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Recently, at one of CLF’s online worship services, we featured a guest minister, Teresa Ines Soto, who lives with cerebral palsy.
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I don’t know about your family, but in my family healthy eating is an ongoing battle. Yes, I am the kind of parent who generally thinks that junk food is bad, and vegetables are good. Not surprisingly, my daughter is equally strong in her opinion that junk food is good, and vegetables are to be avoided at all costs.
March 2014
Again, again we come and go, changed, changing. Hands join, unjoin in love and fear, grief and joy. The circles turn, each giving into each, into all. —Wendell Berry
I wish I could talk to my Great-Aunt Marie about the movie Twelve Years a Slave, but regrettably “Neenie” died when I was three. This spinster librarian from Detroit did, however, leave a legacy—a self-published book of family history. Written in 1957, this book documented my family’s years in Missouri in the 1800’s.
My parents ridiculed these books; giant unopened boxes of them filled our attic. When my father died, I finally brought one home and began to read it. To my shock, the very first line of the preface, written by Aunt Marie in 1957, tells me my ancestors “left a Virginia country environment where they were relieved of the drudgeries of workaday life by the labor of slaves…they were members of a society in which excellence in manners, morals, and religion were prerequisites.” In 1821, when Missouri became a slave state and offered land at $1.25 an acre, my ancestors migrated there.
I had always imagined these Missouri pioneer ancestors living in a house kind of like Little House on the Prairie. Never did I envision Ma and Pa and the kids with slaves out back, ‘relieving them of the drudgeries of workaday life.’ No one ever talked about our family history as slave-owners.
Aunt Marie says in her preface that the family letters, “too numerous to include, have been incorporated into dialogue. The conversations are necessarily fictitious, but the events are authentic. The story is a family diary with eighteen dramatic scenes.” In other words, old letters have been turned into the equivalent of bad 1957 church skits.
Each of these ‘dramatic scenes’ is scripted, with stage directions and settings written by Aunt Marie herself. These descriptions are the primary reason I wish that Aunt Marie and I could have watched and talked about Twelve Years a Slave together.
Here are a few of the lines Aunt Marie included to ‘set the stage’ for various scenes:
“Smiling blacks bear platters of food to the tables, while strains from banjo and guitar are heard from the rear.”
“Black folks … cluster around the well and weave in and out of the buildings, working, laughing, loafing.”
It wasn’t until I saw and reflected on Twelve Years a Slave and the history of cinematography about slavery that I realized where Aunt Marie’s images came from. They sprang, in technicolor, from her Hollywood-influenced mind. Hollywood has presented dozens of films with images just like the ones Aunt Marie described, showing slavery as a time when blacks smiled and laughed and loafed.
Now, thankfully, Hollywood offers a version of history more grounded in fact. Twelve Years a Slave takes its viewers into slavery, not through the eyes of the slave-owners, but through the eyes of Simon Northup, a freed black man from New York, stolen and enslaved. The film shows slavery as mundane, daily, ceaseless, violence and terror. Some African-Americans I know don’t want to see it, or loathed it. But as a white person, who doesn’t experience the daily relentlessness of racism, the physical intensity of the movie was transformative. Leaving the movie felt like stepping out of a virtual reality booth.
I suspect Aunt Marie would not want to have any of it. Her preferred view seemed to be that owning other human beings didn’t make a dent in one’s ‘excellence in manners, morals, and religion.’ Nor did ceasing to own other human beings involve any sense of repentance. As one ancestor wrote:
“I’m not going to let old John Brown or any confounded abolitionist steal my blacks… I shall free them myself. Freeing my servants will not be a financial loss to me. Most of the negroes I have were inherited. In return for their labor, I have given them food, shelter, clothing, medical care…and security in old age.”
When I utter judgment upon my ancestors, some white folks get upset with me for “imposing 21st century values” on 18th or 19th century people. Do we really have to talk about this? they all but groan.
I guess the primary reason I’m most grateful to Twelve Years a Slave is that it is a kind of family intervention. I was born in the latter part of the 21st century. Silences and lies about my family history were handed to me as intact and unbroken as the four sherbet dishes my mother gave me, which made the journey with my ancestors from Virginia to Missouri. If Aunt Marie, writing in 1957, had come to believe that owning other people was wrong, she never mentioned it. My liberal parents –civil rights activists–never saw reason to talk to us kids about this part of our family history. Like many white people, my siblings prefer not to talk about it now.
Though viciously brutal, the film’s truth-speaking is a relief. Finally! Because when do Americans, or families, sit down with each other and say, “Wow, that was us! We did that! What meaning should we make of that? How did we benefit? How were we hurt? How do we heal our nation? How should we live our lives now?”
Twelve Years A Slave may or may not win Oscars Sunday night. But its real value is in changed and enriched lives: lives of people like me who have new ways to talk about and challenge what Adrienne Rich called “the lies, secrets, and silences” which shroud our national and family and cinematic histories. If there were a category for “Most Necessary,” this would be, hands down, my choice for best picture.
stars will stop
gelling—the
hydrogen and
helium gone.
Someday, each
star will call it
a day & go to bits.
Someday the day
will be as dark as
night, the hydrogen,
the helium snuffed.
Someday, in, oh, say,
ten billion billion years,
time will eddy & stop.
Someday deep will
call to deep with
nothing here at all.
Someday here will be
empty like there,
in, oh, say ten billion
billion years . . .
So off we go to
corral the OK.
Off we go to
fish for the net.
Off we go, a link
in the unchained.
Off we go to someday.
Apparently it is all the rage these days for state legislatures to introduce “religious freedom” bills that would allow people to refuse to do business with someone if it would go against their sincerely held religious beliefs. Clearly we are to understand these bills as a means for people who disapprove of same-sex weddings to not have to provide services for those weddings. On the one hand, this seems like not such a big deal. Who really wants an appalled photographer or caterer harshing the vibe at your wedding? Why should people have to participate in something that they disapprove of? Would I be willing to serve canapés at a dog fighting ring or a KKK rally?
But the proposed laws don’t state that no one should have to provide services that run counter to their conscience. They don’t suggest that it would be appropriate to refuse to do business with BP because you’re still mad about their massive oil spill from a criminally flawed deep water drill, or that we as a society get it if you don’t want to take photographs for the catalog of a clothing company complicit in the abuse of Bangladeshi workers. No, these bills are about religious freedom.
So I call bullshit. Your religion sets boundaries on how you live your life. It may tell you that it is wrong to be in a relationship with a person of the same sex, or to eat pork or to eat beef or to touch a woman who is menstruating. It may tell you that you should wear special underwear or a special hat or to wash your hands and feet before you pray. And no one has the right to interfere with your choices around any of those or a hundred or a thousand more ways of expressing your sincere religious beliefs.
But we don’t need any extra laws to say that. We have one already, called the First Amendment. Got it covered. So then the question is whether we need laws to protect you from in any way condoning other people doing things that are counter to your religious beliefs. Let me give you the short answer. No.
If you are Catholic and you disapprove of birth control, that means you shouldn’t use it. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have to comply with an insurance mandate to cover it for other people. How other people prevent pregnancy is not part of your religious practice. If your religion forbids your eating pork, or mixing milk and meat, don’t do it. But your religion doesn’t forbid you from taking pictures of people eating cheeseburgers with bacon. If you don’t think gay people should get married, then don’t marry a person of your gender. Who you bake a cake for is not part of your religious practice. Your religious beliefs apply to you, and if your God is going to judge you for standing by while other people live out their own religious lives, then your God needs to get a grip.
Of course, the reality of these laws has nothing to do with freedom of religious practice. Their function is merely to serve as a way for people who are losing a legal and cultural battle to try to exert control over something that has already escaped them. It is a place to put all the rage over losing the privilege of being able to assume that the way they see the world is the way everyone sees it. And everyone is entitled to their own rage, as well as their own religious beliefs. But like religious beliefs, no one is entitled to impose their rage on someone else. That’s the law.
Al “Carnival Time” Johnson sings “it’s Carnival Time and everybody’s havin’ fun…”
The twitter feed, the facebook, the news cycle all make it very clear that not everyone is having fun… but this weekend (until Ash Wednesday), I will put my twitter feed down, my facebook and the news away, and I will spend time with the people of my city dancing on the streets in handmade costumes with bands that have been practicing all year. Beloveds, we are going to have some fun.
Carnival time in New Orleans is complex, with a twisted history of racism, classism, sexism — AND it is an opportunity for the utter subversion of the oppressive status quo. It is a time when strangers become friends, generosity is the word of the day, and hope for a new day is lived out in the prefigurative politics of a communal celebration.
See y’all after the Mardi Gras.
I had a great time visiting New York City this past weekend. A couple years ago, I would not have expected to enjoy “The City” ever again.
You see, I called New York home for five years. And by the time we prepared to move out of the city, I was pretty overwhelmed by that amazing, infuriating, beautiful, exhausting island.
For the first four years we lived there, I tamped down my frustration, my fear, my overwhelm. But When we made the decision to move out of the city…oooh, it just came flowing out of me.
Rage at people who pushed me on the subway.
Tears.
Yes, Manhattan made me cry.
But we had just decided to move. We weren’t actually moving for another eight months, so I had to do something. I started a list on Facebook. I called it: “Things to like – or even love – about New York City.”
My first item was the evergreen boughs packed around the sidewalk trees on 17th street in the winter. Number 41 was a favorite: I was grateful for the MTA guy on my morning commute at the 14th Street M15 select service bus stop. He was there the entire year I took that bus. Rain, sleet, snow, hundred degree heat. He was so kind – even in the midst of a mass of rather grumpy commuters. He always said “Good Morning.”
The list helped. It made my last year in New York possible, pleasant even. Friends added to it and helped me see the city in ways I simply could not before I started the list. Searching for tiny things that gave me joy became a spiritual practice. Being grateful gave me new way of seeing the world around me.If you live in New York, perhaps you, too, have noticed that the sidewalk at LaGuardia airport sparkles.
A few months after I started my New York City gratitude list, I was called to the Emergency Room of the hospital where I served as a chaplain. I found the patient who had requested a pastorin an isolation room, protecting either him or the rest of us from germs. I donned a mask and entered. He was delighted to see me. I was, to be honest, more than a little nervous.
As we spoke, I learned that this man was HIV positive, that his HIV had developed into AIDS,and that He had come in that day because his pneumonia had reoccurred. He had cancer too, but he didn’t want treatment. He did not even want to know how much of his body was affected. He felt alright, he said. He was homeless and mostly estranged from his family. He needed some new clothes and wondered if I could help. He spoke quickly, frenetically. I wasn’t sure what would come next.
And then he taught me a priceless lesson. He wanted to read something to me, (I don’t even remember now what it was) and he reached into a tattered pocket to pull out a piece of paper.
After he’d retrieved a broken pair of glasses from a different pocket, he paused, closed his eyes and said: “Thank You, God, for the ability to read.”
Thank you, God, for the ability to read.
His prayer made me reexamine the gift that many of us receive in early elementary school and then proceed to take for granted for the rest of our lives. The man in the ER, with so much to be angry, frustrated, despairing about, with a simple prayer of gratitude, had opened my eyes.
The rest of that day the power of that simple thank you washed over me:
Thank you for the ability to walk, to express myself.
Thank you for being able to open this door for someone.
Thank you, God, for the ability to read.
What before was ordinary, with a reminder, became glorious.
I am trying to remember the power of that pause these days. It is a hard time for many of the people we love. I am learning that gratefulness is not always easy, but always lifts the heart and, it is always as simple as a Thank You For…
For what are you grateful today?
“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
In college, we had this mantra among our swim team: hard core. As the phrase might imply, to be hard core meant maintaining physical and emotional strength in spite of pain and setbacks – whether it was enduring the grueling three-hour long training sessions, withstanding the mental challenges involved with competing at the collegiate level, or surviving the social dramas and angst of college life. Hard core was a compliment in the highest regard, synonymous with strength, resilience, competence, confidence, and independence. To be hard core was to be respected and admired.
And so, for many reasons, I was hard back then (though probably not as hard core as I would have liked to be). I saw things in black and white. Questions had one “right” answer. Success (and, consequently, happiness) had a path that must be followed without deviation. There was little room for doubts, mistakes or uncertainty, and almost no room for acceptance, tolerance, and patience.
And, although being hard core as an athlete may have been helpful, I have found that it isn’t all that valuable to me as a person.
Being hard just doesn’t make much sense to me anymore.
I am learning that life isn’t a series of Either/Or conclusions, but a multitude of Both/And possibilities. It is possible to be soft and strong, to be vulnerable and confident, to be patient and resilient. It is possible to swim around in the doubts without drowning; to say “I don’t know” without being unintelligent; to say “I’m sorry” without being weak; to change my mind without being erratic and unreliable; to be generous without being abused; and to be merciful without being manipulated.
So these days I’m taking a softer focus. I’m looking for beauty in the complexities and differences, appreciating our multi-hued world instead of straining to create a monochromatic one. I’m enjoying the mysteries and unknowns, becoming more comfortable with the questions that have no easy answers. I’m saying “I don’t know” and “I’m sorry” more often and more sincerely. And, impatient as I am, I’m even trying to find joy in the waiting.
The thing is, in many ways, it is easier to be hard. It is easier to see things in black and white, to look for absolutes, and to live in an either/or world. It is challenging and confusing living in the softer world, where few things are fixed and certain and there are infinite shades of gray, along with reds and oranges and purples and pinks. It can be terrifying to live with an overflowing heart without a hard protective shell.
And, in many ways, it is hard work to stay soft. Idealist thoughts of perfection must fly out the window, along with regrets and should-have-been’s. The soft focus is more permeable, letting in the bad with the good and heightening emotional sensitivities. It can be clumsy and awkward walking on shaky soft ground. There are missteps, stumbles, and falls. There are wrong turns and false starts.
Fortunately, with this softer way, the falls are cushioned and it is easier to get back up, to turn around, to try again.
So I’m using a softer focus these days, resolving to keep a softer focus despite any personal or societal pressures to be harder, sharper, tougher.
There is no doubt that I am softer now – softer, in fact, than I ever thought I could be.
And, you know what?
I think that I just might be stronger than ever because of it.
Both. And.
This post originally appeared on the author’s website.
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