“Reconciliation” | Reflection by Rev. Heidi Thorsen

On a blustery ten-degree day in February, just south of Lake Placid, NY, my husband Will and I made one final stop on our “babymoon” weekend away: a pilgrimage to John Brown’s homestead and gravesite. On October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown lead a diverse group of armed men to the Federal Arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Fed up with a country in which Black people were routinely enslaved and stripped of their humanity, Brown had come to the conclusion that drastic action was needed. But the raid failed: there were many casualties and injuries, and Brown himself, among others, was tried and executed for treason and murder.

John Brown has a complicated legacy. While I don’t condone his violent methods, a part of me understands his radical response to a world that just didn’t make sense - a world where some people were treated as little more than property based on the color of their skin. John Brown was trying to reconcile the reality of the world he lived with the reality of the world as it should be. That is one of the meanings of the word “reconciliation”: to find an acceptable way of dealing with two or more ideas, needs, etc. that seem to be opposed to each other. On this point, I think we have a lot to learn from John Brown. We must never lose sight of our vision of the world as it should be, a vision that is most clearly expressed in our Christian faith through Jesus’s teachings about the kingdom of God. And we must continue to try and reconcile this world with that vision that God has given us - a vision of justice, freedom, and peace.

We have a long way to go, and many wounds to heal, before we can approach deep, authentic racial reconciliation. But in the meantime, we can do our best to reconcile the reality that we live in with our understanding of the world as it should be— working towards God’s kingdom through the ways we think, feel, and act every day.

I sincerely hope that the world my child is born into will be a bit more like the kingdom of God than the world I was born into, over thirty years ago. May each generation be a part of this work of reconciliation, as we continue on our journey towards the kingdom of God.