Stories and Reconciliation

One of the most formative times of my life was being a student at USC during the Los Angeles Riots in 1992. I can remember the feeling of the air literally pulsing around me with the sound of what must have been twenty helicopters, and the perennial sound of hundreds of fire truck and ambulance sirens. This event propelled me and many of my friends to try to understand the sources of racial hatred, conflict, and misunderstanding together, and I have tried to be someone who both appreciates racial and cultural differences and who demonstrates willingness to move across them as well.

I had an experience this past Sunday that really gave me a new perspective on what racial reconciliation means. I attend a predominately Japanese American church, many of whose members either experienced WWII interment camps themselves or had parents/other family members who did. The WWII era is very much a living and often painful memory for many. However, there are others in the church of other ethnicities who also have painful memories of the WWII era, and these stories have often not been heard. Last Sunday, a friend of mine stood and shared about his own struggles in the church because of his own family history of oppression by the Japanese in the South Pacific during this same time period. This was a painful story for him to tell, and he was unable to speak in the midst of it because of his tears. After a few minutes where he tried to get a hold of his emotions, a Japanese man in our congregation came alongside him at the podium up front and began to read the rest of the difficult story.

I've thought a lot about racial reconcilation, and struggled alongside friends of different ethnicities as we have sought to understand and love each other. But this shed new light on a few things for me. Reconciliation begins when we are able to tell each others' stories and feel the pain as if it was our own. Reconciliation involves standing in a place of pain that someone else has experienced because of something my own race has done. And our stories are the beginning point of this. Perhaps if all of us connected with the pain and joy in each others' stories better, we would less readily slander each other, stereotype each other, and kill each other.