By Carol Burnside

I am a priest, and I make quilts with messages about racism.  

I do it because I asked God what I could do to help, and God said, “Make quilts.” I said, “OK. I don’t exactly understand, but I will do it.” I was thinking about Naaman in the fifth chapter of 2 Kings. He wanted to get rid of his leprosy, but when Elisha sent him a message to wash in the River Jordan seven times, he thought he had better ideas. Then his servants asked him a crucial question, “If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?” 

So now I have a “Quilt Show To Go” called “A Race Against Race.” When my friend, the Rev. Valerie Mayo, invited me to show the quilts in Durham at a thing she called “Sacred Ground,” I said, “Sure, when shall I get there?” Later, I wondered what Sacred Ground is. It turns out to be an Episcopal Church thing where people learn and talk about racism—I’m in!  

When I got to the Sacred Ground Regional Gathering, I was impressed to learn that this event would be held over two days in two churches. The first day was at a historically White church, and the second day was at a historically Black church created in the 1880s to provide an Episcopal Church home to the Black descendants of slaves in the nearby Hayti district of Durham. We all know about “separate but equal”; these two thriving congregations have a complicated history. And yet, all of these years later, the two congregations are working together for racial reconciliation.  

Through worship, conversations, and workshops, the ambience of the event was welcoming, loving, open, embracing. Over and over, I heard repetitions of words that are on my quilts: AUTHENTICITY, EMPATHY, VULNERABILITY, CONNECTEDNESS. It was abundantly clear that a focus of Sacred Ground is building relationships through sometimes difficult, but always loving, conversations about race and racism. I have always hoped my quilts would have this same effect. 

It is fitting that a quilt entitled “+Michael Curry” was watching over us throughout our Sacred Ground weekend, because Sacred Ground and Becoming Beloved Community are important legacies of the past nine years. The background of the quilt has “love” on it too many times to count. Remember Presiding Bishop Curry saying over and over, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God”? For nine years he let us know that the essence of our Christian faith is LOVE. We will carry on Becoming Beloved Community through Sacred Ground for decades after the retirement of Bishop Curry, and we will never be the same.

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The Rev. Carol Burnside grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she met the folks who introduced her to The Episcopal Church and involved her in her first act of racial reconciliation, both before she entered kindergarten. She is now a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland.