Fellow readers-
Unlike the past five days of our immersion, today was the least jam-packed with things to do and learn about. Instead it was more about experiencing the immediate surroundings of Resurrection Parish, the place we are stationed at in Montgomery, Alabama.
In the morning we were able to attend Sunday mass at Resurrection, which was really neat to notice the differences in how mass is conducted down here versus what we know in the Pacific Northwest. Young children did some interpretive dancing to open up the space for the service, the beautiful gospel choir sang almost the entire time, and at the end Reverend Manuel of the parish brought each of us from the immersion up to the front and thanked us for joining the community in prayer, learning, and celebration.
Afterwards a bunch of us were able to take time and call our maternal figures and wish them a happy mother’s day, and just take a few hours to relax, catch up on rest, snack, and hang out and enjoy each other’s company.
Then we decided to get our bodies moving to do something else in terms of exploring the area around us in Montgomery. We ended up going to Jackson Island about 15 minutes away, where the small town was featured in the movie Big Fish! It was so incredibly cool for those of us who grew up with that movie to see that little strip of abandoned houses and the tree line where children throw their shoes up to hang. But even for those in our group who hadn’t been exposed to the movie, just noticing the differences of the water around the little island, and the ways the long hanging trees swayed all over was a special southern experience that we otherwise might not have been able to have.
Then we returned back to Resurrection and were able to rest more and make dinner- chili and cornbread- and now are waiting to watch a documentary. We’re either going to watch The House I Live In, which tackles our nation’s history of the war on drugs and how it has affected mass incarceration, or 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets, which digs deep into the story of how Jordan Davis, a young black man, was killed by a white man for “playing his car music too loudly.”
Until next time~~
Emma, a proud participant on Civil Rights Immersion