We are light

The storyline, which is based on a true story, takes place between 1992 and 1995, beginning with scenes from the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Hilary Swank, in the movie Freedom Writers, plays the role of Erin Gruwell, a new, excited schoolteacher who leaves the safety of her hometown to teach at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, a formerly high achieving school which has recently had an integration program put in place. Her enthusiasm is quickly challenged when she realizes that her class is made up of all “at-risk” students, thought of by some as “un-teachables”, but not the eager students she was expecting. The students segregate themselves into racial groups in the classroom, fights break out, and eventually most of the students stop turning up to class. Not only does Mrs. Gruwell meet opposition from her students, but she also has a hard time with her department head, who refuses to let her teach her students with books lest they get damaged and lost, and instead tells her to focus on teaching them discipline and obedience.

 

But Mrs. Gruwell has no idea of the kind of students she is really dealing with. They tell her that they have no respect for her, that they don’t trust her, mostly because she is not like them – she is white and she shares this trait with only one other boy in the class. The class is made up mostly of Latinos, Cambodian, and Black students. Despite choosing the school on purpose because of its integration program, Erin is unprepared for the nature of her classroom, whose students live by generations of strict moral codes of protecting their own at all cost. Many are in gangs and almost all know somebody that has been killed by gang violence. The Latinos hate the Cambodians who hate the blacks and so on. The only person the students hate more is Mrs. Gruwell. It isn't until Erin holds an unsanctioned discussion about a recent drive-by shooting death that she fully begins to understand what she’s up against. And it isn’t until she provides an assignment of writing a daily journal - which will not be graded, and will remain unread by her unless they give her permission - that the students begin to open up to her.*

 

Erin realizes that her students have encountered, either first-hand, second-hand, or with explicit knowledge, gang initiation. Young children enduring beatings, engaging in criminal activity, and other types of hazing is what makes them part of their new family. After gang initiation they are different people, belonging to a new family, a new way of life; a way of life that demands loyalty to their own kind, even if it means covering up felonious crimes such as robbery or murder.

 

One day during class, Mrs. Gruwell intercepts a racist drawing of one of her students and uses it to teach them about the Holocaust. She taught them that in Nazi Germany they would post pictures and posters of Jews with disfigured faces so that the evil regime could convince German citizens that Jews are less human than non-Jews. Miraculously having the classroom silenced as a result of this history lesson, one student raised his hand, asking, “What’s the Holocaust?” The next year comes, and Gruwell teaches her class again for their sophomore year. She invites several Holocaust survivors to talk with her class about their experiences, then takes them on a field trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

 

A transformation begins to take place in Erin Gruwells’ class. The students begin to experience a different kind of initiation. An initiation of compassion for others, borne from the reality that these kids realize they are not the only ones who suffer; that there is fear, violence, and degradation in all corners of the world. Erin was teaching her students that they need to overcome this, by understanding that their lives do not have to be controlled by anger, violence, or even the imprisonment of gang affiliation. Mrs. Gruwell was initiating them in a new way, into a new life and a new reality.

 

In class, after she had the students read The Diary of Anne Frank, they invite Miep Gies, the woman who sheltered Anne Frank from the German soldiers, to come talk to them. She tells them her experiences hiding Anne Frank. When one student tells her that she is his hero, she denies it, claiming she was merely doing the right thing. She told him – and all the other students gathered – “that she is not a hero, rather they, the students, are the heroes. And even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room.”

 

Today is one of the Church’s designated days to celebrate the sacrament of Holy Baptism, because it is the day that we celebrate the very Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ. Holy Baptism is the initiation into Christ’s Body, the Church.

 

In this celebration, we are called once again, with God’s help, to turn away from all those things that draw us from the love of God. Today we remember our own baptism, remind ourselves of that Baptismal Covenant when we promise to follow Jesus and obey him as our Lord. Baptism is our entrance into the new life of grace. Baptism is a death, actually. It is a death of our former selves; the self that we had before we embraced God. Through the waters of baptism we die to that self, we embrace God and promise to follow him, trust in him, and to continue in the historic traditions of the church where we share the Eucharistic feast in Christ’s body and blood, proclaim the apostolic teaching through the creeds, and promise to love God and love our neighbors as he loves us. And it is the grace of God through this sacrament that enables us to do these things.

 

Initiations into fraternities, sororities, or gangs are intended to give people a new identity by initiating them into a new community. There are initiations in thousands of ways, including initiations into corporate culture and even the church. But there is only one initiation that changes our lives from the inside out, that begins a lifelong process of transformation. And this initiation of new birth and indeed of new life is Baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It is a different kind of initiation. Like Mrs. Gruwell’s multi-year long journey with her students, transformation of our hearts to be “lights in a dark room” is a process that we grow into. This process takes our hearts and souls and transforms them into the grace-filled lives that God confers on us in this Holy Sacrament.

 

A transformation began to take place in the lives of the students in Mrs. Gruwell’s class. And this transformation included something these kids didn’t realize – their former selves were dying. The light that began to grow in their hearts was overpowering the darkness that had taken hold of them: the darkness of violence, segregation and fear. They began to see each other and others as people. Dare I say, they began to strive for justice and peace among others, and respect the dignity of other human beings.

It is at this point for us that the significance of baptism becomes clear. It is not merely a religious rite; it is a death. As Roy Harrisville says, “It is a death of the old Adam and Eve who are crucified together in Christ. In this death, we the baptized are proclaimed children of God and transformed into offspring who may see through such death to the rising of new life in resurrection.”

 

In baptism, we are proclaimed children of God, and God’s beloved. In our tradition, we usually receive the baptism of Jesus as a child, before there is any need of repentance. The Good News is that no matter what, no matter whom, we can be baptized in the name of God, and know we are the beloved of God, and that Jesus is our truth and will empower our lives. We are the beloved of God before, during, and after repentance. The baptism of Jesus was God’s Revelation of that Good News, and our baptism is the sign that that Good News is for us, too. And we claim it for ourselves and for our children.

To be the Beloved of God. What an awesome Gift. What an incredible knowledge. What a welcome call—to live out our lives as the Beloved of God.

Thus today there are those who begin their lives as a Christian by water and the word. It is a new and different kind of initiation. The kind that confers grace upon our lives that we might be lights in the dark places in the world as we are bonded to the Light of the world in our baptism. Like Miep Gies told the students at Wilson High School, ‘within your own small way, you can turn on a small light in a dark room.”

Just as it was so in the beginning of creation when a wind from God swept over the waters and when God spoke the whole world began. God still speaks and a new world springs forth. And in each generation, God makes the church, calling by water and the word a new people into being. This we celebrate today. We are his children. We are heirs of the kingdom. We are beloved.

 

*From the synopsis page at www.imbd.com