Resurrection vs Death

" the Holy Spirit is alive and militant, and in America, dwells in Harlem or wherever else human being so esteem life as a gift that they become insistent upon living as human beings in society (this is the quality sometimes called "soul" - as in soul music or soul food or soul brother) instead of the way most American seem wont to exist as dehumanized automatons dominated by unaccountable and seemingly uncontrollable institutional powers, or as malleable victims of an environment gravely, perhaps fatally, damaged by the jealous abuses of science, war, technology, and mercantilism, or as hapless pawns cowered by official rhetoric and deception and conformed by intimidations to privacy and livery, or otherwise, as slave consigned to pathetic idolatry of death elevated and enshrined as social purpose for the nation."

Stringfellow, "Harlem, Rebellion and Resurrection" in the Christian Century, 1970. Pulled from A Keeper of the Word.(bold is my own)

This is a far more articulate way of saying what I sum up as the ethic of "live and let live" as an abdication of responsibility.

Responsibility

I can say that after 10 years of pussy footing around, which wasn't working, it's time to talk plain. And my experience is, when white people start introspecting on these issues the hate and the mean come out in defense of the shame and the fear.

I have previously done this work in a Christian context, and I am a Christian, but if all you know is from TV, well, that is TV not Christian, and honesty compels me to say most Christians going to church are pretending they are on TV, too.

But here is the thing. This is moral work. This is about human centric living, not dollar centric or crap centric living (do not hear the whole the earth is for us to destroy, I don't go there), and it is so much easier to buy into the American and infecting idea that we take care of our own as me, me, me and maybe my kids or friends, and apply live and let live to everyone else because that allows us to abdicate our responsibility to humans and for systems we live in.

If you aren't engaged in politics - how do we live together in communities and nations and planetarians - you can't do this work. Because you can't see why it is necessary. And you have to have found your reasons why people are deserving of our responsible actions. At least religious people are trying, if poorly, to think about this. I so rarely find it in TV programming. Now, we are definitely making morality in this culture - but it, in dominant culture, so often perpetuates of the unspoken assumption of the live and let live and not my problem morality, and never exploring the consequences of that morality.

There is a difference between imposing my unspoken assumptions of "right" living on another and my knowing how I am living and how it is breaking over the heads of others. I have a responsibility to know that there are consequences to my choices and how they are affecting other and being able to hear and respond with as much grace and compassion as I can when I fuck it up. Because we all fuck it up - we aren't in a vacuum so that is always going to happen, but how we respond to that, how we try to mitigate it, that comes from actually hearing what those consequence are for someone rather than guessing and then fixing things in ways that don't really make me have to change.

Hark! Your life is speaking

How to listen?

So, you don't know any “brown” people and your stereotypes are keeping you from striking up more than the most superficial of conversations?

Well, amazingly enough, brown people can read and write, too. I bet you didn't know that public school even taught that.

Ok, nasty sarcasm aside. But here is where it tends to come from.

I grew up in a tiny backwater lost to civilization secessionist place in CA where there was one kid, who was half Blackfoot, in my school. His mom came to our class one time to talk about weaving with pine needles, and I thought she was an anthropologist. This is because this town never let brown folks in, and I never left. Migrant field workers came through from time to time, but they didn't come into town, and their shenanigans, if they were foolish enough to have them did not make the conversations that a child could overhear. There is a reservation for the local Native American tribe, but I didn't know that until I was an adult and lived somewhere else. From my history classes, I got that we not only killed all the buffalo, we killed all the Indians with them. From extrapolation, I believed we had shipped all the Africans home when we ended slavery.

As I hope many of you are aware, geography combined with the people who live in those patches of memorization, are very poorly taught in American schools – public and private.

So you can imagine it was something of a shock, at 11, to move to Port Hueneme/Oxnard, CA and learn that some of those dark skinned people did not need to ease up on their beach time. My favorite embarrassing story of my ignorance was being a huge Tina Turner fan, but being unaware that she was black until they cast Angela Bassett to play her in that movie. (Hey, some of us like music but don't need to sleep with the musician in order to do so.) My least favorite story is how in 7th grade (middle school for me), I was so horrifyingly ignorant of race issues, but still seemed to possess stereotypes I have no idea where I got, since it wasn't like I had any people reinforce them against and I presumably made them based on what I learned in school and the subtext of adult conversations. My grandpa had to come pick me up from school for a long time because a group of girls were sick of my cracker ways and going to kick my ass. I didn't even know what cracker was. Can I just say – it's still hard to see myself as a Ritz cracker, a buttery, crispy delicious snack that will probably give you cancer.

There are more stories, lots of stories. And I could tell you them, but what I really want is for you to sit down and find your own. Because you have them. Listen to yourself first, before you try to listen to someone else. I spent 10 years doing diversity and anti-racism training with white adults in Oregon. I can tell you true – YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW YOUR OWN STORIES. How can you hear anyone else's stories around race and class if you don't even know your own?

Start at home. Start when you were little. What was dinner like? What did the adults talk about? What were they talking about when they covered your ears (the dumbest thing ever)? What did they never talk about? What TV did you watch as a kid? Go back now and watch it again. So it's fresh for you when you do try to listen. If you have done any of the work confronting your stereotypes, you will probably start to see some of the subtle instructions you received unconsciously.

Start outside. (I'm gonna tell you that if you don't have someone to process this with, don't just say it out loud. That is how you get called a cracker in middle school.) WONER, WONDER, WONDER. Wonder why that person got pulled over. Wonder why you never see white people pulled over. Wonder why some people wander across the street any old time and place and look you in the eye while they do it. Wonder why that makes you so uncomfortable, not why it makes you so angry. Wonder what the difference between anger and discomfort and shame and guilt and an itchy nose.

And Ponder. Ponder what it is like for you to not be a surgeon because you couldn't pass that chemistry class. Ponder what it would have been if you could have been an astronaut, except for the whole application process and joining the military and and and. Ponder whatever dreams you gave up because they didn't seem doable, the process, the negativity, the derision, the need for a paycheck came too high and you gave up and here you are in human resources. (Hey, I love lots of HR people, and many are great, and none of them were aiming there.) Imagine all that mountainous difficulty – and apply it to getting a job at McDonalds. You now have just the tiniest taste of being a young black man but no idea of the baggage he is carrying around due to things he can't possible change.

Do this for a couple of years. In the meantime, don't tell people you are learning to understand the brown skinned people – because you are not. You are beginning to understand yourself.

Interns

Today's breakfast conversation, how to get some teenagers into intern positions. "This seems doable." I love it when people realize they can do something. By Monday, we should have a plan to build a cadre of companies in the Bay Area to introduce kids to living wage jobs that you don't have to have a college degree to do.*

What is possible is exactly what we have been exposed to. You don't know what you don't know. And no one else does either. Do not let your stereotypes define who can do your job. You aren't actually that special. Don't let your comfort, your assumptions and the fact that you don't want to think about how you live in the world, keep the world the way that it is. Obviously you don't like it or you wouldn't be tweeting about it.

• Unsurprisingly, I have opinions about college as a way into the middle class, aka out of poverty. I think that the changes to student loans that have happened over the last 20 years have been more about the government finding a new tax base than any expanding need for a college educated workforce. Sure, there are jobs that need a 4 year degree, but accounting isn't one.

Get over yourself, please

Feeling rather burned out by the outrage/remorse over Ferguson on my other sites.

Because here's the thing, all you white people who are my friends and coworkers, your Twitter rage is Twitter twat. No one gives a crap, least of all you, and making sure your social media thread is on the "right side of history" just makes everyone actually doing the work tired, and so profoundly sad.

If you don't like that young black men are getting shot - THEN GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO DO. Go to your HR department and find a way to make paying internships for them and then make the connections at a local high school and then do the work to listen to them, understand them, and show them how your job works. And then don't be irritated when they totally pass on your job and lifestyle - because they don't have to buy the hype you are selling either.

Better yet - actually do the slogging work of making the world a place that isn't still trading on the commodity of black bodies. Start by boycotting all movies with one nameless black guy who gets shot. Or where the only roles for black actors and actresses is drug or sex trade related.

Once you've tried that for awhile, and you should be pretty bored now that you have eliminated most of your mainstream entertainment, start spending your free time and your burning man money - and get the laws changed that criminalize drugs, that legalize guns, that make it hard for individuals to start small one person businesses. Hell, just pass some laws that easily and automatically re-franchise convicted felons - and make it illegal to discriminate in housing and employing them.

I suppose I appreciate that it is all very popular to say, I am not a young black man so I can't understand their lives, but I can listen. But how many of you are listening to young black men. How many of you even know more than "that black dude that works in the office" or "goes to my gym that I talk to by the lockers." And even that dude that works in your office or goes to your gym, he is still in your social or economic class, except in the subtle ways you and everyone you know remind him that he really isn't and is the exception to the rule. The only people excited by the word "articulate" are robot builders.

Just because you feel safe holding a sign on the sidelines of a protest does not mean that you have done the right thing. Use all the fucking power that actually being white is affording you. Make appointments with your legislature, with the local paper, with anyone you can - and then let bring someone who really needs to get their voice heard. Let them talk - you keep your mouth shut. And even better - bring 16 of your white friends and let the black guy be in charge, not the side show.

Hire the kid with the sagging pants anyway. Buy the candy bar or the magazine subscription from the kids anyway. Send your kid to public school and do the work to encourage their friendships with kids whose parents don't speak English anyway. Let the smack roll off your back anyway. Pay all the taxes you can anyway. Don't call the cops because you don't recognize that person walking down the street anyway.

Get over yourself, please.

Musings on Holy Saturday and the Incarnation

(H and I are busy giving each other our favorite books and passages, especially with regard to Holy Saturday. I know she is the only other person I know that has a passion for this day - and I may be the same for her. I don't know, because I didn't ask.)

Poor Shelly Rambo. I really want to like your work, I just can't read your prose. It does nothing more than lay on the page for me. I keep trying, because I keep getting handed your book and if there was ever a book that should be on my shelf and call to me, one called Spirit and Trauma should be it. So, for the sake of H, I will keep trying, but it's frankly, like eating dry saltines.

I just finished the her synopsis of Balthasar's work on Holy Saturday, complete with the lets not forget the woman behind the man visions of Speyr. I can't actually get on board with this work, if only because I have never actually related to Jesus in my life. Even good old Psalm 51 I hear in the voice of his mother. Most especially, I just can't connect Saturday with Hell.

Saturday is the best day of the whole triduum, in large part because it's the day we actually participate in, all the days. All the days are Saturday unless you were Thomas on one particular Tuesday.

Saturday is the day I most closely associate with the Incarnation at the other end of the calendar. In the sense of "God died" on Saturday, it's really the place where God actually gets a taste of what it means to be human, it's actually the moment where God knows what it is like to be separated from the love of God. There isn't actually all that much that is special about becoming human - gods have been doing that for a long time, or a swan or other creatures, but they always know who they are. And the gospels don't talk much about Jesus as a 6 year old, but from quite early, we get the sense that Jesus knows that he is God and that is nice for him, but does not rise to the standard of something to write home about. Gods being tourists is a nice old trope.

Saturday is different. Saturday is something that no other god ever bothered or knew how to do. In the greatest cry of This Sucks ever spoken "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani!?" God gave himself the worst case of amnesia ever recorded - and is thus able to really understand how it is that we wander about like chickens with our heads cut off. Anthropomorphized gods just don't do this.

In reality, it gives us a God that contains profound sympathy and empathy and compassion and sorrow. It is a place, if there is any place, for God to have second thoughts about this whole creation plan.

Saturday is probably the only place I have ever gladly grabbed a gardening metaphor in my whole life. Saturday is very much the seeds in the ground phase. All the conditions are there, we have done all the books and wisdom and folklore have taught us, and still, we must wait. And there is no guarantee. Sometimes, the seed simply will not sprout. And in this place, no matter how old or wise or folksy we are, we are all children before God in the days or weeks or sometimes years before a seed sprouts. Hope, thy name is carrot seed. Faith, thy name is tulip bulb.

There is no place for belief in this moment. Belief is like roses or apples. We will graft because we do not want any questions for our outcomes. No surprises, no miracles or mysteries to be found here. No waiting for new life, just hoping the surgery turns out ok. We create grafts in our spiritual lives all the time, because religion infused with "that's the way we've always done it" or "we did it once, therefore it is tradition hereafter" let us rest in belief, let's us be comfortable in what we've always known and always done and forever expect. Grafting has Spirit. Everything has Spirit in in, rather by definition, but just because you can put new wine in old wineskins (and even long for the days when bottles were washed and reused by the Coca-Cola company) it doesn't mean that we are embodying faith or Christ or even our own selves.

The thing that I have learned over and over again, is that unfolding into myself and being simply myself, not a graft of someone else's expectation but the surprising what the heck is that weed I didn't plant this seed of myself, is where I feel most alive, most loved, and most cherished by God. Most assuredly, because this is where God most truly understands me and my experience as created.

"I am not my depression"

This phrase is really starting to get on my nerves. I'm trying to figure out why.

I think because it is only the first step on getting to know yourself and all your biochemical quirks.

I went through this with anxiety, and I take an antidepressant at the moment.

Never, through all of this, although it is listed in my chart, have I identified as depressed, or even having depression for more than the usual reasons. (When you move out of state and half your family dies, it's totally ok to be depressed for like 3 years. It's actually totally normal.)

I cry all the time. Or, I did, until I did 5 years of anxiety group work (CBT is awesome, and DBT is right up there with it although I have less experience with it) and eventually started taking anti depressants after 3 years and a massive crisis which unlocked the PTSD achievement.

I don't cry all the time now, I'm probably one of the lucky ones, that medication works for me, but I can tell you 100%, backed by science (I'll look it up if you want) that medication doesn't work without the CBT/DBT actual doing the work.

One year, I spent Lent (this would be the 40 days-Sundays until Easter. Many Christians like to do some spiritual practice for Lent.) "giving up" the voices in my head. I actually had to let some people know I was doing it because telling the voices in my head to shut up sometimes got verbal. But by the end of 40 days, I had a really good idea of the shit I was telling myself. And if you are reinforcing it in your head - yes, you do believe it. And beliefs are not like faith, you can totally give them up, even though it's hard.

Another year, not for Lent this time, I spent 6 months on body acceptance. Because let's be honest - I'm pretty much consistent in my weight and I can be happy with what I have and do what I want now. If it changes, it changes, if I get to the gym, it's because I want to go or I have some goal that has nothing to do with being fit, attractive, an athlete, or sexy. I can be those things, really, by lowering the self talk of who I could be if I was only an actual different person. Funny thing, when you stop telling yourself why you can't be six different kinds of awesome, you sort of end up that way anyhow. Because all that body talk was just another aspect of the "you aren't good enough" talk that I worked so hard to ditch over lent that year.

Right now, I'm working on re-integrating. Philosophy majors and Christians (so much theology of which is built on Greek philosophy as well) have a hard time with this. That is what I am telling myself. Because, really, we are all doing this, and people who are not splitting themselves from their bodies get looked at by Westerners as either nuts or yogis, neither of which I am aspiring to. I just want to stop looking at my hand and seeing something I own. I can't own my hand, I am my hand. I am not a brain in a vat, I am the damn vat, and all of me is having the experience. I'm not watching my body dump cortisol, I am feeling it. And it isn't doing me any good to keep looking at the physiology of my body (see, I just did it again) as something that is being inflicted upon me (here is my brain in a vat.)

I have this mantra, and I completely don't believe it, that I practice, which goes along the lines of :

I do not have a hand, I do not own it, I am my hand.
I do not have a belly, I do not own it, I am my belly.
etc.

Repeat for all sorts of bits that feel unintegrated, which right now, is pretty much everything, including my brain and my thoughts and my cold toes. It is amazing how hard it is to say some bits. Girl bits in particular are giving me a problem right now, probably because I did a lot of work on body talk already but didn't include them. Sigh.

I also read vociferously: philosophy, theology, poetry, psychology. I never read self help books. Self help books are loaded with negative talk. Once I started working on my self talk, I realized how much self help books actually perpetuate the very things they are trying to cure you of. It makes sense, how else can they continue to exist. And that is a whole other thing: that which exists, even if it is not "real" in any sense, will continue to exist.

My mental illness, whatever it happens to be, is not something inflicted on me. It is me. And I can integrate all of me into one person, and I can match my expections to my actual life. To say, I am not my depression is a good place to start, in the unreflective life, to see that we are maleable and controlable, even, gasp, by ourselves. But it's only the first step. Without the work, without the depth, time, commitment, and love, it won't ever be enough.