As Coal Strike Looms, Episcopalians Say Prior Strike was Mix of Crucifixion and Resurrection
Episcopal News Service. May 27, 1993 [93112]
The Rev. Stephen Weston, Free-lance Writer and rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Pulaski, Virginia.
As the threat of a major strike by miners against the Peabody Coal Company looms over the hills and valleys of the coal fields, Episcopalians who were involved in a previous strike against the Pittston Company contend that their struggle was a financial, emotional and spiritual experience.
"Something fundamental happened to me," said Uncas McThenia, a professor of Law at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. The Pittston strike broke out in 1989 when McThenia was serving as a Jubilee intern in Appalachia during a sabbatical. "I was ministered to by people in the region who opened their hearts to me. There's something powerful and simple about being an evangelist -- to go out with a stick and a knapsack knowing that you're now the guest and that your host is determining what's for supper."
"I'm not completely done with the experience," McThenia said. "That time four years ago healed a real wounded part of me, a part which separated a fault line between my intellect and my soul, between being a professional and living into the reality of Jesus' resurrection."
The Pittston strike helped McThenia to revise his views of ministry. "It's easy to heal others, and bring other people in: it is hard to hang out, to give up control," he said. "Part of being a professional usually means being powerful -- drawing lines to separate yourself from other people."
What happened to McThenia during the strike erased the lines. "I lived into that paradox. The time to be an advocate is when you give up being a lawyer and just stand there, sharing their pain and having them share yours," he said. "Ministry started when they [the coal strikers] ministered to me, and I didn't have a darn thing to do with it." McThenia said that he went into the coal fields as a stranger. "They trusted me as a friend: I was a stranger no more."
The price for standing with the mining community cost one priest his job. The Rev. Bob Thacker, rector of Christ Church in Roanoke, was arrested on May 24, 1989, at the entrance of Pittston Company's Moss Three coal preparation plant near Carbo, Virginia. As the result of parish conflict in the aftermath of the strike, Thacker was forced to resign.
Thacker, now rector of St. Mark's Anglican Church in Bermuda, said that his action was right for the time. "It impressed upon me the importance of advocacy, not just what I've done for the cause, but for the person. When confronted with issues of a moral nature, for our own integrity, to save our own souls, we need to say what we're called to say. Because we have to do it," Thacker said.
Thacker said that his sense of Christian hope urges him not to give up. "We need to follow where the call leads us. We have the choice of stepping into life, or stepping away from it."
"People in the institutional church were threatened," said Judy Furr, a member of Christ Episcopal Church in Pulaski, Virginia. "When you take a stand with the underprivileged and you're privileged, you've betrayed your class and culture. You're a threat to the community and you will pay for it."
McThenia believes a class struggle continues over the control of land and its ownership. "Over 70 percent of Dickenson County in southwestern Virginia is owned by four or five companies that extract minerals such as coal. We see people as being poor because (we think) they deserve to be poor, rather than recognizing that we're depriving them of land and mineral rights," he said. "It's been that reality of class in America."
Several women who were involved in the Pittston strike report that their experience helped them to define themselves in an entirely new way. "It radically changed who you were," said Linda Johnson of St. Paul, Virginia. Johnson reported that women helped to feed and house the demonstrators in the strike. In return, many of the women "went out into the world to tell what was happening to them. They walked picket lines, shaped strategy and went to jail."
Johnson said that the strike struck at the heart of her own personal history. "As a child who grew up in the coal camps of West Virginia, I knew what it was like to live without a job, without a contract. That is very hard, very scary. For me the dimensions of this strike were intellectual, political and spiritual, but also of the heart." The impact of the strike produced character changes, Johnson said. "We became critical lovers of democracy -- we had to stand up and fight for it."
Men and women in the coal fields found themselves in good company. "They were joined by pilots from major air carriers, farm workers, and church people," Johnson said. For her, the period of the strike was a time marked by a tension between hope and fear. "For people who live by the Gospel, hope gets particularized -- this strike was one such case. Some people in the church were affirmed. Some people stood up and shouted, 'this is absolutely wrong.' The same thing happened when Jesus went to the cross. You stand and shout, weep and mourn, or be joyous."
Johnson said that she hopes the problems between miners and the Peabody Company will not repeat the history of the earlier Pittston strike, but she's not optimistic. "In a strike everybody loses. I hope there will be no massive strike this time. Sometimes that is labor's only hope. But nobody wins." A repeat strike "could be devastating" for the miners, she said.