Longing and Belonging

“Already and not yet” is a phrase that gets used often in theological and preaching circles to talk about the basiliea of God. (I like using the Greek word; it keeps me from having to choose from inadequate translations, such as reign of God, kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven … for a while, I used the phrase “kin-dom of God,” which I picked up from Ada María Isasi-Díaz, but in all honesty, family is not my favorite metaphor for the divine. So, for today, let it be basiliea.)

Jesus talked about the basiliea as something that had come very close, and indeed, many believed his presence as the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, meant that the basiliea of God had arrived. But then Jesus was killed, and his followers scattered, and one generation led to another without Jesus’ return, which had been expected, imminently. We Christians believe in Jesus’s resurrection, in God’s resounding “No!” to the ultimacy of death, and yet, still we live between times; Jesus’s first coming inaugurated the basiliea of God, but it has yet to arrive in all its fullness. We are surrounded by and all too often complicit with violence and vitriol, hurt and heartache; our history is rife with exploitations, expulsions, and executions.

There is a longing in the heart of all who live between times, between the already and the not-yet. We want to live in a world unbroken by prejudice against and oppression of those who differ from some mythical mainstream, those deemed expendable in the interests of profits or efficiency or expediency.

We feel the hope inspired by such possibilities as those arising with President-elect Obama. And yet, he is one man. He is not our savior, and he cannot transform the world alone. That is our job, all of us together, and it is the together part we must learn.

Beyond this corporate, historical, faithful longing, there are also the personal longings: for connection, surcease, community, joy, meaning, peace. The list gets long; and yet our efforts to satisfy these longings get shorter and shorter shrift; we believe – or are tempted to believe – the messages we hear from the marketing machines, that this thing or that activity will satisfy the longing. So, we buy. We do. And yet the longing … persists.

The African bishop Augustine said our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The Persian mystic Rumi said (by way of Coleman Barks) in the poem “Love Dogs” that the longing we express is the return message, the answer to our prayers. These men lived centuries ago. Why has it taken me so long to accept that longing seems to be an inherent aspect of the human condition? (Note my prevarication; I still am not happy that this may be the case.)

In 1997 I quit my job with Price Waterhouse to try to find work that I loved that loved me back. It was a privileged thing to do, though scary; our family’s income dropped by two-thirds. That same year I joined a church, which was just beginning to dream of starting an anti-racist church, a dream that resonated deeply for me. I also applied to seminary, longing to get to the heart of my passionate curiosity about the intersection of divinity and humanity, God and folk. I was not able to attend until 2000; that longing felt like it lasted a long while.

In my first couple of years at seminary I kept trying to recruit a pastor for our dreamed-of anti-racist church, and the people I was trying to recruit kept asking me why I didn’t do it.

Eventually, long(ing) story short, five years into the journey toward this anti-racist church, I finally did agree to a leadership role, along with a Latina co-journeyer who was as scared as I was to jump into pastoring a new church, but whose heart would not wait for someone else to do it. We worked and struggled together for several years; there were sermons and services and service that brought hot tears to our eyes as we wondered “How long, O Lord?” How long till we figure this out? How long till something feels right? How long till some more people catch this dream? There was some “already” going on; but it felt like a whole lot of “not yet.”

And then I figured out I was (am) gay; and that both ended some chapters and opened up a whole new set of longings. Slowly but surely, satisfactions have come: the new wide-open life, chances to learn full-time and teach through this Ph.D. program, the new love with whom I am slowly but surely building a life and a new family. Prayer, dancing, biking, running, friends and small sets of unrelated communities have sustained me. There has always been longing, and yet there has also been just enough of everything I need. To complain would be ungrateful.

That doesn’t stop me.

I keep wondering, where is my church? Where is my place of belonging? I loved the Mennonite church, especially Many Peoples, the big-dreaming little anti-racist version of a Mennonite church we started in Oak Cliff; but their inability to accept and love gay people took me out of that setting. I appreciated the United Church of Christ church that provided a place for our family to come apart and reassemble, with its acceptance and affirmation of gay folk, but I missed the sense of Spirit-moving I had come to treasure at the Church of Many Peoples. I loved the spirited worship and open conversation at City Church, and its welcoming of lgbt persons, but both the community and the discipleship ended up being too thin. And neither of these churches was ready to embrace an anti-racist identity.

I know; I’m too picky. But church shouldn’t hurt; it shouldn’t take you apart. It should be a place you can live into all of who you are, not to mention all of who God is helping you to become.
Is it impossible for church to be both a place of accountability and comfort? Where you can confess your complicity with society’s failures and commit to and do something about those failures and find comfort and strength for another day’s journey?

I do not find these characteristics in white churches.

Maybe I would find them in churches peopled by and led by communities of color; African-American churches in particular have a long, hard-won history of offering “creative, healing power,” as Sharon Welch puts it in her essay, “Human Beings, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice.” She uses this language in responding to the despair she sees in white people working for racial justice.

Welch notes that what these people needed was comfort: “not the comfort that elides suffering and injustice, that promises an easy resolution to complex problems, but a comfort, a sustenance that comes from acknowledging the immensity of injustice and the cost of working against it. Such comfort is expressed well in music, in the resonance of spirituals that embody hope for justice and the costs of injustice, and in voices and instruments joining together, manifesting the beauty of human community.” (192)

Welch had turned to African-American spirituality as a source of creative, healing power. That power is certainly to be found in African-American spirituality: hard-won insight that cannot be simply appropriated by other peoples who have not shared that struggle, that reality. As much as I appreciate African-American spirituality in sermon and song and service, it is not mine to have. As much as I have loved worshipping with my Latina/o brothers and sisters, surrounded by the sibilant whispers of simultaneous prayer, my spirit lifted by the choritos y alabanza, neither is their spirituality mine to have. And the slope from appreciation to appropriation is so slippery; I had better not go near it.

I want what is mine to have.

The problem is finding it.

Having grown up in South Texas, I used to bring enchiladas to potlucks where we were supposed to bring the comfort food of our childhood. Recognizing that’s not my culture, I tried exploring the Germanic heritage of my dad’s side of the family, but I didn’t find food or music to feed my soul. My mom’s side of the family centered in East Texas, so I have adopted myself into a gumbo and zydeco culture that has the heat I love. Still appropriating, yes, but at least not exploiting an already-exploited culture.

Too often I dwell in words for lack of access to a communal Word; but I am thankful for the comfort I find there. I learn from and am inspired by African American, womanist, Latina, mujerista, and post-colonial scholars, as well as the habitats to which I more nearly belong, feminist, queer and anti-supremacist theologians and theorists. But when it is the touch of Spirit I need, I turn to poets, most often Mary Oliver and a new favorite, John O’Donohue (who unfortunately passed away earlier this year).

I am just now beginning to explore O’Donohue’s book, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong. I have usually avoided things Celtic; it seems too easy and romantic a white identity to latch onto, and I don’t know myself to be Irish … more of an English mutt on my mother’s side. But O’Donohue has seduced me despite my arch protestations, not least with his exploration of longing and belonging.

Sometimes our longing is to belong: “Belonging suggests warmth, understanding, and embrace. No one was created for isolation. When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life – truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of true belonging; they are also the secret intention and dream of human longing.” (xxii)

This passage struck me tonight as I was reading it. Earlier this year, when my relationship with CityChurch came apart, one of the keenest aspects of the loss was having to accept not being part of a church while writing this dissertation. I want to be part of a church: for the spiritual companionship and strengthening, yes, but even more than that I want the accountability of community. I want there to be a community who holds me to my highest and best effort, and helps me to produce it. And yes, it would be wonderful to have a community that wanted to look at and comment on and question the work; it would be stronger and better as a result.

I am blessed to be part of a small prayer group that provides a good balance of accountability and comfort. I am so thankful to be part of them, and to have them be part of me. And … I want more. Spirit-filled corporate worship, deep discipleship, both burdens and studies shared.

I knew going in that writing this dissertation would be an abnormally isolating experience that runs counter to Christian notions of the necessity of community for discernment and discipleship. I did not know how hard that isolation would become. I do feel more prone to fear and negativity; I fear that I no longer know what I am talking about, because I am no longer part of the actively anti-racist spiritual community that gave rise to this work. I fight the negative thought that I will not be able to do justice to the idea. The task of pushing aside children, ailing parent, beloved partner, household management is itself immense, and is taken on in the name of a greater immensity, the focus required to get this dissertation figured out and written down.

It all begins to feel beyond me.

I need the coracle of a community of faith to believe for me when I can’t.

I ask God bitterly why I do not have this community, now, when I feel I need it most.

I wonder what part of my spiritual longing will have to go unanswered, that some other desires might be fulfilled; and I grow so weary of amputating parts of my self to fit in.

I need to belong somewhere that I am accepted as a strong female with leadership gifts, as an educated, impassioned person who wants to serve and teach and pray and preach, who wants to lift her hands in praise to God, who wants to hold her lover’s hand during prayers, who wants accountability and comfort and wise counsel on the road to God’s loving justice.

Doesn’t seem like much to ask. Just, everything. Already. Not yet.

Epistemological Privilege: Worth Voting For

The quick and dirty definition of epistemology is the study of what we know and how we know it. White feminists and women of color have expanded the definition, usefully, by telling us the knower matters, too. Who you are changes what you know, how you can know, what you consider to be knowledge. There are things women know that men don't and can't. And there are things people of color in our society know about our society that white people don't -- and sometimes won't hear or learn.

Epistemology matters, because what we know underpins what we are willing, motivated, and able to do.

That's something Ignacio Ellacuría knew; he was a scholar, philosopher, community activist and priest in El Salvador, who was gunned down in 1989 along with five other priests and two women of their community. A key part of Ellacuría's work was the establishment of an epistemological basis for theology and other forms of knowledge. Embued as he was with the pain and hope of the Salvadoran people, Ellacuría asserted the only adequate form of knowledge was knowing that became critically aware of reality (particularly realities that were not as they should be), took responsibility for that reality, and worked to transform that reality.

This epistemology has implications for who can know adequately. People who live in a given reality and are most directly affected by it have the best chance to be able to perceive with a critical awareness, and certainly will be most strongly motivated to take responsibility for and work to transform that reality. People who benefit from a certain reality will tend to want to maintain it, even if others report they are injured or oppressed by it. In order to protect our benefits, we will choose not to see the reality that others are hurt by the same reality that benefits us. We wear epistemological blinders.

These dynamics operate everywhere someone benefits and someone is oppressed by a given reality, in ways too long to address in this post (but I promise to return to the topic).

My focus here is on the piece called "epistemological privilege," and my argument that Barack Obama has it.

Obama's middle-class upbringing and work as a community organizer give him a sense of the challenges faced by people whose work supports our society and way of life, even as the marketing and political machines hide or misrepresent their reality. In a society that enculturates poorer people -- especially poor white people -- to identify with the values of wealthier people, and to vote against their own best interests because of that identification, this knowledge matters.

Obama is biracial, and was raised predominantly by white women, and yet his appearance is such that he is "read" as black in our society. Accordingly, he knows our society from both of these perspectives, and can see reality from both of these vantage points. In a society still shaped by racial prejudice and privilege -- in ways white people do not want to and often cannot acknowledge, in ways that hurt the life chances of people of color -- this knowledge matters.

Obama is not a perfect candidate, and will not be a perfect president, if we elect him today; but he is more in touch with the realities in this country that need to be transformed than any other candidate has ever been. I am under no illusion that his leadership will overcome all partisan and pork-barrel politics; he cannot undo our well-ingrained selfishness and fear all by himself.

But if we elect Barack Obama president, we will at least have the opportunity to follow a leader who will try to take us by a different road.

And you know what happens when you take the same old road ... you end up in the same old place.

We must all become critically aware of reality (particularly realities that are not as they should be), take responsibility for reality as it is, and work to transform that reality into what it should be: a society and culture that values and works for the abundant life God intends for all.