by Chad Senuta
The Episcopal Diocese of Nebraska led a pilgrimage to Tennessee and Alabama focused on racial reconciliation June 6-12. The pilgrimage was named “Monuments and Roads” because the pilgrims would visit both monuments and roads in Tennessee and Alabama that mark key moments in our national history. The organizers of the pilgrimage also acknowledged that “our group will carry monuments within ourselves, given to us in kindness or cruelty from people or groups in our lives, and each of us is traveling a road with Jesus and the Holy Spirit back towards God’s restoration of the whole human family.” The group spent time in daily prayer, reflection, and conversation to help integrate and process their experience.
Participants in the pilgrimage were required to have completed the Sacred Ground program, which is an eleven-part discussion series “built around a powerful online curriculum of documentary films and readings that focus on Indigenous, Black, Latino, and Asian/Pacific American histories as they intersect with European American histories.” Claudia McKinsey, a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Wamego, heard about the pilgrimage when she attended a Sacred Ground Program facilitated by the Rev. Kay Dagg and her husband LeRoy in Topeka.
While attending Sacred Ground, Claudia was moved to tears by the videos. She wanted to see these places in person to speak to others from a place of education and first-hand experience. She was also attracted to the pilgrimage considering the organizer was the Rev. Ben Varnum, whom she had gotten to know while visiting St. Thomas, Overland Park and attending adult Sunday School classes there.
Claudia shared that the trip had a powerful impact on her. Hearing the stories of injustice that ended in violence and death made her angry. She felt outraged that people could do these things to one another. Two poignant and memorable experiences were walking the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where civil rights marchers were brutally attacked during the first voting rights march, and visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which is “the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.” When asked to describe how the pilgrimage impacted her faith, she said, “The whole trip challenged my heart.”
Returning from the pilgrimage, Claudia hopes to share her experience with others. She wants to have open conversations about what she saw and heard. And she yearns to expose the beliefs and practices that allow racism to continue. Claudia also wants to commend one of the books that she brought home from the pilgrimage, The Official U.S. Civil Rights Trail: What Happened Here Changed the World. She feels it will help others experience the journey she was able to take in person.
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