Lesson from the Female Rat: Recovering from Christian Patriarchy

Voices

In the moments when I feel a sense of powerlessness coming over me (as I've often felt in the Trump era), my first impulse is to freeze. Numbness spreads. I lose my will to speak. What can I say in the middle of all this? What can I do? How can my small hand do a blessed thing to stop the world's bleeding?

My second impulse (when I am still warm enough to feel) is to look back at old things, at personal things. A critical voice tells me that it's silly to look back at your personal history in times like this--times when the destiny of the whole world feels uncertain. Times like this when--even if you haven't suffered directly--you still feel in the locality of your body the weight of movements in the world that are directly hurting others. You feel absurd, ridiculous, taking refuge in the sphere of yourself and your stories. 

But a gentler voices tells me that the world is too big for me, too big for all of us. I can speak to it only in the small things. I am here in the world. Somewhere, my story meets what is happening globally. I may not know what it is yet, but we'll get there. Maybe roundabout, but we'll find where the stories converge.

Sexuality

In the past few months, I've started to think more deeply about sexuality. Many of the catalysts for these thoughts are what you might expect. My formative years were spent moving about as a female body in the patriarchal world of American evangelicalism. I've been a feminist in some form or another for a good eight or nine years now--almost a third of my life. I've thought and written about the toxicity of evangelical purity culture, not just in regard to sexuality, but in the mode of approach to anyone or anything that is deemed outside the bounds of evangelical culture (however those borders are variously defined). I've cognitively moved away from theologies that denigrate and devalue the body.

But getting those toxic theologies to leave the sacred site of my body is easier said than done. I genuinely and enthusiastically cheer on women around me who celebrate their bodies, most especially women of color and sexual minorities to whom the dominant culture attaches additional layers of stigma.

But when it comes to my own body and sexuality, I hesitate. I hold back the celebration. I am afraid. I've only just started to realize how deeply I've been conditioned to feel ashamed of sexual pleasure. 

Not too long ago, I read an article arguing that females of every species have sex for pleasure, but women are stigmatized for wanting to enjoy sex. It wasn't anything I hadn't heard before, but it jogged my memory of what I've known for several years (and mostly try to ignore): I am shy of my own body. I'm not shy with my husband (with whom I've always felt comfortable), I'm shy with myself.

After reading the article, emboldened by the example of the female rat (who apparently really really loves clitoral stimulation), I initiated sex with my husband. 

When we were done and moving on to the next thing, about to make coffee, I suddenly found myself crying, trembling. In the aftermath of deliberate pleasure-taking, I felt intense shame. I don't usually feel guilty for lovemaking, and my body's response took me by surprise. After some thought, I realized that I still--on a visceral level--feel the stigma against female self-pleasure. My way of coping, of keeping shame at bay so that I don't feel perpetually guilty for having sex, is to hide in my husband's pleasure or in the pleasure of "us." 

This doesn't mean I don't enjoy sex. It means the politics of shame are still in place and that I've been trying (mainly) to manage them instead of rooting them out. It means I still feel unduly guilty for taking pleasure. My framework assumes I am secondary, not equal, and that I should not delight in myself. It presumes that the self does not to deserve to enjoy itself--its validity and pleasure depends solely on the affirming gaze of another. This approach to sexuality is the enemy of self-giving because it assumes that I am not first my own to give (or choose not to give).

The stigma against my own self as a sexual person runs deep. I look back at my teenage self harping on what I considered modest dress, listening to my pious talk about not "stumbling my brothers in Christ." In retrospect, looking at my adolescent writings, it's clear that I very badly wanted to stumble someone--not everyone, but someone. All that covering up wasn't because I didn't want to allure. I covered up both because was afraid that I would be seen and found wanting, and because I didn't want to be labelled as "that kind of woman" (what a dreadful phrase).

I've not wanted to go here in my writing for the same reasons. Even I still have women divided into categories in my mind. There are the intellectual ones like me who write in the safety of the abstract. And then there are the women who write about shocking things like rat masturbation. Obviously, the lines are starting to blur.

Looking At The Self

I've started to re-read my girlhood diaries as a step toward healthy self-love. One day, if I become brave enough, I'll sift through the 150 letters that I wrote to my future husband (thanks for the tip, Brio!) from age 15-17. Thus far, I've only been able to break the seals on 15 (yes, I used sealing wax on every single one) to read them with my actual husband (who in no way corresponds to the imaginary "future husband" addressed in my letters).

I feel one half embarrassed and one half delighted when I read my old writings, especially those from my pre-adolescent and adolescent years. This is mostly (I think) because I see in little Rebekah a well of desire and longing to be known, but she doesn't see this. It isn't obvious to her. She doesn't have the language to express--even to herself in the privacy of a diary--her desires. Like most of us most of the time, she hides behind a veneer of words, half of them overly-dramatic phrases picked up from movies, the other half God-language.

She makes me laugh, but she also makes me blush. I can see need oozing out of her onto the page.

As soon as I grew old enough to be aware of my need for affirmation, I took great care to hide this need. I don't think my habit of hiding is unique. None of us are seen as much as we want to be seen or as much as we need to be seen. And when it comes to seeing ourselves, many voices hold us back.

We all ask for affirmation in different ways. But overt pleas for affirmation leave you vulnerable and are almost always disappointing. We all know (if not by experience than through film) the terrible moment when one person works up the courage to voice how they feel: "I love you." And the other person just says, "Thanks." And it's dreadful because you aren't saying just, "I love you," but asking the question, "Do you love me, too?"

The romantic scene is the one that makes it into popular mythology, but we ask for affirmation in many types of relationships. But we can't feel affirmed by just anyone. It's not simply a matter of someone pronouncing a distant verdict of "good" on us. We want someone to see us, to trace our details, and respond with pleasure. We wish more than anything that someone would pay attention, notice us, and answer with genuine wonder.

So here I am confronted by little Rebekah who is both me and not me. I am embarrassed by her need because it reveals in the most telling ways the need of adult Rebekah. Because of this, because she is me (or a window to me), I choose to resist the shame and lean into the delight. I look at the contours of her tiny being, paying attention to her awkward flailing for love. 

Why do we ask such abstract questions like, "Who am I?" The infinitely more practical question is, "Who am I in this story?" You must love yourself in the same way you would love your neighbor: by noticing her details and responding with pleasure. This is the gesture toward self-love. Looking at your details, looking long and hard. Taking in all of yourself, taking generously, taking pleasure.

The Writings

Reading through my diary from 1996-2001 (age 9-14), a few themes recur. I liked boys, watching the PBS series Wishbone, collecting rocks, writing stories, and pleasing God.

I was polyamorous in my crushes and felt perplexed by this (if not also guilty). Over the span of five years, I managed to devote nineteen pages to the nineteen boys that were the objects of my unrequited love. The illustrations are the same on each boy's page. Beneath "I love [boy's name]" are two smiley faces, a pair of lips (labelled "kiss," lest the reader be in doubt of its meaning), a pair of outstretched arms labelled "hug," a heart pierced by Cupid's arrow, and a two boxed wedding rings. "[Boy's name] and Me," is written on the pierced heart.

The diary is filled by my quandaries about my nature and the nature of love:

"I love Harrison, but how can I have a crush on two boys?" (age 9).

"I like Jillian's brother, Jacob. I like him as in I'M IN LOVE WITH HIM. I also like Jim and Jerry O'Dell. The boys love my impression of Barney" (age 9).

"I love five boys, but my favorite is Harrison" (age 9).

"I found out that love, like romantic love, is not having a crush from the start and liking them. It's when you don't know you like them, and just grow fond of them. Like with Derek Ferris, I didn't really like him that much, he fought with other kids and isn't handsome, but I have grown to love him. Being so young, I am not absolutely sure what love is, but my conception of it is nice" (age 11).

"I think Rudy is very insensitive. He was bullying this kid. I made a resolution not to like him, but it isn't working very well" (age 11).

I also had strong feminist leanings, feeling indignant whenever boys teased me for being a girl or said I couldn't do stuff with them:

"I almost hate the O'Dell boys for the way they treat me. They say words like 'my little maid' and they say boys are stronger than girls. But Jesus wouldn't hate them, so I will just love them and forgive them" (age 9).

"Jerry O'Dell is annoying because he said I had little hands" (age 11).

What surprised me most looking over these writings was the few overt references to sexuality. I don't remember ever consciously thinking things like this, let alone writing about them:

"My feet are still growing like crazy. I just bought sandals. And now I have new sneakers, My old ones hurt my feet. I haven't had my period yet, but my breasts are developing. I am having weird pains in my left leg and right big toe. Also weird is that I know I would never have sex and I don't know what it feels like either, but I think of it every time I think of a boy. I think it's normal, though, because Benj [my older brother] says that's how he feels sometimes about girls" (age 11).

I also felt a very keen tension between my love for God and love for boys:

"[Jackson] doesn't seem to draw me farther away from God, like my other crushes. I am not absolutely certain the last sentence is true. Maybe I'm only fooling myself. I don't know. I'm just gonna have to keep praying" (age 14).

It's clear, judging by my diaries and future-husband letters, that I felt this tension throughout teenhood and beyond. I believed that feeling was bad, that God was jealous. I couldn't love any boy too much or God would (for my own spiritual health) want to take him away. It could only ever be me and God on life's lonely road, and God was that mysterious, unknowable Ultimate. This meant that I would forever be a mysterious unknowable, always hiding in God, perpetually afraid of myself.

This fear of knowledge is really what I find so problematic about the world I grew up in. Implicit in our theological framework was the notion that knowledge and desire is the antithesis of faith. It marked humans as innately bad, seeing us as a danger to ourselves and the world, as bodies to be contained and distanced rather than known.

The idea of God then becomes a cover, a mask to shield us from ourselves and from one another. It excuses us from the responsibility (and pleasure) of becoming acquainted with ourselves and the world. It relieves us of the impulse to love our neighbors and ourselves because God will do it for us.  Fear of the self is the end of knowledge, and displeasure the enemy of love.

Food Taboos: A Conversation on Vegetarianism and Other Good Stuff

I was hammering out a date via Messenger to have coffee with my friend, Tori Aquilone. I told her I might have a bagel, and she said she might splurge on a vegan donut even though she's been mostly off sugar for a bit. The following conversation on food taboos ensued, and I thought it was interesting enough to share with you all.

RD: No pressure to eat food when we have coffee if you'd rather stick to your routine. You probably don't feel pressured, but I'm always amazed at how easy it is to just eat something because someone else is or because someone suggested it.

TA: Ah, yes—it is a strange phenomenon. Thank you for saying that, though I've become quite accustomed to breaking social food rules. I actually couldn't drink coffee for a bit and people were incredulous that I wanted to "go for coffee" just to spend time together. Thankfully, I can drink coffee again...that was awful.

RD: Yes, we associate food so much with socializing and relationships. I was actually reading a book on food in Isaiah this morning, and it was looking at anthropological studies about food taboos. It noted that often (in literature, but in life as well) we make assumptions about how people eat and what it means for people in other areas of life (whether or not that's true). For example, we Westerners associate dogs as pets and if someone eats a dog, it seems weird even to folks who are not vegetarian. We make assumptions about that dog-eating person (they must be weird...a serial killer...psychopath). In some other cultures, eating a dog would have the same social/moral connotations as eating a cow in our culture.

TA: Yes! That's something I've come across in my food research as well. I think people don't realize how socialized food is until someone challenges it, but usually that person becomes socially ostracized. It's interesting how we're tempted to say "It's just food, who cares?"—but that's not really how we engage it. Perhaps because in our culture we are so accustomed to food being readily available that we don't see how much we rely on it for life and sustenance, but in reality humans are created to have strong connections to that which sustains us.

RD: Right. And "food" is actually a human category. Many things are edible, but we choose whether or not they will be food to us. In our society, we don't choose humans as "food" even though they are edible. We make that choice based on our perception of what is morally okay to eat and what isn't. And our conception of it being immoral to eat other humans is based on how we perceive our relationship as humans to other humans.

TA: Ah, yes–how interesting! I never thought of it like that. I know how strongly I have moral associations with food, but it's interesting to consider that as the default rather than the deviation. It's just that I have different moral standards than the majority culture. It reminds me of presuppositional apologetics–everyone has a moral foundation, it's a matter of which moral foundation rather than whether you have one at all.

RD: Yes, and our presuppositions are shaped by our cultures and societies, and at times are at odds with the broader culture. I love Mary Douglas on "purity" and "dirt." She points out that everyone (not just ancient or tribal cultures) has different ideas of what is pure and impure (both in regard to eating and in other areas of life). We can eat food anywhere, but we would consider it strange to eat food in the bathroom or (for some) in the bedroom, not because it's necessarily unhygienic, but because it conflicts with our socially constructed sense of where food should be consumed (usually kitchen or dining room).

TA: Hmm. Interesting. I'll have to check out her work. I think people fail to realize that our cultural assumptions are often underlying moral beliefs, like the use of the language of "pure," which is why there may be so much vitriol surrounding challenged food habits. I asked my students yesterday in class (in the context of whether or not the economy should be regulated to protect the environment...they don't know I'm vegetarian) if the government should reduce the amount of red meat that's produced to protect the environment and the consumer. Students who were pro-regulation before totally changed their minds because they couldn't imagine giving up red meat. I didn't press into that, but I wonder now what moral assumptions underlie that reaction.

RD: Eating meat is such a huge part of the social aspects of culture, it may be that the students realize (even just on a gut level) that giving up meat has social implications (sacrifices) that they don't want to make. It also runs counter to so much of what is advertised. So much advertising goes into marketing meat and making it look good. Salad not so much.

TA: Yes, there are so many facets. I will think more about the socialization. I've only ever thought about it in light of my personal experience, but I think there's definitely something deeper going on. Like a visceral, instinctual need to belong, and to eat the food everyone else is eating. Not to mention that meat/dairy subsidization makes absolutely NO sense, but that's another topic all together.

RD: I don't think I've really thought much about the idea of food choice as social sacrifice (or alteration) until I verbalized that to you just now. People think of vegetarian or veganism as giving up particular foods, but you're also giving up social currency (and maybe gaining other things and other social currencies). I was always fascinated by the fact that when I would create a huge salad in the cafeteria at school and come to the table, people would often comment on how "healthy" it was and how I was "being good" and contrast to what was on their plate. I never commented on their choices, but they perceived my veggie-oriented choices as a judgement of their choices. It goes to show you that making different food choices (or any choices that diverge from the dominant cultural impulse) puts other people in the position of how they will respond to your difference. Will they ignore your difference? Will they comment (positively or negatively)? Will they create space for you to cultivate your different practice? Will they see your practice as an indictment against them? Will they change their own eating habits in response to your difference?

TA: Yes, social currency is an interesting concept that I definitely feel intuitively from experience, but also never really verbalized. And I frequently have thought of Paul's argument about meat sacrificed to idols and that as Christians, we should deny our rights for the moral convictions of others, regarding food. And his argument in general seems to acknowledge that we attach moral assumptions to our food consumption. I frequently have to bring my own food to social functions and it always invites comments ranging from somewhat benign statements like "Oh, so healthy!" to "What's your problem?" I feel like I have so many instances where I've experienced this personally and it was very, very hurtful...and now I’m thinking it hurt me in ways I didn't even realize.

RD: It can be very ostracizing to have someone comment negatively on your food. Whenever I see people do that to other people, I feel very uncomfortable. It can be ostracizing in general, but also—what if that person struggles with an eating disorder or other food issue? The last thing you want is for someone to call attention to how you’re eating. Paul opens up a lot of interesting issues. In 1 Corinthians 8, he’s speaking to a newly formed Jesus-community who live in a world where eating meat is often connected to the worship at temples of other gods (and the imperial cult of the deified Caesar). Eating the sacrifices offered to the god is associated with worship of that god—you’re dining at a god’s table. The meat was often sold in the marketplace. You can imagine that for some folks in the Jesus-community who used to worship other gods, eating meat offered to those gods might evoke the memories of their former worship and even end up strengthening the emotional and social connections to those gods. I think Paul (from the perspective of a monotheist) recognizes that in an abstract sense, there are no other gods, so on the one hand eating meat offered to the “no-gods” isn’t a big deal. But in the concrete, on the ground, Paul knows that people have memories and associations with food, and social bonds, and so whether or not they eat idol-meat matters. And so he’s calling the folks in the community to be aware of how the other members are approaching food (as it relates other issues) and telling them be willing to show deference to one another.

TA: Yes! I feel uncomfortable too, especially when you bring in the possibility of an eating disorder and medical issues that affect food intake, which I've been battling recently. I've talked with people about Paul on this and they come back with some interesting retorts. One time in a theological conversation I aligned vegans with the "weaker brother" who have convictions about their food, and the person responded, "Do you really want to be the weaker brother?" It seems that people feel if they are the "stronger brother" it's ok to just write off the other position as a weakness that needs to be admonished rather than a conviction that should be respected. I think it also comes back to philosophical ideas. It's clear that a lot of Platonic/Socratic ideas beat out Aristotelian ones in the history of Christianity, and Plato refused to see the "tangibility" (as I call it) of anything. Christians run into problems when they eschew tangibility (what you said above as concrete) in my opinion. Even the sacraments seem to be barely hanging on by a thread because we've relegated them to merely symbolic rather than seeing ourselves as inherently embodied. One of my favorite things ever was when I was in Gary Schnittjer's Intro to Bible class and he asked, "Who is the weaker brother?" and we all said, "The one who refuses to eat.” And he said, “No, they are both weak, for the stronger brother refuses to love the weaker, rendering him just as, if not more, weak in the end.”

RD: That's great. Good old GES. But yes! Absolutely. I really just think Platonism has ruined everything.

TA: Haha. I'm tempted to think that too but I'm still working through it. My assumptions about Plato only started changing recently so I'm a bit swept up in it at the moment, but I definitely am seeing the negatives more clearly.

RD: I have actually intentionally started to avoid even using the word "embodied" and say "bodied" instead (though that’s a bit tricky, too). I think if we're serious about the implications of Jesus’ resurrection, we have to recognize that–however we might parse out the relationship between what we call "soul" and "body," that disembodied existence for humans is seen as a negative (or at least insufficient) mode of being. If we have something that can be called a "soul," it isn't something that (in its fullness) can be abstracted from either physical bodiedness or our bodied social and political locations. But Plato is probably a lot cooler than Platonism.

TA: Yeah, I think you're right. It's funny how the resurrection is so central to our theology yet it seems to evade practice in other ways.

RD: It really is very sad. I see so many Christians not digging into life here because they're hoping for some distant future where everything is "perfect" and perfectly disembodied. But life begins now. Matter matters.

TA: YES! It's certainly sad, but mostly leaves me angry. I'm not sure how we continue to coddle a theology that renders the here-and-now irrelevant.

RD: If matter didn't matter, if it wasn't redeemable, God never would have become human. He'd just have condemned it to burn.

TA: Yes, I think we have to realize that the incarnation is one of the most important supports of the import of earthly matters. As well as the resurrection.

RD: I don't coddle theology that looks away from the here and now. Not anymore. I'm not done with Jesus (and maybe not Christianity), but I'm done with Christian articulations of the gospel that run counter to it.

TA: Yeah, I'm done with it too. I just don't know all of the implications of that doneness, haha. I'm still trying to find out the implications for my engagement with other Christians in a variety of ways.

RD: I was about to write that I don't think Jesus coddled it either—but then I realized I can't think of too many passages that come to mind where he confronts metaphysical dualism. But he does just seem to keep doing his thing—healing the sick, talking about helping the poor, hanging out with people.

TA: Yeah, they are few and far between. But I agree: his example is most poignant on this issue. Why heal the sick if he could just promise them heaven?

RD: Exactly.

The Apolitical Jesus (or "Fuck This Shit")

The misconception of the gospel of Jesus as apolitical is a blight on American evangelicalism that robs its articulation of the gospel message of any power to affect the present. Jesus was not born into the world as an unspecific, socially and politically neutral human being, but with a socio-political location.

Though in the form of God, Jesus didn't hold on to equality with God with an iron grip, but emptied himself and took the form of a doulos--a slave, someone on the margins of society (Philippians 2).

The identification of Jesus with those on the margins is a political statement: that the God articulated in Jesus is the God of the weak, marginalized, and oppressed. Those in power will only know this God insofar as they follow the power-divesting example of the crucified and resurrected messiah whose kingdom from God does not work according to the logic of Caesar, the logic of empire.

Imperial logic holds that "peace" is achieved through domination: kill or be killed, enslave others or be enslaved, conquer and demand assimilation. According to imperial logic, our different specifics as humans--our backgrounds, languages, cultures, socio-political locations--are weaknesses and a threat to the "unity" of empire. The sameness of its members and/or their adherence to carefully constructed hierarchical power systems that advantage some and disenfranchise others is imperative.

But the incarnation runs counter to this narrative: the God who came as a doulos affirms the particulars of our contextual details as humans in various locations. It also criticizes the false story told by the empire: the lie that the oppressed and oppressors cannot be redeemed from slavery to the unjust systems and the ideologies that support them.

Imperial ideology argues that human specificity/location necessitates hierarchy, and imagines that our differences demand that some be on top and others on the bottom. Proponents of empire cannot imagine a world in which people are both different and equal, simultaneously political and yet not vying for power.

But the self-emptying God-human turns this logic on its head, the ruler of the universe divesting himself of power and privilege. By becoming a slave of all, Jesus subverts the imperial powers that insist on the necessity of a world that runs on the hierarchy of lords/masters and slaves.

The incarnation is nothing if not political. To say "Jesus is Lord" is to insist that Caesar is not--that though there presently exist many "gods" and many "lords" in this unjust world, for us there is but one Lord, and in contrast to the power-grabbing Caesar, this Lord comes as a slave to liberate all those in bondage.

If Jesus came only to save me from my personal sin, but didn't come to dismantle white supremacy, fuck this shit.

I Thirst

I Thirst

Am I a good person? she asked her teacher.

Who is good but God alone? he answered.

And alone, God is good, he said.

He does does not need you,

does not hunger, does not thirst.

He the Eternal is the Eternal He,

timeless

colorless

genderless

apolitical

unspecific.

He is the god who did not

let go of equality with God

to become

not just human, but

a human slave, a slave

among

the slaves, the women, the prisoners.

He is the god who did not

at his execution, as his lungs

labored their last before collapse,

wheeze out the faint, ungodly cry:

I thirst.

Human Hands

I'm not sure if this poem is finished, but it's what came to me after dinner tonight.

Human Hands

You return to the old poems

and they are as you feared:

Fixed, budged not a jot

since you pressed them into shape,

worked their whirling figures on your wheel.

Glazed, fired, brilliant

on the day of conception, but now

they sit, still and silent, on the shelf

as you whirl through the ages,

dazed, wild, resilient,

and pliable as the day of your making.

You return to your old face,

and it is as you feared:

A mask

brittled by time and horror-filled

by dread of becoming

a shell that becomes,

a formable face cupped in human hands,

searched, seen, smoothed, kissed

by lips not of cold, kilned glass,

but warm skin rushing

with nascent cells.

Dancing Out of Oblivion

My parents' attempts to make me exercise were largely futile. 

Whenever my mother rummaged in the video cabinet beneath the TV and popped in a VHS of Richard Simmons' Sweatin' to the Oldies, I might join her for the first song or two, but wimped out after a few minutes. The half-hour following lunch and recess at our home school was slotted for exercise, but I dawdled about and rarely did more than a few jumping jacks. My father tried to take me on a walk around the neighborhood once, but after a quarter mile I was done. Sorry, Pops. Time to head back home now.

I worked very hard to avoid any kind of movement that would put me in a sweat or out of breath. 

Except climbing trees and dancing. I forgot exercise when I danced, caught up in the rhythms of the music. And one night, when I was about sixteen, I went into Manhattan to a Swing dance with some friends where we twirled into the wee hours of the morning. That wasn't exercise. That was heart-pounding, blood-racing, skin-shocking joy.

Exercise was a bane. Ultimate frisbee days were the worst. I went to our weekly homeschool frisbee practices primarily to hang out with my friends, but the cost was high. Running was arduous. It wasn't so bad once we got to the frisbee part--then I could choose when I felt like running to catch the frisbee and when I felt like lazing in the field. But the team captain required us to run a lap around the field before starting practice.

This lap was a constant source of embarrassment to me. I was the slowest runner and always came in last. If I was lucky, I could find another slow runner who could share my shame as we lagged together behind the clump of runners some yards ahead of us. 

I was also a rather well-endowed adolescent, and not even a sports bra could quite reign in my ample bosom. I could feel it moving conspicuously up and down with each step of the lap. Probably no one else cared. No one was looking at me and thinking, "Why is that girl's chest flapping around her neck?" But I was always relieved when the lap was done. I could stop feeling so seen without being seen.

My mother (wisely, I think) never pushed me too hard when it came to exercise. She just continued to get up every morning at 6am for her 40-minute walk. Every day. No skips (unless we were going to travel or had an unavoidable appointment). Every day.

When I went off to college, I started to walk in the mornings. Living with roommates and seeing students and teachers constantly pressed against the introverted parts of me, and I needed a quiet space every morning in order to breathe. The only empty space in that crowded college existence was the morning hour before everyone was up.

So I walked. Just before the sun was up, I was, too. Langhorne Manor became my Westminster Bridge: The City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.

And I just kept walking. I wanted to walk. I needed to walk. My body grew used to it, and my muscles ached without it.

Over time, my routine changed. When it was too cold to walk, I'd go to the dorm basement lounge and put on some music so that I could leap and twirl around the couches. The regular morning walk turned into several hours of walking hither and yon when I spent a year in Oxford. In England, I ate everything and walked everywhere. I was at my heaviest in Oxford, but didn't have regular access to a scale and really didn't care. Because I was just doing what I wanted now. Not worrying about what I'd see when I hopped on the scale the next morning.

My body started to crave more rigor, so I incorporated a short routine of other exercises for indoors. This became my primary routine after I gave birth since I couldn't go out in the early morning when Marshall was still sleeping. It's short and intense, but it's enough. For now. Enough to make me feel at home in my body. To keep the bad aches at bay, to stretch myself, to keep my day ordered so that I do what I really want to do and don't get distracted by feelings of inadequacy.

Everyone has different ways of managing their lives and desires. I do best when I don't have some grandiose vision of a body I don't have, some imaginary body I work towards, but instead make decisions about what to do as my body right now. Instead of dreaming for a smaller this or a bigger that, I focus on what will make my body feel most alive today.

This is my approach to writing, too. I forget my wild ideals of writing something that will change the world, of being a Writer. A writer is one who writes. So write. Just do it. A little every day or every week or every month--whatever time you can carve out. Work on this piece. Right here. Right now. This is your plot to tend, your space to love. 

Forget the visions of all you could be and leave your guilt over what might have been. Concentrate on the world that is and the self you are in it. The world to come will come, but not tomorrow or the next day or the next. It will come today, as you listen to the rhythms of the world, to the pulsing of bodies. As you dance yourself out of oblivion.

Marduk, Son of the Gods

I'm thinking about the language of "sonship" after just reading through Enuma Elish (also known as The Glorification of Marduk). The story is about how Marduk became enthroned as king of the gods at his temple (Esagila) in Babylon (after quelling the rebellion of Tiamat, goddess of the ocean, by hacking her to pieces and creating the heavens and earth from her body and then creating humans out of the blood of rebel god in order to serve the gods--yeah, it's gross).

The Anunnuki gods (as homage) build a temple to honor Marduk, and then all the gods sit down to a celebratory banquet where they grant Marduk kingship of the gods and confirm his dominion. The gods are referred to multiple times throughout the epic as Marduk's "fathers," and he is referred to as their firstborn. When they confirm his dominion, they say, "Most exalted be the son, our avenger. Let his sovereignty be surpassing, have no rival." They also charge him with providing not just for creatures, but for the gods: "May he establish for his fathers the great food-offerings."

This is just one more window into how "sonship" was associated with rulership in ancient Mesopotamia. When talking about rule, it's not about the dads, it's about the sons. In Mesopotamia, a human king was often referred to as the "son of god" or "image of god" (or both). We see this language in the Hebrew Bible, too. The term "son of god" is sometimes applied to an angelic figure, Israel, or Israel's king, perhaps most notably Psalm 2 (Yahweh's anointed king is also Yahweh's son).

And then there's the famous 2 Samuel 7 passages where King David wants to build a house (a temple) for Yahweh, but Yahweh responds to David's offer by saying (this is my  super-short paraphrase), "I've been living in a tent since the days I brought Israel up from Egypt, and I've never asked for a house. Nope. You won't build a house (a temple) for me, but I'm going to a build a house (offspring/kingdom) for you. I'll raise up one of your offspring and establish his kingdom. And he'll build a house for my name. I will be a father to him, and he will be to me a son."

We know from the rest of the story that David's son Solomon ends up becoming king and building Yahweh's temple.

Yahweh's initial rejection of David's offer to build him a temple is an interesting contrast to Marduk's desire for the building of Esagila. The interplay between "fathers" and "sons," tells us much about the interplay of divine and human rule in the Hebrew Bible.

Yahweh's divine kingship is often assumed throughout, but you don't get the sense that Yahweh feels the need to legitimize or prove his kingship. This is perhaps what we might expect in a monolatrous context: when you've only got one god to worship, that god doesn't need his kingship to be established by others gods and he doesn't have any rivals. (Except, perhaps, the humans that he has made just the teensiest bit lower than gods (Psalm 8), when they start to think that their spectacular humanity isn't fantastic enough, that the glorious freedom of the sons of god just isn't free enough.)

The portrayal of Yahweh's interaction with David makes it clear that Yahweh is the one who will  establish the kingship of David's descendant, not the other way around: it's not David who establishes Yahweh's rule in a temple, but Yahweh who establishes the rule of David's son. The son doesn't make the father, the father makes the son.

But unlike the the Marduk's "fathers," who take the backseat now that Marduk's at the wheel, Yahweh doesn't fade into the background. The elevation of his own "sons" (be they Israel's kings, Israel, or the primordial humans in Genesis 1-2) doesn't threaten his own sovereignty. He's not afraid that humans will usurp him (they can't), but things get complicated when humans stop leaning into their human rule and potential and instead busy themselves trying to to be Yahweh's rival.

This is a recurring theme we see in many parts of the Hebrew Bible: the deliberate distancing of Yahweh from anthropomorphism. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of verbal anthropomorphisms (e.g., you can speak of Yahweh's body, even if metaphorically, "hand of god," "eyes of god," etc.). And of course there are visions of Yahweh and times where a messenger of Yahweh appears to be human, but he kind of might be Yahweh as well, and it isn't always clear (Genesis 18, anyone?).

But when compared to the unabashed portrayals of gods in human form in Mesopotamia, you can feel the difference in the Hebrew Bible: Yahweh can be imagined in human language and terms, but he's also not like humans as well. Gods in Mesopotamia eat and drink, have sex, grow tired, etc. Not so Yahweh. Oh, wait...he kinda sorta eats. He receives food offerings, but he receives them by smelling the smoke instead of direct consumption, emphasizing that while he's interested in enjoying the relational benefits of a meal, he's not dependent on it for nourishment.

This de-anthropomorization of Yahweh actually alleviates a lot of the tension between divine and human rule felt in texts like Enuma Elish.

Creation in Enuma Elish is a cosmic battle against Tiamat. Marduk creates the world by vanquishing Tiamat and her rebel forces and cutting her up to make the world. In Genesis, god simply separates the waters above the earth from the waters below, whereas Marduk looked at Tiamat's body and "split her like a shellfish into two parts: half of her he set up and ceiled it as sky, pulled down the bar and posted guards. He bade them allow not her waters to escape" (Tablet IV, lines 137-140).

Humans in the biblical creation myths are made from dust and divine breath, while in Enuma Elish, humans are created through violence: Marduk kills one of the rebel's from Tiamat's band and makes humans from its blood. The express purpose for the creation of humans in Enuma Elish is to relieve the gods of their work. Genesis 1-2 certainly has the idea of humans doing working (cultivating and keeping the garden and reigning over the earth), but it isn't work for Yahweh god, but simply the normal work of human life: cultivation for food and survival, care of other creatures, and the building of culture.

Humans in Enuma Elish are basically servants, while gods get to rule and feast and have awesome temples. The de-anthropomophization of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible lets him be the divine creator king and frees humans to be the awesome, glorious, spectacular humans he made them to be. Yahweh doesn't need humans to serve him--they can just enjoy the world he created as long as they don't abuse their freedom and power.

We see more of this sort of thing in Genesis 1-2. Enuma Elish is the story of how Marduk became king of all the gods in Babylon (taking up residence in his temple), while Genesis 1-2 is a story about the establishment of humans as rulers on the earth, and (perhaps) the enthronement of Yahweh, but Yahweh's divine kingship is once again assumed more than broadcasted.

If Genesis 1-2 were primarily about the enthronement of Yahweh, we'd expect a fancy temple-building scene at the end like there was for Marduk. The god who creates the world is entitled to a temple and kingship. There's certainly temple language in Genesis 1, but it's much more subtle, and the creator god's kingship is presumed more than declared. The god in Genesis 1 creates the world by issuing commands much like a king, and at the end of his creation, he "rests" from his work in creating the world (Gen. 2 1-3). The language of "rest" often appears in Mesopotamian texts in reference to the idea of god's presence coming to occupy a temple. If this god is coming to rest enthroned in his temple, it's the temple of creation, which is the domain he's just given to the humans to rule. Is he threatened by this overlap in domains? Nope. He's happy to sit back and let humans rule.

You Are a Transgression: A Poem

You Are a Transgression

Imagine

you are a transgression,

Your body

       bursting at the seams,

       peaking out from hems,

       spilling out of necklines,

       onto man's territory.

Your mind is a revolt,

Your voice

        pushing against the order

              of silence,

        contradicting the terms

              of your confinement.

You are not

        a cup flowing over

        a light passing through a window

        a fruited vine crossing the borders of its field

               to feed the hungry.

You are too big

        for the  britches you may not wear.

You are not

        until you scale the wall 

        built by your accusers

        and cry:

Go fuck yourself.

Your Body Longs to Feed the World

I had the pleasure of writing the Wake Ups for Red Letter Christians this past week. This week's theme was food. You can read the Wake Ups in the archives here.

*

Food was my adversary for many years. I grew up eating lots of healthy foods, but had a sweet tooth and from a young age was heavier than most of my peers. As a teenager, I was prone to binging on sweets at parties and often felt bloated and like I wasn't really enjoying the food anymore (just kind of wolfing it down). I ate when I was bored. Or when I felt lonely.

I didn't feel like I could control my eating, so mostly I just ate anyway and tried to ignore as much as possible my own dissatisfaction with my body.  I held on to the gnostic myths that comforted me: that I would one day marry a missionary who wouldn't be so shallow as to care about externals. He would love me for my soul and my discontent with my body wouldn't matter so much anymore.

I think I knew that my disordered eating was a symptom of other pangs and longings, but wasn't sure how to address them. In the end (if we can call it an end), it was a long relational process (that began about 10 years ago) that helped me develop a healthier relationship with food and my body. As you might expect, it happened concurrently with other emotional development and healing.

As an undergraduate, I started taking morning walks for mental and physical relief (exercise became a habit). I grew intellectually through the courses I was taking. My year at Oxford, I had weekly sessions with a professional counselor to talk about the issues related to my parents' marriage and divorce. I started to take more of an interest in the world. I started to believe that I was a good person. 

Throughout that period, there were many ups and downs, some evenings still spent staring into the mirror, hands grabbing the flab on my belly, feeling guilty for eating too much. Feeling like I was terrible and now needed to lean into the terribleness. I've always had a fear of being boring, and this feeling was always exacerbated by eating lots of sugar. But those downs gradually came less and less. I learned to be more balanced in my eating. I took an interest in food as more than sugar or fat: in knowing what goes into it, portioning it so that my body feels nourished, and preparing it in ways that my taste buds are delighted and satisfied.

I have learned (for the most part) to enjoy food. The regularity of preparing and eating satisfying, well-balanced meals, and crafting a cup of coffee in the afternoon or evening, are rituals that ground me. Food is a major part of my self-care.

As my love and appreciation for food has grown, I've developed a heightened awareness of how important it is to both share food on a local level, and also be a part of efforts to feed communities across the world that suffer from lack of food. My food issues have always been related to excess and, in some ways, an irrational fear of lack that came from my own low sense of self-worth. I believed that I did not deserve to eat, that I was not worthy of having this basic and universal need met. I didn't think I deserved to be provided for, so I was afraid no one would provide for me, despite the reality of plentiful food sources.

I can only imagine (and not very well) how excruciating it is for those who suffer from hunger and starvation. The physical pain of your body deprived of nourishment is compounded by the mental sense of your own body devouring itself. Add to that the horror of watching your community starve and being powerless to feed it. Lack of food doesn't just destroy you physically, but cuts into the fabric of your communal life. Without food to share, without commensal meals, what holds your community together? Around what do you gather together? Your bodies are too weak even to work together as you once did.

If people like me can feel deeply neglected even though we have our daily bread and then some, how must those who are quite literally and physically abandoned feel? Can you believe in life at all when you are physically dying slowly and watching those you love die beside you? How can you believe that you deserve to be fed when no one is feeding you?

But then imagine, just imagine, that moment when someone brings you food. This, here, is the beginning of your new life. Today, you are fed by others. Tomorrow, you will plant. The day after, you will both feed and be fed. Your community has been torn apart by devastation and lack, but you will rise again. You will once more gather around the table to be nourished together.

And this is a day of liberation not just for those who suffered from lack of food, but for the people of excess who lived in the myths of their own scarcity. This is the day those with excess of food stop fearing lack, stop hording their resources, and begin to believe that the whole world deserves to be fed. They stop fearing that no one will provide for them and, instead, recognize that generosity does not lead to lack, but abundance.

I began this post thinking about the efforts of Preemptive Love to bring food and relief to communities torn apart by ISIS (and most recently their efforts to address the water crisis in Mosul). Food has deep theological, emotional, and social significance, and to me hunger around the globe has become deeply personal. I do not (and should not) feel guilt for the food security I have, only an intensified desire to do what I can to help others find safe and abundance spaces.

I encourage you to consider giving to Preemptive Love or other relief organizations you might know. You may not feel like you have much to give, but remember: you have more than you know.

Touch My Scars: Why Matter Matters

As I reflect on the white evangelical community I grew up in, I think about how eerily similar our understanding and articulation of the gospel was to European colonialism.

We marketed salvation as "free," by which we meant "no strings attached." The prize was eternal salvation in heaven, an everlasting (if immaterial) home that had been purchased by Jesus' blood. All we had to do was accept this gift – to receive the salvation promised to us.

The receipt of this gift was formalized through a single ritual in which we each individually asked God's forgiveness. Our sin, we understood, had disqualified us from receiving this gift of heaven, but once we begged forgiveness, the deed of heaven had been signed over to us. There was nothing we could do (besides that initial Sinner's Prayer) to gain or lose this salvation. We simply grasped the salvation that had been offered by God.

Parts of this message were, in theory, not as problematic as European colonialism. Heaven, after all, wasn't already populated with people who would be annihilated, displaced, or assimilated as we flocked to inhabit the New Jerusalem. We conceived of heaven more like an empty city or house with no inhabitants apart from God, the angels, and the saints who had gone before us.

At the same time, the "no strings attached" philosophy we espoused is deeply troubling to me now because it's evidence of a deeper problem: our resistance to the innate dynamism of the world and our subsequent reticence to engage it (or take responsibility for the detrimental ways we've engaged it). Instead of embracing our bodied, relational existence, we've fought tooth and nail to be abstract, absolute, and decontextual. If that doesn't reek of Western imperialism, I don't know what does.

By believing salvation was either ours or it wasn't – and that there was nothing we could do to qualify or disqualify ourselves from it – we gave up responsibility for how our actions affected the world. What we did didn't really matter because our end was sealed.

Everyone wanted to be good, of course – and there were plenty of exhortations from the pulpit to flee sin and not to use our salvation status and God's grace as an excuse to sin. But like the Europeans who "discovered" America and took it as their own even though it was already inhabited by native peoples, we felt that we did not have to worry about history. Columbus and the other colonists could conceive of America as a New World not simply because it was new to them, but because they thought it was theirs – their world, their land, new for them to take, inhabit, and shape. 

In a similar way, when we prayed the Sinner's Prayer, we had entered New Life, but not just because it was new to us, but because it seemed to us a clean slate, no strings attached. The past was the past, and the present was ours. The colonists were able to believe themselves justified in erasing the history of the native peoples (which ultimately entailed trying to completely wipe out the natives). And we as newly-saved Christians were able to believe our own histories did not matter. Who were were, where we had been, what we had done – the Old Man, so to speak – was inconsequential. Jesus had wiped the slate clean.

On the outset, a clean slate (for individuals – I don't mean the colonialists) sounds good. No regrets, no harboring guilt for years and years. Freedom from the past.

But along with this presumed erasure of the past came an unrealistic and destructive sense of timelessness. We focused at first on the fact that we were new people with a new status – no longer sinners, but saints. But as time wore on, we began to realize that our new status – our new label – didn't mean the things we'd done or the people we'd been had entirely gone away. We are not blank slates after all, but dynamic bodies that change and interact with the world around us. We affect our world and are affected by it – we have power.

But we did not want that kind of power – the kind that comes with responsibility. We did not want timed power, but timeless power. We did not want to be changeable and moving, dynamic and growing. We did not want the responsibility, the complexity, of sharing a world with the Other, of collaboration. A world of matter colliding with matter to catalyze change.

We wished for a world we could control –  a solid, monochromatic world without so many moving parts – instead of a world of shared power where everyone had to work with others rather than for or against others. We didn't want a world of color.  We wanted a world that was black and white. Well, really, just white.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think anyone I knew harbored any hatred or dislike of people of color. But that's why systemic racism is so tricky and hard to see if you're not the ones directly suffering because of it. You don't have to hate people or wish them ill to harbor beliefs and stories that reinforce and advance the systems that oppress them. You don't have to be a white supremacist to internalize and propagate the myths of white supremacy.

Our reticence to recognize our location, our bodies in historical and social context, was part of our European Enlightenment legacy. Our truth was God's truth. God's truth was universal, not contextual, and hence our truth was universal. We became functional gnostics, scorning the locality of the body and longing for the universality of the spiritual.

We did not like bodies, so we pretended we did not have them. We could be "colorblind" because we were body-blind. We did not like the idea of bodies, and so we acted like we lived a disembodied existence, that our white bodies in the context of Western imperialism didn't have implications for our interactions with bodies of color.

But a disembodied existence wasn't our lot. The world is a complex web of interrelationships. We are spatial, we are bodies. We are living.

This dynamism of the world didn't sit well with our sinner/saint polarities. We were either good or evil, guilty or innocent, dirty or clean, redeemed or damned. And as time wore on, we sensed that the myth of our own sainthood couldn't be sustained. We felt more and more inwardly guilty and all the while tried to look more and more outwardly pure. Our dynamism haunted us. Instead of coming to grips with our contexts – our relationships, our social and political locations, our bodied existence – we felt guilty for not being timeless, for not  being bearers of absolute truth, for being contextual.

Not even the Westerners could be sufficiently Western.

We hoped more and more for our vision of a disembodied heaven where we could just lead a pure, unchanging existence. So getting to heaven – and getting others there – became the most important thing: "filling the bleachers of heaven." What we would do when we got there (apart from singing hymns) was anybody's guess.

So we peddled the horrible good news of a salvation that didn't care about this present world. We did not learn to cultivate or plant or create. We did not learn how to invest in or nourish our world. We thought ourselves spiritual refugees, displaced in this world and longing for our true home in the clouds. We did not take responsibility for the power our white bodies gave us over bodies of color.

I remember taking a course on Christian missions in high school that used a term called "felt needs." Felt needs were things like food, clothing, and shelter – the physical needs that missionaries might need to help address in their mission field. This was separated from spiritual needs, which of course meant salvation from sin and reconciliation to God.

Felt needs weren't to be neglected, but they were secondary. Meeting felt needs was a stepping stone to open people up to understanding their spiritual need. Meeting a felt need was never an end in itself. The goal was salvation, as if building someone a house was somehow less meaningful than promising them a blissful home in heaven for all time. As if God does not want to meet us in matter – in the particular, in the present, right now.

This was the Christianity I grew up with, and I am grateful for the people who somehow managed to resist being entirely swallowed up by visions of heaven. We couldn't ultimately escape our humanity (thank heaven!) and so we lived in a strange tension where our speech was heavily spiritualized and heaven-centered, but our fingers still longed to touch and create tangible things.

It was my science, drama, and literature teachers (strained and squashed as we were by trying to fit into some kind of pure mold or inflexible system of ideas) that first showed me the beauties of bodied life. There were borders we could not transgress – ideas we could not consider and things we could not do or experience – but we pressed against those borders as much as we possibly could. I spite of so many thorns and thistles, some of us still managed to sprout and grow.

Still, I feel increasingly troubled by this way of talking about Christianity that is so far away from, even antithetical to, the gospel as articulated in Jesus' incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

Think of what the incarnation means. God becomes flesh. God as matter. Not God in matter. Not God pretending to be matter or becoming matter for a little while.

God as matter.

And not just as matter, but redeemed matter, contingent matter, growing matter. After his resurrection, Jesus ate with his disciples to show them that he wasn't a ghost, but flesh and blood (Luke 24:39-43). Jesus' resurrected body wasn't released from the dependence, the mutability of human life. He ate. His body still bore its scars from his crucifixion, though healed. The past was not erased, but transformed.

What does this say for the present world of matter? For its future?

It screams that matter matters. Our bodies matter. The world and its intricate ecosystems, cultures and subcultures, webs – all this matters.

Your life is not a stepping stone to the next world. You matter now. Your body matters. This fragile, resilient body of cells is not a suit you will shed, but a dynamic living organism that will die and rise and experience transformation. Change. Contingency.

"Christ is contingency."

Poet Christian Wiman wrote those words in a rare work of prose, My Bright Abyss. Wiman has an incurable (and often unpredictable) cancer of the blood, and his meditations reflect a heightened sense of his own contingency. He writes:

Contingency. Meaning subject to chance, not absolute. Meaning uncertain, as reality, right down to the molecular level, is uncertain. All of human life is uncertain. I suppose that to think of God in these terms might seem for some people deeply troubling (not to mention heretical), but I find it a comfort. It is akin to the notion of God entering and understanding – or understanding that there could be no understand (My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?) – human suffering. If Christianity is going to mean anything at all for us now, then the humanity of God cannot be a half measure. He can't float over the chaos of pain and particles in which we're mired, and we can't think of him gliding among our ancestors like some shiny, sinless superhero...No, God is given over to matter, the ultimate Uncertainty Principle. There's no release from reality, no "outside" or "beyond" from which some transforming touch might come. But what a relief it can be to befriend contingency, to meet God right here in the havoc of chance, to feel enduring love like a stroke of pure luck. (pp. 16-17)

You matter. You-in-the-world matters. We matter. All of us together. Wherever we are, whatever bodies we exist as, whatever local part we play in the web of the world. We are not stamped as "saved" or "condemned" and left to twiddle our thumbs and think about our (possible) salvation with fear and trembling. We work. We build. We grow. We create. We transform.

We are born into a world of horrors and wonders, triumphs and tragedies. We are deep wells of pangs and longings, desires that can only be met in the confluence of matter with matter. We hunger and thirst for the rightness of bodies colliding with bodies, where we encounter the Other and are not threatened by its weight. A world where we take responsibility for the structures we create and inhabit, aware of the generative and destructive power we wield.

When you are tempted to think you do not matter, that your contingent existence is somehow an argument for its illegitimacy, remember: that's some weird fusion of gnostic heresy, Western imperialism, and white supremacy.

You are the light of the world.

You are not

a luminary hidden beneath a basket,

a glow dimming through membrane,

a radiance pressed back by cloud or veil.

You are fire

licking across the bark of the bush,

surface

unconsumed.

Ogling and Othering: My Love-Hate Relationship with Biblical Studies

The terms "Middle East" and "ancient Near East" assume a Eurocentric view of the world, and these monikers sum up why I so often feel conflicted about the moorings of my training in biblical studies.

As many of you know, the literature and art of the so called "ancient Near East" (ANE) has provided invaluable insights into the cultural backdrop of the Hebrew Bible. It has heavily influenced my own academic research and creative writings. But the study of the ANE didn’t just emerge at the height of British colonization, but as an extension of it. The whole enterprise grew out of this context and the current discourse carries with it the language and baggage of a Western gaze.

I suppose it makes sense, then, that my favorite scholar on Assyro-Babylonian art is Iraqi scholar Zainab Bahrani. She was educated in Western contexts, but is native to one of the regions (Iraq) that was home to ancient Mesopotamia. (We use "ancient Near East" as a drip-pan phrase to refer to any or all of the ancient peoples and civilizations that lived in these regions over the span of several millennia--talk about generalization! For a breakdown of the modern names, see Wikipedia.)

Because Bahrani is native to Iraq, she has a vested interest in de- and re-constructing the discourse on Assyro-Babylonian art. Much of her work goes into explaining why/how this art has been misinterpreted/seen as inferior because of a Western gaze that exoticizes the East and/or views it as the antithesis of "superior" Western rationalism.

When I reflect on it, I realize that my own interest in writing about Mesopotamian cult images is becoming more and more about truth-telling. As long as the West maintains that it is synonymous with the spread of Christianity and continues to interpret the Bible in this way, it will continue to think of the biblical stories of Abraham and Israel as equivalent to Western rational monotheism. The story then becomes the (Westernized) Abraham/Israel pitted against the otherness of Mesopotamian polytheistic religions, which the Western gaze then uses as its lens to read all Eastern forms of religion as inferior.

All of these are false constructs. The biblical stories about Abraham and Israel are far removed from Western rationalism, as are the literature and art of the many polytheistic religions of Mesopotamia. Even bundling them together under the label "polytheistic" is an unhelpful conflation of distinct histories and religious practices.

I am interested in understanding (as much as any Westerner can) both the Bible and Assyro-Babylonian art and literature as Eastern works that really do challenge many Western assumptions about the nature of religion, politics, spirituality, community, and a host of other things.

When many of these texts were first discovered, they were understood as foils to the Hebrew Bible--their value was in how they would illuminate the world of the Bible. This focus has shifted somewhat to study these texts as valuable in their own right, but the framework of the discipline still carries the Eurocentric baggage.

I am not sure--given the initial ideological moorings of the study--if it's possible to escape them (nor is any reading of history without ideology). But I do believe that the more we are able to see the histories of Mesopotamia as worth studying simply to tell a true story--and not as the "other" to "our" (Westernized) Bible--the more we will understand not only the landscape of ancient of Mesopotamia (in all its myriad, diverse details), but also ourselves and the texts of the Bible.

As a Western Christian (and as a Western human being) it seems important to me to realize that if I think of ancient Mesopotamia as an inferior other, then the logical step is to also understand the texts my Christian faith holds as sacred in the same way, understanding them as equally strange and inferior to contemporary Western ears. But this is not what Western Christians have done. Instead, we have dressed up the Bible to masquerade it as a Western text so that it would support our own ideology instead of challenging it, while at the same time using the Bible as an excuse to read other Eastern texts as inferior.

I want to be honest about the inherent conflict in this gaze, and try as much as possible to relinquish my stranglehold on history. To let go of my gaze of dominance and let history challenge me. If these texts appear strange to me as a Western reader, I need to take them as challenges to my own modern Western sensibilities rather than a sign of their inferiority. These ancient words and images have things to teach us, but so long as we insist on ogling them, we won't be able to hear a word they say.

"I'm Not Political, But..."

I'm a little hesitant to post anything not related to politics on social media these days. I don't have much faith in social media to renew the soul, but I think it can be a really great tool for activists and community organizers. It's useful for networking and disseminating information quickly. So I try to use it mostly for that (and promoting my author page).

Mostly. Sometimes I post other things, but it feels a little schizophrenic given the current climate. I mean: is the apocalypse nigh or are we just so excited about these cutesy cat videos and this triple-thick-gooey-delight chocolate cake recipe? 

Probably both. The world is ending and we lust after that Smitten Kitchen cake of fudge-y goodness. In every age the world has been ending, and this is worth holding in perspective. War, sickness, and poverty are a part of every age.

At the same time, however, this does not make all ages or communities equal. Just because the world is always coming to an end does not mean the fallout is the same for everyone. I don't think anyone is safe under Trump's unchecked authority, but I am among the people least unsafe. I am white. I am straight. I am highly educated. I am (lower) middle class. I have massive school debt, but no other debt thanks to well-endowed relatives. I am not wealthy or financially stable, but I am not in danger of being without a home or unable to pay my bills. I have healthcare benefits through work. I am not in danger of having my house of worship burned down or experience a hate crime because of my skin color. As a woman, I experience many of the negative effects of patriarchy, but still benefit from whiteness. My experience of patriarchy is not analogous to the experiences of women of color.

We are all in this together in some sense, but we're not all equally threatened by Trump's rule. I think all post-evangelicals and many other communities (religious or otherwise) are experiencing trauma because of Trump's ascent--I don't discredit or minimize that. When one part of the body is wounded, it can threaten the whole body. However, people (both individuals and communities) experience traumatic events differently because of their social and historical location. As a white woman, I belong to the group that's always been on top. Historically, I am part of the oppressors and continue to benefit from the privileges of a country structured around the needs of white people (more specifically white men, but the structure still has benefits available to me that perpetuate oppression for people of color). I've written about this a little already (you can read some half-baked reflections here).

I am experiencing trauma, but it not the same in kind as the trauma experienced by people of color or others directly affected by Trump's actions. I should also say that the trauma experienced by people and communities of color will be unique depending on the specific histories. The trauma wrought by the attempted genocide of Native Americans will not be identical to the trauma caused by the African slave trade in America, and naturally individuals and families within each community will have their own unique stories. However, all experience the trauma of the oppressed, which is very different from the trauma of being the oppressor.

My trauma--and I'd venture to say that of many white people--is evidenced either by flat out denial or a mixture of disbelief and horror at what we've done (accompanied by a sense of betrayal). I feel betrayed by the white evangelical community of my youth because I believed that it was mostly good and right about things, and has turned out, in its ignorance, to perpetuate systemic evil. (It's not just white evangelicalism that's the problem, it's whiteness in general, but white evangelicalism turned out to be rich soil for seeds of whiteness to grow.) I feel angry at my own complicity and yet not always sure what to do about it.  I'm still thinking through how best to channel that anger and turn it into something useful, something that can help heal the damage done by white supremacy.

This type of trauma is easy to ignore (though it has and will continue to catch up to us, hopefully before judgment day). Oppressors are allowed the luxury of forgetting. In fact, forgetting is integral to perpetuating oppression. In order to justify oppression, we engage in selective memory. There's a big difference between "The Civil War" and the "War of Northern Aggression." The same war, but remembered very differently. In order to justify genocide of Native Americans, our white ancestors "forgot" that the Native peoples were people, calling them "savages" in order to absolve whites of guilt. The same logic justified slavery in America. Our ancestors remembered only a racialized narrative that distinguished between types of human beings and deemed that only the white human lives mattered. These narratives are still alive today, evident in atrocities like mass incarceration, but white people have forgotten that these narratives exist. We have lost our ability to distinguish them as narratives, and false ones at that, because they support our existence and status in society. For us, these false racialized narratives are just "normal life."

That is the forgetful privilege of being white, why we can blithely say "all lives matter" without remembering the historical context, that historically only white lives have mattered, and that "black lives matter" is calling us out on this. By saying "all lives matter," we fail to acknowledge that "all lives" has historically been shorthand for "white lives," and in so doing reassert that only white lives matter.

I heard one woman say  during the election that, while she didn't like Trump at all, she was glad Trump's candidacy has brought a lot of America's issues to the surface. She's right in one sense. As I heard Mark Charles say at a talk last year, Trump is forcing America to decide whether it wants its racial bias to remain implicit or become explicit. But I wanted to say to her (and probably should have): "These issues were already at the surface. It's us, it's white folks who didn't notice. Everyone else knew we had problems because our "normal" meant their oppression." Now the white man even gets credit for raising awareness of racism--how colonialist is that?

What does all this have to do with recipes and cat videos?

I grew up in an environment that made it hard to distinguish between ages, both on a personal level and on a broader plane. Because God was "in control" that meant that anything we experienced was a divine appointment, so it couldn't really be bad (ultimately). This was how we viewed sin, too. Since Jesus wiped all our sins away, that meant we never had to confess or deal with anything we did that damaged the world. A blank slate. A carte blanche.

These are slight exaggerations, but not much--my evangelical community suffered from a really bad case of functional gnosticism. It made it really hard to make a judgment call on anything or know what we were supposed to feel. How could we ever be comfortable feeling sad or angry or anything but happy and grateful if God was in charge of our lot and God was good? By pinning everything on God, we abdicated our responsibility to act in the world, and take responsibility for the effects of our actions. We became timeless, unable to distinguish between times, to see cause and effects in history. A communal case of Alzheimer's. The complex legacy of white supremacy found in evangelicalism a space to grow because it already believed in itself as timeless and absolute, abstractly true, good, and beautiful, instead of time-bound and relative.

I'm not suggesting we stop posting cat videos or that our newsfeed must always swirl with head-splitting news and political posts. I think more than anything else we can accomplish via social media, we need people engaged on the ground, for the long haul. But I'm also keenly aware that one demographic of my Facebook (i.e., the white one) is primarily posting Pinterest-y stuff or apolitical humor, and the other part (mainly people of color and LGBTQ+ friends) are following and commenting on every detail of the current political climate. This concerns me not because Facebook actually matters, but because it feels indicative of a larger problem of forgetfulness. I hope that tons of white people are having great conversations off of social media with people of color (the face to face is better anyway), but I'm concerned that the social media silence is indicative of white forgetting. I'm afraid it really means we just don't care about the political havoc because we're the least negatively affected by it on the surface.

When we claim that we are "not political" we are not being apolitical at all. Instead, we are tapping into that privilege that white people in this country have always experienced--the luxury of thinking we are timeless, apolitical, without beginning or end in the broader sweep of history. In truth, we are and have been active and complicit in oppression. The very fact that we say we are apolitical is a political (and, for Christians, a theological) statement. We are saying very clearly that we are comfortable forgetting our whiteness and how it benefits us and disadvantages everyone else. We are once again pretending that we can remove ourselves from the world--away from history, away from cause and effect, away from the dire consequences of white supremacy.

Christians should view this as a bastardization of the Gospel of Jesus. Jesus had no interest in quitting the world or rescuing us out of it, but rather rescues us into it. In Jesus, God chose to become human, time-bound, local, specific, political. His life, death, and resurrection runs counter to a gnostic Gospel message that views the material world and human action (culture, creation, etc.) as irredeemable. Instead, he becomes flesh and affirms materiality, not to whisk his followers away to another world, but to usher in God's kingdom on earth. A kingdom of justice and equity. A kingdom of liberation for the oppressed, freedom from sin and all its effects, including relational ills on all levels: personal, corporate, and systemic.

This gospel challenges us to lean into the present and act in ways that will build up the world. Our hope is not in any of the current political systems or parties, and our allegiance is not to our country's president or government. But let's not forget that our allegiance is to the king whose kingdom may not be from this world, but is still in and for this world. The kingdom from God is no less than a human kingdom, ushered in by a human king.

My Science Textbooks, the Demagogue, and God's Missing Body (4)

Part 4 of a 4-part post. Here are parts 1, 2, and 3.

I am not sure where I’m going with all this. When my friend asked why I am still a Christian, I actually started writing the story/explanation below about why I haven’t gone the “spiritual but not religious route.” But then I stopped and wondered if I was really getting to the issues that frustrated me so much about my experience of Christianity. By relying so heavily on my own interaction with scripture as the basis for why I considered myself a Christian, wasn’t I once again pull out the evangelical stops? What if I was just reverting to the old, gutted belief that beliefs themselves are what make a Christian? Am I again engaging in the very bibliocentrism that I’ve tried so hard to get away from?

Maybe so. Still, this seems to be what I have. Here I am: Pope Rebekah. Me and my exegetical tools and my imagination. I offer you what may in fact be a contradiction to the story I have told above.

This is the story that makes sense to me.

God's Missing Body

A friend asks me why I am still a Christian.

Maybe I shouldn't be. There might be any number of compelling reasons not to be. Couldn't I just be "spiritual, but not religious"? Active, thoughtful, not tied to religion?

I don't begrudge those who go that route. It might even be necessary for some folks. Sometimes religious trauma can only be dealt with by leaving the structures that housed the abuse. And maybe stepping away from evangelicalism (even if not from Christianity as whole) is a similar kind of divorce.

But that's not where I am. The Bible education that has proven so toxic for many young Christians (I know this from many, many conversations with peers who graduated with a Bible degree) has been my lifeblood.

If I hadn’t been so textually-oriented from the beginning, things might have been different. But I’ve loved words and interacting with stories ever since I was a little girl. My mother encouraged me from a young age not only to write, but to engage life creatively, generatively. Words have been my life.

My mother’s creative bend laid the groundwork for the handful of college professors (some of whom were later ousted from their teaching positions–go figure) who opened my eyes to the dynamism of Judaeo-Christian scripture and its history of interpretation. The Bible was not a static, monolithic body of text or monologue, but a constant dialogue back and forth.

And gradually, the girl who used to bunker down and wait for the world to end caught sight of the world outside her dugout and stepped out into. God grew bigger, and the earth did, too.

But the bigness of God was only one side of it. The scope of my world, my self, my God–all this grew in relation to God's smallness. And it still does.

I keep coming back to the story of a God who has legs, skin, hands, eyes, teeth. The story of Jesus' incarnation–God becoming human in a specific person–is what takes me beyond the god of the apocalypse. God's body, God as organic matter, is the definitive affirmation of this-worldly existence, hinted at from the beginning of Hebrew scripture and climaxing in Jesus.

You can read the stories of the Bible different ways, and the fact that it's stuffed the gills with lots of different metaphors and stories is an open invitation to do so. (It's the classic problem of trying to write a comprehensive biblical theology–there are so many themes and so many threads, you can't just pick one and say it's the central theme.)

The story that's always stuck with me, though (if I took it into my head to attempt a biblical theology) is the story of God's missing (or hidden) body. It's this story that fuels my passion to live, to create, to build the world we long to inhabit.

You can feel God's absent body hovering everywhere in Hebrew scripture, a sharp breath from an unknown deep rippling across its surface.

The writers of Hebrew scripture have always been a bit squeamish when it comes when it comes to depicting their god (Yahweh by name) in corporeal terms. They engage in a deliberate and difficult dance between talking about Yahweh using pictures and metaphors from human life, while at the same time insisting that Yahweh is not reducible to these verbal images. And while verbal anthropomorphisms abound, visual depiction, specifically the making of cult images of Yahweh, is strictly forbidden.

The peoples of the ancient Near East had no such reservations when it came to depicting deities whether it was in literature or visual representation. The faces of gods could be seen all across the ancient world, from the sacrosanct cult images that lay hidden in the great temples most of the year, to the statues sitting in the shrines that dotted the hills, to the small images of household shrines. Gods had arms and legs and heads like humans and beasts, sometimes wings or claws or talons. Gods ate and drank and had sex.

But did Yahweh, too, have a body?

“The mouth of Yahweh has spoken.”

“His hands formed the dry land.”

“The eyes of Yahweh search the whole earth.”

“May Yahweh make his face to shine on you and be gracious to you.”

Mouth, hands, eyes, face–if Yahweh’s body could be envisaged in verbal form, why this resistance to visual depiction?

We could spend years and volumes trying to answer that question (many have). But let's just approach it through one doorway, one theme: creation.

In both ANE literature and the Hebrew Bible, creation is linked to rulership. The god who creates the world is enthroned over it and determines its destiny. But we also see this rulership delegated in various ways. In ANE literature, the "image" of a god is tasked to be the god's reigning presence–an extension of the god, not just the god's legal authority, but its real presence (scholars debate on how exactly to tease this out). In the ANE, sometimes the king is referred to as the "image of god," and other times "image of god" refers to the god's cult image housed in its temple. In Genesis, however, the divine image is not cult statue of wood or stone nor is it the king. The image of god is humankind.

The Hebrew Bible, particularly the Book of Isaiah, sees the “image of god” as a statement not just about the god and its image, but the fate of Israel (and ultimately the cosmos). Through a series of polemics against the making of Babylonian cult images (Isa. 40:18-25; 41:6-7; 44:9-20; 46:1-7), the writer of Isaiah 40-55 insists that making cult images is an attempt to supplant both humans and Yahweh, thereby subverting or denying the power of both to act and change the course of history.

The human craftsmen (who, in the context of Isaiah, appear to typify both the other nations and Israel itself) try to make an image that resembles a god, but they actually end up making an image that resembles a human being. The very humans that are themselves the image of Yahweh, tasked to advance the destiny of the cosmos, use their creativity to make their own replacement image to rule instead. The cult image, in turn, ends up being conflated with a god, and receives the worship due to Yahweh. In reality, the prophet insists, these other gods don't have the power of the Creator and thus cannot act in Israel's history or save them. Yahweh, by contrast, is the god who formed Israel and can rescue her from her oppressors.

This is one way of looking at the mystery of God's missing body. It isn't so much missing as it is hidden in plain sight. We are God's body. Humanity is God's image, God's "son." Just as Adam fathered a son in his own image and likeness (Gen. 5:4), so God "fathered" humankind in his image and likeness. The image has the power to create, to shape the world.

This power comes with a responsibility. The image must emulate the the Creator's own generous spirit, for God shaped the earth, filled it with creatures, and provided food for all. "Multiply, fill the earth, subdue it." Don't let an obsession with militarism distract you from the richness of these words in their context. What we have in Genesis 1 and 2 is actually two creation stories juxtaposed to one another, which have two kinds of language to talk about humanity.

First, we have the regal view in Genesis 1: humans as monarchs, exercising dominion and spreading throughout the world. (In this first story, humans and God are both regal: God creates the world by speaking, by giving commands like a divine king: "Let there be light!" and the cosmos obeys.) In Genesis 2, we see humans as people of earth, tenders of the garden: "Cultivate and keep." (God, too, gets dirty: he doesn't create humans by speaking, but by forming and breathing into them. This God is a gardener more than a king.)

By placing these two stories together, Genesis qualifies the kind of kingdom to be advanced by and through humankind: not a rule of plunder and pillage and scorched earth, but of tending, tilling, and cultivating.

If you've read the rest of the stories of the Hebrew Bible, you know that the images of God struggle to embody this kind of generative rule. Genesis 3 shows us the images of God staging a mutiny, trying to usurp the place of the very deity who made them. They are sent into exile outside the garden of God, away from Yahweh's presence.

God's body goes wandering, estranged from the Creator that formed and animated it.

That's not the end of the story, of course. God keeps reaching down, searching for images who want to embrace their divine resemblance, lean into it, to be the gods he formed them to be. He appeared to Abraham and proffered a similar gift: land, descendants, and blessing. The land itself wasn't cosmic in scope, but the reach of it's influence was meant to be: God told Abraham that through him all the families of the earth would be blessed. And Abraham, unlike Adam and Eve, believed God would make good on his promise, and it was counted to him as righteousness.

The Hebrew scriptures are full of stories of God reaching down and humans reaching up. Long ago, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in many ways. Through the prophet Moses and the giving of the Law. Through Elijah and Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah. Through the prophets whose names have been obscured or forgotten.

But in these last days, God has spoken to us in his son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the world. This son is the radiance of the glory of God, the spitting image of his nature.

In Jesus, the mystery of God's missing body reaches its zenith, collapses, and rises again. At the very point in time where God is reunited with his estranged image–the moment of power when the image flawlessly embodies its Creator–he surrenders his body, gives it over to death. By leaning into death, Jesus fulfills humanity’s generative destiny.

By participating in humanity’s corporate fate of death (brought on by humanity’s rebellion) despite his own individual innocence, he simultaneously inhabits the corporate body and prophesies against it. Instead of insisting on his rights as God’s faithful heir to forgo the suffering brought on by the human rebellion, he suffers with humanity and so embodies the kind of self-offering righteous rule that God desires. At Jesus’ resurrection, the body of God that has gone into hiding emerges from behind the veil.

My Science Textbooks, the Demagogue, and God's Missing Body (3)

Part 3 of a 4-part post. Here are parts 1, 2, and 4.

The fundamentals and the markers of Christian identity are perpetually elusive. We have the historic creeds of the church, of course, but these raise the same issues raised by bibliocentrism. No unmediated access, revised understandings of the text to incorporate new data, and what constitutes participation. And the perennial problem that assenting to “right doctrine” cannot be equated with living, dynamic faith.

We know from church history that not even the church can entirely agree on what constitutes it. The church has split on various occasions (first the Eastern and Western churches, and then later when Protestantism broke from the Western Catholic church). It’s not outside of church tradition to splinter off and start a new structure. And even before this, we have in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple writings abundant evidence of debates about what it means to be the “real Israel.” (Just, for example, read the Esther and Nehemiah. Both have very different ideas of what it means to be a Jew. Esther–a Jewess living in Babylon–has no qualms about marrying a pagan king. In Nehemiah, intermarried with non-Jews is verboten: you can be a proper Yahwist if you are married to foreigners. Both are Jews in different physical and social locations, and both have different ideas of what being a “true Jew” entails.)

The issue of identity markers brings us again to the problem of the larger body and the individuals within it, and what is a Christian. So we have prophets who constantly tell us to return to the early teachings, be they of the early church, Jesus, or the historic creeds–individuals calling the body back to its true self. But let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that “being true to the true body” means embodying the teachings of Jesus or emulating life of Jesus (as many Christians would say it is). What are we to do with those people of other faiths or no faith at all who actual do embody this spirit and who do the kinds of things with their body that Jesus did. They are not within the Christian markers of identity, not baptized, not confirmed, do not profess Jesus with their lips. Are they part of the true body even though they live outside the very True Body where God is supposed to be most fully present?

So what is a Christian? Who is a Christian? Am I a Christian?

I continue to think of myself as a Christian, but thinking is not the same as existing, moving, as a body within a larger body. I interact with people, some Christians and others not, in a wide variety of contexts. I try to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God.

I’ve gotten all my cards punched. I’ve prayed the Sinner’s Prayer. I’ve been baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I have three higher degrees in Bible and theology. But more than that (because we all know you can have three Bible degrees and still be an asshole): I’ve tried really hard to be a Christian. I’ve tried to love people and do what I think will help usher in the kingdom of God on earth. I’ve never expected being a Christian to be easy. Life in itself is difficult. Living with an awareness of bodies and being committed to redeeming or re-creating the structures that have proved toxic is hard no matter who you are. But I think I always expected the hardest pressures to come from outside the church body. I was not prepared for the resistance within.

Here, naturally, my sacramental theology kicks in, but this exacerbates the sense of God’s missing body. God is supposed to be present in the eucharist, the priest, and the faces of the people kneeling beside you taking communion. Communion–that food you can’t get outside of church. That covenant meal that might feel less awkward and less funerary if everyone at the table lived like they actually gave a shit about the world Jesus came to save.

Communion and participation in the sacraments was less of a conundrum for me when I was an evangelical than it is for me now that I’ve turned to liturgical strains of Christianity. In an evangelical context, participating in the body meant trying to have meaningful relationships with other Christians. Since the church was “the people” not the physical architecture or the liturgical structure of the Sunday service, you could “do church” anywhere. Having coffee with a friend could be church (as long as you did some praying and ‘fessing up). Church was less the ritual of the Sunday service or the sacraments and more about the relationships.

If I were still an evangelical, I would have no intellectual qualms about stepping away from traditional church structures, away from the weekly rituals and sacraments. I mean: isn’t that how we grew up? Who among evangelicals or post-evangelicals doesn’t have the odd house church in their history started by some unordained white man in a Hawaiian shirt who thought God would be most fully present in his living room? If that’s what being a Christian is, can’t I just grab the nearest bunch of likeminded Christians and pitch a new tent?

The Sacramental Body

Because there wasn’t much sense of tradition to retain in an evangelical context, we felt okay doing pretty much whatever we wanted as long as it didn’t conflict with the morality system we’d created. Now that I have a keener sense of tradition, I’m less comfortable leaving the sacraments behind, even if I’ve lived most of my life devoid of many of them. I grew up without many aspects of church that I think are important to maintaining a sense of Christian identity: confession, regular communion, reciting of the creeds. I crave these, not because I think it’s the only way to “do church” or for God to be present, but because they are dramatic performances that aim to help us embody stories of re-creation. These rituals (in theory) are supposed to keep grounding us in the traditions about God’s presence in the world, helping us to be God-in-the-world.

Writing this makes me sigh with the weight of the missing body. What if God isn’t here in this eucharist and in these performances? What if we don’t take God from the church to the world? What if God has wandered out into the world, and we keep running after him to pull him back inside?

My desire for the grit of liturgy only highlights a problem with church I’ve had for as long as I can remember. My closest and most meaningful relationships have never existed in connection with the body that met on Sundays. Many of these relationships have been with Christians, but always in other contexts like school or work. The only time I’ve felt the actual weekly gathering of Christians felt life-giving for a sustained period of time was during my year in Oxford, where most aspects of my life converged. I was living with other Christian students and many of these went to the same liturgical church. I found the liturgy profound and life-giving, but I was also learning a lot in my academic courses at Oxford from a variety of teachers from different persuasions and faiths.

Maybe my question isn’t really what/who is a Christian, but why do I continue to identify as a Christian. Should I? The tensions between the larger structure and the convictions of the individual exist everywhere–they are not unique to religion. We can’t quit all the worlds we inhabit. I would still be part of a mass, one thread in a great web. My concern is the adaptability of the structures we choose to inhabit (insofar as we can make a conscience choice). It’s clear to me that conservative American evangelicalism has lost any power it once had to speak prophetically into the culture. There may be faithful individuals living and moving in evangelical contexts, but as a body it has a bad habit of spitting out its prophets. But maybe this is nothing new. Maybe prophets were made to be vomited up.

Is a body still malleable, still open to change, still moving? This is an issue that has often troubled me in the twenty-two years as a Christian. I have known individuals open to growth and change in various ways, but the majority of gestures I have witnessed from churches were gestures of self-preservation rather than growth or openness to change. Even my Christian university experiences were like that (though some were more open than others). Even in the educational context that taught me to think and question, there were still places we were intellectually not allowed to go, at least not publically. There is a very real fear of otherness that rears its ugly head in various ways.

Maybe this is not particular to Christianity. Maybe institutions and large bodies are just resistant to change (just look at America’s (in)justice system). But when is it time to quit the body and how do you decide if it’s redeemable? Or, even if it is redeemable, if you’re really the one most suited to help redeem it? You don’t quit a marriage at the first sign of trouble, but you also don’t want to cling on for years and years and years hoping your spouse will change.

My Science Textbooks, the Demagogue, and God's Missing Body (2)

Part 2 of a 4-part post. Here are parts 1, 3, and 4.

Being True to the Body 

Being "true" to a body may mean adherence to the explicitly held beliefs and practices, but it can also mean the implicit values that are inherent to the structure itself. And sometimes (often) we experience tension between our individual convictions (or lived experience) that seem irreconcilable to the larger body. Within the context of the church, departure from orthodox teachings and practices of the church is often viewed negatively.

At the same time, however, Jewish and Christian tradition both have a long history of individual dissent within the body (I’m not saying this is necessarily unique to Judeo-Christian tradition). The Israelite prophets depicted in the Hebrew Bible are some of the earliest evidences of this strain–speaking and performing words against the practices and beliefs of larger bodies, whether the bodies are other nations or Israel itself.

Every prophet views herself as either hearkening back to some earlier teaching or upholding and/or advancing the real heart of the body. It is not understood as a revolt against the body so much as a call to the body to come back to its origins, to its “true self.” A contemporary example of this would be those evangelicals who consider the embrace of Trump to be contrary to the values of the Bible in general (and more specifically the teachings of Jesus). The true structure, they maintain, the real heart of Christianity, has been lost and replaced with a terrifying specter, a false image.

However, as a cradle Protestant, I know how elusive agreement on what constitutes the “true body” (and “trueness to the true body”) can be. To what image do these prophets call the body back?

One of the key features of the Protestant Reformation was of course a call to return to the text of scripture and use this to measure church tradition, teachings, and practices. In the evangelical community of my youth, there was again this odd divorce between what thought and said we were doing, and what we were really doing. On the one hand, we espoused the text of the Bible as primary. On the other hand, the majority of us (even our pastors) didn’t have a lot of education in biblical exegesis and interpretation. We were able to live with the impression that we were under the direct authority of scripture without a Pope or authority to interpret for us. We had a direct line to and from God. We thought we had unmediated access to God’s word. In actuality, we had (as everyone does) presuppositions, traditions, ways of reading that we all brought to the text without knowing it.

None of these mediators–whether they were individual Bible readers, church leaders, the Pope, or Bible scholars– could function as a univocal, definitive authority on how to understand God’s word without the whole system collapsing. We presupposed that presuppositions were inherently bad, that we had to check our theology, our minds, our everything at the door and come to the Bible as a clean slate. But presuppositions are not only not-bad (how’s that for a sweeping endorsement?) but inevitable. Presuppositions can become bad when they are considered normative and the system closed, the body refusing to be challenged by other voices (whether they come from within the body or outside).

If that idea is raising your hackles, I suspect it’s because you (like me) were raised with a closed view of scripture. The idea that scripture speaks univocally is demonstrably false. That’s just not the scripture we have. Such a view taken to its logical conclusion would have to exclude the possibility of Jesus as a new, inbreaking revelation of Yahweh, for in order to understand Jesus’ identity, the New Testament authors simultaneously invoke Jewish scripture and go beyond its original authorial intent.

The Bible (both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) was composed by many authors speaking in various times and places. This doesn’t mean there is never any agreement between the voices of the Bible or that what we have is a bag of completely divergent voices. On the contrary, there are common themes, metaphors, patterns of thought that keep cropping up. Newer texts engage in dialogue with older texts.  

One point of basic unanimity between the books of the Hebrew Bible is monolatry: worship of one God. (Unlike monotheism, which holds that only one God exists, monolatry allows for the existence of other deities, but maintains that only worship of one particular God is acceptable.) The Hebrew Bible is unapologetically monolatrous. Yahweh and Israel have entered into a covenantal relationship, and thus worship of other gods constitutes infidelity to the covenant. At the same time, within these “orthodox” texts, we have evidence Yahwistic Israelite faith that does not always adhere to monolatrous orthodoxy. An example would be the Israelite worshipper portrayed in Judges 17-18 who does not appear to be familiar with “orthodox” thinking on making cult images (more on images below). Another example would be the cases of religious syncretism in Israel, say, when King Solomon erects cult centers to other gods (1 Kings 11). These are portrayed negatively in the biblical texts. Solomon loses the kingdom for this offense. It is considered a breach of Israel’s covenant with Yahweh. Yet at the same time, these breaches do not disqualify Solomon (or the worshipper in Judges 17-18 for that matter) from the covenant community. They are still Yahwists and still Israelites.

These points of agreement in the biblical text do not negate the idea that the Bible is polyvocal. The Hebrew Bible’s unapologetic monolatry is a actually a very good example of the dynamism of the biblical texts because Jesus’ entrance into the scene redefines monolatry and monotheism  in a way that runs counter to Jewish monotheism. The Bible is not not a closed system. Christianity holds that Jesus is the same God of the Old Testament. That one God exists in three co-eternal person: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is a new idea. This is unorthodox.

Viewing the Bible as a closed system is contrary the Bible’s own polyvocal witness. There cannot be one defining voice. The Word of the Lord, if it is really to speak to us “at many times and in many ways” to different peoples and contexts, must meet us as the words of the Lord–in the smallness, in the lowercase, in the plural. I think you can argue plausibly that this is what God did in the incarnation of Jesus (more on that below).

In short: when I studied biblical exegesis (and a smidge of church history), I realized that the quest to make the Bible the locus of faith is not only wrongheaded, it was impossible. There we were–just me and my Bible. I had all my exegetical tools, my linguistic knowledge and backgrounds knowledge, and all the knowledge that was to be had in the Western intellectual tradition. At last, I could really be my own pope.

But there were three related problems here, as any Bible scholar with an ounce of self-awareness will tell you. First, having better tools with which to study the Bible still didn’t give me unmediated access to the text–I still brought to it all the other structures I inhabited. My social location still influenced how I read the Bible. My whiteness, my economic status, my gender, etc.–I didn’t get rid of any of these coming to the text. The second problem was that being able to elicit more historically-informed readings of the text did not constitute participation in the church, the alleged True Body. Being part of a body isn’t just giving assent to doctrines or even the stories you tell (though this is part of any body, not just religious), but a space you inhabit (whether willingly or unwillingly). Whatever “true participation” means, Bible study alone wasn’t it. The third problem was the just the old issue of what constitutes true participation (we’re back where we started).

My Science Textbooks, the Demagogue, and God's Missing Body (1)

Part 1 of a 4-part post. Here are parts 2, 3, and 4.

A demagogue rises to power in my country and begins to quash freedom of the press, and all I can think about is how my science textbooks told me global warming was a myth.

An odd patch of memory on which to fixate. I have other, more pleasant (or at least more interesting) memories of my science education: the warm, enthused faces of my science teachers (moms and dads from my homeschool group), the unnerving dissection of a frog, the thrill of doing research and experiments for a biology project on smell and emotional memory.

Global warming. Our textbooks–I can't remember if they were put out by Bob Jones University Press or A Beka–took great pains to remind us of a fact we already knew: global warming was a myth. Like evolution, there was no real science to back it up, it was nothing but a meaningless speculation. The fact that there was consensus among most scientists about the reality of global warming meant nothing: most scientists did not know God.

There is nothing–I surmise in retrospect–inherently contradictory about these two statements:

1. God is real.

2. Global warming is real.

Nor is there any innate philosophical tension between these:

1. God created the world.

2. The world was created through the process of evolution.

The first is a statement of origins, the second is one of process. They are not mutually exclusive.

And yet global warming and evolution were both seen as threats to Christian faith by the evangelical community of my youth. If embraced, they would poke holes in a very intricate, locked system of how we read the Bible. Because we equated true faith with adherence to that system, if the system fell, faith would, too.

So we bunkered down and waited for the apocalypse. For some, apocalypse was quite literally imminent, and they literally bunkered down. For others, the bunkering mentality manifested itself as a refusal to engage with any ideas or people outside our circle unless it was for the express purpose of "witnessing" to them to convert them and bring them into the fold. And that kind of interaction isn't real engagement, isn’t a posture of turning, seeing, and knowing–it's a posture of control.

Accepting global warming was dangerous–a concession to the atheist scientists who crafted their godless theories of evolution to prove that God was dead.

I write about these memories knowing that people and movements are complex, and North American evangelicalism is no different in that respect.  But it's the very complexity, and the ease with which we all became subsumed into the monolith of ideas that makes me angry. We can perpetuate lies simply by inhabiting systems and never challenging them. 

Anger at institutions–religious, political, collegiate or otherwise–is a tangled mess to unravel because you know there are individuals within this broader body who both represent the body and at the same time rail against it. Their very presence within the body is like new wine in old wine skins. They threaten to make the whole thing burst, collapse.

I know many thoughtful evangelicals, both leaders and lay folks, who speak out and prophesy against untruth and injustice. People who denounce the demagogue and urge those who worship him to turn their eyes from this idol.

And I know that even some of the less thoughtful folks are more than this terrifying spectacle.

But the problem of the monolith remains: the great mass that was instrumental in Trump's ascent.

I am livid. White-hot rage. Blood-spitting anger.

I don’t know why people are surprised by evangelical support of Trump’s ascent. "We threw a bunch of gold in the fire, and out came this graven image!"

No, Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump was waiting to happen. It was only a matter of time before a god of glittering gold arose, a god we shaped to look like us, to embody our values, to show our true hand.

A friend asks me why I am still a Christian. This question leads to so many more. What is a Christian? And whatever that is, am I still that? If it means inhabiting a corporate religious body, can I justify being a Christian?

What is a Christian?

The catechetical answer to what is a Christian might go something like this: anyone baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is part of the covenant community of the church. (The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches might view the other major branches of Christendom as “brothers in error,” but still kin in the faith.) Most Christian traditions have a public affirmation following baptism when a person comes to a certain age, something that expresses that person’s willing commitment to continue participating in the covenant community into which they were initiated through baptism.

In liturgical traditions, this is called “confirmation,” a sealing of the covenant that was created in holy baptism. In anti-liturgical traditions like the ones I grew up in, the public affirmation is often the baptism itself (“believers’ baptism”), sometimes accompanied by a verbal testimony of how the believer came to faith.

These practices recognize and try to remedy an inherent tension in any body, be it social, religious or political (or a mix–it’s always a mix, isn’t it?): the individual’s participation in (and conflict with) the larger structure. We live and move in relation to social bodies, but also exist as individuals, distinct persons, and cannot be reduced to the bodies we inhabit. Individuals participate in systems, but are not always true to them (I’ll talk a little more about what being “true” means below). Confirmation and other public affirmations of the faith attempt to express the individual’s willingness to try to be true to the communal body which they have entered, whether that entry was by choice (believer’s baptism) or by the choice of your family (infant baptism).

This tension between the individual and the larger frame of the corporate body was present even in the evangelical tradition in which I was raised. We railed against the externals of the Catholics (who we believed were trying to work their way to God), but at the same time had our own sets of external motions that were needed to verify and legitimize “true faith.” We all knew individuals, Christians who “talked the talk” without “walking the walk,” and viewed this as a divergence from true faith as defined by the values of the corporate body. One side of our rhetoric denied the necessity of individual action, while another side of our rhetoric created its own web of moral hoops through which to jump to achieve true faith. You didn’t need to dress a certain way, refrain from using curse words or watching certain movies to please God–God would accept you. But if you wanted the church body to accept you, you most certainly did.

God was weirdly wed to his body and estranged from it all at once. We could create our own body and rules for it without explicitly pinning its creation on God, but still wield the rules as divine authority since it was through us–in our communal body–that God was to be found in the world. God would still love you if you were outside the body, but if you wanted to encounter God, you had to get past us, jump through all our hoops. If you wanted to experience God, you needed to go to the True Body, and to get there, you had to be true to that body.

This was the conundrum of God’s body. I couldn’t meet with God apart from his body. But I’ve always been at a loss as to where exactly God’s body is to be found.

Stop the Platitudes

At the risk of adding to the noise and fear, I do feel the need to say a brief word to address the discrepancy of reactions to the election outcome in my news feed. From my friends of color, I hear a lot of anxiety, frustration, and hurt. From most of the white people in my news feed, I hear "God is in control" platitudes. Even if God is sovereign, this does not negate the very real, very damaging consequences of human action. When a person or community is suffering, reminding them that God is in control can effectively dismiss their pain and and truncate their legitimate expressions of grief and anger. When Jesus cried out on the cross because he felt abandoned by God, the Father wasn't like, "Woah, calm down, son. I got this." The Hebrew Bible, too, is filled with expression of lament, anger, and all manner of human responses to calamity--God's sovereignty is never, ever an excuse to ignore the role humans play in re-creating or de-creating the world, and does not negate our responsibility to work toward justice in this world.

I also realize that as a white, Christian woman, whatever the fallout of a Trump presidency is, I will not be affected anywhere near as much as people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, and people of different faiths. Trump's misogyny has affected and will affect women across the spectrum, but this seems "small" compared to the racist sensibilities that Trump's rhetoric stoked this past year. It utterly inappropriate for the white community to tell communities of color to "calm down, God's in control." I realize that many of the folks saying things like this mean well, but if I've learned anything from this past year, it's that good intentions without knowledge can do a lot of damage. I say this as someone who has been ignorant for most of my life about the hardships and discrimination people of color in this country face. I probably can't even begin to know what my ignorance has cost my brothers and sisters of color. 

Over the past year, I've lived in a strange middle space. On the one hand, I hear bewilderment at best and hostility at worst from the white conservative community I grew up in when it comes to issues of racism. On the other hand, I hear my very tired, very legitimately frustrated friends of color exhausted by having always having to justify their narrative/experience to their white sisters and brothers. I understand the bewilderment because I've experienced it--growing up in white skin made my largely oblivious to the experiences of people of color. But since we've lived so long in this blissful ignorance, we must now work that much harder to embrace the folly of wisdom, of awareness. And while we are trying to wake up, we must stop patronizing people of color by dismissing their pain and perspectives with platitudes.

And remember that the Lord's prayer for the "kingdom" is NOT "Your kingdom come to take us away from earth into heaven where your will is done." It is "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." The Kingdom of God is not an otherworldly hope, but a this-worldly one. Our hope for a future kingdom characterized by God's justice and mercy begins now, in the present. As we look at the injustice in this world, we can hope and long for the day when God's rule (which is, in fact, human rule, cf. Gen. 1-2) will be fully realized. But we cannot us this as an excuse to ignore injustice in the present, to turn a blind eye to the very real affects of human choices. The only way to embrace the future is to lean in to the present.

Donald Trump, Apocalyptic Theology, and Evangelicalism

After watching this video by John Oliver on the RNC, it made me think again about why Trump appeals widely to white evangelicals in America.

Trump's appeal is not so surprising when you think about how American evangelicalism was shaped by the Great Awakenings, its emphasis on salvation as an individual decision or moment (read: emotional experience), and its focus on personal piety/inward purity as taking precedent over social justice issues or outward works/actions.

I remember experiencing a lot of angst as a teenager about God's disposition toward me because mainstream evangelicalism is all about being inwardly pure and having devotional feeling towards God. I knew that I was a sinner (y'know, stuff like pride, getting mad at my siblings not sharing my stuff), but I had no dramatic testimony and so I was at a loss as to know what I should be *doing* other than trying to feel right towards God and cut down on the pride and not annoy my little sister.

I had essentially no framework to do or be good because I knew from a tender age that it was all about what Jesus did on the cross, and I couldn't add anything to that. And since the whole point was Jesus saving my individual soul, the only "good" thing I could even do was evangelize to people so that Jesus could whisk them out of the world, too. I felt I had no power to affect change in the world, nor any sense that "saving the world" meant anything more than God redeeming peoples' hearts. It was all very apocalyptic in a narrow sense.

It's this apocalyptic theology that Donald Trump appeals to. His message is: "America was once great, but now it's not (because of all the Muslims, Mexicans, woman, and black people), so let's take back America by kicking out folks who don't belong." His message is completely antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that began in Genesis. 

I know many people have said this before, but we need to begin our Gospel story in Genesis 1 and see it through to the present day and beyond. The story begins with God creating the heavens and the earth and filling it with all forms of life. After forming each aspect of the world, God declares it good--and by the end of it, he sits back in his throne, looks at it all and declares it "very good"--exceedingly, overwhelming good. He creates the humans in his image (in the ancient Near East, a regal role--the humans are monarchs of the earth, appointed to manage, tend, and care for the earth and its creatures). He gives the humans and animals food to eat.

The humans have but two tasks: eat and cultivate the earth (so that all may eat). God blesses them and the other animals to multiple throughout the earth, and as they do, they are to eat and tend. But then a serpent draws the humans' attention to the one fruit that God had told them not to eat. They began to believe that God was withholding something good from them, that he was not to be trusted, that in fact eating the forbidden fruit would make them like gods (ironically, they are already like gods by virtue of their status as God's images).

Instead of eating the good food of their creator and basking in the delights of the garden, they fixate on this other fruit and end up breaking their creator's trust. And when the humans began to distrust the goodness of the world their creator had made, they actually started to live that way. They could not trust God. They could not trust each other. And people have been warring with each other ever since, and the whole earth has felt its effects. Because we believed the world was evil, we actually began to make it evil.

But since then, God has been calling human beings to start listening again to his voice and making the earth good again--not by ridding the land of people we perceive as threatening, but by loving the world, caring for it, and feeding it. And indeed, much of the earth's goodness still remains, though we still have much to do. In Jesus, we know what it looks like for a human to believe in God and work this out--not just a pious feeling, but embodied action. God becoming human in the person of Jesus is the affirmation of this good creation. If we are in need of an apocalypse, we have it right there: Jesus dying the death of the world and then rising from the dead to show that even the earth in its broken state can't keep humans and God from partnering together to fix it, to make it yield life.

Trump does not believe the earth is good. He doesn't believe it is worth saving. His message is not salvation, but purging. In Trump's world, only certain kinds of humans deserve to eat. The gospel of Trump is not "cultivate and keep," but stockpile and batten down the hatches. And Trump may try to convince people that he's got great food that will make us like gods, but don't be fooled: that fruit's rotten to the core.

Alton Sterling

When Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown and the Ferguson riots began, I was about two weeks into motherhood. As a white woman raised and homeschooled in the suburbs of North Jersey, I didn't know what to make of it all. I grew up with a very simplistic and skewed view of how our justice system works in North America. The police were the goodies who put away the baddies. If you weren't a baddie, there was nothing to fear. Race didn't even factor into the equation.

I knew racism existed. I knew that when my mother visited the deep south, she saw confederate flags still waving and houses with window signs that said: THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN. But those were racist individuals, weird people stuck in the past.

Then Ferguson happened. And slowly (perhaps too slowly), cautiously, I began to read more, to listen to different voices than the ones I'd been hearing most of my life. I started to see that the shootings of unarmed black men like Michael Brown were not isolated one-off events, but part of a disturbing pattern of violence rooted in systemic racism. Men and boys--boys like 12-year-old Tamir Rice--the victims of police brutality and murder because of the belief (whether conscious or subconscious) that the lives of people of color are not only unequal to white lives, but insignificant. Because of the lie that black lives, black bodies, are an inherent threat to white lives and must therefore be contained, controlled, annihilated.

If you're not tracking with me (and even if you are), I invite you to read. Read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Naomi Murakawa's The First Civil Right. Cornel West's Race Matters. James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Drew G. I. Hart's Trouble I've Seen. Watch this talk by Soong-Chan Rah. That's just to get you started. And, hopefully, you'll begin to see that what happened to Michael Brown and now Alton Sterling (and hundreds before and between) are not isolated cases.

We cannot be silent. We cannot remain unaware.

The more I study the Bible, the more I see how the individualistic focus of Protestantism (particularly the North American evangelical variety) makes us easily blind to systemic problems in our justice system and communities. This is not a new critique of contemporary Protestantism, but I am seeing more and more how the focus on individual and inward purity has become a distraction from the very real and urgent need to look outside ourselves and love our neighbors as ourselves. Think about it: the idea "as long as I myself am not a racist, I'm okay" is insular and concerned only with inward purity alone, and has little to do with the embodied, outward act of loving your neighbor's black skin as much as you love your own white flesh. 

This focus on individual sinlessness/purity is antithetical to the corporate understanding of ethics in the covenant community of God found both in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. This isn't to say that individuals weren't personally culpable for their own sin, but there was the understanding that their own sin affected the whole community. In turn, the community itself could be guilty of corporate sins and injustice. 

In fact, when you step back and look at the sweep of the Mosaic Law, the gist of the entire law is: here's how you approach God (the just law-giver) through ritual performance and purification, and here's how you live in peace with your neighbor. Jesus said as much when asked asked what the greatest command in the law was: "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Much of North American evangelicalism has lost that horizontal aspect, thinking that we can actually realize the vertical aspect of loving God without loving our neighbors. Thinking that if we abstain from certain things or keep our minds and hands pure, that we don't have to worry about problems of justice that are bigger than us as individuals. If I've learned anything over the past two years, it's that I am not just responsible for my own individual behavior, but those of my community past and present. 

As a white American woman, I am culpable for the African slave trade in America and all the other atrocities committed by white people against people of color, even the slaughter of Native Americans that happened long before I was born. It doesn't matter if I wasn't there. I'm responsible for the havoc my ancestors have caused, along with the ways in which I perpetuate the cycles of injustice today.

If you are a Christian and believe the Bible has any kind of claim on your life and doings, I challenge you to delve deeper into it. Know that its stories are deeply rooted in this sense of communal responsibility from generation to generation. A simple, but poignant example is found in the beginning of Deuteronomy, where the prophet Moses begins a series of four speeches to the Israelites as they are about to enter the promised land.

Some years ago, the previous generation of Israelites had been enslaved in Egypt, but God rescued them from Egypt and brought them to Mt Sinai (also called Horeb). On the mountain, God spoke with them and revealed his presence through thunder, earthquake, and fire. At the mountain, God and Israel made a covenant, a particular relationship sworn with solemn oaths. God gave them the Law, and Israel swore to keep it, casting their lot with this God who had rescued them and promised to bring them safely to a land of their own. But many of the Israelites of that generation broke the covenant by committing idolatry and died in the wilderness before they entered the land. 

As Moses speaks to this new generation about to enter the land, he starts with a history lesson. He reminds them of their history with God: how he brought them out of Egypt and revealed himself and his Law to them at Sinai/Horeb, and how they broke the covenant. The point here is that this history Moses remembers is their history despite the fact that technically it was their ancestors, the previous generation, who experienced all these things. Moses speaks with them directly in the second person about the revelation of God at Horeb and exhorts them, saying:

Watch yourselves, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest they depart from our heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children's children—how on the day that you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb...And you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, while the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven, wrapped in darkness, cloud, and gloom. Then the Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words, but saw no form; there was only a voice. And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Words, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone. (Deut. 4:9-13)

Moses speaks to the people as if they were there, as if they themselves saw the presence of God atop the mountain. As if they themselves had sworn to uphold the covenant and keep the laws, even though it was their ancestors who had done so. And with this memory comes a warning: don't forget what your eyes saw. Your eyes. Don't forget how God revealed himself and his covenant. Don't forget that when he rescued your ancestors from Egypt, he rescued you, too. Just because you weren't there, doesn't mean this salvation and this covenant isn't yours. Don't forget the covenant like your ancestors did and commit idolatry. Don't forget.

If you're like I was two years ago, you may be white and bewildered (I'm still white, but only slightly less bewildered). Bewildered because we have grown up with a different memory, a different consciousness than people of color in America. While we have been permitted the unholy privilege of forgetting the atrocities of slavery committed by our ancestors, people of color don't have this luxury because the fallout from these initial injustices never went away. It still plagues their lives, rearing its ugly head in many different forms--macro- and microagressions--and most heinously in the continued slaughter of innocent men and women at the hands of those who have sworn to "protect and serve." 

We are dealing with fundamentally different memories of how our common history has unfolded. In my white-washed memory, there's no way a cop would pull over or assault another human being because of their skin. In my white-washed consciousness, slavery is a thing of the past--done, dealt with and gone. I don't see what it's like to be abused for my skin because I've only ever lived as a white body. And so my white-washed reaction is that the discrimination doesn't exist. The brutality isn't there. I need more facts. But this is the sight of privilege, the toxic permission to forget.

We--white Americans--have forgotten what our eyes saw. Now, with the use of body cams and social media, our eyes see what they have forgotten. We are starting to wake from our amnesia. But the gut reaction to the horror of our own making is suppression of the memory. We don't want to believe that we are capable of such monstrosities. That we have done these things and continue to do them. We can't believe that the blood of Alton Sterling is on our hands. We can't believe what we've done. But we need to. If we do not face and lament our sins against our neighbors, there can be no healing for anyone. There can be no restoration. There can be no change. 

We need to start listening to different stories. We need to tell different stories. Black lives depend on it. All lives depend on it. We are one body, and when one member is killing the others, it's only a matter of time before the whole blessed, beautiful body dies.

No, You're Not Losing Your Faith: A Letter to Introverted Moms

Do you remember that quiet space?

I suspect you do. I think your body remembers it well, and feels its absence. You remember the days when you had access to that much needed alone time--when you could sit, read, pray, or just sip your coffee and stare at the couch.

Now? In those rare moments when you are able to get alone, you can't seem to settle your brain. Your mind is racing, screaming, "What do I do? How should I use this precious bit of time? Don't waste it. DON'T WASTE IT, WOMAN." In your brain, you've already spent the time on five different activities. You've taken a hot bath and read a chapter of the next Wheel of Time book and made coffee and written in your journal and exercised and mediated and read your Bible.

I won't tell you it's okay that you don't have any alone time, because it's not. You need it. But you don't need to feel guilty about wanting your alone time back. You're not a bad mom. You don't love your kids any less.

And don't worry: you're not losing your faith.

You might feel claustrophobic--like you don't have time to be spiritual, to cultivate the inner life. And that's probably true. You fight to get that quiet time, that quiet space, but sometimes you're tired of fighting and just want to sink.

That doesn't mean God is moving away or that you're moving away. It means you're in a different life stage.

There will come a time when you're able to sit more, to rest more, to calm your soul. There will come a time when you'll be able to do more--to do the creative things that make you feel alive. And chances are, as time goes on and you get to know yourself better, you'll learn how to carve out small spaces even in the midst of mommying. You'll find your rhythm.

But for now, just do what you can. Grab any quiet moments you can, and don't feel guilty or afraid. You're still you. And God is still God. No one's going anywhere.