William E Pannel, introduction to My Friend, the Enemy, 1968:
My own personal hang-up stems from my growing desire, and I must add, need, to be properly related to my people, whoever they are, and to Christianity, whatever that is. My understanding of the latter is that Christianity is “Christ in you,” a definition calculated to set at rest my evangelical friends. This ought also to define the former, and so it does until I venture out of my study to associate with the rest of God’s family. Then the ideology blurs, and our devotion to each other becomes tentative and halting. Yet it is this search for family and the desire to belong that animates the current crisis in human relations. Martin Niemoeller declared several years ago that when the Heidelberg Confession was formulated the burning issue was “Who can find a merciful God?” Today, he said, the crucial issue is “Who can find a merciful neighbor?” If the church dares to wax theological and declare correctly that Jesus Christ is the answer to both questions, then she had better prepare to defend herself. I personally know churches in all kinds of denominations whose flight to suburbia testifies eloquently to their rejection of me as a brother and neighbor.
But then perhaps I am making too much of this. After all, isn’t our “citizenship in heaven?” Yes, but that gives little balm when viewing the bloodied form of a twelve-year-old lying face down on Newark’s cold pavement. Scriptural quotations about the end time and the spirit of the age fail to soothe a breaking spirit when one views children looting a neighborhood store for a paltry bag of potato chips. But what would my white brother know of this? He taught me to sing “Take The World But Give Me Jesus.” I took Jesus. He took the world and then voted right wing to insure his property rights. A riot can make you feel more lonely than suburbia will ever know.
So I’ve written a book, but the writing of it has settled very little. I’ve learned a bit more about myself, but writing has only intensified the anxiety and agony of being an alien in one’s own land. I respond to Frantz Fanon, who declared: “An endless task, the cataloguing of reality. We accumulate facts, we discuss them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is made, one has the feeling of incompleteness.”