What Pauli Murray’s story stands as a reminder to me is that hope is real but hope doesn’t demand perfection or happiness. This is a promise I have and will stake my whole life on. It is the thing that says there’s no such thing as death in the end. It is the thing that says each person matters regardless of where they were born or what they have done or who they love. Because here’s the thing about hope: it is the equal and opposite to everything our world values, exalts, and holds dear. It is the very thing that I believe can change this world. It is what compels me to give my life to following Jesus. In these days in which weariness is abundant, Pauli’s words and life stand as a reminder that it is from exactly this place that hope rises and it is exactly in these places hope is to be found.įor me, hope is the thing that make the Christian story make sense. Pauli’s song was a song of hope, a song of justice and equality, a song that proclaimed the Kingdom of God drawn near. As if that wasn’t enough, Murray was the first female African-American to be ordained priest in the Episcopal Church in 1977, seven days after it was officially allowed in The Episcopal Church.īy the time Pauli Murray wrote those words in 1970, the songs she sang no doubt came from a weary throat but she kept singing.
It was this same person, an advocate for civil rights of all kinds, especially racial and sex equality, that herself identified as what we now know to be transgender.
She had formed the National Organization for Women, in part out of a believe that civil rights were about the whole person. She had been arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus, two decades before the civil right movements of the 1960s. I recently read an article about her life- I hope you will read it too.īy 1970 when she wrote the words above, she had already been the first woman to graduate from the Howard University School of Law and was working to dismantle the “separate but equal” legislation that was the law of the land at the time, enabling the passage of Brown v. I first learned of Pauli Murray in seminary and since then she has been a hero of mine. Read the full text by clicking here or at the bottom of the page. “Dark Testament: Verse 8” the Reverend Pauli Murray. Give me a song of hope and world where I can sing it.”
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