Daddy Love Read Online Free PDF

States of North America. We are a people created in God’s image and we abide in the great mystery of all Being.
    Shall we not say that we cannot know the limit of our grace? That we cannot plumb the depths of our own single, singular souls, let alone the depths of God?
    Knowing only that we are brothers and sisters in Being—beneath our separate skins.
    The Preacher spoke in a voice of consolation. The Preacher spoke in a voice of tenderness, forgiveness. The Preacher spoke in a voice that did not judge harshly. The Preacher spoke in a voice acquainted with sin.
    The Preacher did not stand at the head of the flock and preach to uplifted faces but moved between the rows of seats in the central and side aisles of the little church with the ease and grace of a true shepherd. Often the Preacher reached out to touch a shoulder, a head, an outstretched hand—
Bless you my brother in Christ! Bless you my sister in Christ! God loves you.
    The Preacher was a visitor at the Church of Abiding Hope. He had several times given guest sermons here in the small asphalt-sided church at the intersection of Labrosse and Fifth Street in the inner-city of Detroit in the shadow of the John Lodge Freeway.
    The congregation of the Church of Abiding Hope—some seventy-five or eighty individuals of whom most were over fifty and only a scattering were what you’d call
young
—gazed upon the Preacher in a transport of incomprehension. It was
white-man’s
speech elevated and wondrous as a hymn of a kind they rarely heard directed toward them and yet in the Preacher’s particular voice intimate as a caress.
    Understanding, their own minister Reverend Thomas Tindall could provide them.
    The Preacher was a tall man of an age no one might have guessed—for his stark sculpted face was unlined, his eyes quick and alert and stone-colored in their deep-set sockets, his beard thick and dark and joyous to behold. His mouth that might have been prim and downturning was a mouth of smiles, a mouth of beckoning.
    The Preacher’s words were elevated but his eyes sparked.
My brothers in Christ. My sisters in Christ. God bless us all!
    The Preacher wore black: for the occasion was somber. A black light-woolen coat, black trousers with a sharp crease, black shoes.
    The Preacher wore a crimson velvet vest: for the occasion was joyous. And at his neck a checked crimson-and-black silk scarf.
    The surprise was, the Preacher was not dark-skinned like the faithful of the Church of Abiding Hope or Reverend Tindall who was the Preacher’s host. The Preacher’s skin was pale and bleached-looking and if you came close, you saw that it was comprised of thin layers, or scales, of transparent skin-tissue, like a palimpsest. The Preacher was the sole
white face
in the church and bore his responsibility with dignity and a sense of his mission.
    The Preacher’s rusted-iron hair that was threaded with silver like shafts of lightning fell to his shoulders in flaring wings. Parted in the center of his head that was noble and sculpted like a head of antiquity.
    The congregation stared hungrily perceiving the Preacher as an emissary from the
white world
who was yet one of their own.
    The Preacher spoke warmly of the great leader W. E. B. DuBois who exhorted us to see the beauty in blackness—
In all of our skins, and beneath our skins. The beauty of Christ.
    The Preacher spoke warmly of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who exhorted us to never give up our dream—
Of full integration, and full citizenship, and the beauty of Christ realized in us as Americans.
    Then in an altered voice the Preacher spoke of his “forging” years in Detroit for he’d been born in this city that was beloved of God even as it was severely tested by God.
    Forged in the rubble of the old lost neighborhood south of Cass and Woodward. In the rubble of destroyed dreams. Now there were small forests of trees pushing through broken houses. Gigantic weeds and thorns pushing through cracked pavement. The