Stoking Fear and Encouraging Violence

Every time I open my computer or phone I am blasted with an endless stream of information, much of it concerning, even horrifying. And every time I go to Facebook I want to say something, but what? I can't focus. I can't mold my thoughts into words that address adequately all that I am reading and seeing. So I close my computer or phone and walk away with my thoughts stuck in limbo and feeling like a coward.

So instead of addressing all.the.things (for there are too many to count), I am going to share one thing. ONE.

This past weekend I read We Are Charleston: Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emmanuel. This book was written by a history professor, a journalist, and a poet and it details the horrific murder of 9 church members at Mother Emmanuel AME Church on June 17, 2015 by white supremacist Dylan Roof, as well as touching on the history of slavery, the Black church (and the formation of the AME denomination), reconstruction, Jim Crow, civil rights, and the implications that all of this had on the congregation of Mother Emmanuel and those who were killed. For everything happens within the context of history.

One thing that really stuck out to me were the words that Dylan Roof spoke as he stood to fire his gun:

"I have to do this. You rape our women, and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."

He was speaking this to a group of 12 people. Nine were women, most were considerably older, and all were pillars of their community.

Two things struck me:

1.) This is the age old accusation of Black men. "You rape our women." That was the standard accusation used by all sorts of violence against Black men and boys (think Emmett Till). That was the fear driven by the 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, that sparked a rise in the activity of the Klan. You spark violence by fanning the flames of fear. Even if that fear is unwarranted. (The reality is that white male owners raped their slaves for centuries with no repercussions whatsoever. "Every accusation is a confession"?)

2.) These words sound exactly like what I am hearing today about immigrants. I cannot tell you how many times I see posts about the horrific things immigrants have done to "real Americans," always with "they would be here today if it weren't for these illegals here." The current regime claims that they are going after violent offenders. And yet over 70% of ICE arrests are of people who have NO record of any offense.

If you can rationalize the hideous treatment of the immigrant community because a few American citizens have been killed by a few illegal immigrants, then you can rationalize Dylan Roof killing the pillars of the Charleston Black community.

The person should be held accountable for the crime. Not the community. After all, isn't this the argument when it comes to gun violence? "Don't take our rights away because of the action of one person!" And that is even though noone is taking your rights away should gun control laws be tightened to something more reasonable.

What this really is is the black and white thinking writ large on entire populations. Maybe this is where the "One of ours, all of yours" mindset comes in.

But does that hold up? Do the wicked actions of one person or one group of people mean that all that fit that category are guilty by association?

-Should we oust every person with Italian ancestry because the Mafia originated in Sicily?

-Should we lock up all former members of the US Army because Timothy McVey killed 168 people when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City?

-Should we ban men from positions of ministry because of the thousands of reports (not to mention all of the unreported incidents) or sexual assault within churches?

As you can see, that would be ridiculous. As ridiculous as it is to target entire communities of people who are here working hard to make a new life for themselves just like ALL of our ancestors did at one time (unless you are 100% indigenous).

All I am saying in this mixed-up, frazzled rant is that there is nothing new. This is nothing new. Those in power in our country have used double standards and the rhetoric of fear and disgust to excuse their own behavior while fanning the flames of fear and suspicion since before we were a country.

And this kind of rhetoric, this kind of demonizing of entire people groups, this kind of dehumanizing language against those created in the image of God, only leads to violence.

And if you don't stand up to it now, one day you may be on the receiving end. And I doubt you'll like it. 

Tweet

A Tidy Life

 I’ve always been a bit of a disappointment. A misfit toy. Someone who, more often than not, resided somewhere outside the box. 

I haven’t always had the tidiest of lives. 

In my younger years, a tidy life meant that you were thought well of by the neighbors and you made your parents proud. Later on in life, as my world revolved around the conservative evangelical church community, a tidy life meant that your theology was right and therefore God wouldn’t be mad at you. 

I didn’t fit the mold as a kid. Or as a teenager. Or as a mother. Or as a wife. Or as a realtor. Or as a Christian. 

No matter the scenario, tidy and I were like oil and water. For a very long time this was a source of shame. 

When you have been on the receiving end of impossible expectations or at least ones that seem impossible for you to meet, you can go one of two ways: you can dish the same out to other people or you can do the opposite and fling your arms wide open. 

I’ve come to the understanding that God has never asked me to be tidy. That was a standard set up by other people due to their own discomfort with disorder, mess, and people in all their fragile humanity. 

And I’ve come to realize that I don’t want a tidy life.

 I want a REAL life. 

I want a life where compassion and curiosity and awe and kindness and understanding are more important than what things look like on the outside or whether or not they check some arbitrary box. 

I want people to feel the freedom to sit with me and let who they are, who they really are, spill out, knowing that there will be no judgment, no fixing, no disappointment. 

I want to understand deeply. 

I want to speak truthfully. And graciously. 

I want to give generously. 

I want to love extravagantly. 

That’s the life I want. 

Tidy be damned.

Tweet

The Martha Mitchell Effect and Believing Women

Every so often I come across some new story that just rocks my world in a “How am I just hearing about this?” way. 

Last week I learned about Martha Mitchell. 

Martha Mitchell was the wife of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general. 

Martha was a southern lady from Arkansas. She talked a lot and drank perhaps too much. She had a likable, folksy, opinionated way about her. 

When she heard some juicy piece of news that she thought the American people needed to know, she would call the press. The press loved her. The American people loved her. Richard Nixon? He did not. 

She was “The Martha Problem.” 

And she became more of a problem. She was in California when she learned of the Watergate break-in and immediately tried to call the press. She knew that Nixon was in on it. She knew. 

Her husband’s security detail caught her, ripped the phone out of the wall, had her tranquilized, and held her against her will for days. 

As time went on, as she tried to tell that she knew this was big, even her husband tried to pass her off as off her rocker. She had become unhinged, he said. 

Nobody believed her. Until they did. Until the evidence backed her up.

This was the 70s, of course. A time when women weren’t listened to. Weren’t believed. And were written off as unhinged on a regular basis. 

In the early 70s Diane Langberg was a fresh young psychologist. She would sit and listen as women began sharing with her stories their stories of sexual abuse. Abuse she had never encountered in her own life. Abuse she had never read about in any literature. Abuse she had never been taught about in her pursuit of 2 graduate degrees. As she remembers, “Often counselors were warned to not get ‘hooked’ into believing hysterical women. I chose not to heed the advice.”

She believed them anyway. 

Diane Langberg went on to become perhaps the foremost Christian authority on sexual abuse. 

Martha Mitchell died a short few years after the Watergate scandal. Perhaps her most lasting legacy is the phenomena that bears her name: The Martha Mitchell Effect.

According to the National Institutes of Health, “The Martha Mitchell effect describes a paradox in psychiatric evaluation where clinicians mislabel patients’ truthful accounts as delusions because they seem implausible from a clinical perspective, which can result in misdiagnosis and harm.”

What must it have been like to be Martha Mitchell? To be disbelieved? Silenced? Even told you are crazy? 

What must it have been like for women in the 70s to have a therapist who, unlike Diane Langberg, chose not to believe your stories of abuse and passed you off as hysterical? 

Unfortunately, I think a lot of us know what that’s like. Because we’ve been there. 

The sad reality is that not a lot has changed in 50+ years. Women are still written off as too emotional, perhaps unhinged. Our experiences are still disbelieved. Our concerns are still dismissed. 

Last fall I was spending the night with my granddaughter when I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of gun shots. I considered calling 911 but found myself hesitant. I didn’t want to be accused of making a big deal out of nothing, of making a mountain out of a mole hill. I didn’t want to be another “hysterical woman.” I didn’t call. 

 The next morning there were 6 bullet casings in front of my daughter’s house. 

Years of being dismissed take their toll. We women know this well. We are all too often left to the same fate as Cassandra of Greek mythology, who was cursed with the ability to tell the future but never believed. It crushes the soul. 

Something has got to change. But what? How? 

Maybe it starts small. With taking each other seriously. Believing each other. Maybe what we all need is a little validation that we aren’t crazy after all. 

Martha Mitchell finally got that, if not before her death, then certainly after it. 

An anonymous person sent flowers to her burial. White roses spelled out the phrase: 

Martha Was Right.

Tweet

On Leaf Blowers and Perspective

Perspective (according to me): Seeing something from a different angle than before that then changes your opinion or broadens your tolerance or challenges your belief. The more dogmatic your position, the more you may need perspective.

Example: Leaf Blowers

I used to hate, HATE leaf blowers. They are noisy. And while I find nothing quite so peaceful as the rustling of fall leaves in the breeze, all too often that peaceful sound would be interrupted by the obnoxious din of the air blowing monster known as the leaf blower.

Leaf blowers caused noise pollution. Air pollution. They were a menace to society.

I used speak with disdain about people using leaf blowers and then going to the gym for exercise because if they just spent some time raking up a yard full of leaves, they would get all the workout they'd need. After all, I was doing it. So should they.

I was very proud of my position, not to mention my physical prowess with a yard implement.

But then something happened.

It always does.

Perspective rarely changes of its own free will.

Enter the Tarlov cysts. They sit in my sacrum and, when inflamed, leave me feeling like someone has taken a baseball bat to my lower spine, butt, and lady parts. What inflames them? Lifting (anything more than two gallons of milk...some days way less). Pushing. Pulling. Bending repeatedly. All the things I do when I am doing the things I love, like moving furniture, hauling junk to the dump, mowing the lawn, raking leaves.

Raking leaves. Hmmmm. Suddenly, the only way I can do what I normally do is not with a rake and the good old muscles and grit of my prideful youth but with the dad gum leaf blower. The very machine I reviled for much of my adult life.

And now I am thankful for my leaf blower. My beautiful, hardworking leaf blower, that enables me to still, to some extent, be me.

And so, my friends, if you ever encounter a friend who seems to have changed, whether it's their opinion on something as mundane as a leaf blower or their formerly dogmatic belief about much more consequential things, just know that they may have changed because something happened and they see things differently now.

They got perspective.

Tweet

Tone Police

Jemar Tisby wrote yesterday,

"Here's how you knpow someone is 'tone policing' you and what might be going on. People don't comment on the content of your message, but they critique your delivery. You say something hard but true, and they slide in your comments telling you to be more 'gracious,' 'balanced,' or 'loving.' They shift focus from the injustice you're naming to the feelings your words provoke in them. Tone policing isn't about you, it's about them. They support justice intellectually, but emotionally resist the urgency, repitition, or directness that justice requires. Not only do they want to avoid their own discomfort, they want to make themselves superior. By telling you to soften your mesage, they're presenting themselves as 'balanced.' As the calm, rational voice above the fray. By contrast, you are the 'emotional,' 'angry,' 'irrational' one. Justice isn't polite. Discomfort is not an attack. Truth-telling requires a tone that matches the moral weight of the harm."

That's a lot of soak in. Mind that he's not saying that in everyday life tone doesn't matter. It does. We all do need to, for the most part, make sure that our tone toward one another is respectful and kind.

But....

But there are situations where someone speaks of a terrible wrong or grave injustice and, instead of that message being heeded and acknowledged and addressed, that person is chided for their tone, taking the entire focus off of the wrong or injustice.

Imagine backing over somebody's foot. You might not have even meant to back over their foot, but you did. In their pain the victim yells at you and, instead of rushing to their aid, you stop and tell them that you don't like their tone. That their emotional display is offensive, that they need to learn to communicate better, and that the shattered bones in their foot are no reason to raise their voice.

That would be truly ridiculous and you would wonder what sort of person has such a fragile ego that they can't handle a little harsh language from a someone with a deep wound.

A few years ago this happened to me. I sent an email to a group of people who had cause profound spiritual wounds to both me and a member of my family. I had waited years to communicate as it took me that long to be able to write without the emotional intensity that I knew would be offputting. I pleaded with them to reconsider their words, asking how those words looked anything like Jesus.

I got no reply. I was told I would be getting no reply. And when I asked why I would get no reply, I was told that my "tone seemed harsh and accusatory." End of story.

Their lack of response to my genuine and heartfelt plea absolutely crushed me. It still takes my breath away.

Who, when learning of something they did that caused incredible damage, doesn't respond? That is kindergarten level interpersonal skills. "Tell Jimmy you are sorry" type stuff.

I honestly don't understand the "you are not worthy of a response" and then throwing in my tone as an excuse.

Imagine putting it on the wounded or oppressed to soften their tone, twist it into some acceptably tasty pretzel, and package it in a palatable way in order for you to believe they deserve any help or even a basic apology.

Let's be careful not to tone police those who are expressing their pain, even when they express it in ways we find distasteful, intense, or even threatening. especially if we are the ones with the power in the relationship or situation. Let's try to look beyond the tone to the "moral weight of harm." Let's acknowledge that harm and, if it is within our power to do so, let's do something about it.

Tweet

Souls First

Yesterday at St. James, our rector, Judith, reminded us that we are souls first and it got me wondering. What would happen to us, to our relationships, to our culture, to our society, if we really believed that?

Imagine the impact on:

-the cosmetics industry

-the cosmetic plastic surgery industry

-the fashion industry

-the diet industry

Imagine the impact on prejudice and racial profiling and viewing people as the “other.”

Imagine how we would view our own accomplishments and those of others.

What would happen if all those things that we think make us who we are, make us impressive, popular, wanted, valuable…what if all those things were taken away?

In her TED talk “You Are Not Your Body,” former champion cross country skier Janine Shepherd describes life in the spinal ward after a devastating and life-altering bike accident. The patients were flat on their backs, unable to see one another. Their lives forever changed. They were there together, souls sharing their deepest thoughts and feelings, with one another. One day a nurse brought in straws and had the patients work the straws together, end on end, into a string. That nurse then formed a circle with the straws and each patient held on. Souls connected by tragedy and plastic straws.

What would happen if the playing field was leveled and all we had was each other, without all the things that we believe give us an advantage in life? What if all we are is a collection of souls, connected to one another by a circle of straws?

How would we treat each other then? How would we value each other? How would we value ourselves when we aren’t clambering to the top of the social ladder, seeking approval, proving our significance, or failing in comparison?

We’ve been sold a lie. We have bought into the idea that that which is visible is that which is valuable.

Some of us need to be reminded, perhaps others of us need to be told for the first time, that we are souls first.

That weird kid in algebra class is a soul first. That the homeless person standing at the bottom of the exit ramp, begging for food or money or a job, is a soul first. That the tired looking disheveled woman wandering the aisles of Walmart in her pajama bottoms, looking like she could use a good night’s sleep, some personal discipline, and a fitness plan, is a soul first.

The gay neighbor is a soul first. The gender fluid kid behind the counter is a soul first. The immigrant suffering in an ICE facility is a soul first. The old guy with a MAGA hat is a soul first.

That person who doesn’t look like you, act like you, vote like you, or value the same things you do, is a soul first.

And you, when you look in the mirror, stand on the scale, try on the dress that doesn’t fit, peek at your bank account, count up your professional successes or failures, assess your storehouse of knowledge or your stockpile of skills…you must, must remember that you are a soul first.

This morning my granddaughter started her first day of eighth grade. She was as dolled up as I have ever seen her, having told me that her goal for today was to look good. I want so badly to let her know, to get through to her hormone rattled, developmentally restructuring teen brain and her tender heart that, as beautiful as she is, she is and always will be, a soul first. 

Tweet

When Preferences Become Mandates

 Anybody who is part of the evangelical church or a conservative congregation of other

stripes knows that it is relatively common to encounter someone who has decided that

doing things a certain way is the "biblical" way to do it. Whether it's how you parent, how you

run your family (and who's in it), how you teach your kids, what kind of church you attend

and how that church goes about worship and engaging with the community, all the way to

how you dress or who you vote for or whether you vote. It is not hard to find someone who

has a certain opinion or has made a specific choice and then spells out the case that that is

THE biblical way, and they can often expertly lob diced up chunks of Bible at anybody within

throwing distance just to prove their point.

Years ago there were the Worship Wars, wherein people would sit around and debate,

whether in person or on the interwebs, the value of hymns vs praise songs, traditional

worship vs contemporary. And each side had their talking points, all effectively ignoring

Ephesians 5:19, which mentions "psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs," so it's all included.

But people were very opinionated about these things. They could get testy.

Then there’s schooling. Home school vs Christian school vs public school. There was some

bizarre pecking order to it all, as if this was an intensely spiritual choice (though some had

no choice at all). This issue could ruin friendships and split churches and crush the spirits

of many an overwhelmed mother.

I've done it, too. I've had convictions, or maybe just preferences but I called them

convictions, and decided I was doing something the way God wanted. And then I changed

or grew or something happened to force me out of my bubble or to see things differently or,

at times, I was left with no choice in the matter, and realized that what I really wanted was a

biblical rationalization for what was my preference. I wanted someone to back me up so I

wouldn’t have to fight so hard for what I really wanted.

Because it wasn’t ok to just want something and then go for it.

Maybe it is because people, especially in the more authoritarian churches, families, and

cultures, aren't ever given the freedom to have their own opinions and preferences to begin

with. We learn to do and say as we are told. So what do we do? Our only way to rationalize

our preferences is to say that this is God's preference, no, God's mandate, to do it this way.

When wants are not ok and when children are taught obedience above all else, they don’t get to

develop a sense of agency. Because when parents’ choices and dictates matter most, and

matter above all else, and come with the authority of God, a child doesn’t get to be her own

person with her own wants and desires. When everything is spiritual, then our wants have to be

spiritual, too. Our preferences have to have the spiritual stamp of approval.

So what if all of this pontificating really is just a way of getting validation for a preference

you don't feel you have a right to have outside of some divine ordinance?

What if we gave kids, women, and people of all shapes, sizes, ages, and genders, the agency

to make decisions and like and not like things and use their gifts and or make use of other

people's gifts in the ways that they best see fit without having to wrap everything in spiritual

packaging?

What if we were able to see someone else's choices as just that, choices made based on

their situation and the factors that play in their lives, and not some spiritual failing.

Maybe we should back off with the Divine Mandate Heavy Hammer and let people be

people. Not right. Not wrong. Just people being people, doing things people do.

God gives us the freedom to do that.

Tweet