There are many ways to learn a lesson – one is to look at your assumptions.
I was living in Kingston, NY, in the Hudson River Valley. For a year or two I made a practice of going to a different religious service every Sunday morning. I was interested in finding a church with good congregational singing. My observation had been that the fundamentalist churches, who from my perspective had the worst politics, sang full voiced. The churches whose politics I agreed with such as Unitarians kept their heads bent to the hymnal, which cut off the breath and constricted the singing. Some years later I discovered Unity and was so happy to see everyone singing full voiced.
Anyway that Sunday I was in an area of Kingston called Rondout, in the black section. The town had been cut in half with urban renewal with the poor white people on one side and the poor black on the other. I parked around the corner from the church. As I was getting out, I saw a group of about 6 young black men walking down the street. They were walking in the middle of the street, laughing and joking, pushing one another. Definitely dominating the space. I let them pass and remembered hesitating to leave my car there, worried that they might vandalize it just for kicks. It was not an expensive car, but it was all I had, and I was pretty poor. A cracked windshield or stolen battery would have been a huge inconvenience. I crossed my fingers and went inside the church.
It was a fairly small church and the service didn’t start for ½ hour or so. In the meantime, there was a lot of socializing. Women were dressed in their finest. There were not a lot of men. I was probably conspicuous as the only white, but there were welcoming. They started the service with a procession down the center aisle and I was very embarrassed to see that they young guys from the street were the choir. The service went on for a few hours – speaking in tongues and lots of praising. I left in the middle. I didn’t feel an obligation to stay to the end. In retrospect it would have been great if I could have met some of those kids afterwards and gotten to know them as people. My car was fine and I had had a lesson.
