Frustrated

So, given that I am naturally extremely opinionated, I wanted to comment on Perez Hilton's blog about the whole Miss USA debacle, but I didn't want to give him the attention he craved by posting on his website.

So what's the big deal? Perez asked Miss California her opinion on extending gay-rights. A pertinent question for today's time, but definately one that is so taboo that it would almost seem unfair to put the question to all of the contestants. Carrie Prejean began by arguing that there is some right to choose in this country, yet she believes according to her upbringing that marriage is defined between a man and a woman. Perez's outrage against her is that she would not properly represent the diversity of people within the US and that she was therefore a bad candidate for Miss USA. So he gave her a zero for her score. They both agreed that her answer lost her the crown. Not only did her opinion cost her the crown, but she has been continually harassed by Hilton on his website and in media interviews.

I personally would not qualify her opinion as "hate." Her views were not expressed in hostility, though she may not be fully aware of the legal consequences that the LGBT community face by not being able to marry. Regardless, I applaud her for sharing her views even when she knew it would be unpopular and would cost her something that she deeply desired. She also does not seem to be crying foul for her loss and is simply making her views known through media outlets.

Ironically, this news (for me at least) came on the same day that I found out that the Westboro Baptist Church (a hate group listed by a certain important organizations that I can't remember the name of) picketed in front of the Duke Medical Center. I was incredibly happy to hear that Duke Chapel opened its sacred doors to host a breakfast for the LGBT community to show love to them and reaffirm that the views of WBC is not the Gospel.

Prejean's comments paled in comparision to the horrific language and views of the WBC. Simultaneously, Perez's response also paled in comparison to the means of correction that Duke showed. He attacked Prejean for alienating people (yet he suffers from minor myopia that her opinion is not rare and is shared by many--included their home state of California through a voting referendum). Perhaps she could have left out the comment that she saw her country agreeing with her opinion, but she did assert that she was aware that others have the right to choose.

Both Prejean, Perez and myself are equally broken people. I was shocked at Prejean's provocative clothing and photos, her self-identity tied into beauty pageants and her links with Michael Phelps (he's not worth her time given his own maturity issues). But Perez comes off as intolerant to those who do not hold his opinion, his website is overly obsessed with gossip, sex and dehumanization (i mean this in the sense of degrading what was meant to be godly about humans). I know that I too am broken, but I had to vent my frustration and lament. I'm not ashamed that I care about something so trivial because deep within me it reveals the burden that I carry for our collective brokenness as humans.

History and Christianity

UNC Asheville trained me well in the discipline of history. I can pull apart texts. I can find bias. I can compare methods and ideas. I can see a deep relationship between historical events and how they affect our everyday life and our stereotypes. The discipline is absolutely necessary for understanding society.

So what happens when society, history and Christianity intersect? I feel that I can assure one thing with confidence that always seems to apply to human beings and the Gospel: it gets messy. Our Protestant buddy Martin Luther claimed that the epistle of James was a letter of straw. How does that affect hundreds of years of Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism? I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to toss James. What happens when you discover that a good chunk of Christian doctrine is mixed into the context of Greek philosophy and philosophies of other eras? How do we bring correction when modern-day people twist Scripture for their own agendas? What happens when so much more of the Scriptures become clearer once you learn to read the Old and New Testament well by studying languages, history, literature etc. because they were written thousands of years ago?

So often the answers to these questions can become clearer when using the tools of the historian. But at what point do those methods go too far? At what point are the tools no longer applicable to studying something as personal as Christianity?

I have some thoughts on this, but I think it is time to live in the tension of this often unrecognized tension.

My Spring Semester Academic Learning Curve

So, back by popular demand...is a blogpost. I gotta get back to doing the things I love--and this is one of them. Despite the fact that this semester has been all over the place when it comes to my health and ability to get to class, I've found that I've actually learned a lot! This list is not hierarchical, but simply stream of consciousness:

1) Read the Gospels in Synoptic Parallels. It is pretty fascinating when you read the Gospels through the lens of what the author chose to include in their telling of God's amazing story! If you are super-analytical like me, you will LOVe dissecting all of the facets of what each Gospel includes and what it doesn't.

2) Read the Old Testament. Read the New Testament. Read them through the eyes of a Jew. Read them through the eyes of a Gentile. Read them through the knowledge of Christ as Messiah. If you wanna go deep, don't just rely on yourself to come up with some miraculous interpretation, but use the concordance notes in your Bible. Chances are that if you read the echoes deeply, you'll have an interpretation that is much more orthodox and mindblowing! Think of the example of the significance of the tearing of the curtain when Jesus died. You only get the deep significance of that when you realize what the curtain was there for in traditional Jewish life. There are many more crazy occurances like this if you read deeply and interpret intertexually.

3) It is ok for those of us who follow Jesus as Lord to study the Historical Jesus. We don't have to leave that to Bart Ehrman. In the words of the guy who redeemed the study for Christ followers said post-WWII that if we aren't focusing on who Jesus was and who He said that He was, then we create our own Jesus (and he was refering to folks like Hitler). Let's not make our own Jesus--lets find and be found by the REAL one.

4) The Prophets ROCK!!!! They are bedrock foundations for the New Testament (and for understanding the life of Israel). If the Church truly wants to be the Church, we gotta read these scary passages and IN THEIR CORRECT CONTEXTS!!! Read around Jeremiah 29:11 and you might pee in your pants!

5) This is an overall lesson from reading the OT with Ellen Davis: a blessing from the Bible is usually blessing and curse wrapped together. Be carefuly when opening these lovely presents!!!

6) The Protestant Reformation can make Protestant Christians nasty people. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and all of the other Reformers were pretty amazing (and you should read what they actually wrote instead of interpretting them through the denominations and doctrines that are named after them). However, be mindful that as someone said "the Protestant Reformation was an argument or a reaction." They weren't necessarily trying to turn over the whole he church. The interpretations of the Reformation have dramatically influenced how we treat others, how we think about God, etc. Remember this before you start to think that the Church started with Luther. Read Christians who existed before and outside of the Protestant Reformation. It might help critique our myopia.

7) Women were actually part of the Protestant Reformation and some of them were quite amazing! I think Katherine Von Bora is my favorite!

8) The Wisdom Literature is kind of layered: There is Proverbial Wisdom that upholds the status quo (though I'm told it is still not all bad...I'm still working on that one). Then there is Ecclessiastes/Qohelet who is your typical Ashevillian who tells you what is important (eat, drink be merry and throw in some spirituality b/c all else is vanity). Then there is Job who had crappy friends who tried to tell him proverbial, prosperity wisdom when God was trying to teach him about life with God. It is ok if your life follows this path. According to my super fab teachers: Beware! Job is always around the corner. Once God gets a hold on you, you may not get to go back to the simplicity of proverb world.

9) If you have never hung out with 600 page commentaries, you should!

10) Take Greek and Hebrew. I haven't taken them yet, but you realize how important they are when the scholars who are looking at the text are trying to figure out the significant meaning of prepositions: "Faith IN Christ" and "Faith OF Christ" are two highly differnet things. This would scare the crap out of Rev. Birdsong.

11) According to Ellen Davis, if you read something in the Bible that does not fit the commandments Jesus spoke about (love of God and love of neighbor) then you may need to move from a literal to a metaphorical interpretation.

12) This is my own interpretation of sorts but, when dealing with God, you must read with a lens toward justice and mercy, death and resurrection. As my dear friend Abraham Heschel suggests, read books like Amos and Hosea together as duel understandings of who God is. Read Jonah and Nahum together too.

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.

The Power of Memory

Over the past few years I have found myself holding tight to the book of Hebrews, finding that when my faith seems insufficient, it can rest on the power of memory. I have found this theme to permeate throughout the Old Testament as I've been studying under Dr. Davis. There is something about memory that is absolutely profound. What is equally terrifying for me is realizing that memories that are negative can be equally profound and can tear away at the foundation of any sense of hope.

As I've made my way slowly through my material for the South and Black and White class, I'm finding that it is either the perversion of false memory (the glorious Antebellum South or the "evils" of political changes after the Civil War) and instances and threats of violence to keep people in check so that white supremacy would prevail that fulfill much of the memories that Southerners have of the past. The propaganda of these tactics were both meant to rile up whites and to weaken and castrate blacks (and even those who would "side" with "them"). What I find incredibly interesting is that these tactics are alive and well in today's America.

--I think I was about 11-12 when I had my first run in with the KKK. Having grown up in the city school system rather than the county school system, I was surrounded by people who did not look like me. As a student in what had previously been the "old black high school" named after Dunbar, the MLK Jr. holiday was something that we never missed celebrating at school. There was a lot of hype around school over the first annual MLK parade in downtown. I feel certain that we went to the parade that year, but it wasn't until after running a few errands in town and were making our way back home in the car when we passed the Courthouse which was plastered with men in white sheets and Confederate flags. "What are they doing here Daddy?" I asked, wondering why someone would allow people who I'd learned in school hated others would be allowed to approach the Court House steps which only an hour or so before had been the best spot along the parade route. I innocently thought that if we as a people believed they were so bad, then why don't we stop hatred where it was allowed to grow? I can't remember exactly what Dad told me, but I knew he was uncomfortable and was perhaps heartbroken to have to explain such a rough history to his daughters--one which was probably all too close to home to him given that his own father was given the task of integrating by force one of the last segregated schools in NC and therefore the country. That was my first time feeling that maybe this world was not so safe.

--A few years later my sister and her black and white friends were put in danger as they made their way into a hotpocket of KKK activity when they were cheerleaders making their way to the visitor side of the football field. Trucks of white men raced passed them, taunting them with salutations of the N word and 'N-lovers.' Perhaps it sticks out more deeply in my own memory than hers because I remember reading and hearing about the dangers of the KKK and maybe she didn't know the whole story and only remembers her white cheerleading Coach preparing the team for what they might encounter. "They're ignorant," she was told. "Don't worry about them, just ignore them." The team was used to being comforted with hugs and encouragement from their Coach so perhaps my sister lived in the reality that was painted for her by such a positive adult. But I didn't get the speech or the hugs, I just heard the story afterwards and I realized that I could be grouped and identified as a white person by who I associated with and my skin color would not save me. I remember that after that day, if another school taunted us or disliked us, our own everyday groups of preps, nerds, athletes, goths, black, white, hispanic, asian, etc. fell apart it and we became an "us"--a united front that was taunted together.

--When I left my little smalltown for college, I found myself missing the "us." When I recieved news that the bones of a former basketball standout had been found in the sparse woods where he had gone missing after being racially profiled, misidentified with the actual suspect they were looking for, crashed his car and chased into the woods--I knew that not one of us was safe any longer. I knew that Tedric had been murdered for the color of his skin by the deputies who pursued him under a policy of "pulling over anyone not whiter than snow" which we found out months later when the Sheriff was indicted on numerous charges. Yet not one of them included the death of this young man who went off to college, claimed his children (and the children of his girlfriend from previous relationships). And I lost complete hope and live still terrified and angry when I see a white governmnent official who has a holster.

--To write my undergraduate thesis, I spent a lot of time at the Archives at UNC-CH. I remember finding an account of a lynching in my Dad's hometown back in the 1920s that many had called 'very suspicious' and 'dangerous.' I called my Grandfather assuming that I could get some leads into what happened. And sure enough he remembered the event and how it was spoken about at the barbershops around town--even when he lived about 15 miles away at the time. "Jennifer, don't you go digging that stuff up that people don't want to talk about." And from his tone I could tell it was because 80 years after the event he was aware of the memory and felt great fear for me and our family if I exposed anything that others didn't want to become common knowledge.

The burden of these memories of the South weigh heavily on us still. Heavily enough that I fear and heavily enough that I hope for change. Heavily enough that I have to say to myself, "I will not put my hope in education, in my privilege, or even in my own idealism--but unto you O Lord I must commend my spirit--there I will put my hope."

Overwhelmed

This time I was only able to get through one page on the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 before I felt overwhelmed. Last time I picked up the material I didn't get too much further than that until I felt not only overwhelmed but deeply disturbed.

As a North Carolinian, as a student of predominantly Southern and African American history (though I am sooo far from being an expert) and as a former history teacher, I am familiar with the Wilmington Race Riots. I'm re-reading material that I have either both read before or have had summarized to me. But this time, it's messing me up. Perhaps it is because I read it as we are studying the Prophets in Old Testament. Perhaps it is because I know longer am looking for the "approved by black people badge" that Dr. Tyson so wonderfully described on our first day of class. Or perhaps it falls around the time we celebrate Human Relations Sunday (which I get a complete kick out of honestly if you study the quirkiness of the white folks who started these days), MLK Jr. Day and the Inauguration of Barack Obama.

As I'm learning to not hate and despise my whiteness, while being more active to confess my race-based sins, I find that it makes me less immune to not just knowing intellectually the pain of injustice, but feeling it in a pathos sense. All of this together raises new questions and emotions that I'm not sure exactly what to do with.

Why is there such a link between active white supremacists and proponents of Education? As a former school teacher I can assure that not only have I seen this in the form of your "typical redneck" folks involved in the Educational system, but I've seen it in more subtle ways in who Jonathan Kozol calls "the people who say that they are with me" like those in the Education Department who tried to physically restrain me from asking Mr. Kozol a question about "apartheid" on our own white-washed campus. And yes, that comment was directed to the "nice Southern women" who had in the name of rules and polite Southern etiquette who had restrained me and thus greatly angered Kozol. Yet I will also say that I left the school system in part because it did suppress me into being that person I didn't want to be--a person who was forced to live scheduled and scattered, expert and executer, not friend but foe, limited by resources, racial and religious tension, reading skills, raucous behavior and raw politics. In the case of the coup in Wilmington, much of the strategies were started and carried out by men famous for supporting Progressive Education.

As a white Christian woman, how do I respond when my race, religion and sex were used to legitimize horrendous acts of violence on the black community and to literally and figuratively emasculate and kill black men? My gut reaction is to cry, wail and throw up (which we learned in Old Testament today was much of the response in Lamentations--thus such a reaction would be appropriate). The answer of laying it on the cross of Jesus almost seems too much. "Jesus, how can you carry and forgive such sin?" Or even if Jesus can handle it, how am I expected to look at my black brother and expect him to forgive people who look like me? If the Christian Church is given the 2nd Great Commandment (according to Jesus) to "love my neighbor as myself," then how am I supposed to love myself as a white person to love my black neighbor and vice versa if correct self-love is supposed to make me rightly love my neighbor? What does this mean for feelings of black shame and white guilt?

I'm in the business and vocation of saying that Jesus is enough. And I truly think that He is, yet I can equally and justly see why others would struggle in this way. But I think the point for me is to situate myself in the sin that Jesus sits in and pays for and (as I believe) endured on the cross. Although I know Jesus is enough, I'm called to wade a little in the water, to linger, to mourn, to grieve, to feel a little of Gethsemane and Golgotha.

Yes, resurrection is coming. Hope is coming. The Kingdom of God is coming. But Jesus waited for it for three days and even made his way down to Hell before He rose in glory. He walked for a certain amount of time (yeah, I should know how long) on the Earth as a resurrected person before returning to heaven to be with the Father. He wasn't afraid to involve Himself in our junk. But he is also present in those of us who believe in Him and also sits at the right hand of the Father and actively involves broken, messed-up people in His work. He calls us righteous because He said we get to have the righteousness that He earned. In the process of making us more holy on Earth, we let go of our earthly junk and live more to the new identity that Jesus gives us: friend, new creation, beloved, righteous, holy, blameless. So how do I as a white person come to terms with the way that God made me? How can/will God redeem my whiteness and the ways my identity has been perverted by the past? How can/will He do this for other races and ethnicities that Psalm 139 says were "fearfully and wonderfully made"?

I have some ideas, but I think it is important for me to spend some time in the in-between area before I start sharing. So come, sit with me where Jesus sits. Sit with me in the brokeness. What shall we mourn over? How shall we respond?