as transgender or non-binary. Pauli was an extraordinary person on many levels, someone that challenged traditions of exclusion while embodying the grand tradition of the gospel—good news to the poor, hope for the downtrodden, healing for those wounded by the world. In 1970, Rev. Murray—also a talented poet—wrote these words, in a poem titled Dark Testament: Verse 8:

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at last . . .

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

May the witness of Pauli Murray, and all the saints gone before us, inspire us to sing songs of courage and compassion and help us remember the hope that holds us always.