Moses The Black And Many More Hellfighters

Today (most of) the Christian church commemorates two of its great teachers from the first half of the first millennium. Augustine (November 13, 354 - August 28, 430) is probably more familiar to my reading audience; he wrote the City of God and the Confessions oft regarded as the first autobiography who became a Christian late in life, whose mom Monica had prayed for him for decades that he also spent as a dualist -- a simple way of expressing Manichaeism -- and living out of wedlock with a woman who gave birth to his son Adeodatus, the Bishop of Hippo (insert joke here) who is famous, or infamous, for praying, "O Lord, make me pure, but not yet."

Now Moses the Black (born 330; my devotion said his martyrdom was this day about 258, but other sources say 405, so I'll go with that) you'll meet simply by shifting east to Egypt -- Augustine's Hippo was in modern Algeria, but I digress -- is more of an adventure story! He served a government official in Egypt and got fired for theft and suspected murder; before he became a Christian he led a gang of bandits in the Nile Valley and hid among monks when he attempted to rob a man TWICE and was foiled each time.

Moses the Black didn't have the best start as a monk -- he beat some robbers who came to the monastery and brought them to the chapel and asked what to do with them because he didn't think it Christian to hurt them (more?), but then the robbers turned Christian too! -- but he became the leader of a hermit colony in the desert and died a martyr when he and seven others refused to fight off a bandit invasion of their monastery. Indeed, they welcomed the bandits with open arms. Not as well known (to me, anyway) but we have in both their contemporaneous lives stories worth telling and worth  remembering. Indeed, you wouldn't do a bad thing comparing Moses the Black to Gandhi.

The whole nonviolence thing ... interesting thing, as I type this and come away from the basic search I did for details, I'm reminded of a person I went to Stetson University with who was also black of skin (not my fault, that's how sources refer to my title subject, as "Moses the Black") and who cited as his goal while raising the need for racial equality and excelling in scholarship to be "the Moses of his people". Along with this gentleman and Harriet Tubman (often referred to in American history as the Black Moses) I suspect Rick Whitted, class of '95,  would be in good company. And if he's reading this on a random search of his name, I'd like to tell him "Hi".

Day two of school. Our kids Sarah and Jeffrey got home from day one of school without many bumps and bruises, I say with a wink. Seriously, Sarah in third grade came home with a planner she's supposed to fill out each day and Martha or I initial and send back the following day, while Jeffrey in second grade came home with just a lunch menu. Since Sarah's our oldest child, all the paperwork we need to fill out for school lunches, medical provision, etc. comes home through her. Jeffrey gave high praise -- for him -- to her at the end of his first day, saying she was "really nice", but then cousin Josceline who had Mrs. Braasch two years ago (she's now in fourth grade) said she's really nice unless you do something bad. Not much on Sarah's teacher Mrs. Tillema did I hear, though ...

It's a learning curve. So was a graphic novel the likes of The Harlem Hellfighters (ISBN 9780307464972) written by Max Brooks of World War Z fame and illustrated by Caanan White of the comic book Über, both of which I'd read and seen. But the story of the all-black 369th Infantry Regiment from World War I presented here is hardly the movie Glory (a sanitized version of an all-black Civil War regiment). Race relations were, and many would say still are, not as great as they ought to be, and this book shows it. The name of the book comes from the Germans, for ultimately the 369th despite the discrimination they faced in the United States and even among their own command -- another reason I'm not a big fan of Spartanburg, South Carolina, but I digress -- never lost a foot of ground, never had a soldier captured, and were decorated and decorated.

The truth's got an ugly way of killin' nice stories, David