Sermons I Can’t Hear Anymore

I’m finally at the point in my history of church attendance that I’m recognizing the patterns of stock sermons and things that get said over and over and over from the pulpit. Certain questions need to be answered (or asked) repeatedly, certain lessons need to be examined again and again, certain issues are the ones that Christians think about (or are supposed to think about) every day and that need to be seen from different perspectives. And thematically, these are usually the kinds of questions that all church leaders have been studying for years in their own lives and centuries in Church life, which doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to getting something new and fresh every time. And summer, when we’ve got a rector on vacation and a guest preacher who doesn’t necessarily know the congregation all that well, seems to be something of a high point for the kinds of stock sermons that I just can’t stand.

What I can’t stand about this particular kind of sermoning is mainly that it doesn’t actually challenge anything. Not only does it take on a pretty basic question, but its answer is usually the Obvious Christian Answer. It’s usually the one that Church People want to hear (sarcastically capitalized “Church People” refers, for me, to a specific kind of Christian churchgoer, the kind that fits into the classical meanings of ‘holier-than-thou’ and self-righteousness) because it doesn’t really threaten their understanding of their place in the universe and God’s expectations for them. Maybe I’m being too harsh, and maybe I have nothing to say here that is anything more than ridiculously obvious, but what gets said up there matters in the lives of individuals and emerges in the actions of those individuals when they leave the church. Part of what frustrates me about these kinds of sermons is that it’s impossible for these kinds of answers, with the comforting smugness and the reassuring sense of certainty, not to come from a place of social power and blindness about the nature of that social power. More than blindness, even, outright refusal to accept the nature of that social power and the great, Spiderman-esque responsibility that comes along with it.

I’m starting to feel like the specifics of the sermon that have been running through my head are less important than that general point about how the easy answers relate to power, but I suppose my generalities make little sense without a grounding reference point. In this case, it was a Power of Prayer sermon, with three examples drawn from the preacher’s life of miraculous interventions by God in direct response to prayer and faith. I got an informal version of this sermon as well from a Church Person who just saw a loved one recover from a life-threatening illness and who attributes this person’s recovery directly to all those who were praying for her. And I hate that I feel this uncharitable sense of frustration and focus on that woman’s smugness, because of course she’s grateful to see this recovery. But when she talked about the power of prayer, she explicitly mentioned all the people who didn’t heal from this illness, and spoke with a sense of having a trump card over these others, these poor lost souls who, the implication is, didn’t have prayer on their side. It felt, to me, like she was articulating the “Gotcha” moment of having found an irrefutable argument for her own rightness. When I’ve expressed this frustration to others who know this woman, they’ve pointed out that if she were to examine it, she likely would have to see this flaw, because she’s watched other loved ones not recover with just as much prayer and loving attention, but the connection doesn’t seem to stick.

And that’s the incredibly obvious problem with this particular sermon – what about when the healing doesn’t happen? This is the question that non-Christians or seekers or people who are struggling ask all the time about Christian theology. If we’re going to talk about miraculous healing, responses to prayer and interventions against an unjust, unfair world, without mentioning the continued presence of that injustice, illness and pain, what the hell are we saying to the person listening who is in that kind of pain and for whom no miracles are forthcoming? I obviously have no answers to this question, though I could point to dozens if not hundreds of attempts by people who’ve tried, any one of which makes a better sermon than a simplistic, reductive and omission-filled claim that “prayer works”.

The comforting thing about “prayer works”, and the reason I think it can’t come from anywhere but a position of power, is that is presents and reinforces the illusion of being in control. It’s “The Secret”. It’s the basis of bootstraps theology of “God helps those who help themselves”. It isn’t really about God. The way it’s expressed always feels, to me, like providing us with something that we can do to assert a sense of order over the chaos. And I recognize that overcoming that sense of helplessness in the face of incomprehensible experiences and big, all-encompassing pain matters, but there’s a lot of nuance that has to come into those much, much more complicated questions from a psychological and theological perspective than “Don’t worry, it’s okay – here’s a series of examples from my life where prayer has worked. I asked for something and I got it. Don’t change what you’re doing. Don’t expand your sense of justice. Just believe more. It really is true that God likes our kind better”.

In the old “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” model, these sermons do neither. And even on summer vacation, I’m coming to expect better.

Anger

A big part of the reason I haven’t been blogging lately has been that I’ve been feeling a lot of anger. While of course there are probably plenty of issues onto which I could vent my righteous indignation and make good productive use of said anger, I’ve come to realize that I’ve become extremely uncomfortable being really angry. At one point in my life (or maybe several, or maybe a very long section of line as opposed to a ‘point’) I would describe myself as having been a very angry person. Whether I had good reason or not is kind of irrelevant, because all I can associate with that feeling is the sense that it was an incredibly destructive force in my life. Now that I’ve had at least a couple of years feeling generally not angry, I am not very good at dealing with it when it does come back. Being not very good at dealing with it, I tend to avoid anything that requires sitting still and settling even a little into my own head – like writing. So I get a cycle going of constant motion fueled by anger and anger at my anger, and I don’t sit still long enough to try to break it.

Fortunately, a recent 4.5 hour train ride forced me to do otherwise. A spiritual podcast I was listening to en route contained sort of a revelation on the subject of anger, for me – at its most basic level, one of the conditions that ‘anger’ describes is the feeling that something is not okay, that the situation is unacceptable. Since from a social justice perspective, there are obviously tons things that are fundamentally the opposite of okay, I’ve occasionally felt almost guilty for not feeling more angry of late. Like I’ve somehow lost my ability to be passionate/compassionate/empathetic. But there’s another component to what I think fully constitutes anger, at least when I’m describing the feeling that makes me so uncomfortable, which is the sense of ego-damage and wounded pride. Sometimes, that ego-damage and pride emerges from situations and actions on the part of others that really do initiate that ‘really not okay’ state. But other times – and this was the case lately – my anger has had a lot more to do with how my own actions/reactions/emotions don’t match up with my idealized ego-image/expectations. It’s that latter kind that kills me, but I think sometimes I’ve also used the former kind to mask that one.

I don’t have much point other than that basic one, but I’ve been feeling like I needed to think through this anger before I could get to anything else, and so. Turns out, as often happens with spiritual/emotional things and me, that the avoidance of thinking it through and the fighting not to think it through took a hell of a lot more time and effort than the actual thinking and releasing.

In His Church

A hell of a lot has already been written about the murder of Dr. George Tiller. I can’t add much more than an agreement with anyone who’s identified this as an act of terrorism, and an additional voice of incredible sadness for this man’s family and anyone who was affected by his life and work.

I obviously don’t believe that the location of an act of violence like this one makes any kind of a moral difference in the end, but I can’t help but come back to the detail that this happened while he was on his way into church for Sunday service. I would presume that the murderers profess a kind of Christianity that considers Tiller’s faith an abomination, perhaps worse than had he declared himself an atheist, which I guess would make this church space no longer sacred in their eyes. The terrorism here is obviously against anyone who would consider providing this kind of very necessary medical service, but I think it’s also an act of violence against this kind of church. I can’t imagine ever being able to experience worship in a place where I’d witnessed something like that.

I’m not trying to discount the main point here or somehow give murderers more credit than they deserve, but there’s a hollow, hateful callousness to the whole scene that makes it hit me harder.

The other reason I think this part of the story strikes me is that Tiller was still attending church, and likely regularly, which is why people who would have researched his habits would know to find him there. And I honestly find that remarkable. It’s an incredible testament to his bravery and personal commitment that he continued to provide these services despite years of threats and attempts on his life. Continuing to go to church is something else – it’s a recognition that the God he believed in wasn’t manifested in those people and a faith in his role in God’s community. I’m not much for the construction of popular martyrs and I don’t know enough about the man’s personal faith story to project any of that onto him, but I can imagine that kind of a struggle, and I admire what he did with it.

I can say for damn sure that I would want to be in his church rather than in the church of the people who killed him. And once again, I’m pretty fucking sick of only one of those churches getting to set the terms of life in God’s plan.

Waking Up

After having directed all of my brain energy into my end-of-term papers, I feel like I should have something to say about something here, but I seem to have lost track of all those random things I said I would write about, at some abstract future point and never bothered noting.

First of all, though, general thanks to the Creative Revolution types for the existence of the Canadian F-Word blog awards, and particular thanks to Mr. matttbastard for nominating me even if I never say much at all, let alone anything of relevance. There be lots of good readings over there, anyway.

The one thing I do recall from the list of thoughts I couldn’t get around to blogging was this YouTube clip from the apologetics organization “Answers in Genesis” that, although a couple of years old, was actually new to me. That thing seriously freaked me out – it’s just incredibly jarring and cold, which I assume is pretty much the point. And really, of all the possible things wrong with it, I honestly think that’s the biggest one. It’s trying to advocate for Christianity by instilling fear in them, which is nothing new, but instead of the old kind of wrath-of-God fear, what we have here plays on something a lot of people fear very genuinely – isolation, abandonment, their own unworthiness and irrelevance to others.

Obviously, I think that is absolutely the opposite of the point of the gospel, which is that you matter to God, whether you think you do or not – and if you’re not so comfortable believing in God, I frankly don’t see much wrong with an evangelical Christian message that’s based primarily on ‘you matter’. Not “you will matter if you meet the following criteria, make the following promises and accept the following beliefs”. Not “we will accept your unacceptable self if you change in certain prescribed ways and appreciate that we will be policing your meeting of said conditions near constantly”.

This is, as usual, not rocket science. There is no ‘if’ here, and I absolutely cannot imagine anyone responding to this ad with the sincere desire to walk into a church and expect to find a place where they would be welcomed and embraced. While I’m not sure I fully believe the saying that ‘where there is faith, there is no fear’, I would certainly figure that any kind of ‘faith’ growing out of this particular brand of fear would be brittle, defensive and incredibly strained. I think there are a lot of reasons to find this ad offensive (and believe me, I do), but I can’t help but also notice that it’s likely to be extraordinarily ineffective, and that actually makes me sad.

The Desert and Lenten Sacrifice

I was on a bus the other day driving through random small town back corners of Southwestern Ontario, and saw a sign on one of the churches that said “Lent is about surrender, not discipline”.

That got me thinking about a lot of things. I definitely like the overall sentiment, especially since I think the elements of authoritarianism, restrictiveness and punishment still pervade the Christian faith (both from within and from the perspectives of those outside). Moving away from spirituality that focuses heavily on those things – and that is grounded, more than anything else, in fear – is, I think, extremely healthy for anyone and a particularly important part of where I see the intersection between faith and feminism (or really, any anti-oppression activism). The word ‘discipline’ is full of incredibly problematic connotations, not least would be the contemporary assertion of “Christian domestic discipline” as biblically justified spousal abuse. The word ‘surrender’ has some layers to it that I had originally planned to address in this post, but I find my brain going in a different direction, so maybe I’ll get to them another time.

The cultural practice of Lent brings a few things about our social attitudes into focus. Again, I think these attitudes are prevalent among people who are practicing Christians as well as people who aren’t, but who have grown up or lived surrounded by a culture that is full of Christian imagery, mythology and behaviours; I think that’s important, because it has to do with how a specific model of thinking continues to shape both our experience of Christianity and things that purportedly have nothing to do with Christianity directly. What, mostly, do we know about Lent? During my (Catholic) childhood, I was told that Lent is when you give up something you like. Chocolate, or TV, or whatever. As I got a little older, I knew that it was related to Jesus having gone out into the desert to fast for 40 days and 40 nights. If Jesus did it, we should do it. Because of the rather tenuous spirituality of my upbringing, I don’t know that I got an understanding that the whole point was to use this time to get into closer contact with God until well into adulthood. All I really knew was that you were supposed to give something up, that it was going to be unpleasant, but that you should do it anyway.

There’s an equation in this picture between suffering and holiness. There’s a direct line between giving something up and being good. Sacrifice is about loss, it’s about unpleasantness and yes, it’s about discipline.

First of all, there’s a point missing on this chain of causality. I was in my 20s before anyone ever talked to me about what fasting meant to them in a more spiritual sense. I realize now that a lot of people take the opportunity, when they feel that sense of craving or frustration or suffering, to pray. Maybe just to force themselves to be more aware of God, maybe to specifically find a way to be grateful for things, maybe to ask for greater peace and acceptance. But there’s a step there between the suffering and the resulting benefit, so that the suffering isn’t the end in itself, nor is the simplistic prideful victory that you were stubborn enough not to give in to the cravings. The moments of pain (however large or small they may be, depending on what you’re giving up) remind you of something you need to be more conscious of, and you bring that to God.

There’s also the assumption that the main point is the taking away of something that one enjoys. When a lot of people casually talk about Lent, they ask “What are you giving up?” This year, I started jokingly saying that I’m giving up working for Lent, but I fairly quickly realized that I wasn’t really joking at all. I’m taking some time off from the 24-hour a week, shift-work heavy part time job that I was trying to retain while also juggling full-time graduate studies and a few other commitments that require varying amounts of time and energy. For six months, I was sleeping sporadically at best, eating completely irregularly and pretty much never feeling genuinely relaxed or calm. It was starting to threaten my health, physically, mentally, and yes, spiritually. Not only did I lack the time to really focus on prayer and meditation, and not only was my exhaustion starting to make me angry, bitter, frustrated and lacking compassion, I was also constantly getting that prideful perfectionist streak back into me. The one that says that I have to do more than anyone else, and I have to be better than anyone else at everything I am doing, and that the possibility that I might have to drop something or do less than brilliantly at something is really absolutely vital to, like, the survival of the human race or something.

The desert is more than just a place of empty, barren sacrifice. It’s more than this no-fun world where you don’t get to do cool things like play video games and eat yummy stuff (the equation of deliciousness and, yes, fat with sin is full of its own problems, and they clearly apply well beyond the boundaries of the Christian faith into our popular consciousness about what is good and bad and holy, but they’re really the subject of another post). The desert is a place of silence and stillness, where you move away from the multitude of distractions that are not God. It’s a place where you’re forced to take away all of the distractions and performances that you put up on yourself and just be.

So I’m giving up working for Lent, as part of a way of foraying into the desert. Given how much trying to do everything and be everything was taking me away from God, this is, actually, an act of surrender. I’m suffering a hell of a lot less these past few weeks, and in fact feeling a great deal of relief and even joy. None of that suffering was doing a damn thing to make me a better, holier person. I didn’t really ever think it would, but I think there’s a subconscious tendency to move towards that belief, where never enjoying one’s self is the mark of true goodness. There’s a reason the ‘martyr complex’ is so pervasive.

If we could all, collectively as a culture, give that up for Lent, I think that would be really cool.

Faith, Certainty, Fear and Violence

I do realize that what little I’ve been writing lately has been on the self-centred side, in that it’s not really about anything that’s going on in the world, but rather whatever has been going on inside my brain. And yes, I’m extremely busy, but more than that, I just don’t know what to say about some of the big events these days. Thinking and speaking just feels so futile when it comes to Gaza. Everything seems both overwhelmingly complicated – and since I lack a PhD in Middle Eastern history, I feel unqualified to comment – and unbearably, horrifyingly simple in the unacceptability of this kind of violence.

Slightly closer to home, there’s recently been the Oscar Grant shooting, the violent hate-rape of a lesbian woman, and uncountable other acts of violence. Last week, Natalia asked the question:

Those among us who are least capable of defending themselves make for the most excellent targets. Is it because, deep down, we fear and loathe vulnerability in all of its forms? Do we just want to punish it, cull it, stomp it out? Are we disgusted by the people who trust us, who depend on us, in one way or another?

Honestly, I think so. There’s a lot to be said about the construction and dehumanization of the Other, but more and more, I’m convinced that the most terrifying thing about the Other is the threat that it could become the Self. Or rather, the possibility that the Self has those weaknesses. It’s not when we’re positively convinced of our superiority that these acts of hate play out on the most intimate and the grandest of scales, it’s when the mirror shows us our own vulnerability.

There’s an overwhelming tendency to conflate faith and certainty. But as Daisy said in comments to one of my recent posts, it’s when I’m most fragile in my life that I feel the need to cling to my own rightness, that I will get most aggressive about my opinions and forceful about my need to have you share them. I think most of us here understand that, politically and religiously, inability to tolerate dissent is a sign of uncertainty, and the more unstable the position, the greater the need to erase the signs of one’s wrongness. In some cases, it’s enough to petition to have references to evolution removed from textbooks; in others, we have to erase the human markers of the possibility that the European Enlightenment project of reason, progress and modernity was not just ill-advised, but flat-out wrong.

On a purely interpersonal level, I’m still being held back by serious trust issues, and I still have to ask myself “what if”. What if I’m wrong about someone? What if what they tell me isn’t true? What if they intend me harm? What if everything changes again? Realistically speaking, I just can’t know the answer to any of those questions. There’s no script. There’s no certainty. When I want that certainty and can’t get it, I am an anxious, angry, hostile, frustrating person. If I’m being completely honest, I’m consumed with fear, not of the what-ifs above, which are all about them, but of the what-if of my own vulnerability.

I can’t pretend to really understand violence and hate, and I’m not trying to oversimplify them. I’m bringing the very banal and all-too-common experience of insecurity and a well-earned inability to trust into a discussion that is ostensibly about deep-seated historical inequalities, long-standing anger among groups of people and horrifying acts of violence because this is the part that seems pathologically simple, to me. Not “simple” in the sense of believing that we can just say “get over it” and “can’t we all just get along” and everything will be figured out, but just…heartbreakingly the same, over and over again.

Speaking personally again, I think I’m at my best when I’m not afraid of uncertainty because I’m absolutely confident in my uncertainty. Weakness and vulnerability are right up in my face, so I don’t have to defend the possibility that they’ll emerge and be seen. In the real world, outside of the bounds of my cozy warm apartment in which the greatest threats to my security are my cat’s claws, I have no idea where to go with that. So I kind of just…don’t.

Self-Identifying

This list of 2008′s Top 10 Christian Bashers from the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission is, to be frank, ridiculous on its face. The vast majority of my brain looks at stuff like this, sighs and moves on, because…what can I say? Most of it is all too predictable, though a little discouraging.

The part of my brain that won’t move on from this particular article, however, is the one that was stopped short by countdown items number 3 and 2. Back-to-back, we’re told that Barack Obama’s declaration of his Christian faith is an act of “defamation” while it was Sarah Palin’s mere self-identification “as Christian” that led to her being heinously attacked. The leap in logic is immediately apparent – we’re expected to accept that Christians are being persecuted by the left simply for stating that they are Christian while simultaneously getting outraged about the overwhelming support and electoral victory garnered by a man who dares to call himself a Christian.

For the most part, this is still depressingly predictable. I find it a little odd, however, that despite the placement of these two items next to each other, the authors seem to have missed the connection between them. I do recognize that without this “oversight”, a great deal of the persecution complex becomes untenable, so I guess I just expected some more significant rhetorical tricks to attempt to cover up the parallel. The thing about the Christian faith is that self-identification is (debatably, I know) among the most important markers of who is and who is not in the group. I’m no scholar of world religions, but what understanding I do have of others suggests that the importance placed on declaration of beliefs is significantly stronger in Christianity (anyone who is a scholar of comparative religions – or really, anyone more familiar with the topic than little ol’ me – can feel free to correct me here, or help me to modify this position). Certain kinds of behaviours matter, of course, and there’s the idea that genuine commitment to Christ will lead towards a specific path – though which specific path varies with sect, with cultural context, with C/church and even with individual practitioner. Even if some (on both the left and the right) wish to place specific limitations, using whatever historical and biblical criteria they deem most relevant, on who is entitled to self-identify as “Christian” without reproach, the point remains that, anthropologically speaking, a person pretty much “becomes” a Christian by publicly declaring themselves Christian (usually through an act of baptism).

I’ve been hesitant to confess that I’ve actually been struggling with that self-identification for quite some time now, and while I hate to admit it, this kind of bullshit article really doesn’t help. I don’t think it’s my own beliefs that have been shifting so much as my understanding of the implications of the words and labels, especially as the readings I’m doing in my academic life continue to point out ever-more-intensely horrifying layers of those implications. Some of this line of thinking takes me in a more personal direction that I’m up for going in this particular post, but in addition to being stupidly busy, I suspect that this struggle might be keeping me from blogging more than I’d like. There’s a weird dynamic of self-identification connected to blogs, which lend themselves so well to categorization and Ven diagrams of collaboration and contact, but less well to shifting positions and permeable labels.

I don’t have a point of closure for this highly meandering post, except to say that it’s kind of a way of dipping my toe into some personal waters in that oh-so-strangely intimate-yet-distant venue of the blogosphere.

Unity

As I suppose may be obvious by now, I spend a lot of time thinking about selfishness, from both a “practical” and a spiritual perspective. I think, on the whole, that selfishness is both a lot more complicated and a lot simpler than is immediately apparent. I don’t think there’s a checklist somewhere of actions (or people) that are Selfish and actions (or people) that are Not Selfish, creating conveniently obvious binary hierarchies between childless/mother, Christian/atheist, liberal/conservative, feminist/nonfeminist, male/female etc etc and so forth. I also don’t think that actions can be easily dismissed as selfish because they show some benefit to the individual who performs them – or, for that matter, deemed unselfish because they involve some pain for that individual.

No matter how much I try, it still grates me to hear “it’s okay to be selfish”. I know where it’s coming from, especially in a feminist context, since accusations of selfishness are often leveled at women as higher rates of self-sacrifice are demanded. I do know and hate that particular weapon. But I’ve also heard “it’s my turn to be selfish” – or variations like “I deserve it” – used as just as powerful a weapon, used to hurt people and make excuses not to examine one’s own actions. I’m not interested in a debate about whether genuine altruism is or is not possible, because it inevitably begins and ends with the “gotcha” position of pointing out that when someone does something generous for no apparent gain, they clearly get the gain of the warm fuzzy feeling of having done something for no apparent gain. Sure, okay. Fine. Don’t really see what that has to do with anything, sophistry notwithstanding.

A couple of words seem to come up extremely frequently in both my academic and my spiritual reading (or my brain is in such a state right now as to notice these words repeating themselves. Whichever): unity and solidarity. Spiritually and politically, solidarity strengthens. Divide and conquer and whatnot. Capitalism not only pits individuals against each other in competition for wealth, it also creates this pervasive myth of merit, having earned our material possessions as well as our personal worth. This is mine, it can’t be shared.

I feel like I’m writing “all I need to know I learned in kindergarten”, but while none of this is new, my point is that it’s all connected. My point is that selfishness doesn’t come down to gaining vs. not gaining and unselfishness can’t be summed up as giving something up (stuff/time/pleasure, whatever). Selfishness is about setting the self apart, acting in division rather than in unity, living first and foremost as an individual rather than as part of a whole. In Christian terms, the whole is how we as the church make up the body of Christ (based in my very limited understanding of Christian terms), but there’s lots of other frameworks saying the same damn thing. Thomas Merton describes individualism as spiritual pride, saying “The man who lives in division is not a person but only an ‘individual’”. Selfishness here isn’t really about stuff or about charity or about taxable donations. It’s about creating a separation between self and other, about living in order to create that separation, that hierarchy, that superiority, whatever its terms (financial, moral, political, sexual, spiritual). It’s the antithesis of unity and of peace.

I can’t get okay with selfishness. I know that some people use the “it’s okay to be selfish” line when they mean “I need to take care of myself before I can take care of everyone else”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I actually think it’s selfish to take care of others in order to be recognized as the philanthropic businessman, as the self-sacrificing mother, as the fine upstanding churchgoer. Motivation plays a huge role here in how I see it, but not just for abstract philosophical purposes, because I think that ultimately, the prideful, self-aggrandizing motivation has to shake loose and will end up causing harm. The self-seeking drive is the divisive one, the one that tries to set self apart from other. By definition it has to break apart.

As usual, not rocket science. But sometimes I think rocket science is easier.

Trust and Politics: I Believe Him

The past week or so, I’ve actually been around, with some time and some thoughts that I could have been blogging, but I just couldn’t bring myself to write when everybody in the tiny circle of my blogging world could think of nothing but the culmination of the past two years of perpetual election. I was going to hide until after talking about the election per se had become relatively passé, but it turns out, I kind of can’t.

I doubt I’m saying anything that hasn’t been said by many before, and better, but I’ve been seeing a lot of continued skepticism from some of the people around me. And you know, I’m under no illusions that now-president-elect Obama is any kind of radical leftist who will enact policies that will really fuck with corporate America or seriously revolutionize the status quo (which, in my world, are good things. Because I am a socialist, among other things). I’m also well aware of the limitations that are inherent in the office and the structure, and that there’s only so much one person can do from one seat, however powerful.

The whole campaign, listening to Obama speak has given me hope. Whatever else he is, the man has the capacity to inspire. To energize. To excite people. That shit matters. Having something to frame the fight around makes it possible to fight. I’m as frustrated and politically cynical as anybody, but the man is such a brilliant, skilled politician that I manage to forget all that. I believe him.

I was watching the results on NBC with some friends, and of course, after they came in, between McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s acceptance speech, Brian Williams et al were telling the narrative they had been handed for the Obama victory: Only in America. Anything is possible, but only in America. Many things will reignite my cynicism, and I have to confess, despite the circumstances, American exceptionalism is one of them. For one thing, only in America, what? Only in America can a black man be elected? Why yes, that is mighty gracious of you folks. Congratulations on not letting racism win. Again. This time. For now. Congratulations on taking the contrast between a mediocre politician who has run an exceptionally poor campaign and made it exceedingly clear that he has no real plan for dealing with the kinds of problems the US is facing right now and one of the most impressive leaders, brilliant rhetoricians, intelligent and skilled policy makers that has emerged on the world stage in a damn long time, and still ending up with a popular vote in the 50-50 range. Only in America can we…overcome everything that was fucked up about us? Well, it would have been nice if it could have been not fucked up in the first place, or if it hadn’t taken literally centuries, not to mention the fact that, obviously, it’s not anywhere near overcome yet, and oh yeah, plenty of other places in the world have been trying to do exactly that (South Africa comes to mind immediately). To be frank, it felt like NBC was giving the nation a giant cookie for the very basics in not being an asshole.

And I felt bad, because they brought out a congressman who had been seriously active in the civil rights struggle, and I found myself feeling cynical even at hearing him say these things, in that case because the line NBC was playing was that this battle is over. We can all pack up and go home, there’s no more fight to be fought. Inspirational? Hell yeah. Has something been overcome? You’re damn straight it has. This shit matters, I know it does. But at that point, NBC was setting the stage for us never to be able to talk about race again, because weren’t we there? It’s over. And I was cynical.

Then there was that speech. Yes we can. That absolute confidence, faith, and clarity of purpose. That refusal to pretend that any of this is easy. That constant focus on giving some direction. Going somewhere, and making damn sure that it’s forwards. He says “Yes, we can” and fuck, I believe him. I don’t believe any politicians. I don’t have a lot of trust for our political institutions, and I make my political choices accepting the reality of manipulation and near-constant bullshit from all sides. This guy? I believe him. I don’t agree with all of his positions, and he’s still far to the right of where I’d like my politics to sit. But I even believe him when he stands up there and says he wants to listen, especially when his consitutuents disagree with him. I even believe him when he raises the possibility of listening to the rest of the world.

Say what you will, but that shit matters. US friends: congratulations (I guess? What does one say about such a thing?). If you could please avoid starting to talk about 2012 for at least a year or so, I would really appreciate it.

Segregating Worship

Read. Because Renee is so very, very awesome.

For my part, I keep coming back to the way that, as Christians, we manage to continually separate ourselves into those who are ministering and those who are ministered to. As I’ve said before, the “charity” model of Christianity doesn’t ever involve a relationship of equals, a sense of being truly “neighbours”, in that it’s always premised on the assumption that we have something to teach/give/reveal to them. The occasional vice-versa comes in the form of granting a kind of tokenistic “model of the simple life” status to certain chosen Others (in such form as the “noble savage”, the sweet young child with disabilities, etc), but there’s never (or very rarely) a sense of inherent, ongoing reciprocity or unity.

That problem is obviously not directly or exclusively connected to race, but it is connected to segregation and marginalization. Actual community is uncomfortable, and actual diversity makes it even more so. Not only is it far more difficult to ignore racism, poverty, inequality and injustice when it’s right in front of you in all its ugly, dirty, violent glory, it’s also far more challenging to believe in your own self-satisfied view of “helping”. Obviously, a lot of Christians do interrogate this, but as Renee points out, there’s still a lack of congregation along these lines, and it seems to me that solutions are not only not forthcoming, they’re not really being sought.

Harder than a camel going through the eye of a needle, indeed.