Popular Christian speaker and worship leader Carlos Whittaker discusses his book “Enter Wild: Exchange a Mundane Faith Life for Life With an Uncontainable God” and shares how he is working to heal racial injustice in our country.
Father Dave asks Carlos what he would say to people who are uncomfortable speaking about racism. Carlos responds, “My advice is if you don’t know what to say, don’t do too much research trying to figure out what to say and just say what is on your heart. Because I promise you, if you say what’s on your heart, if you’re reading the Gospels, if you’re saying what it is that the spirit is pressing upon you, it’s going to be right. Maybe you’ll accidentally offend some people. Let me tell you this, Black men and women in America are less concerned about being offended because of the way you’ve said something incorrectly then we are concerned that you just won’t say anything at all. Say something.”
RELATED: Katie Prejean-McGrady on Catholic Social Teaching and Our Call to Justice
“There’s a book called ‘White Fragility‘ that I’m trying to get a lot of my friends to read because right now is not the time to be fragile as a white person in America. Please don’t let your feelings get hurt over the course of these next few months. I haven’t been able to have a fragile emotional spectrum in a long time. So can you at least move your fragility for a couple of weeks for me, because I haven’t ever been able to be that way.”
Father Dave mentions Carlos’ Q&A’s on Instagram, where he creates a safe space for people to ask questions about difficult topics like racism. “Most of the churches and conferences that book me have been white middle-class kind of people,” he says. “So they see me as safe and I feel like I am. I’m a safe place for them to ask questions that they would be scared to ask somebody else. So I’ve been doing these Q&A’s and people are asking me questions. I give [my followers] a safe space. I’m answering all the questions, like, ‘Can I say Black lives matter?’ Or ‘What do I talk about with my racist parents? Should I give them a pass?’ I try to do these Q&A’s every few days and answer questions in a graceful way, but also in a way that I think is going to propel people into conversation.”
RELATED: Faith in Action: Resources for Today’s Anti-Racist Catholic
Father Dave asks how Carlos would explain the Black Lives Matter movement to those who might not understand. “You don’t need to have to be a rocket scientist to know that all lives matter. But can I tell you that if my house is on fire and the fire truck comes down my street and starts spraying every single other house, because all the houses matter, I’m going to say, ‘My house is on fire! Please put my house out.’ The reason why we have to say that Black lives matter is because right now Black lives are on fire. So we’ve got to focus on putting that fire out … I don’t want to have to talk about this all the time, but I’ve been left no option but to talk about it right now … I don’t believe that police lives don’t matter. Just because I say Black lives matter doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that there are great 99% of police officers that are incredible. You can say one thing, you can talk about one thing without having to talk about everything else.”
Carlos discusses his book, “Enter Wild.” “I’ve gotten to a space where there’s conversational intimacy with God all day long on a daily basis. Since I’m in this space and it’s a wild space… I’m certain to see some things that I hadn’t seen before. … I’m talking about entering rest so that you’ve lowered the volume of life. And then when you lower the volume of life the volume of what’s important begins to rise … Once you’re interested, he tells you what you need to fix. Then you move into interwar, which is the middle section of the Bible. That’s where a lot of us are in right now. That’s this racial injustice. That’s the thing that we’re fighting. We’re fighting things that are spiritual things … So you enter war and then once you fight those battles, you enter wild and you get to step into these miracles, signs, and wonders that are all around us. And what I believe is going to happen is there’s going to be a miraculous healing of our nation. There’s going to be a miraculous healing of hearts. And I’m beginning to see even stone cold callous hearts of people that have had racial bias for a long time begin to crumble. Because I honestly believe we’re taking the spiritual, we’re taking the natural and the supernatural and we’re putting them together.”
Originally published June 18, 2020.