An Unnoticed, Life Changing Moment
By R. Hal Ritter
[Dr. Hal Ritter is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas, and he serves as the Assistant Director of Pastoral Care for Counseling at the Hillcrest Samaritan Counseling Center. Ritter teaches counseling courses as adjunct faculty in the Graduate School at Baylor University.]
The purpose of this autobiographical story is to discuss, for the first time, a moment in my life that has challenged me for thirty-four years. I have never spoken about this incident, but for some reason I mentioned it last week to a colleague at a meeting of our local ministerial alliance. My friend suggested that I write it down.
I am sure that what happened went mainly unnoticed except for the few people who were involved, and I suppose that none of them has any memory of it. I have often debated within myself whether or not it was actually "life changing." But I know it was life changing in the sense that it created a memory and awareness in me that I will never forget, and I hope it has made me a different person. However, I know with my human limitations, that I disappoint myself over and over again.
I was born in Summerville, South Carolina, in the Dorchester County Hospital. Years ago the hospital was moved and merged with two other county hospitals, and the old hospital building is now used for county health services. I lived in a segregated community, and my grandfather, who hired black men to work in his yard and plow his garden each year, always said that "nigras" were all right so long as they stayed in their place. Now, forty-five years later, I understand how offensive the term "nigra" is, but as a child I do not have any memory of ever hearing the term used in sarcasm or insult.
I did not learn blatant prejudice at home. My father always said that all people are to be treated with respect, until or unless they give reason not to be. Then they are to be treated with caution, but still respected. His particular saying was this: "A woman is to be treated as a lady until she proves herself otherwise, and a man is to be treated as a gentleman until he proves himself otherwise." Dad made no racial distinctions in the application of this saying, and it equally applied to whites as to all others.
Nevertheless, I lived in racially segregated community. I went to white schools and a white church, and I knew I did not have to go to the "colored" restroom or the "colored" window at the Dairy Queen or the "colored" water fountain. In some ways, it was a fairly typical, southern town. To my knowledge we had no Ku Klux Klan, and I have no memory of ever observing anyone walking around someone else in order to avoid the person because of their color. In other words, as my grandfather would say, all things were in their proper place.
At age eleven, my family moved to Littleton, Colorado. As a sixth grader I had to be bused to school, actually to two schools. I spent that year at two different schools because of over-crowding. While my younger sister walked to a neighborhood school two blocks from our home, my whole sixth grade class was bused across town to another school. It was an older, lower income area with a mixed ethnicity of whites, blacks and Hispanics. We were the whites from the "other side of town," but I do not remember any particular concerns with the busing. But it was my first experience of ever being teased because of my southern accent. I was sometimes asked to repeat words that I had spoken, not realizing the sarcasm in the request to repeat them.
About fifteen days before my seventeenth birthday, in the middle of my junior year in high school, my family moved from Littleton to Montgomery, Alabama. There I attended the Sidney Lanier High School, which is named for a southern poet whose poetry I had to memorize for English class. It was there, in the spring of 1966, that the defining "moment" occurred.
I had just left a class in business law and was walking toward the boys` restroom. While I was not a smoker, the restrooms were the places where the students were allowed to smoke between classes. I could smell the smoke as I approached the door. But then it happened. A black girl student, somewhat small in size, was walking between classes with an armload of books. An overweight white boy, who was also in the business law class, walked up behind her and shoved her books and papers out of her hands, spilling them all over the hallway floor.
Immediately, a number of white students gathered around the girl and began to laugh and laugh. I was paralyzed. I had never seen such blatant abuse. Quietly, alone, the black girl, surrounded by a sea of laughing white students, crouched down on the floor and began to gather her things. The white students continued to laugh. I stared in disbelief. The laughter continued until she had gathered all of her books and papers and silently walked away. As the moments passed, I felt awful. What had just happened was a violation of what I believed, as a Christian to be right; and I stood by and did nothing. It is a decision that I have regretted for the ensuing thirty-four years.
I do not presume to think that I can know how the apostle Peter felt when the crowing rooster called him to awareness of his denials about knowing Jesus. But somehow I think that is how I felt. In that moment of denial, of just standing by and doing nothing, I was saying, "No, I do not know Jesus. I have nothing to do with who he is. He means nothing to me." No doubt Peter was acting in fear, perhaps afraid of arrest, perhaps fear for his own life. But what was my fear? I did not feel any threat physically, that somehow I would be in danger if I took a stand. Perhaps it was just peer pressure, or ambivalence, not knowing what to do. I do not know. But I do know that in a moment of ethical decision making in the presence of blatant injustice, I chose to remain silent and do nothing. Was I deluding myself, making myself think that I was simply staying neutral, that somehow I should not become involved, and that neutrality in the face of injustice is an acceptable decision?
I walked on to my next class, but I could not concentrate the rest of the day. Over and over I thought about what happened. Even now, all these years later, I remember the laughter of the overweight white boy and the terror in the eyes of the black girl who was totally alone and who knew that remaining silent was her only way to safety.
I have often wondered how to atone for that moment of denial of my Lord. I have prayed and asked God to forgive me, and yet the memory is as real as if it had happened five minutes ago. I have resolved within myself never to do that again, never to let a blatant injustice go unchallenged. And yet, as I know myself, I have, no doubt, walked by other incidents of injustice again and again without ever allowing them to register in my consciousness. My decision to do nothing on that day in 1966 lives on as a constant reminder that all of my good intentions may become denial in the moment of decision.
One of the things that I appreciate about the apostle Peter, however, was his willingness to move ahead with his life and be teachable. In his vision of the unclean animals and his subsequent encounter with the Gentile Cornelius, he took a stand for God as the God for all people. For me, after this "unnoticed, life changing moment," I became much more vocal and active on issues of civil rights. I am proud of the fact that in my junior year at the Baptist school, Charleston Southern University, I was the only white charter member of the school`s Afro-American society. It is a membership that was very troublesome for my white fraternity brothers and for some of my fellow Baptist ministerial student friends. Three years later I was in Louisville, Kentucky, attending seminary, and while there I spent a year attending a predominantly African American Baptist church. One time, when the pastor was out of town, I was asked to preach in the Sunday morning service. It was a joyous time for me, and when the pastor returned the next week he thanked me from the pulpit and said, "I`ve talked to several folks, and they say Brother Ritter`s got soul." There is no greater compliment that I could have ever received. Somehow, like Peter, I learned that a predominantly black church is still God`s church, and I learned that God can still use me.
I spent a year as a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and I participated in two open housing demonstrations. But through all the subsequent years of my life, the "unnoticed, life changing moment" is still the place that I returns the defining event in shaping my thoughts and attitudes about social justice issues and human dignity. It is also a moment that taught me a humility about dealing with people who disappoint and do not live up to what they say, who do not take a stand when they should. Like Peter, I know how they feel. Maybe they are not scared. Maybe they are not embarrassed. But for some reason they do not know what to do, so they do nothing.
It is also a lesson about forgiveness for me. Peter bragged to Jesus that he would forgive his neighbor seven times, and Jesus responded that forgiveness should be unlimited, seventy times seven. No doubt Peter replayed the scene of denying Christ over and over again in his thinking across the years, but Peter also personally experienced the unlimited forgiveness of seventy times seven.
Perhaps, now, I am less impatient with those who disappoint. Perhaps I am more forgiving of those who do not act as I think they should. Perhaps. But I also know myself well enough to know that my indignation often flares when I think an undeserved injustice is being perpetrated. Am I a different person now than I was when the "unnoticed, life changing moment" occurred? I hope so. I hope I have "changed." But I am also painfully aware that I must not, to use Paul`s words, count myself to have apprehended. I hear in my heart the words of St. Augustine, that I am simul justus ut peccator, both justified and sinner. Thank God, that in the Lord Jesus Christ, forgiveness is seventy times seven. There is still much to do.
