Hate: The Internal World of Exploiters

Rev. Leona Stucky

Reverend Stucky is a UU Santa Fe affilliate minister and author of ​The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God.

"We knew in common that something was essentially screwed about the world. Life delivered a losing hand. We played heartily and well, but earned few concessions. Revelry belied the torment of our defeat, which was predictable. We knew the edges of covert, controlled, rank malevolence, and surmised how it was unleashed against unsuspecting and weaker souls, like those in Southeast Asia. Cognizance of human depravity bound us. I thought I’d learned those pulverizing lessons better than most.”―Leona Stucky, The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God

I don’t remember when, in my lily-white-rural-Mennonite upbringing, I discovered that Black people existed.  Perhaps in National Geographic pictures – a magazine my worldly Uncle and Aunt ordered for us at Christmas.  Perhaps during some Sunday School class when missionaries talked about saving the Africans.  To me, ‘segregation’ meant the high school lunch line, where General Conference Mennonite kids and their Christian friends ate first, and where Holdeman Mennonite kids, who wore beards and more conservative dress, filled in the end of the line.  Still, I couldn’t hate the Holdeman Mennonites or the African Americans. Their lives had no bearing on mine.  They simply were not real enough in my conscious mind to matter to me....READ MORE.

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