Persimmon and Lavender Lattes

My daughter is home from college, her final holiday break as an undergraduate. One of the first things she made me was homemade lavender syrup. She talked about how she has been making more and how simple it was. We talked about capitalism and consumerism and how all of us have what we need already around us. I stood beside her yesterday as she was patiently preparing this syrup from lavender I happened to have from a trip a week ago to Small State Provisions. So she made this syrup and after a night of it settling, I started my morning as usual with my preparations.

Two things ended up delighting me, the first was the persimmon I cut and ate while my Moka Pot was doing her thing with the fresh ground beans I picked up from a local roaster. It was me creating my coffee shop mornings at home, that is something I have decided to do lately, just can't in good conscience do a $10 latte anymore. Besides, enjoying my surroundings has been a gift I've always given myself, I love the time in my books, it is my meditation and prayer.

So this morning, after my Advent devotion (I'm reading Luke and let me tell you, The Human One left nothing ambiguous, if one was really listening), I started looking around my temporary dwellings at my books, trying to decide what would make the journey with me to my next location as a Chaplain. These aren't even all that will be in my Atheneum. The rest are in storage waiting for when they will come home. These are the ones I've acquired in the last two years, only a handful made the initial journey of what was supposed to only be the summer of 2023.

Looking at these as we enter the final weeks of what has been the most emotionally fraught and psychologically challenging year of any of our recent memories, I am reminded of what is still accessible and still available to all of us. We still have heart, soul, mind, will, emotion, and spirit. We still get to choose us. Luke, the methodical historian who years after Mark wrote his gospel decided to put another account to the times The Human One walked the earth and shifted the atmosphere. It was not unlike the tumult the United States has been under since January 20, 2025. It has felt unnerving and like an endless roller coaster. We have our own mad king and surrounding sycophants who would do anything for access to power and control. But my reading of the canon and the canon of African American literature reminds me that this, too, will pass. It is a rest, a recalling, a reforming, and for others, a reckoning.

We told you so became the refrain of so many of us who are Onyx. We tried to warn the nation, Octavia Butler did in The Parable of the Sower and the entire series that followed. Melissa Harris Perry did in Sister Citizen. Robert P. Jones did in White Too Long, and Ijeoma Oluo did in Mediocre.

The problem, one of many, is that people have become lazy, want the quick and easy sound bite, don't want to do the slow work of reading, thinking, writing, and talking with others. Just jumping with emotions and click bait that we learned in the last two weeks (again, so many of us already knew) was operated by farms in places like Russia and Nigeria, massive data bots that sought to stir up emotions of the CloudDancers™ who were afraid of their shadow and the Colors of the World™ of the Crayon™ Box being more delightful, more sought after, and just more interesting than them. It has all been a lot.

When things seem nonsensical and beyond reasoning, I go to the scholars, like Dr. Keisha Blain, Dr. Imani Perry, Dr. Jemar Tisby, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, and others who for the better part of the past decade have been reckoning with our complicated history of a nation of people not-from-here. Only the First Nation People can claim this land as "theirs" - the rest of us were forced here or came here seeking relief from distress. That is what we are facing now, the fourth and fifth waves of people who have a few more choices in the Colors of the World™ box than that Pantone™ Color of the Year people now scared (well, they've been that way since 2008, but even more so since Charlottesville in 2015 with the khaki pants, polo shirts, and tiki torches).

What I know, what history has taught me, is that this will course correct. 

In my reading of Luke's gospel yesterday, Luke 11:37-54 NRSVue, is the section where I kept underlining the "woe to you" because The Human One was calling out the powers-that-wannabe. He told them about themselves in no uncertain terms. He didn't play around with them and their fake piety. He named a thing a thing. With full conviction and him knowing there was more than himself to consider.

I was reminded that the state we are in is because of the sin of white supremacy. Robert P. Jones wrote in his book that one of the issues we are facing is the to the white Christians he was writing to, is that "we are Cain...white Christians have been most disfigured by white supremacy...and white Christians go into overload on "try to to protect their own sense of innocence or being the good ones." 

As an independent scholar, I grapple with history. Like the Mwalimu in Psalm 78 and in Akan tradition of the Sankofa moment, I look back over the lens of time to see where we missed it. This is an awakening moment for the entire country, if they dare to see. What Dr. Jones suggests (again, writing to white Christians) is that "allowing the waves of the past to crash on the shore of the present until the rhythm is familiar enough to ring in the ears, is a critical step toward healing and wholeness." (pp. 226-227

The issue has been that so many have refused to do their own work, to their detriment, and unfortunately, to the detriment of the rest of us.

So, here we are, in this Advent season. On this particular Friday, a week out from when these same people will sit around and pretend they are filled with love and light.

Changing is hard and requires us to look beyond just ourselves, not the white Christian preoccupation with individual sin, but the broader of humanity and social justice. There is still time, still hope, still possibility.

But until then, I will sip my homemade lavender lattes, enjoy the presence of my daughter, reap the fruit of thirty-nine years of parenting, and look out to tomorrow.

 ™2025 on a beautiful Friday filled with still and yet.