Defense: "successful." Collaboration: not so much.

I did not enjoy the defense of my dissertation, and I have been trying to understand why, since pain is usually instructive.

The critical feedback was certainly accurate. The work that I did to "listen" to Latinas' calls for liberation and write this information up in one chapter did not adequately shape subsequent chapters. I did not return explicitly enough in later chapters to the method pieces I wrote up in the introduction. Overall, there are not adequate connections among the chapters, and there is apparently some doubt whether what I wrote can be characterized as theology, or as a theology. And, in general, the dissertation is just not focused and "done" enough.

All points well taken. Here's what hurt, though: hearing this at the defense, rather than a month ago, when I would have had time to do more with the criticisms.

I sort of knew these things already, but it's hard to edit your own work, and critical feedback from others helps to puncture the armor one's own writing has against one's own editing. But, yeah. I sort of knew these things already. And I really don't want to be whining.

So, what's the pain really about?

One, as a person trying to live into and work from an anti-racist identity, getting called on one's inadequate use of the work of scholars and activists of color is painful. It's like being held accountable, which is a necessary part of white anti-racism, but in this case without the agreements in place that help accountability be productive. However, I have found that thinking of the criticisms in this regard does give me a structure for making the pain productive, and therefore more meaningful.

Second, receiving these criticisms at the time of defense (rather than sooner) was painful because I had to try to defend my work against the criticisms, which is the last thing you do when you have been held accountable. When someone -- especially a person of color -- holds you accountable for a racist action or speech act, the first thing you do is shut up and listen. Later you might approach the person in a spirit of trying to learn from what happened, after you have done the work of your own thinking, and perhaps processing with fellow white anti-racists. But in the context of the defense, I felt I had to push back, because no one in the room shared the analysis or the process I am working with, and so my simple acceptance would have just made me look like an academic wienie who was not participating in the process adequately. This is the way institutional racism works, by the way. The institutions we work in are not structured to enable us to behave in anti-racist ways. And so, we don't.

Third, not hearing these criticisms sooner meant that I could not work with them sooner, to produce a dissertation more in keeping with all of our expectations. Granted, it is "my" dissertation to write, "my" project to complete, but those of you who have been with this blog from the beginning have known that I have struggled with the false individuality of the academic process from the get-go. This dissertation arose from communal experiences, and I wanted it to have a communal development process. This desire was thwarted repeatedly, and thwarted definitively at the end by the lack of feedback in a timeframe when I could use it most effectively.

So. Now what. (Another little list ensues ....)

One, I have to accept the fact that I did not establish an effective working relationship with my external reader, Dr. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz. I continue to hold her and her work in the highest regard, and I can only hope that some later work I do more clearly evidences the extent to which I have tried to listen to her and learn from her.

Two, I can and will take the criticisms from the defense into the process of writing a book that uses my dissertation research.

Three, if I ever become part of an academic institution, I can and will work to produce true collaboration in the education process. The notion of a "defense" is -- in my opinion -- a ludicrous way to end one's academic training. Each scholar's work is just the diamond bit drill in the hands of a person supported by a team and multiple learning communities as the search for knowledge proceeds into the mountain of experience. It doesn't prove anything that is not already known. The cumulative and conclusive event should feel collaborative and celebratory, if everyone has done their work. And if that's not how it feels, then perhaps none of us have done our work.

* * *

This is the last entry in this blog. I have enjoyed the blogging experience, and will likely begin another blog -- perhaps more general in focus -- on another blogging platform. I have not learned to use Blogger adequately, and have been frustrated by it on more than one occasion.

So, if you want to know when and where I blog next, drop me a line at tammerie@gmail.com or find me on Facebook.

I wish you strength for the struggle.

Tammerie

What's So Anti-Racist about a Stack of Paper?

It was a very quiet March.

I sent the dissertation out to the committee in the last days of February, thinking I'd have feedback by the end of Spring Break. I was hoping for constructive criticism, and the go-ahead to defend.

Well, I did get the go-ahead; the oral defense is scheduled a week from today. By this time next week, I'm likely to be done.

But there has been no feedback, aside from that offered by my advisor before I sent the whole thing out to committee. That's a little unnerving.

I deliberately took a break from the manuscript while waiting for comments, and it's been good to come back to it with a fresher eye. I've spent the last week reading through the pages -- all 400 some-odd -- and seeing how things hold together.

It is too long ... and by the time I got to the end of writing most chapters, I was too out of breath to write much of a conclusion. So, there's work left to do, and I've been trying to do it, wishing I had red pen marks to focus my efforts.

But there is also work that has been done. As I read through the pages, I feel a quiet sense of satisfaction, and the realization that -- imperfect as it is -- it does what it set out to do, what I could do. I felt real trepidation at the beginning of the project, that I would not be able to get out what was inside me, get it onto the page in a way that represented what I had learned from the grace and hard effort of so many people. It is not all it could be, and there will be advisors and committee members and maybe editors to point that out, but I did the part no one else was going to do: this dissertation represents the learnings of my community in a way that makes those lessons available to others.

I hope that's worth something; I hope it matters to someone someday. Specifically, I hope it matters to white folks trying to learn to live more justly, to live into the kind of loving we are called to. And if not, well, I guess dissertating is like preaching: how it is received is not your primary concern. Getting the word out is your task.

Right now I am flooded with what has been the most common emotion through all of this: what is so anti-racist about a stack of paper? What good is having done this? Wouldn't I have done better to be involved in trying to reach white people personally, and getting involved in local initiatives led by Latinos/as and other people of color?

Could be. I'll never know. This is the path that presented itself to me when all other doors were closing. It has been my practice and my church and my memory-book and my therapy and my credo. I know what I know more surely, and I can argue for what I know a little more effectively.

Which I will have to do next week. Perhaps the most important question of all is the one I am expected to answer right up front, in an opening statement. What question did I seek to answer in the dissertation? What answer did I arrive at? What difference does this make -- that is, how does this project advance the inquiry in the field?

When I was trying to frame the core of the project, I found some words from ecofeminist theologian Sallie McFague helpful. She sees theology as "the attempt to bring the resources and insights of the religious past into fruitful conversation with the challenges of the present. ... There must be people whose priority it is to look critically at the interplay between theological ideas and everyday practices; to listen carefully to the voices and experiences of suffering and ask how religion has contributed to that suffering as well as how it might offer words of hope and healing." (McFague, "Theology as Action," in Constructive Theology, Jones and Lakeland, p. 152)

In my case, the question that found language in McFague's framework was this: "How can the resources and insights of Christian theology be used to challenge and undo racist oppression, when theological ideas have contributed to the construction and maintenance of that oppression?"

I had to write the dissertation to find out whether I could answer that question. The good news is that I did find answers. Here are some.

First, Christian theology has to acknowledge that it has contributed to the construction and maintenance of racist oppression. Theologians of color have been pointing this out for years; some white theologians also have begun to acknowledge this truth. In my dissertation, I listen to (i.e., quote) scholars exploring this deadly history. One scholar, for instance, traces the rise from Christian supremacy in Spain (with its concern for limpieza de sangre, or pure blood) of white-skin supremacy in the "new world." Others note the religious language and imagery wrapped up in newspaperman John O'Sullivan's 1840s reference to "manifest destiny," language that captured and justified the greedy exploitation, expulsion, and execution of American Indians.

Second, Christian theology needs to attend to its underlying epistemology. Traditional epistemological concerns address such questions as "what do we know? how do we know we know? what is true?" Feminist scholars have shifted the field of concern to include questions such as "what difference does the knower make? what is worth knowing? what is the purpose of knowing?" Women of color scholars ask "what difference does the knowing make? does it liberate?" (One hears the echo of "will it preach?") Ignacio Ellacuría, murdered Salvadoran priest, philosopher and theologian, argued that the only adequate form of knowledge was that which led to critical awareness of reality, and then to taking responsibility for that reality (particularly what was unjust in it), and committing to and working to change that reality. In this case, having become critically aware that theology has contributed to the construction and maintenance of racist oppression, we theologians and Christians need to take responsibility for that reality, and change it.

I've tried to do just that, to do my small part to change how theology is done, by modeling how a white person can write an anti-racist theology, in an anti-racist way. I drafted a set of prerequisites (prayer, relationships, openness, praxis) and principles (dare to dream and hope; consider the impact of worldviews; be power-aware; embrace partiality) that I wanted to follow in writing the theology, and then I did my best to follow them. I determined key theological methods (being responsible, appreciating-not-appropriating, being accountable, integrating focus on material and spiritual realities, and thinking/working in matrixed ways) and then practiced them. I defined key tasks (re-examine everything, work locally with a global awareness, follow the lead of and seek to benefit people experiencing oppression, and develop practical tools for transformation) and tried to accomplish them.

Yeah. I think I advanced the field, because of who I listened to, and because I tried to respond. Whether this project advances the inquiry in the field is ... up to the field.

I have done what I could do. And whatever happens in the defense next Monday, I will never forget the words of my peers, the anti-racist fellow journeyers who read early drafts and gave me not only the critical feedback I badly needed, but who also offered affirmations I would not have imagined. Their words ... their words have made this stack of paper worth something.

May these pages help build bridges toward more justly abundant futures.

Personal Best

Sometimes good news is hard to hear.

I sent the dissertation draft to my adviser a couple of weeks ago. After a few days, he wrote back with several pages of feedback attached to an email that said "Please note that you have my general approval for the project" among others things. I focused on the other things and completely missed the implications of that comment. My beloved M. picked up on it ... "You're getting approved!" she crowed. As in, getting done. As in, I might finish and graduate this May, if the committee also approves the work.

I could barely hear what she was saying. I am Very Busy keeping my head in the sand so I don't count ostrich eggs before they hatch.

But a conversation a week or so later confirmed that that was what my adviser had meant. And, as I continued revising, using his feedback, that of the friends I asked for help, and my own sense of unfinished business, a small glow began to infuse the work, a sense that among the critiques there was affirmation. This is giving me some much needed energy here, late in the game, even though I struggle some to let myself feel it.

I was brought up with that curious white girl's mix of perfectionism and invisibility. Anything short of perfection was not really good enough, but seeking -- or even enjoying -- recognition for accomplishment was just not done. It's a potent combination for keeping women insecure and quiet. And it's a tired old story ... one I'd like to rise above. (Quietly, of course.)

Frankly, I was surprised by my adviser's approval. It felt sudden, premature ... how can he approve something I know is SO not done? But as I kept writing and revising, the sense grew in me that I was not so much scrambling for a deadline as making a good thing better.

I don't think it will ever feel done. My main fear before beginning to write in earnest was that I would not be able to do justice to the idea of an anti-racist dissertation. The concept I held in my head -- which somehow felt like both gift of and mission from God -- was bigger and more wonderful than I felt able to deliver. And now, here at the end, I still feel that sense of inadequacy. But, it's getting close to good enough.

No, it doesn't measure up to the vision I had; there are still loose ends, still things to figure out. But "good enough" is one of the lessons I've learned, inspired by one of the first books of theology I ever read, Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma. I actually picked it up back when I was working at Price Waterhouse in their management consulting practice, and trying to deal with the early years of motherhood. It was the work and family part that drew me to the book. Miller-McLemore makes the point that when you choose to -- or have to -- both work and be a mother, one of the lessons you have to learn is that nothing is ever as good as you want it to be ... but it can be good enough, if you let it be. And letting "it" be good enough can help keep you almost sane.

This approval is not the only surprise I've had of late. When I transitioned from the 9-minute run segments to the 14-minute segments, it was surprisingly easy. So easy that the next week I moved on to the 19 minute run segments. Yesterday I ran a personal best of six miles in 65 minutes. The 65 minutes included a five minute walking warm-up, a three minute walking cool-down, and three one-minute walks interspersed among the 19 minute running segments. So, my "don't brag" side says, "Well, you didn't really run six miles. You had three little walking breaks in there." But my recovering-from-perfectionism side says, "Yeah, but the running part had to be sub-ten-minute-miles to get six miles in 65 minutes that included 11 minutes of walking!"

The inside of my head is a funny place.

That six mile run felt good. I was hauling ass on the last couple of miles. My ankle only bothered me a little. So, my next run will be using the last Podrunner Interval segment: a solid 50 minute run, no walking. We'll see how it goes.

There's that self-doubt again. Or is it perfectionism ... or are they the same thing?

I think something healthier is driving these late-stage writings and revisions ... love.

I will send out the dissertation to the whole committee next week, including my external reader, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, who is a brilliant theologian and a hero to me (and I'm sure many other women). My work is inspired and informed by hers, and it is in some small way a reply to her calls for justice. And when I get her feedback and that of my other committee members, I hope it is in line with my advisor's: this is good enough, we'll approve it, and here's where it can use more work.

And I will keep working ... for love. For love of those who inspired the work. For love of those who taught me. For love of those who learned with me the lessons this work is based on. For love of justice, and the hope my work might make some difference for someone somewhere in the pursuit of justice. For love of the ideas and the questions at the heart of this dissertation, which I am not remotely tired of. For love of God.

And on a certain day, perhaps in the next month or two, the dissertation will be finished. It will not be perfect; it will not even be done. But it will be my personal best, on that day: what I could do, in the time available, with what I knew and what I could wring into words. There will be no regrets on that day, because I will know I did the best I could do.

The Sixth Mile

I'm slowly working my way through the Podrunner interval training program that culminates in a 10K run, which is about 6.2 miles. When I use Google's g-map pedometer, my runs usually measure out around 5.5 or 6 miles ... of course, I'm still doing intervals, so lately that has meant six 9 minute runs, interspersed with one-minute walks. The next set involves 14 minute runs: five of them interspersed with one-minute walks. That's a big jump. I'm not sure how it will go.

Well, yes I am. It will be hard. And the first attempt might not fly.

But I'm learning something from this interval approach ... as the distance has increased, I've noticed that the first segment is usually just painful; the second fells like a slog; the third begins to open up a little, with more regular breathing and a better rhythm. Usually by the fourth and fifth segments, I feel like I am running (although I am of course just jogging). The sixth segment usually feels pretty good, though my legs are tiring by then. I think the aspect of my running I am most impressed with is my breath: my breathing usually stays strong and even.

One of my favorite lessons from the intervals, though, is that the first two or three segments are the price you pay for the joy of the fourth, fifth and sixth ... sometimes in the last segments, I feel like "I ran the first part to get to run this part." I have to run that first half to feel the exhiliration of the second half, not to mention the bliss of finishing and stretching.

Lately I've been having trouble with my ankle, though, and I've been asking around for advice, doing some research, wondering if I should go to the trouble of a visit to an actual doctor. So far what I am doing (rest, ice, ibuprofen) is helping some; I am happy that I am still running, and hoping I'll get through this (like I did the sore knee last spring and the sore instep last fall ... all on the left leg. Hmm).

The dissertation is in a similar place ... pained joy, let's call it.

I finished a draft of the whole thing, mostly, around the first of the year. And found myself facing the dissertation's "sixth mile": I got this far so that now I can revise.

The draft was/is too long: almost 400 pages when 200 would have done. I've had a bad case of "I don't know what I think until I write it down." Sometimes I have thought of it as "First you make a big marble block. Then you carve it into shape."

The problem is, it is very hard to have any perspective on what you have just written, a fact I know from editing other people's work.

I knew I needed help. And I felt picky about where I would get it. Who would understand the subject matter as well as the anti-racist perspective I was trying to hold? Fellow journeyers ... I was blessed that all three of the people I asked for help agreed, and provided prompt feedback: Felipe Hinojosa took time from his own work to advise on the South Texas history chapter (a topic on which he is far more expert than me); Tobin Miller Shearer took time from his Christmas family vacation to help with the white liberations chapter; and Regina Shands Stoltzfus has given feedback across multiple chapters. I am a blessed woman, rich in wise and generous friends.

Frankly, I am still struggling, which is a little scary. I should have the conceptual frame nailed down at this point. But I left some loose boards as I went flying through the middle chapters, and one of them is coming back to haunt me.

Long-time readers will remember the challenge Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz put to me ... "I think it is not theoretically valid from the perspective of liberation theology/philosophy to construct your argument mainly around what you can do for the oppressed. The moral agency of the oppressed in the process of our liberation is very key.

For me, if you work at dismantling white racism because it is important for your own liberation -- Wow! that would be an enormous contribution. We are always struggling to find ways of convincing those in power to understand that oppressing others [is] not in their (the oppressors') best interest..." [personal communication, April 25, 2008]

I heard what Isasi-Diaz said; it shaped much of what I developed subsequently. And yet, there are key ideas that I have been holding in tension, and I know they need to be held in tension, and yet I don't know if I am giving each their due, and giving their creative tension its due.

The idea for the dissertation began with my experience of being transformed by my involvement in dismantling racism efforts; this work changed forever the way I think about loving God and my neighbors. I think there are some profoundly right things about what I have learned, and the way I have learned them. I wanted to share those right things.

Isasi-Diaz is right, of course, that white people cannot liberate Latinas/os. But we can stop what we are doing to oppress ... and we can offer ourselves as partners in the struggle, able and willing to follow the lead of Latinas/os in solidary struggles for change. And herein lies the tension: it just so happens that this shift in commitment helps bring about the change in consciousness that is liberating for white people. To seek to benefit peoples of colors is to begin to see how one has consciously and unconsciously been about the business of benefiting white people.

There's one knot of the tension: white people's work does not liberate Latinas/os (or any other group of people), and yet committing to the liberation of Latinas/os does bring about a shift in consciousness that transforms what it means to be white, in positive and justice-producing ways. So, even a theology about the liberation of white people needs to have this component in it of listening to and following the lead of and committing to the benefit of people of color -- what I think of as processes of solidary love. I don't want to give up on any of these strands. I just don't know if I have demonstrated the necessity and nature of each.

The second knot of tension is my use of Latino/a and Latin American theorists and theologians ... not to mention the wisdom of Latina pastors, scholars and activists. This project is not a survey of all available Latino/a and Latin American theorists and theologians. I have picked the people I want to quote, reference, interview, and be informed and challenged by ... yet another instance of white privilege, yes. But I have good reason for the people I have picked: either they say something directly to white people that we need to hear -- and I am using this project as a listening post -- or they work in a way that models a useful approach for us to emulate. A corollary complication is that some of the scholars are from Latin America (El Salvador in particular) and others are from the United States.

I know these are different contexts; I know the work of these scholars cannot be lumped together. And yet, I am part of both of these contexts: definitely in the case of the United States, but also in the case of Latin America. I may not seem to have direct connections with the Latin American contexts of "my" scholars, but my nation has invested in the instability and violence plaguing that region. Isn't it right to hear and attempt to learn from their understandings of the gospel, not to mention respond to the demands their understandings place on us?

I have worked carefully to appreciate, and not appropriate, not only through citations and acknowledgments but also by respecting and responding. What I have read and sought to learn from has changed my work, and me. I get a lump in my throat thinking about it. I feel inadequate to respond well enough. And I get scared when I realize I am close to the finish line, and yet still feel undone. This feels a lot more like the third interval than the sixth.

Perhaps running still has something to teach me. A few weeks ago, I was running and suddenly stumbled. And fell. No real harm done: just a scratched palm, and later some soreness in the elbow I fell onto. Unfortunately, my iPod skipped back to the beginning of the interval program ... I knew I was close to the fifth segment, so I switched to another piece of music, and chose to just run all the way home. It worked out.

I don't know why I fell; I was deep in thought as I ran. But it occurs to me that my ankle problems cropped up after that run. So, maybe I twisted my ankle. Now I am having to go back and take care of it.

I've been struggling with the challenges Isasi-Diaz put in front of me all year. If I have stumbled, I need to know. I need to resolve these ambiguities, or know that they are inherent to the mysteries of learning to be a more-just white person ...

I'm going to the doctors this week ... asking a couple of members of my committee to help me work out these knots.

I do know that a day will come when I will be able to say, "I went through that struggle to get to this joy." Right now though, it's the struggle. And I am doing my best to let it shape me, and the work.

And here, I have to say, my breathing could be better. I need to draw full and invigorating breaths from the inspiring Spirit that enlivens us all.

"Joining Imagination to Common Purpose"

This line from President Obama's inauguration speech caught my attention. It sums up a lot about what I believe our call to be, whether "our" is defined as white anti-racists, or Christians, or U.S. citizens, or humanity, and whether the "call" is defined in terms of economics, justice, love, or all of the above.

First of all, we are called to join. Whatever the challenge in front of us, very little of significance can be achieved by one person alone. Our myths of individualism and manifest destiny do us no good now. Like the dishonest steward (Luke 16), who was accused of wastefulness and lost his job, we need to invest in community. As long as we rely only on ourselves, we will always feel the hounds of scarcity and never-enough baying at our heels. When we begin to support the people around us, and feel them supporting us, abundance begins to feel real and we can loosen ourselves from the frenzy of self-aggrandizing but ultimately unsatisfying greed.

I have learned this lesson over and over, in corporations and churches and gardening and even in the wee community of two I share with my beloved M. She is always reaching under my burdens to help support me; I am always looking for ways to help shoulder her load. We are regularly astonished at the changes this has wrought in our lives.

Second, we are called to imagine. A lot of us suck at this. Imagine the world after poverty and hunger have been eliminated. Racism ended. Classism unraveled. Patriarchy dismantled. Imagine conflicts that move directly to diplomacy without thousands of lives lost and billions spent on armaments first. Imagine a world full of people seeking to feed the planet and its creatures more than we take from it. Plenty of smart and impassioned people have imagined all of this and more ... all they need is our will to do it. That's the real trick to imagination: the will to believe, act, change.

Oh, the "c" word. Well, here are some more. I hear a lot of claims to confusion in the face of our economic turmoil, our world conflicts, even our neighborhood/family/relationship issues. Many of us stay with confusion because, frankly, it's comfortable. On some level, we know that if we get clarity about what is needed, courage can't be far behind: the courage to change what needs to be changed. If we imagine clearly, we will feel courage arise in the form of desire to change, so that we can build what we imagine: an economy that works for all of us ... living wages for meaningful work ... affordable housing ... good public schools that no one opts out of, for religious or elitist reasons, because the real world is all of us together, learning not just tolerance but mutual respect so that we can live together and take care of each other. The list is endless. So are we. Why do we think it is otherwise?

Third is common purpose. We already know what this is, too, as William Julius Wilson discovered some years ago, and described in his book, Bridge Across the Racial Divide. Wilson found common interests among middle/working class people of all races: Wilson reported research finding only small differences by race in such core values as work, education, family, religion, law enforcement and civic responsibility, and high congruence regarding challenges to these values, as well as preferences for government priorities. Many of us could name even more fundamental commonalities, such as the basics all humans need: clean air and water, shelter, nourishment, security of person and community, love and belonging, fulfillment, meaning.

Many have dreamed, too, of what you get when you put all of these ideas into that nutshell, "joining imagination to common purpose." Jesus' kingdom of God. Martin Luther King's beloved community. What I am beginning to think of as the commonweal, the common-well-being of us all, which all of us must tend for each other.

If we all put a shoulder under each other's burdens -- instead of trying to climb on top of each other's shoulders -- we can all find what we need: enough.

I have had Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak on my decade-at-a-glance for quite some time. I had read his Courage to Teach a couple of years ago, before teaching my first class at seminary, and found it thought-provoking and helpful. Thanks to Christmas generosities, I obtained a copy of Let Your Life Speak and read it last week. This too gave me plenty to think about. And then the other day I had a little spare time to listen to one of the Speaking of Faith episodes I have stored up in my iTunes, and I chose Krista Tippett's interview with Palmer on the unfolding economic crisis.

Tippett invited Palmer to consider a comparison of his description of his own struggle with depression to the current economic depression. Palmer agreed the comparison was apt. Here is their interchange:

Ms. Tippett: And what I kept thinking of was actually my conversation with you and you talking about how in the middle of a depression, a psychological depression, you had a therapist who said, "Parker, could you think of your depression as a friend, which is bringing you down to earth, ground on which it is safe to walk?"

Mr. Palmer: Mm-hmm. That's a wonderful connection. And in fact, I have had some of the same thoughts, Krista, the parallels between psychological depression and economic depression. I finally learned, with the help of this therapist, that depression didn't need to be pictured as the hand of an enemy trying to crush me, but rather the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand. And through that realization, I understood that part of what took me into depression was that I was living life at artificial heights, at untenable elevations, so that the elevation involving a kind of inflated ego or a free-floating spirituality or a detached sense of "oughts" and in that sense a false ethic, or simply living intellectually in my head more than in my feelings and in my body, that all of those things put you at such altitude that if you trip and fall, which you're inevitably going to do, you have a long, long way to fall, and it might kill you.

But if you are in fact on ground where it's safe to stand, you can fall and get up and fall and get up again, which most of us do every day. And, yes, I do feel that we all knew at some level, if we took a moment to think about it, that there was a huge amount of artificial altitude, elevation, inflation in this society, that housing prices were ridiculous, that stock prices were way beyond value. And we now know in fact that a lot of that was a purposely contrived illusion. (From Speaking of Faith podcast; see www.speakingoffaith.publicradio.org)

As I received the wisdom of this story, it brought to mind the one with which I began this post: the story of the dishonest steward in Luke 16. The story is ambiguous: neither fault nor favor can be unilaterally assigned, just as in our times. But what is clear is the action at the center of the story: when the steward's world collapses around him, he chooses to invest in the community where he will land when he falls.

Many of us feel that our world -- whether we fully understood it or not -- has collapsed around us. The more isolated we are, the more individualistic we have become, the harder this fall feels.

I think Palmer is right, though. Thinking about his words reminds me of Peter Mayer's song, "Fall" on Million Year Mind. He sings:

What if the highest destination
of any given human life
was not a place that you could reach if
you had to climb
wasn't up above like heaven
so no need to fly at all
what if to reach the highest place you had to fall ...

Fall, finding a way of trusting in the ground
as if the highest and the lowest places
are the same

We have fallen: but perhaps not fallen low so much as fallen to a safe place, a place where we can clearly see the need to ... what?

Join. Imagine. Common purpose. You are not alone; neither am I. What can we do together, that we cannot do alone?

Only everything.

And when that seems overwhelming, we can start smaller. I will start by feeding the ground, and trusting in it. I will start composting again, and begin my latest garden this spring ... but not my last. I will have an abundance ... enough and more to share.

Until the Killing of Black Mothers' Sons ...

As I have read this week of the suspicious death of Billey Joe Johnson, the haunting refrain from Sweet Honey in the Rock's "Ella's Song" has echoed in my head:

"We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons
Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers' sons ..."

There is no national outcry over the death of this young man. Perhaps we think it is a story too old to still be news: and yet, if our hearts do not break, and are not outraged, something in us has died, too. We need to hear Bernice Johnson Reagon's words, written to commemorate civil rights freedom-worker Ella Baker, and live into them.

The young Mr. Johnson was a football star in Mississippi, according to a story in Mississippi's Sun Herald, "a tailback who rushed for more than 4,000 yards in his three-year high school career. A national recruiting service said Johnson had scholarship offers from Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, LSU and others.

"'He was one of the kids that was out front," Al Jones, the high school's head football coach, said Monday. "It's hard to believe. I was getting ready to take him to a banquet that day. All of sudden you go from that to this tragedy.'"

The tragedy is that Mr. Johnson is dead of gunshot wounds. The story of how he came to die is not yet clear. Official reports record a traffic stop of Mr. Johnson for running a stop sign. As the deputy, Joe Sullivan, returned to his car to run a license check, he reports having heard a gunshot, whereupon he "found Johnson lying on the ground on the driver's side of the teen's vehicle."

The official report asserts a self-inflicted gunshot, either suicide or accidental.

Family and friends are outraged, disbelieving a young man with everything going for him would do such a thing. Family members add disturbing details, reported by longtime civil rights activist Ruby Sales of SpiritHouse in Washington, D.C., who visited Mississippi this week.

Following the traffic stop and its tragic ending, police held Billey Joe Johnson's body for more than seven hours, not allowing his parents to "see or identify their son's body. The parents waited all day, hoping and pleading to see their son. Over and over, the sheriff denied their requests, although they permitted the high school coach and school superintendent, Barbara Massey, to identify the body." Police subsequently took Billey Joe Johnson's body to Jackson, Mississippi, for an autopsy, "without seeking or receiving the permission or approval of the parents," according to Sales.

The parents were not allowed to see their son's body until three days later; the father reports "they butchered Billey's body like a pig."

The family and community of Billey Joe Johnson want answers; they are working with the NAACP to obtain a second autopsy.

If the death of this black mother's son matters to you, you can write to the sheriff of George County, Mississippi (Garry Welford) and/or the District Attorney (Tony Lawrence) and let them know that you are watching to see how justice is done.

Sheriff Garry Welford
George County Sheriff’s Office
4263 Highway 26 W
Lucedale, MS 39452

Tony Lawrence
Jackson County District Attorney
P.O. Box 998
Pascagoula, MS 39568

Billey Joe Johnson will be buried December 20, 2008.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

Comfort, Comfort O My People

We all have ideas about what President-elect Obama needs to focus on. I think he'll need our help, specifically with bringing down some mountains. And providing comfort. More on that below.

It's the Economy. With bubbles bursting in the housing, auto and stock markets, multiple sectors of the economy are melting down as if there was no "there" there. Representatives of both the companies and those who used to work for them (or are about to lose jobs) are all clamoring for help, and quickly. The magic of "first 100 days" is invoked repeatedly, and -- given the failure of confidence in the current administration -- Obama has had to move quickly to begin providing answers and describing plans.

Of course, the list does not end there, although the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Ford do seem to be getting more attention than we do.

It's Health Care. Health care reforms are on the horizon; even the insurance companies are pitching their own proposals, perhaps recognizing that the brokenness of the system cannot be plastered over so easily as in years past. I don't think health care will get fixed during Obama's term; probably not even a second one. It's obscene that 50 million people in the US have no health insurance; what's worse is knowing -- as a sandwich generation daughter/mom/graduate student -- that neither private insurance nor government programs like Medicare have figured out how to keep from wasting the time and money of consumers, marketers, and bureaucracies. And meanwhile, we get sick and put off care until we get sicker and the bills are higher ... and somebody is profiting from this madness. Profiting in ways that do not make us or the system healthier.

Don't forget immigration. The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) reminds us in a December 7, 2008 editorial that "Obama needs to remember immigration reform." The lead paragraph states: "On Jan. 20, President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress will have their hands full with two wars and the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. It will be easy to overlook a problem that received relatively little attention during the presidential campaign: the need to develop an immigration policy that acknowledges the reality that our economy depends on immigrant workers - far more than current law allows - and the presence of an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants whose precarious status needs to be resolved."

It's Racial Justice. More than 75 percent of women ages 18-29 say President-elect Barack Obama should make civil rights and racial justice top priorities, according to a survey by the YWCA. When I first read that statistic, I thought that was a high figure, and I realized my cynicism was showing. Perhaps it is because the YWCA's stated mission includes racial equality ... but I don't think the questionnaire was limited to YWCA members.

I have some questions. What does "civil rights and racial justice" mean today? Can it be described with a clarity compelling enough to get past the typical responses of "Civil rights got done in the '60s" or "We just elected a black president. Isn't that enough racial justice for anyone?"

I was curious enough to check with the Y's own press release, which stated:

"The representative phone survey, 'What Women Want: A National Survey of Priorities and Concerns,' conducted on behalf of YWCA USA by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI), included interviews with 1,000 women aged 18-70 between October 28 and November 2, 2008. The findings reveal that significantly more Generation Y women (18-29) than older women (30-70) say that the new administration needs to make several domestic issues 'top priority' in the first year, including healthcare reform (87% v. 76%), quality and cost
of education (85% v. 76%), the housing crisis (83% v. 69%) and HIV/AIDS (66% v. 45%). The findings also show that more than seven in ten (77%) Gen Y women say that civil rights and racial justice should be a 'top priority' for the first year of the new administration, compared with 54 percent of women aged 30-70. Gen Y women are similarly more worried about personal experiences with discrimination; half (50%) of these younger women say that racism or discrimination based on ethnicity or religion will be a 'major obstacle' to the progress
of women like them over the next decade, compared with only 31 percent of older women."

Then I wondered about the racial makeup of the women surveyed; the instrument description said 534 of those surveyed identified as white (non-Hispanic) and 451 identified as non-white; 368 of these women identified as Black. (A link to the .pdf of the report can be found at www.ywca.org.)

Looking in more detail at the survey instrument revealed a lot of consensus among women of all races surveyed: 92% agreed the financial crisis needed resolution; 87% highlighted health care reform; 85% were concerned with the quality and cost of education; 83% mentioned the housing crisis; 77 % spoke about racial justice, and 66% spotlighted HIV/AIDS. On none of these issues did responses shift significantly based on race.

That doesn't mean we are in a post-racial society. It means that when you get down to the real issues affecting our quality of life, we are all affected by (if not to the same degree) and concerned about the same things. We have a lot of common ground on which to meet and work together.

William Julius Wilson saw this same thing, 25 years ago. In his book The Bridge Across the Racial Divide, he highlighted both the great commonalities among interests expressed across racial groups -- good jobs, education, family, religion, law enforcement, civic responsibility -- as well as the tendency of divisive politics to scapegoat particular people groups and prevent cross-racial coalitions from forming.

Some make the classist assertion that racism most rears its head among lower-class whites, the NASCAR Bubba crowd. Two facts are worth noting here. One is that systemic racism is hurtful to people of color on a much greater scale, and that is perpetrated by people with more organizational power: the 78% of the managerial/professional class who are white, the 87% of CEOs who are white, the nearly 100% of legislators who are white, the 78% of HR managers, education administrators, medical/health service managers, business and financial operations people, architects and engineers who are white ... plus the 88% of lawyers who are white, the 83% of magistrates who are white, the 79% of teachers who are white, the 76% of health-care practitioners who are white, the 80% of dentists who are white, the 75% of pharmacists and 72% of physicians who are white. (Statistics courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007)

(If you got tired of reading "who are white," guess how it feels to be a person of color running up against all that white power everywhere you go.)

Here's the second thing, about that perception that it's lower-class whites' racism that is the problem. What lower-class whites are actually concerned about, according to the findings of theologian Tex Sample, are "the centrality of family, religion, cooperation, commitment to family, school and church, respectability and moral living." Sounds familiar. Sounds a lot like Wilson found as the concerns of people across all racial groups.

So, what's my point here?

That we have a remarkable and widespread consistency of viewpoint and values: we all know what we need, and we all need pretty much the same stuff. The problem is, a very few of us have plenty of all those things -- health care, education, jobs, housing, ability to care for family and community -- but many of us do not have enough, and way too many of us have no good prospects for getting enough.

Which brings me to Advent. And mountains. And comfort.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am missing church, badly. And during the season of Advent -- roughly the four weeks leading up to Christmas -- I miss it even worse. I miss the purple, the candles, the music. The words about hope, peace, joy, love. So I've been having a DIY Advent, looking at the texts, thinking about them, writing my reflections to my long-distance beloved instead of preaching to a congregation or leading a class or reflection group.

This week's texts include some old favorites. First there's Isaiah 40, where Isaiah tells us God wants us to comfort God's people. The voice of the prophet says "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."

That's a different kind of public works project ... but we can relate to it. I hope. Many of us do feel we are in a wilderness, having lost our former security (maybe it wasn't that secure ...). But in the midst of that wilderness, we are called to work: to prepare the way of the Lord. Valleys shall be lifted up, and mountains brought low. Is it too far a stretch to see that preparing the way of the Lord means filling in the economic troughs with the mountains of capital accumulated elsewhere? If we as a people -- with our shared values and needs -- could agree to a great leveling, would the glory of the Lord be revealed? Who is it, anyway, that poo-poohs the notion of moving hoarded wealth into productive use? Who tells us "that's socialism, and socialism is baaaaad." Maybe in this day of financial implosions and incredulous revelations we don't believe those voices anymore. Maybe we can see those voices as mouthpieces of a very few benefiting at great cost to a great many.

Isaiah goes on ... We are to cry out, "Here is your God!" because we see God coming, with might, with reward, with recompense, to feed the flock, to gather up the lambs in a loving embrace, and to gently lead the mothers. God is bringing a reward, and recompense: a young pregnant teenager saw that God coming, according to Luke 1:52-53, and her song has lifted weary hearts for millenia. "[God] has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; [God] has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."

Then there's Psalm 85, which tells us "Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. The Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps."

There it is again: righteousness makes a path for God to come to us ... a righteousness that is intimate with peace ... rooted in a faithfulness that springs up, wrapped in steadfast love. All this movement -- love is a dance, and our need to be whole is all the invitation we need.

No one person can dance this dance alone: not Jesus in the past, not Christ in the present, not Martin Luther King or Barack Obama, not you and not me.

I know that full well, remembering the drums of Advents past, pounding out the beat to a favorite old hymn: Comfort, comfort O my people ...

That comfort will not come until we muster the will to give it to each other: by filling in the hole of debt we owe peoples we enslaved in the past and exploit today, by making good on the promises of our commonwealth, by pulling down the mountains of wealth stored up, by learning that enough is enough, and more than enough is unjust.

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.

About that Running Thing ...

Earlier in this blog I wrote about learning to play guitar, and how beginning to play guitar had many useful similarities with learning to write a dissertation, not to mention learning to live into an anti-racist identity.

The most important similarity, of course, is being willing to mess up. You may recall the mental bumpersticker that goes along with that: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." At first.

I loved learning to make fairly musical noise on the guitar, but hit a wall when it came time to switch over from finger-picking notes to actual chord-strumming. My beloved M. -- a guitar player from way back -- has tried to help me, but learning to play the guitar requires a basic willingness to make noise, and somehow I don't have that. Yet. Maybe because my noises just aren't musical enough yet. Or, maybe I have just retained a certain childhood certainty that quiet is safe, and safety is not a sure thing, and so quiet is best.

There is another and more obvious reason for laying down the guitar, for a little while: the posture for guitar playing -- at least when you are learning -- is a lot like the posture for writing or reading. And I spend way too much time in that posture already. Too, the activity of learning musical notation and to make music is a lot like learning a foreign language, and right now I need something completely different.

Like running.

I started running at about the same time I set the guitar aside, though that was unintentional. I just wanted to get a little more exercise without driving to the gym for a workout class or to lift weights. (Somehow driving somewhere in order to get exercise just makes less and less sense.)

I had heard about this music source called Podrunner: Intervals (you can find it on iTunes or at the creator's web site, http://www.djsteveboy.com/intervals.html) and I tried it out. The idea is that you listen to the music as you run, and music changes cue shifts in running or walking speed and duration. Using Podrunner, I have worked up to an 8k distance, or a little over five miles in about 50 minutes.

Which is astounding to me. Less than a year ago I was in a workout class and the instructor had us run an indoor lap and I could barely finish.

But intervals are a great way to increase speed and strength and distance gradually, and I am happy for anything that helps me keep moving and relatively fit.

As my distance and fitness increased, a funny thing happened: I began to be able to think while running. And I noticed that when I am thinking about my dissertation, I run a little faster and with less discomfort. Alternatively, when I am thinking about something that I feel worried or sad or angry about, I have more trouble running. I am intrigued by these signs of the connections among my thoughts, feelings and physical abilities.

I remember in the year after I came out to God and myself and lost a bunch of weight in the process, there was a day when I was playing with my kids (who were then 11 and 9) and realizing I could chase them around. I was running. Out of curiosity, I began running then, back in 2003, but could not get more than a mile or so into a run before I was too bored or tired or something hurt. I kept up with workout classes and biking, but let the running go.

Until I discovered intervals, and slowly began increasing my distance, and learned that the first mile or two is always the hardest; even now that I am running a little over five miles, it is the first part of the run that is the hardest, even if I stretch and warm up really well. I've also discovered that the more often I run, the easier that beginning stage is.

And that got me to thinking about writing.

Back when I was in college, I picked up Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, which is about writing as a Zen practice. Natalie says you should write every day; that writing is a muscle, and like any other muscle, it needs work to be strong, and stretching to be flexible.

I tried that for a while ... got bored and distracted and quit.

And then I read the same thing in Madeleine L'Engle's memoir, A Circle of Quiet. And then a third time the advice came, when a friend and I decided to read (and do the work in) Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

I usually get the hint when the universe tells me a third time to do something, so I adopted Cameron's "morning pages" and have stayed fairly regular with the discipline of writing something every day. I fall off the wagon now and then, and have learned that not judging myself too harshly makes it easier to climb back in. I have accumulated about ten years' worth of spiral notebooks (the writing equivalent of running shoes and a road).

In writing, as in running, as in any disciplined activity, regular practice or exercise makes regular performance or execution far easier. Your thinking mind or your bicep or your lungs or your writing hand ... makes no difference. Your body needs your mind to tell it to keep going; your mind needs your body to be fit enough to sit and write, or focus and read.

And of course, body and mind are incomplete, too, without spirit. This I learned for real only after my coming-out process began. I did not know how dis-integrated I was, until I became integrated, body, mind and spirit. Prayer was revolutionized in the process: I had asked my spiritual director for years why I could not feel God's love. I knew it was pouring down on me, like a constant and invisible rain, but I thought I should be able to feel it, and I could not. This felt like a failing to me.

Slowly but surely, as the realization of my lesbian identity unfolded, so did my prayer life. I could feel myself going to deeper and deeper places in my self and in God when I prayed, or -- as it felt -- when prayer was happening in me. I realized that my self-knowing and self-loving were key ways that God knew me and loved me. If I could not love myself, then God could not love me through that avenue, either. In being cut off from myself, I had cut myself off from God. In coming into a fuller awareness of myself, I came into a fuller awareness of God.

This integration was startling in the intensity and viscerality of its effects. My coming out process began the year before I started this Ph.D. program, and I remember in the first year of the program, there were times I was sitting in class, participating in discussion, reading a new text, when I felt as if I would jump out of my chair, I felt such a keen and physical excitement. Sometimes the heat of intellectual passion literally ignited a sensual response in my body, and I knew what Audre Lorde said about erotic energy being the life force in an integrated self was absolutely true. I knew it in my own body. I know it still.

Which brings me back to running. And writing. And the natural interconnections of an integrated life. Just as I got to thinking about these interconnections, I stumbled across a book title and knew immediately I had to read it: Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It's a memoir writting by a long-distance runner who also is a novelist.

Murakami notes some interconnections among his writing and running; some of them we share, and some we don't. As I read the book, I realized I experience some interconnections that are unique to me. Here are a few of the first and the latter.

Like Murakami, I have learned the value of momentum: if you stop running at a point when you still feel strong, you are more likely to run again; similarly, if you stop writing at a point when you are going strong, it will be easier to get started again the next working day.

Murakami says he often writes to know what he thinks; I do this, too. I often don't really know my thoughts clearly on a topic until I have written about it (and, I have noticed, what I will write and how I will say it changes over the years, as time and experience shape my perceptions, even if I am writing again about the same event).

Murakami describes himself as someone who is capable of being happy on his own -- an important trait for a writer, which requires long hours of solitude -- and that he is not interested in team sports or particularly competitive sports; he really only competes with himself. I too need a certain amount of alone-time, and typically am happy on my own; but I have such an abhorrence of competition that I really will not even compete with myself. I do not time my runs, or set goals to exceed; I just try to keep running, and writing, and living, as well as I can, on any given day. Each outing, each effort has its own integrity, and I try to be my best in each one, simply because that is the simplest, truest way to experience abundant fulfillment.

Like Murakami, I am happy with running's low-maintenance nature; all you need are shoes and a road (well, and a good sports bra, I have to add). And a dose of discipline: all runners and writers know that you have to get through the days you don't want to run, or to write, and do it anyway. That's the nature of discipline; and that's where treating all running and writing as practice is useful. When the running isn't going well, or the writing feels stiff or blind, treat it as practice and keep moving. That way tomorrow has a chance to be better.

Murakami decribes the three necessary qualities of good writing (and running) as talent, focus and endurance. Murakami describes focus and endurance as qualities that can be developed; he is less sanguine about the ability to cultivate talent.

Focus is something I struggle for, and balance is important, too ... rather than talent, I think a third ingredient is "something to say." Which seems not to apply to running, unless you generalize to something like "desire." Maybe I am kidding myself, but I think desire or passion are more important even than talent. If you have a reason to and want to run, or write, you will, and nothing will stop you.

Running is schooling my mind and my body ... and my spirit. My legs are stronger, and so is my belief in my own ability to endure and persist. My "wind" lasts longer, and so does my ability to stay in the flow of a writing. My tolerance for struggle is growing, as is my willingness to stay in that struggle. When my mind is tired of reaching for the words, I think of how I felt in the third mile yesterday, and how much better the fourth and fifth miles felt, and I push a little harder until the words are flowing again.

When I am running, there are voices in my head that say "this hurts, let's quit" or "that's far enough" or "maybe I won't be able to run all the way back." I have learned that these voices are impostors, and that I can listen for and hear the truer voice whispering from somewhere in the back of my head. That voice just says "keep going." And "it's worth it." And "you can do this."

I need to know the sound of that voice when the world interferes with the dissertation. Those impostor voices say "Who wants to read about love?" and "This is all so obvious." Or "you are not post-colonial enough" or "you are not anti-racist enough" or "you are talking to yourself and no one will want to read this." Or, worst of all, "You are not doing and can not do justice to the idea God has put in your head ... if it was in fact God."

The true voice says, "You can do this. It's worth doing. It needs doing. Just pray some more ... write some more, pray some more, run some more, and then rewrite. Some more."

Two more chapters and an epilogue -- by Christmas, I hope -- and the first draft is done. The block of marble will have been assembled, and I can begin to carve. Because the process of rewriting is where all good writing gets done.

Help me, Beloved. Help me do justice to this idea. Your love, your justice, your grace, which we all need so much more of.

(And then maybe I can get back around to that guitar ... and maybe a triathlon? That should get me through the job search process!)

Running for Love of Women

October 19, 2008 was Race Day in Dallas; Race for the Cure, that is.

I have had friends over the years who have had breast cancer; many have survived and thrive still. Some have died of the disease. Breast cancer has come closest to home in the person of my beloved M., who is a 20-year survivor. I marvel at the stories of what she went through during her two surgeries, with subsequent chemotherapy; and I whisper small grateful prayers for our meeting, and our life together. It so could have been otherwise (and when I think this, I always think of Jane Kenyon's poignant poem of that name, "Otherwise").

Given that I started running this year, and -- much to my surprise and delight -- have stayed with it, and given that my daughter decided to walk with a team of women from the office where she worked this summer, it occurred to me that I could run in the race this year. I've been running five miles at a whack pretty regularly, so I figured a three-mile run was doable.

We got to the race location early, riding transit with many other pink-clad women down to the massively-crowded site; about 25,000 runners and walkers participated in the 25th anniversary Race today.

We walked around for a while, since we got there early; I noticed a strong representation of African-American women; some Latinas were there as well, but it did not seem to me there were a number representative of their overall population in Dallas. That got me wondering ...

And then it was time to run. As a novice, I was one of the few runners clueless enough to start at the back of the pack; the first two miles were bumper-car running through yards, among walkers and strollers, and sometimes on the street where I was supposed to be. About halfway through we ran by a high school, and a bunch of kids were passing out water; I noticed they were mostly Latino/a.

The sweetest moments came in the last mile, as the road opened up for a clear run, down and then uphill, and then around a corner where a high-school group was cheering and clapping. I knew it wasn't personal, but applause and a band playing is rare for those of us who are not playing high school football, so I got a lump in my throat. I noticed the group was all Latino/a kids, too. And then the finish line was in site, and I was looking for my beloved M., who promised to wait for me and watch me cross the line.

It felt great to run across the finish line; it felt even better to see the grin on M's face as she snapped my picture and gave me a big hug. I was thinking about a finish line she crossed 20 years ago, done with surgeries and chemo and learning to live into her survivorhood.

We walked around afterwards, waiting for our teenager to finish, and got to participate in donating to a local tissue bank that is supporting breast health research.

As we walked around, I wondered about the representation of ethnicities among the women involved, and got curious.

When I got home, I Googled up some statistics on breast cancer findings by ethnicity. In a report titled "Trends in Breast Cancer by Race and Ethnicity"*, I read that "The average annual age-adjusted incidence rate from 1996 to 2000 was 140.8 cases per 100,000 among white women, 121.7 among African Americans, 97.2 among Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, 89.8 in Hispanics, and 58 in American Indians/Alaska Natives."

Although more breast cancers are diagnosed in white women, tumors found in women of color tend to be larger (by the time they are found) and tend to be at later stages, with resulting increases in rates of death. Racial disparities in access to health care, including mammography and other screening and diagnostic services -- particularly for low-income women -- are primarily to blame. Other contributing factors leading to a higher rate of death from breast cancer in women of color include delays between abnormal mammographic findings and definitive diagnosis, more limited access to health characteristics, and variances in follow-up care. For instance, studies have shown African-American women are less likely to have follow-up radiation therapy after surgery.

When treatment protocols are equalized, death rate disparities are substantially less. For instance, "An analysis of the survival experience of women with breast cancer treated in US military health care facilities suggest that the disparity in breast cancer survival between African American and white women could be reduced by 70% by providing
equal treatment to all women."

The study referenced above asserts that "Passage of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention Act of 2000, which states the option to provide medical assistance through Medicaid to eligible women who were screened through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, should reduce economic barriers to those who meet the eligibility criteria."

Options ... shoulds ... well. Laws don't always have intended outcomes. What's the funding level? Who qualifies through Medicaid? What about women who don't qualify?

The authors of this study note the truth that much additional research is needed on the causes, prevention, and treatment of breast cancer; but they also note that "much progress can
be made by applying current knowledge fully and equitably to all segments of the population."

Indeed. That's a race I'd like to be helping to win.

* Here's the citation for the journal article that provided the statistics I quoted: CA Cancer J Clin 2003; 53:342. Asma Ghafoor, MPH, Ahmedin Jemal, DVM, PhD, Elizabeth Ward, PhD, Vilma Cokkinides, PhD, MSPH, Robert Smith, PhD and Michael Thun, MD, MS

Coming Out Day

Coming Out Day is a chance to celebrate the courage and freedom of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people (who have been able to choose) to be open about who they love. It’s also a chance for straight allies to express their support.

Of course, for lgbt people, pretty much every day is coming out day: we come out over and over and over, to different people in different ways, and we are always calculating the cost, even if we have been able to choose to live out of the closet all the time. Some people love our reality; some tolerate us; some hate us; some kill us.

Coming out stories are fascinating to me (and to enough other people that collections of coming-out stories have been published); they bear all the earmarks of conversion experiences, of metanoia. I like to hear the stories of people who seem to have always known their same-sex preference, and the stories of people for whom the realization came slowly, and the stories of “late bloomers” like me, who lived straight lives until some catalytic event catapulted them into their own reality.

My own reality tried to peek through the blinds of my enculturation as a straight girl, but there were enough barriers in the way for me as a young person that I could not let myself fully acknowledge what I felt and what it meant. That truth hid in a gray space in my soul I kept so carefully locked away it seemed even God could not find me in it. I thought the gray space was constructed to contain the childhood sexual abuse I had experienced; but the truth was buried even deeper than that.

A different light came, slowly. First, through language. There was the feminist theology class where I heard the term “compulsory heterosexuality.” Then through visibility: there were the lesbian friends I met in my M.Div. program who I could see living into full Christian identities. Finally, through experience: the friendship that teetered on the edge of becoming something more.

What surfaced through that friendship had the power to reach what I thought was the deepest wounded place in my life, and turn it into my deepest question: am I a lesbian?

The question was too risky; I ran from it, into deep and heartfelt prayer, including fasting prayers. A day here, a day there … my life as spouse, parent, pastor and student continued, with regular activities and exercise. Every day I prayed Psalm 51: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit with me.”

This came not from a sense of homosexuality as sin; I had a longstanding affirmation of lgbt folk as beloved children of God, deserving of justice and acceptance. However, I was struggling with the notion of accepting this affirmation myself, when it seemed everything hung in the balance: my marriage, my children, my ministry, my ordination, my church.

I asked God to take away the desire for this woman, for any woman, even as the awareness began to surface of how there had always been an important woman in my life. The truth was streaming in; I was stubbornly running. The cost of embracing this truth would be too high. “Take it away, God. Take it away.”

Weeks went by … five, six … I was oblivious to what was happening in my body as I prayed back against the frightening freedom beginning to dawn in my soul.

Finally, one day, I stood lost in prayer before my closet, wondering what was happening in my life even as I wondered what clothes I could put on my body that I would not feel lost in. A small voice came, in response to my by-now monotonous prayer for clarity: “Have you noticed that your lifelong addiction to food is gone? If I can take away that unhealthy desire, don’t you think I could take away this one? If I thought it was unhealthy? You don’t need clarity. You need courage.”

Stunned, I moved through my day, accepting the implication. Later, at the local Y, I stood on the scale. Forty pounds had melted away … and God was right. I felt completely different about food, and I was beginning to feel differently in myself, and about myself.

I was changing, from the inside out: changing shape, changing identity, changing allegiance. Having come out to God, I began the process of coming out to myself.

And a funny thing happened. My spiritual director, a pastoral counselor friend, and my womanist theology professor all gave me the same good advice in a space of weeks: “Tammerie, before you can figure out who you are meant to love, you have to learn to love yourself.”

And so, I set about the task of learning to love this new self God had given me. I went about it the way I would love another: I would want to know the beloved’s favorite activities, joys, passions; I would want to know where the hurts where, what needed tenderness, what brought pleasure. I gave myself the space and permission to experience healing – to feel healed. I chose when to say no; I chose when to say yes.

There was a high cost; the women of color I was co-pastoring with could not abide the questions or the changes coming about in my life, and it took several years for those relationships to regain their footing (and I am thankful they did). The anti-racist, multicultural church we were pastoring together – a vessel for so many dreams and hopes – had already been struggling to survive, and this was one difference too many. We came apart.

To make space for my own and our family’s discernment, I found the courage to resign my credentials in and respectfully disengage from a denomination and a church that could not affirm even the question of my orientation. I moved to a local church community in the United Church of Christ, which offered room for the asking and answering of this question. And over time, God and community helped me and my family to move as nonviolently as possible through the painful process of ending a 21-year marriage, and beginning family life anew in a way that spans two households. I am grateful that my ex-husband has happily remarried; and I am unspeakably happy in the rightness of the love I now share with my beloved M.

I have made choices and taken stances to live into who I feel made and called to be. I meet white people who are uncomfortable with my stances on racism, anti-racism, white privilege, feminism, or my queer identity. Some individuals and communities of color struggle too with homophobia, and sometimes in those settings I experience tension between my queer identity and anti-racist stance. Sometimes, when my feminist commitment runs up against a person of color behaving in a sexist way, I need to find the way between my anti-racist and feminist stances.

I feel the constraints of respecting positions I know in my embodied self to be wrong. In wrestling with those tensions, I come back to the primacy, for me, of my anti-racist stance. I name the truth as I can, and live into my commitments.

Given the interconnections among forms of oppressions, and the similarities of their processes and effects, I gain some insight from the experience of sexism and heterosexism that helps me in my attempts to be an effective white ally, in dealing with racism and white privilege. And, conversely, I have learned some things from people of color about how to deal with and resist oppression when it comes. I have not learned everything that is on offer, but I have learned some things, about courage, honesty, grace, and being human.

I will never regret coming out, because it has been a coming into my own, a coming into the self that God uniquely created me to be. I will always thank God for bringing me to my senses. Literally.

Rhythm? No. Rhyme and reason ... some.

I thought I would develop some rhythm in the writing of this dissertation, and the blog that (sometimes) reflects it. Well, no. Real life keeps getting in the way. I recall with some humor the concluding words from the acknowledgments in a text written recently by someone on the faculty of my institution:

"Finally, I'm grateful to my family, who gladly leave me to my intellectual pursuits without complaint."

Okay, yes, it is a man who wrote that, white, of a certain generation. This sentence conjures up a whole (imaginary) world for me, of a person for whom laundry is done, food is acquired and cooked, a house is kept, children are raised ... and all that goes on outside the door of a closed office, in which this man has the leisure to cogitate, reflect, and write. For long stretches of time. In peace.

I don't live in that world.

In my world, there are the teenagers, the widowed mother with significant health issues who just moved closer by, and my beloved M., who has been slowly but surely moving into our house and winding deeper into our hearts, and who unintentionally tugs at the strings of my wanting-to-be-with.

I am grateful to my family, too ... though they do not typically leave me to my intellectual pursuits. Pursuit of laundry, shopping, and transportation, yes. Intellectual pursuits ... well, when we do talk about my work, I usually learn more than they do. So, it's a good thing I am not completely left to my own devices.

It is hard to write a bit here, think a bit there, edit and reorganize and try to hold onto a train of thought until my mind gets to the station. And yet, I can't stop with reflecting on the lack of male privilege in my life. Because there is plenty of white privilege, and the difficulties I have being a sandwich-generation full-time mom and lot-of-the-time daughter and part-time instructor while attempting to write a dissertation do not change that.

I sit in a house acquired through one of those they-had-no-right-give-her-a-mortgage loans; and I have been supported not only by my own efforts and employment but also by gifts and inheritances flowing through the gates of a white world. My mother has moved into an assisted living center where the nurses and administrators (in higher paying jobs) are for the most part white women, and the nurses' aides and housekeepers and hands-on care providers (in lower-paying jobs) are all women of color. The cost for this is paid for with money my dad made, profits generated in part by using underpaid Latino labor.

White privilege plays into all of my environment ... and I do see my complicity. But I can't stop with noticing. It's like housekeeping; you know you are going to keep making messes, just by living, and so you keep cleaning up, and you try to make a little less mess than you clean up.

I have been working for 15 years now on accepting that what I can do is good enough; becoming a working mother -- even with white privilege -- took a big bite out of my perfectionism right off the bat. I had to accept that I could not be the employee I wanted to be or the mother I wanted to be, if I was being both, and so if I wanted to be both, I had to accept the notion of "good enough." (I had some help in that department from Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, which I picked up for working mother tips, not realizing it would trick me into quitting my job and eventually going to seminary.)

Beginning to (try to) live into an anti-racist identity took a few more big bites out of the perfectionist cookie. You realize the original sin of whiteness: i.e., you are born into and grow up in systems that teach you (and help you internalize) your superiority, such that you think it's natural and inevitable. You realize that it is sheer grace that causes God and people of color to love you anyway, despite the ways you keep acting white (see Macon D's excellent and prolific blog at http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/ and everything Tim Wise every wrote). You learn to forgive yourself so you don't get paralyzed with guilt, and you learn to be willing to risk being wrong -- even as you try your darnedest to do the right things right -- so you don't get paralyzed with fear.

You learn that partial and imperfect progress is better than no progress at all. And so you set yourself to write an anti-racist theology, even knowing that you will be making a part-time and imperfect effort that will not be the best, not even the best you could do, but it will be the best you can do, and that whatever you can do is worth doing.

My committee probably won't want the dissertation cover to read "Best That Could Be Done Under the Circumstances."

So, maybe I'll just acknowledge on my acknowledgments page my gratitude for everything that gets in the way of this project -- because every distraction reminds me what it's really about.

Having the courage to see the world, name what's not right, and take responsibility for doing something about it.