Commonality and the Crazies

So I've waited a lifetime to be at Duke for the storied Duke-Carolina Game.

And the excitement hasn't hit me until now.

Granted I truly love my Blue Devils and I CHERISH the memories that they have made which are like patchwork pieces of my life. But this year my heart has been caught up in the mix of trying to understand where all of the emotion comes from--how we make something so small so big. How we wrap our identity into which shade of blue you pull for. How these false identities cover up truth: 1) that our identity is really covered and influenced by how we see God and 2) that every game is a good game to watch your favorite team--especially for me when it comes to Cameron.

So where does this excitement come from? Why now?

It started when I saw the campus covered in blue. I woke up this morning tired, but I still got up and put on my blue. The K-ville residents who have been sleeping outside for days and weeks are also in their blue. Our lecture hall was filled with blue.

There is something about shared experience. Commonality. It makes you a community and that is where the enthusiasm comes from--the them vs. us.

I got excited when I saw the suffering spirits of those Crazies whose airbed mattresses and sleeping bags litter the sidewalk. At first I wanted to think that there was NO WAY that I'd want to go out and engage in suffering in that way. But then I remember camping out and having the sheer joy that came through suffering with others. I'll never forget reading from an excerpt on a book about cultures of poverty about the importance of how the oppressed laugh rather than crying when faced with trials. There is something uniting and energizing about suffering not alone--but with others. It binds you together, uniting spirits. Commonality.

Thanks for the lesson Crazies!

The Infathomable Truths of Folk Culture

Southernisms. Ebonics. Hebrew.

What do they all have in common? The power of language and shared experience where culture is transmitted. Words are evocative layered onions.

Sometimes I get frustrated when I'm stripped of my colloquialism. When I loose it, I loose my way to speak, to have a true human voice. I must exchange it for argument, rhetoric, thesis-statements--the academic importance of a very very Western world. Please don't think that the language of academia is irrelevant, but it does provide a common language when vernacular (though more expressive, poignant, and even more to the point and accurate at times) isn't translatable and understandable to all. The frustration comes because colloquialism is my very voice and telling me to put it away means silencing my voice. How many times as a Southerner do you feel the pressure to speak better? Or to change your words? Or the Ebonics I picked up in high school--why can't I use those words when they may speak the essence of what I want to say?

I've struggled with the threat of wanting to hide my voice when in academic circles and wanting to only bring them out in the cultures that share the language. But as I'm learning Old Testament when the Hebrew words and images become important, as I learn the history of oppressed peoples in The South in Black and White, when I read about the dramatic display of both God's justice and mercy--I find that is the very language that I (and others) try to bury. For example, the double meaning of "blessed" like blessed prosperity and blessed out in black culture is much more accurate to describe the hebrew concept of blessing.

What happens if we begin to loose these modes of language in exchange for the argumentative style of writing? It begins to bury our culture and then even our very ability to communicate live--especially life cross-culturally and in our deep state of humanness.