We attend St. Bart’s Episcopal Church in the City of New York. It’s a place filled with radical welcome, questioning, faith, joy and community. Because it is Pride Month, the two large flags over the front doors ( cast in bronze more than 100 years ago ) are not the American Flag and the flag of the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church flag is replaced with an equally large Pride Flag.
This past Sunday wasn’t just a day to be in church. For our Shia Muslim brothers and sisters, last Sunday was the observance of Ashura.
On the sidewalk in front of the church, about 15 men were preparing to carry two very large and long flagpoles. NYPD vehicles had blocked traffic at 50th & Park Ave on the East side of the avenue so that marchers were safe to step off and walk. The flagpoles were different in design and different in the large flags attached to them. When I saw them, I could already here loudspeakers from 2 blocks further up Park Avenue. The march had already begun. The men had a few chairs set up by way of keeping the poles and flags off of the ground. I wandered over and asked the man holding the back/ bottom end of one of the flagpoles what was happening.
He gave me the basic sketch description of the day of observance. We agreed that nothing on the planet has changed since that grandson was murdered 1,300 years ago and now. I wished them a peaceful walk. It’s a public gathering of mourning and protest over murder and so “have a happy march” wasn’t really the right wording.
I walked back up to the steps and sat on the foot of one of the columns at the door of the church. It was all pretty interesting. A few of the young men- and they all seemed to be about 18-35- had swords with the tips cut off. They were laughing and working on their technique of quickly drawing the swords and then sliding them back in to their scabbards. The men holding the flagpoles weren’t being silly at all.
I don’t much about Islam but I have been around a few mosques, both in the US and in Marrakech. I know that there is no decorative artwork on the inside. The insides have (sometimes enormous) calligraphies of words from the Qu’ran. I got why effort was being made to insure that none of the flags touched the ground.
As I sat and watched, a man walked up Park Avenue right past this group on the sidewalk. He didn’t stop to engage with the men but started to complain as he passed by them. His voice rose as he mounted the steps and walked past me into the church, presumably to use the bathrooms that are open to all.
" …who the fuck these people think they are waving swords around…this is America, nobody here is waving swords at people…they have no right to have those swords it’s dangerous somebody needs to take them away fucking people with their swords…" and he walked into the church.
Utterly disheartening. I didn’t even make eye contact no less engage this angry man. On his way out, he turned down the steps and headed right for them with the same loud protestations streaming from his mouth. What he did not do is stop and engage with them and escalate. A few of them turned and watched as he went past, still complaining.
How sad. How small. How obviously racist. This older white man was just furious. It was in no way worth it to try to engage with him and gently remark that hundreds of swords get raised in military parades on July 4th all over America every year. He was angry that brown people had swords and were appearing to draw and raise them. ( While the flagpoles were decorated with hard plastic/ mylar scimitars and such, the swords were your basic straight silver-colored metal with the tips cut off blunt. )
How complex and quintessentially American. As he only used his words, while I was sad to hear them I appreciated his right to USE those words. His Free Speech is as valid as the Free Speech being exercised by the Muslim men. He went on his way, they finished preparing their flagpoles and walked up the sidewalk to join the procession.
It remained a peaceable day.