sitting shiva

As we drove home through the snow, my mom called what we did tonight ‘sitting shiva’ for Kenya.  As no copy of Mudhouse Sabbath was handy, I turned to that bastion of anecdotal wisdom, Wikipedia, for a surprisingly insightful summary of Judaism’s mourning ritual called shiva.

“Shiva is not meant to distract the mourners from their loss, but rather to let them experience their grief together with friends and family.”  It is a time where members of a community gather to mourn, to tell stories, to sit with and experience grief.

That’s what we did.  We told stories and we said names.  In the last few weeks I haven’t wanted to pray for Kenya – or really to pray at all.  What I’ve ached to do is to hold a child, to affirm life in the midst of such extreme darkness.  But for awhile we just said names, wave after wave of them, interwoven with each other and tears.  And we read lament Psalms, the kind that hold God’s promises and the world’s reality together and cry out in the space between them.

Again and again and again I return to Nouwen’s words about remaining in the painful places.  So much of what we’re told in times of difficulty is to get over it, to ‘choose hope’ and to move on.  But is hope alone always (or ever) prophetic?  Or do prophets call forth something different from the deepest places of pain?

In an article entitled “Is there no balm in Gilead?” by Walter Brueggemann are the following words in reflection on Jeremiah: “The same speaker knows about an awesome despair and a confirmed buoyancy.  The one does not negate the other.  In the very midst of a realistic despair that sees life in its rawness, there is nevertheless a word of hope.  Despair does not override or drive out buoyancy, but succeeds it and lives with it.”

What does it mean to choose grief over distraction?  What does it mean to live with both buoyancy and despair?

“We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but what he cannot do, or will not, which is catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel’s worth of sense into our days.  And we need reminding of what time can do, must only do; churn out enormity at random and beat it, with God’s blessing, into our heads: that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone.  Who are we to do demand explanations of God? (And what monsters of perfection would we be if we did not?)  We forget ourselves, picnicking; we forget where we are.  There is no such thing as a freak accident.  “God is at home”, says Meister Eckhart, “We are in the far country”.

- from Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm

eisegesis

Opening the Bible has been very difficult for me in the last few months.  I am suspicious not so much of the text itself as of the way that I read it.  Because I was raised in a practicing evangelical home, marinated in that brand of Christianity from infancy, its influence infuses every encounter with the text.  Most biblical stories are littered with interpretations I’ve received in Bible studies, Sunday school, from books and parents and teachers, in sermons, in conversations.  This familiarity with Scripture is both blessing and curse.  I must appreciate a broad knowledge of biblical characters and themes that enables my toddling steps towards theological and philosophical reflection.  But it’s a frightening thing to begin to acknowledge how culture and context-bound my understandings are. 

I tend to think of the influence of different cultures on a reading of Scripture using the image of an onion’s layers.  God’s Word (Christ) was spoken into the specific cultural context of first century Judaism under Roman occupation.  The human authors of the Bible wrote from within their culture to others who shared their images, metaphors and social structures.  Two thousand years later, I am told that that Word as expressed in the Bible speaks to my context too.  Yet between me and that lived Truth are the onion’s layers: those active on the text before it is available on the page before me, and the assumptions with which I approach the text. Thousands of years of translation across cultures, languages, and time, with each translation bearing the imprint of the translator’s context rise to meet me when I open the Bible, and before my own eyes are the lenses my culture and upbringing have given me, including those that, as an adult, I have chosen for myself. 

It appears the only thing to do is to attempt to dig through the layers, to somehow roll back culture’s influence.  Yet just as the onion is its layers, acknowledging the transcendence of scripture means that its essence is not in a culturally-neutral core, but messily embedded in the cultural layers.  It speaks in and to each culture.

But as human beings, we are inclined to speak first to scripture, rather than letting it speak to us (using eisegesis, reading ourselves into the text rather than exegeting and allowing it to speak to us).  Scripture has been used to justify both sides of some of the most terrible oppression in the world: slavery, colonial oppression, the subjugation of women…  We see what we are looking for.

For this reason, the concept of biblical exegesis seems idealistic and unrealistic.  I’m currently working on an assignment that calls for me to take an honest look at Ephesians 5:22-33 (the ‘wives submit to your husbands’ passage.  Note the culture present even in the assignment – v. 22 is a sentence fragmenting, saying “wives, to your husbands as to the Lord”.  It makes no sense without v. 21 which talks about mutual submission among believers.  Still, the NIV translators thought this fragment self-explanatory enough to separate the two verses with a helpful paragraph heading “Wives and Husbands”, which completely alters the tenor of the passage).  I can’t take an honest look at it.  I am a biblical feminist.  I believe that Jesus’ interactions with women were radical and that the gospel continues to be a force for the liberation of women from oppression and domination.  I cannot approach scripture as a tabula rasa, and therefore I am deeply suspicious of my ability to let it speak to me at all. Can I ever encounter truth, and will I know it when I experience it?  Being suspicious and deeply distressed by readings of scripture that allow ‘Christians’ to oppress the poor and destroy the environment requires that I hold my reading to be equally suspect.

Currently Reading Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith By Kathleen Norris see related

stigma

[Note: While I hate having to qualify things before I say them, this post merits some explanation.  As angsty as what follows sounds, it's really not so bad.  I have wonderful friends at Wheaton and feel like I generally can fit in as much as I want to.  Being a TCK is not something I even think about very often anymore.  Discussing the power of stigma in SOC 380 (The Body, Suffering and Death...aka group therapy) just made me stop and reflect.]

It’s one of the things I’ve had to get used to this semester – seeing my parents on campus.  Leaving the SRC on Saturday morning after Zumba (an all-women group fitness class that is basically Latin dancing – a very non-Wheaton embodied experience) I ran into them coming to work out for the first time.  I spent the next 20 minutes showing them around the weight room, teaching them how to use the treadmill, and explaining the general dynamics of the place.  Walking back to my apartment with my roommate, she asked why I hadn’t just let them figure it out themselves, and I started to reflect on the crazy role reversal that the last few months have been.

Growing up as an MK, my parents were my cultural brokers, helping me to understand America.  We moved to Kenya when I was six, and I remember from a young age having a certain understanding that I didn’t fit in either of the geographic worlds I lived in.  I was a piece of paper torn over two continents, an image that was especially salient in the days preceding and following each trip across the Atlantic.  My parents explained America to my brother and I and demonstrated what was normal – drinking tap (sorry – faucet!) water, not always shaking hands, standing still in church.  They impressed on us the importance of being intentional in our encounters with our American world too, particularly with a year-long furlough when I was 10 (a year I still consider to be the second-worst of my life, only slightly outdone by 8^th grade – which was awful for the normal middle-school reasons).

But something began to shift as I hit my teenage years.  I started to recognize the flaws in my parents’ cultural instructions.  They taught me the American culture of their generation, which could leave me painfully out of place in my own.  It’s a feeling that still makes me wince.  I remember reading a story about a boy who grew up overseas.  When heading off to an American school for the first time while on furlough, the boy proudly carried a new briefcase he had carefully chosen – just like his father’s…  Years after reading it, that story still makes me tear up.  It’s a feeling of being adrift – who can you trust if not your parents?

So, at the wise age of thirteen, I attempt to usurp the role of integrating my family into American culture.  I remember real agony when ordering at fast food restaurants with my family – we would be in line forever while my parents perused the unfamiliar menus.  I would rather order something I didn’t really want and make it quick than break with the American cultural norm of hurry.  I resisted my family’s attempts to embrace the oddities of missionary life.  No, I did not want to participate in the christening of our latest 15-year-old granny car, and I certainly didn’t want to have to take a picture with the damn thing!  Being seen in public with my parents was an emotionally taxing experience that would leave me distraught in my attempts to make us all seem normal, seem American. (While I recognize that this is a common adolescent experience, these memories are associated almost exclusively with our furlough trips, when I felt most powerfully the need to fit in.)

This left me with a good bit of anxiety regarding my move to college in the US.  I did a lot of lying my freshman year – smiling, nodding, laughing along; anything to hide my cultural illiteracy.  I had hoped for a bit of TCK-community, but caught on quickly that seeking that out would only alienate me from the broader Wheaton culture even more.  Because there is stigma attached to being an MK – that you are proud, awkward, cliqueish, don’t know how to dress, and take a know-it-all approach to the world.  It hurts to write those things down too, because I know I fall painfully short of contradicting those stereotypes sometimes. 

The first months of freshman year are tough for anybody – having the same conversation with everyone (Where are you from? Where do you live? What’s your major?  Got any brothers and sisters?  How did you choose Wheaton?).  But I found myself particularly boxed in.  As soon as ‘Kenya’ came out, there were three ways the conversation could go (all quick dead ends): “Kenya, wow, that must have been cool!  What was it like?” or “Kenya!  I went on a missions trip to Zambia last year and I LOVE AFRICA!” or “Kenya!  Wow, there are so many people from cool places around here.  I’m just from Minnesota”.  I mean honestly – how am I supposed to respond to that!  When people assume that I see their life experience as less valid?  And what was Kenya like?  What was YOUR hometown like?  It was just life.

What we do when we stigmatize each other is to take one feature of a person and make it what we relate to first.  We cease to treat them as an individual, and instead treat them as an identity, a background, a disease. 

But it’s not quite that simple – because while I never wanted people to interact with me as an MK, that was still a powerful part of how I saw the world, something that I occasionally burned to share, but often chose not to voice because I wanted to at least relate to people, even if I couldn’t be understood. [And I’ve switched to past tense to pretend that this doesn’t happen any more.]

Going home to Kenya twice since coming to college has been wonderful…and hard.  It’s a bittersweet reality that I feel more fully alive there than here.  It’s simple things – Kenyan politics, English premier league soccer, Sheng (a wonderful mix of Swahili and English) – the body of knowledge and experience I have that (sometimes literally) doesn’t translate to Wheaton, and the things I don’t have to explain to my high school friends (No, I don’t actually know how to handle heat – Nairobi is 5,000 ft in elevation and the weather is pretty much a gorgeous 75 degrees year-round; Yes, we had electricity…well, most of the time…).

From here, rootlessness is tempting.  Never completely fitting in anywhere can make it easier to fit in somewhat anywhere.  I’m used to negotiating, used to watching people for cultural cues, used to knowing what not to say, and there’s a thrill to starting to ‘learn’ a new culture that makes a restless life attractive.  Perhaps it’s an avoidance, too, of living in a place where I could reasonably achieve the near-complete outward conformity that can feel like such a lie.

intellectual humility

I scare myself sometimes.  The things I hold loosely, the things I hold tightly – it is an odd mix.  The singularity of Christianity, the idea of “one way only” to salvation, the nature of prayer and the Holy Spirit, the belief that calling on the name of Jesus and then living your life like God doesn’t exist will get you an eternal reward, while living for others and serving the poor but never acknowledging Jesus as Lord will see you in hell – these things, I hold loosely. 

So I am startled at times by the things that I am passionately convinced of, and at my willingness to see only one side and surround myself with others who agree.  My favorite teacher in high school would begin each of his new classes with several days going over the ‘intellectual virtues’ – seven marks of intellectual character and their corresponding vices.  Yesterday I pulled the handouts that I saved from the last of those lectures.  I can still read the faint numbers in the margins, where I rated myself on the different virtues as per our assignment, but was too ashamed to put the numbers down in ink.

Intellectual humility: “Someone who is intellectually humble is someone who earnestly wants to know the truth and so they…recognize that they, like all people, are sinful and capable of error.  They are humble because they are aware that Truth is not of their making but is God-breathed.  They are also honest enough to admit the limitations of their own knowledge base and actually rejoice when they are proved wrong because it means they have grown in their understanding of God’s truth.  However, the intellectually humble person is also aware that all people are sinful and limited in knowledge and thus is not willing to passively accept the opinions of others.  They remain courageous in their passionate pursuit of Truth even as they admit their own limitations. (Intellectual Arrogance is the corresponding vice).”

The numbers in the margin that I wrote 3 years ago indicate what I still consider to be very true of myself.  I’m much better at Intellectual Curiosity and Intellectual Courage.  I really can’t think of anything that is ‘sacred’ in the sense that I refuse to question it.  When someone forbids me to think a certain way, I am like a kid at Christmas time.  Knowing I am not supposed to open that closet and see the ideas inside only makes me relish the peek even more.  So right now Wheaton College is making Marxism, feminism, open theism, and (some days) even agnosticism far more appealing than they might otherwise be.

But somewhere in this mix of questions I’ve emerged with a couple of ‘truths’ which I am quick to use in judgment and condemnation.  A couple of weeks ago, one of my roommates asked me what I would say if I had 30 minutes in front of the whole Wheaton College community to say anything.  I know for sure one of those things would deal with our ignorance of structures.  Our general concept of moral responsibility doesn’t extend much beyond our own personal space.  This enables us to drive SUVs, not recycle, sit by as our country’s leaders screw the rest of the world over, and live in ignorant cocoons of privilege.  When confront with evil injustice we say, “Well, I was not personally responsible, so I don’t have to do anything”.

The campus’s response to last year’s Solidarity Week was a perfect illustration of the problem.  Solidarity is a student organization working for understanding and reconciliation around issues of race.  Last year they examined white privilege.  Excellent (and provocative) advertising meant the whole campus was talking about it.  But the typical response from white students was, “I’m not a racist!  I don’t make racist comments, I don’t discriminate against people.  Because I have not personally participated in any of these behaviors, I don’t have to worry about white privilege.  I therefore find this advertising offensive”.  I wanted to grab those people and shake them and say, “Can’t you see that the whole system is flawed?  You benefit from it every day, and by not working against it you are perpetuating it!”

In my Gender Roles class we are talking about the invisibility of power structures and marginalized identities to the powerful.  In “’What About the boys?’ What the Current Debates Tell Us – and Don’t Tell Us – About Boys in School”, a discussion of the gendered classroom, Michael S. Kimmel describes his own first realization of the invisibility of marginalization to him as a white male:

“…When I look in the mirror, I see a human being.  I’m universally generalizable.  As a middle-class white man, I have no class, no race, no gender.  I’m the generic person”.

I think Wheaton struggles to understand marginalization because, for the most part, we are ‘generic people’ – some of the most privileged individuals to ever live on this planet.

Understanding structures has implications all over life.  The one I’ve most recently been struck by relates to (what I see as) our inability to understand how American hegemonic power affects the rest of the world.  Tikvut Israel (Hope for Israel – a club started on campus this year) showed the film ‘Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” on Tuesday evening.  The advertising, the music, the ‘experts’ interviewed, and the perspective of the film all presented a very chilling portrayal of Islamic fundamentalism. 

One of my biggest frustrations with the film and the discussion that followed was the lack of context.  To me, terrorists are rational actors.  I see the language of jihad and references to Islam as a religious frosting for a struggle against powerful political, economic and social inequalities.  The film pushed very hard to depict terrorism conducted by disparate groups spread across the globe as a ‘war’ on the West.  I think this rhetorical shift is extremely important.  Because when we think of wars we think of relatively balanced, similar actors in conflict.  There’s a good reason we don’t think of a kid throwing a rock at a tank – the power differential in the latter case is stunning.  And I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind when trying to understand and address modern terrorism.

I’m so passionate about this stuff that I’ve lost the actual point I started with for more than a page.  All that to say, I am thoroughly convinced that I am right, in a way that frightens me and does not acknowledge that I am indeed as blind and deluded as everyone else stumbling around on this planet, no matter what their political persuasion.

At the beginning of my senior year of high school, I gave myself a faint 5 (on a score from 1-10) for Intellectual Humility.  It was one of the lowest ratings I gave myself (a little grade inflation going on, perhaps?), but I would put it far lower today than ever before.

an evangelical response to AIDS

I’ve heard a lot of evangelical hand-wringing over the Christian response to AIDS (or more appropriately, complete lack thereof) in the last week.  The general storyline is as follows:  “ (x # of years ago) I was minding my own evangelical business when I (read magazine article/saw sad picture/went to Africa on a short-term missions trip) and God broke my heart and I realized that AIDS is huge and tragic and terrible and that (I didn’t know anyone with AIDS and/or my church and evangelicals in general have done nothing about it).

After a description of the appropriate period of remorse following this realization, the story continues with a description of one of the things that makes us evangelicals in the first place – our desire to go out and do something.  The general pattern is as follows: “I/my church adopted an African child/village/country and we are partnering with and in relationship with said child/village/country, which we (spend lots of money) visiting and supporting each year.”

But when it gets really interesting is when we address the uncomfortable fact that AIDS happens in America too.  A lot.  And we should do something about it.  At that point, an elephant enters the room.  Because AIDS in America isn’t sexy.  It isn’t necessarily starving, poor, or the victim of gender injustice.  Despite the changing demographics, AIDS in America continues to be identified, at least by evangelicals, as a gay disease. 

This presents the average broken-hearted evangelical with some problems.  Because just like we don’t know people with HIV, we also don’t know gay people.  Add to that that in our subculture, homosexual sex is about the worst thing you can do.  So the story continues with a warning about how when we really let God break our hearts with something God takes us to some interesting places and we get to know and love some interesting people.

The inflection of interesting here is very important, and often preceded by a slight pause and accompanied by eyes widening to indicate how worldly-wise we are.  Interesting is our euphemism – for gay people, for drug addicts, for people we normally would not see as fit to love or associate with.  But that’s just it – God broke our hearts and now we are learning to love ‘these people’.  We are stooping to love ‘these people’.

There’s a special word for love that stoops.  It’s patronizing.  It’s charity with every possible negative connotation.

While in Europe, one of the best ways I could find to describe what was happening to me spiritually was that I had lost my place in the story.  When I opened my Bible, I didn’t read myself in it, not even in the Psalms.

So I started to read parables about being lost.  I went to Luke 15, with the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son.  I only got two verses in before I found my place in the story again: “Now the tax collectors and ‘sinners’ were all gathered around to hear him.  But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them””. (Luke 15:1-2).

I read those words in and almost started laughing because it was so simple.  In the first sentence, the word ‘sinners’ is in quotes.  Because when we really look around the table, we can’t see which is which.  We can’t see who is a tax collector and who is a scribe, who is a openly practicing HIV+ gay man and who is a born-again Wheaton College student, not if we really look.