What I'm Reading #18: The Hidden Wound (Wendell Berry)

The Hidden Wound, by Wendell Berry

Before I dive into talking seriously about this book, I have to point out that The Hidden Wound was the first book I read in its entirety on my Kindle. I still don't know how I feel about the general idea of an e-reader, but it worked for me this time.

Wendell Berry is a wonderful writer, and this book was no exception. He argues that in oppressing black, whites inflicted upon themselves a hidden wound that has not healed with time but has become hereditary. Unsurprisingly for Berry (most of whose writing has something to do with agriculture), part of the current racial divide (which he acknowledges is now further divided along socioeconomic lines) is due to our separation from the land. Whites, he says, did themselves a disservice by placing blacks between themselves and the earth, forcing them to learn skills that whites were actually worse off not knowing themselves. After slavery, many blacks had the ability to hold small farms, and even if they were poor, their poverty was manageable because they had the talents to make do, to improvise with the resources they had. As blacks moved into the cities, an entire agricultural skill set became useless, and people could no longer "make do" because they became wholly dependent upon the money-based economy of the concrete jungle.

I'll admit I was a little skeptical when Berry first made the agricultural connection. I wanted to say, "Seriously, Wendell Berry? I read Jayber Crow. I get that you think farms are awesome. I read this book to get your perspective on race." But, particularly in the epilogue, Berry offers an extended critique of our current economic situation. To summarize roughly (and therefore do injustice to) his argument, he claims that our current image of economic stability—an executive office position and a sizeable income to go with it—is actually as unstable as it gets. Anyone who's been paying attention the past couple of years can see that clear as day. Berry argues that your typical "executive" generally does not do anything tangible; even if he or she is part of a company that produces a physical product, the executive may never come into contact with the product and certainly doesn't make it.

Our society's move toward intangibles means that we place less and less value on the kind of work that Berry calls "n***** work" (I decided a long time ago I would never use that word, but now I feel foolish marking it out like that)—in his context, that's not a racial slur but a socioeconomic connotation by which certain kinds of people, black and white, imagine themselves to be "above" certain kinds of work—often very practical, necessary work without which our society would collapse, like collecting the garbage. And the irony is that the main job of many executives seems to be to produce trash in today's disposable economy. The Hidden Wound was written in 1970, the afterword in 1989. How much more true are Berry's words today. The afterword reminded me of a recent Newsweek article called "Dead Suit Walking," in which the plight of your typical upper-middle class white man is described as nearly hopeless. The part that struck me was when a survey conducted as part of the article showed that 58% of white men have turned down a job they thought was "beneath them." Berry says himself that it is dangerous to make another human being do work you think of yourself as too good for—perhaps we need to think hard about what that means for class and racial divisions today.

There is far more present in this book than I can helpfully convey here, but I will surely return to it in the future. In the meantime, I recommend it to anyone wondering how we got to where we are in terms of persistent racial tensions and a desperate economic situation.


Favorite Quotations

"If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself."

"The question of how best to live on the earth, among one's fellow creatures, was permitted to atrophy, and the churches devoted themselves exclusively and obsessively with the question of salvation."

"It may be the most significant irony in our history that racism, by dividing the two races, has made them not separate but in a fundamental way inseparable, not independent but dependent on each other, incomplete without each other, each needing desperately to understand and make use of the experience of the other."

"...we are one body, and the division between us is the disease of one body, not of two."

"Whites fear what they feel, secretly or otherwise, to be the righteousness of the anger of the blacks; as the oppressors they feel, secretly or otherwise, morally inferior to those they have oppressed."

"No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse."

What I'm Reading #17: A Severe Mercy (Sheldon Vanauken)

A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken

This semester, my boyfriend and I decided to read a book together. We wanted it to have something to do with God without being too theologically heady (I get more than enough of that at school) and something to do with relationships without being a lame advice book. Gary ended up suggesting Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy. He had read it several years ago and had told me about it, so I was excited to read it, especially with company.

This book tells the true story of a couple (Jean, known as "Davy," and Sheldon, the author) that falls in love and gets married under a (self-described) "pagan" worldview but, ever curious about the life of faith, they eventually befriend C. S. Lewis and over time convert to Christianity.

The evolution of their relationship through that transition is interesting and challenging in that as young lovers they constructed what they called "The Shining Barrier," a sort of wall around their relationship where they were absolutely first in all things, shared all things and were committed not to let any outside force interfere with their love. In many ways, this was admirable—their profound sense of self-sacrifice to their love, their commitment that if there were something one of them enjoyed, the other would look into it so that they might enjoy it together, never anything separately. Separateness was the enemy, and they worked over the years to avoid anything coming between them.

However, as each comes closer to faith—Davy more quickly and more profoundly than Sheldon—it is clear that God breaks the Shining Barrier. This breaking is for the purpose of remaking, but Sheldon cannot see that at the time and, as Davy plunges more wholeheartedly into her devotion to Christ, Sheldon finds himself resenting her faith, even resenting God for seemingly coming between them. Before, the appeal in any disagreement was centered on what was best for the relationship; now, Davy's appeal was to God's will while Sheldon's continued to be first about her and about their love.

Throughout their entire conversion and development in faith, Sheldon is writing letters with C. S. Lewis. 18 of those letters are included in the book, and they provide an interesting insight into Lewis' thought, framed in a different way than in many of his own books. A Severe Mercy is a beautiful book in its own right, but fans of Lewis should read it even just for that aspect.

The meaning of the title, as one might suspect, draws from the tragedy that winds through this entire book. Davy contracts an unknown illness and eventually passes away. Her death proves to be just what the book is called—a severe mercy. It takes Sheldon quite a while to process it, but with Lewis' help, he comes to see that although Davy's death was undeniably painful and this does nothing to diminish the loss, it was in some strange way merciful.

Lewis comments that because of Davy's death, their love never died but stayed young and beautiful. The fifteen years they had together can never be spoiled. And in the months following her death, Sheldon slowly comes to see what might have happened had Davy lived: because of the jealousy Sheldon harbored toward God without even realizing it, it is likely that he would have come to hate God and even to hate Davy as her faith deepened and his continued to flag. God had interrupted the Shining Barrier, but Sheldon had not accepted that. Lewis framed it this way: they had moved from a focus on "us" to a focus on "us-and-God," but Sheldon had not yet made the final leap to "God-and-us"—that is, the call on their lives as Christians was to put God first, above even their love for each other. Ultimately, Davy's death spared them that foreseable pain and even helped Sheldon on to fullness of faith—for ultimately, his grieving led him to acknowledge and then to let go of his resentment toward God.

Sheldon dismisses the question of whether God caused Davy's illness for the sake of the severe mercy—he says that is making things far too simple and not giving God enough credit for the complexity of creation and grace. But this book is a beautiful exploration of the journey of faith, the beauty of marriage and the rawness of grief and death.


Favorite Quotations

"The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians—when they are sombre and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths."

"It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing."

"Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, to get used to it... We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home."

"I came to wonder whether all objects that men and women set their hearts upon, even the darkest and most obsessive desires, do not begin as intimations of joy from the sole spring of joy, God."

"Think of me as a fellow-patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier, cd. give some advice." (C. S. Lewis)

"Thus I wouldn't now be bothered by a man who said to me 'This, which you mistake for grace, is really the good functioning of your digestion.' Does my digestion fall outside God's act? He made and allowed to me my colon as much as my guardian angel." (C. S. Lewis)

Illuminating the Gospels with the Tears of Christ

I became co-leader of Duke Divinity School's New Creation Arts Group about a year ago. At the time, I knew very little about theology and the arts, even though I've been doing music most of my life and have dabbled in other art forms. I abandoned visual art at a young age when I realized my sister was the true visual talent in the family. When I learned that contemporary artist, speaker and writer Makoto Fujimura was coming to Duke to visit, I was excited by proxy because other artists I knew were excited, but I had no idea what to expect.

The two events I attended during Fujimura's visit on April 1 proved to be profoundly formative and have spurred me on in my desire to explore the connections among the arts, theology, community and healing. The first event was a brown bag lunch discussion co-sponsored by New Creation and Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. The focus of this session was Fujimura's experience of 9/11 as an artist whose home and studio were scant blocks from ground zero. He spoke of some pretty incredible experiences of art and healing in the wake of the tragedy, and made some points about the deep scarring that has occurred nationwide since then—but that's something I'll blog about separately.

The real treat was the public lecture Fujimura gave that night, on the Four Holy Gospels project he was commissioned to work on to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. It is a unique work in several ways—this is the first time literally in hundreds of years that a single artist has been commissioned to illuminate the Bible, and this is the only abstract/contemporary illumination of the Bible. The St. John's Bible, which I love, borders on the abstract but is definitely representative, whereas Fujimura's artwork consists of illuminations but not illustrations.

Fujimura told us that for this project, he wanted to select a verse to be a sort of theme/guide for him as he prayed and worked his way through it. Almost jokingly, he said that since it was such a huge project, he chose the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). I was blown away by his explanation of how this verse framed the project and how it informs his entire understanding of the place of the arts in the church.

All of Fujimura's paints are water-based, so he imagined himself literally painting with Christ's tears. Fujimura has studied the Japanese painting form called Nihonga extensively, using minerals and gold to create stunning works of art. In the water used to paint, Fujimura saw Christ's tears as the base of each piece, infused in every illumination. And, to paraphrase Fujimura, the tears of Christ still flow today.

At one point, it seemed as if Fujimura were delivering a deeply thoughtful, profoundly imaginative yet incredibly humble sermon on John 11. He reflected at length on the question of why Jesus wept. Jesus knew that he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead—he had just told Martha, "Your brother will rise again" (John 11:23). Why did he not respond similarly to Mary, who had echoed the very words with which Martha first approached Jesus in John 11:21—"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." Jesus could have reassured Mary just as he had Martha, or at the very least could have gotten on with the raising of their brother.

But he didn't. Instead, Jesus stopped and wept. Jesus wasted time weeping out of love for his friends. This, Fujimura said, is why we need the arts: because Jesus wept. Tears are useless. Tears are wasteful, especially for the one who comes to wipe every tear from our eyes (Revelation 21:4). The arts do not have a utilitarian function, which is precisely why they are so neglected in today's society, especially in the church. But Jesus wept, and so we are called to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15), to invest time and care in those things that are useless in the eyes of the world but which give us a glimpse of God's eternity, those things that show us beauty and give us a foretaste of the kingdom.

Beata Progenies

On Saturday, April 16, the Duke Vespers Ensemble, of which I am proud to be a part, presented their spring concert, Beata Progenies. The repertoire consisted of English music about biblical families. The list of pieces is below, as is a video of the entire performance. It was great fun and a real blessing to perform with this group.

Hosanna to the Son of David – Orlando Gibbons
Beata Progenies – Leonel Power
Ave regina celorum – John Dunstaple
O nata lux – Thomas Tallis
Ave Maria – Robert Parsons
Ave verum corpus – William Byrd
When David Heard – Thomas Tompkins
Psalm 23 and Psalm 121 (from Requiem) – Herbert Howells
The Lamb – William Tavener

Theology in Avenue Q?

Last night, I saw the musical Avenue Q at the Durham Performing Arts Center.

Let me give a disclaimer right now. This musical is positively bursting with inappropriate humor. If you are sensitive to cursing, sexual innuendo, or ethnic jokes, don't go see this. And sweet fancy Moses don't take your children to see it.

But don't worry, this blog isn't dealing with the offensive parts of Avenue Q. I'll get to that later. :) I had seen this musical in high school and have owned the soundtrack for years now, so I wasn't surprised by anything that happened, but part of the final song caught my attention in a way it hadn't before.

The song is called "For Now." The song is basically summed up in this line: "Everything in life is only for now." But the part that struck me this time around goes like this:

Everyone's a little bit unsatisfied
Everyone goes 'round a little empty inside

It's almost depressing to hear that. And in the context of the musical, it is. Avenue Q basically concludes, "Things might suck right now, but it's only temporary. And if things are going well, that's temporary too. Oh well."

That's fine for a comical musical involving furry puppets. But I can't help seeing a beautiful, painful parallel with the life of faith.

We all are a little unsatisfied. We are a little empty. Those lines hit me not primarily because they're sad but because they're true. It's part of the human condition—the part where God can get to us.

Perhaps the most obvious summary of this is C. S. Lewis' widely used quotation from Mere Christianity: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." Our emptiness is not an end in itself; it has a purpose in and toward God.

An even more eloquent response is a song by folk musician David Wilcox called "What the Lonely Is For." Here are the lyrics to the chorus, and be sure to take a listen below:

When I get lonely
That's only a sign
Some room is empty
That room is there by design
If I feel hollow
That's just my proof that there's more for me to follow
That's what the lonely is for

What I'm Reading #16: After the Spirit (Eugene Rogers)

After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West, by Eugene F. Rogers

One of the most interesting aspects of the class I took this semester on the Holy Spirit was reading the book After the Spirit. I hadn't intended to read it because of time constraints (I had a paper due on it less than a week after I started the book) and because Dr. Begbie had recommended this book for Th.M. and Ph.D. students, and another one for M.Div. and M.T.S. students. But my roommate read it and said it was incredible, so I dove in. And this book blew my mind. You can read my whole book review (which didn't quite do it justice but is still more thorough than this post will be) here.

For Rogers, the Spirit is no mere decoration or bond of love, but the person of the Trinity on whom we utterly depend for communion with God. In fact, the way we tend to think about the Spirit—as superfluous, as unnecessary—may actually have an important truth to it. The Spirit's work is to share God and God's grace with us, gratuitously, superfluously, excessively. We are not saved because we deserve it or because it makes sense, because we don't and it doesn't; we are saved purely because God loves us, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens that love out to us and draws us into it.

This book not only presents a robust, positive theology of the Holy Spirit; it has huge implications for how we think about ethics, sexuality, etc. Some of the things Rogers hinted at in terms of sexuality were not fleshed out (ha), but I fully intend to read his book Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way Into the Triune God and will report back on that. A lot of that would be difficult to explain in brief, so I encourage you, if you're theologically-minded, to check out that book, and I may go back to After the Spirit and deal in depth with one or two points that Rogers brings up.


Favorite Quotations

"Even the distance between God and creation is contained within the Trinitarian embrace."

"[O]nly God can pray to God, so that when human beings pray, they are caught up into the triune activity of the Persons praying to one another."

"To think about the Spirit it will not do to think 'spiritually': to think about the Spirit you have to think materially."

"The logic of the Spirit is not the logic of productivity, but the logic of superfluity, not the logic of work but the logic of Sabbath."

"The Son gives his life in trusting the Spirit before all Israel has come in, allowing himself to 'fail' as Messiah, and the Spirit gives the unexpected and peculiar gift of the mostly Gentile church."

"The whole point of grace, after all, is its gratuity, its non-necessity."

Holy Spirit

This past (well, almost past) semester, I took a course called "Spirit, Worship and Mission." It's the best class I've taken in seminary, no question. The professor, Dr. Jeremy Begbie, is an incredible theologian and musician and a great teacher. That would have been enough, but this class made us look hard at how we think and talk about the third person of the Trinity. Turns out that the answer for me at the beginning of the class was "not much" or basically "as decoration." Now, I'm fascinated by the Holy Spirit and was thrilled to learn I'll be preaching on Pentecost, a reaction I would not have had a year ago.

One thing I found helpful in framing our discussions about the work of the Holy Spirit was a list of five "moves" of the Spirit. These are ways of recognizing and thinking about how the Spirit works both within the Trinity and in the church and the world:

• The Spirit unifies. This is true in the immanent Trinity (within God's self) and the economic Trinity (how the triune God interacts with the world). Augustine spoke of the Spirit as the bond of love between the Father and Son, a lovely image that I've long held to as my only actual understanding of the Spirit; the danger with this is that it tends to reduce the Spirit to a thing without agency or person, but it does speak to the function of the Spirit as sharing in and joining together intratrinitarian love. The Spirit also unites people with God and with each other.
  
• The Spirit opens out. I love this one. As with most of these moves, it's multi-layered. The Spirit opens out the Trinity to us, us to the Trinity, and us to each other. Eugene Rogers, in his book After the Spirit (post on that coming soon), talks about the wounds of Christ and the breaking of bread in the Eucharist as a very visceral way of the Trinity opening itself out to us. The Spirit is both the gift and the giver, pointing us to Christ while giving us herself to enable us to follow and participate in him, opening us out to live into the love we have been given. The Spirit also opens us out to the world for mission and service.
  
• The Spirit particularizes. The unifying work of the Spirit is never at the expense of diversity. The Spirit creates, abides in and loves diversity. The Spirit can and does work through a vast array of cultures, languages (hello, Pentecost?), worship styles, etc. The Spirit does not whitewash us, but gathers us into the triune life in all our God-given particularity.
  
• The Spirit previews. The Spirit likes to give us teasers. I guess "foretastes" is a better term. In baptism, the Spirit is not only washing us of sin but also preparing us for a heavenly banquet, preparing us to be clothed with Christ as a preview of the completeness in which we will be in the eschaton. One thing I discovered over the course of the semester is that this also means that the Spirit reviews, looking back over God's long salvation history and drawing it all together in Christ.
  
• The Spirit plays jazz. That's just another way of saying that the Spirit improvises. Of course, within the triune life, nothing is actually unexpected, but from our perspective, the Spirit regularly moves in surprising ways. These surprises are always consistent with the nature of God and often serve to shake us out of our assumptions about what we know to be true about God.
  

I have a ton of books that we read or that were just recommended in my class, so there will certainly be further blog posts about the Spirit and writing thereon, but that's just a little taste of what I learned this semester and why I've grown to love and hunger to know the Spirit. I've also begun writing some songs about the Holy Spirit, so those will be forthcoming as well. In the meantime, here's a beautiful song by Keith Getty, "Holy Spirit, Living Breath of God."

Separate Never Has Been and Never Will Be Equal

On April 9, I attended the 2011 Jack Crum Conference on Prophetic Ministry at Avent Ferry United Methodist Church in Raleigh. The event was sponsored by the Methodist Federation for Social Action, and presenters included Rev. James Lawson, Great Schools in Wake, Rev. Dr. William Barber, Dr. Timothy Tyson and more. This is not going to be my most eloquent blog post, but this information needs to get out there, and I intend to do my part.

The main focus was the dismantling of Wake County Schools' diversity policy, long part of the school district's widely acknowledged success. The current school board aims to move toward an assignment policy based on a neighborhood schools model. Controversy has ensued, enough that even Stephen Colbert picked up the story.

In theory, I love the idea of neighborhood schools. But, as one presenter commented at the conference, until our neighborhoods are themselves more racially and socioeconomically integrated, neighborhood schools means segregation. And, as Dr. Barber put it, separate never has been and never will be equal.

Busing was (and is) demonized as the source of all evil in public education—but the stats show the average bus ride in Wake County is 17 minutes, and here's an article my dad wrote about busing in 2002 in The Charlotte Observer. Busing is not the problem.

I learned a lot at this conference. It hit home for me because I am the product of 13 years of public education in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS). In much of the statistics arguing against the Wake County school board's proposed actions, CMS has been used as a negative example of the effects of neighborhood schools.

I remember when CMS instated the current choice program. Since then, schools have moved toward resegregation; just a year after the move to neighborhood schools, the number of high-poverty schools in the district jumped from 39 to 49. Now, that number is 83—nearly half the schools in CMS. Many high-poverty schools have closed. The middle class doesn't seem to care.

As a high school student when this started, I was hardly aware of the implications; as a magnet student, it didn't really affect me. Thankfully, some Wake County teenagers are aware; several have even been arrested, including Seth Keel (pictured). There is an organization called NC H.E.A.T. (Heroes Emerging Among Teens) that have taken this issue to heart. These are some brave young people.

A major talking point for folks opposed to the work of John Tedesco and the current Wake County School board is that integrated schools benefit socioeconomically disadvantaged kids AND the middle class. In one of the many educational presentations available on the website of Great Schools in Wake, a study conducted in a few CMS schools produced this chart—which features the high school I attended for 9th and 10th grade, North Meck:

Yikes. The idea is that Garinger and Independence, as more diverse schools than North Meck, provide better learning environments and help students not only to succeed academically and career-wise but also to make life choices that promote diversity in their communities at large.

The NAACP, NC H.E.A.T. and a Wake County teen have lodged a Title VI complaint against the Wake County School board claiming intentionally discriminatory school reassignments, the discriminatory impact of those assignments, and discriminatory school discipline. You can learn more about the complaint here.

As we heard from various speakers on April 9, I sat next to a friend from my church in Durham. She is African-American and grew up in segregated schools. At one point, she said to me that as a child of segregated schools, she never thought she would still be fighting this battle today.

I haven't yet said how my faith plays into this. It's really quite simple: 1 Corinthians 12:26 says, "²⁶If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it." When we willfully abandon our neighbors—for, even if they don't live on the right side of the tracks, they are our neighbors, our brothers, our sisters—to injustice and discrimination, we violate the body of Christ.

John Wesley said, "The world is my parish"; protesters declare, "Wake County is my neighborhood!" Even if you don't live in Wake County (I don't), it is your neighborhood. You can take a small step in supporting the diversity policy in Wake County Schools by signing on to the NC Council of Churches' petition here.

19 arrested as protesters claim school plan would resegregate system (Raleigh, 7/21/10)
Neighborhood Schools in Charlotte: Ten Years Later (Charlotte, 2/7/11)
Wake schools corrects some data in civil rights probe (Raleigh, 4/14/11)
N.C. plan a step back toward segregation (Raleigh, 4/20/11)

A Statement of Faith of the United Church of Canada

We are not alone, we live in God's world.
We believe in God:
who has created and is creating,
who has come in Jesus, the Word made flesh,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others by the Spirit.
We trust in God.
We are called to be the church:
to celebrate God's presence,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope.
In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.
We are not alone.
Thanks be to God. Amen.

UMH No. 883

Gather, Grow and Go

This past Sunday, we debuted a song I wrote for Orange United Methodist Church, which recently launched an expansion campaign around their new vision: "Gather, Grow and Go." That's also the song title. Here are the words, and check out the video below as well (the song is playing toward the end of the video):

We gather in your name
We grow together in love
Then we go out in the same
The work of faith to be done
And you will walk by our side
As Father, Spirit and Son
Lord, we will gather, grow and go

We come with joys that we share
In thanks for all you have done
We come with burdens to bear
In faith that healing will come
We are the body of Christ
The hands and feet of your Son
So we will gather, grow and go

When Will My Life Begin?

OK, so...here comes something a little more lighthearted (though perhaps deceptively so). I am OBSESSED with the latest Disney movie, Tangled (which is now out on DVD, just for the record). Since I'm taking ethics with Amy Laura Hall, I'm supposed to hate Disney, but even though I'm starting to identify some of the complexes the classics left me with, Beauty and the Beast will always be my favorite movie, and Tangled threatened to upset it for a while there.

Anyway, the first song in Tangled is an upbeat, acoustic-guitar driven account of the life of a princess locked in a tower wondering, as the song is entitled, "When Will My Life Begin?" (Click here to listen to the original.) Within a few days of seeing the movie in theaters, I had learned the song on guitar and was considering the possibility of covering it, but I didn't really have reason to sing about candle-making and ventriloquy and brushing and brushing and brushing my hair.

Plus, the song was touching on something I've thought about a great deal over the past several years: seriously, when will my life begin? In middle school, I was sure high school was when my real life would arrive; in high school, I couldn't wait to get to college; and I finished college a semester early and drummed my fingers until graduate school started.

Now I'm in seminary, where I thought I'd be affirmed and built up, and although that does happen, I pretty regularly feel inadequate, uninteresting, and just plain behind. Did my life already start and I just missed it? How much longer do I get to play the "I'm really young" card? Will I ever really know if I'm living into God's will for my life? The answer to all these questions is "I don't know!" And so I modified the words to "When Will My Life Begin?" and added a bridge. Check out the video I posted on YouTube (which, to my happy surprise, has garnered quite a bit of positive attention from fellow Tangled fans)—the lyrics (and chords) are in the video description—and look for the hope in the confusion.

Indy-Bound

This summer, I will be serving at North United Methodist Church in Indianapolis for my second field education placement. NUMC is a big, beautiful downtown church that looks to be thriving in its worship life, missions and outreach, and more. NUMC is where the field ed students going to Kenya will spend some time on the front and back end of their service in Africa. And they have a farmers' market! They also have a partnership with Lockerbie Central UMC, a progressive community that runs Earth House, a coffeehouse and collective dedicated to outreach through the arts, sustainability, and social justice. I'm excited to learn more about NUMC and to live outside the South for the first time! Also, I spoke with my supervisor, Rev. Kevin Armstrong, yesterday--I'm going to be preaching on Pentecost! I'm particularly excited about that, in part because I've been taking a course on the Holy Spirit and have learned so much this semester. Keep me in prayer as I wrap up my semester and get ready to head to Indy!

No Harder Hell Than Sin

I posted recently about Julian of Norwich; now here is a PDF of my paper I wrote on Revelations of Divine Love for my Christian Ethics course. The final paragraph is reproduced below.

"I was shown no harder hell than sin," writes a woman in medieval England. Julian's visions of God's love may seem to some to promote universalism, but against a narrative of cheap grace, Julian shows us a God whose love is so powerful the knowledge of it causes a person to seek God, not to look for a way out of punishment. Our sin cannot change God's love, even if we grieve God's heart by choosing to remain in our fallenness. Evil makes sin about us; true faith turns our eyes back to God. "God judges us according to our essential nature, which is for ever kept whole, safe, and sound in him. And his judgement is according to his righteousness." We punish ourselves with sin; God seek to draw us back into the divine love by the mercy and forgiveness that has nothing to do with us except as the object of God's love. "If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered" (Psalm 130:3-4, NRSV). Julian teaches us to know and honor the God who made, loves and sustains us all.

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Clifton Wolters (London: Penguin Books, 1966).

What's Going On?

On Tuesday, March 29, Myers Park United Methodist Church (my home church in Charlotte, where my dad is the pastor) held an event focused on reconciliation, particularly racial reconciliation in Charlotte. Panelists included my dad; Dianne English, a church member and director of the Community Building Initiative of the Foundation for the Carolinas; Sarah Stevenson, whose son Sammy sang at MPUMC until he sadly passed away several years ago; and Bishop Claude Alexander, Senior Pastor of The Park Ministries in Charlotte. You can view the entire conversation below, and I'm going to reflect on a few highlights here.

Dianne English began the conversation by encouraging the audience to ask the right questions. She said that what we should ask is not "What can we do?" but "What's going on?" In my introductory ethics class this semester, we've talked a great deal about race, and the frustratingly true thing I've learned is that even—and especially—when you see that whiteness matters, you learn that you can't fix it. The work of reconciliation is not first and foremost about doing something to make it better, but about knowing what's happening, being in relationship with people across racial and socioeconomic lines, and being together in a struggle that doesn't have a quick fix.

Bishop Claude Alexander offered this metaphor to think about how to talk about race: when something in the air, it is symptomatic of something in the ground. Race is in the air, but it is very much in the ground of our community and our history—we can't talk about America without talking about race. This actually is more than just a metaphor; in Charlotte, and in many other American cities, race is quite literally in the ground—when highways like I-77 were built, they cut through intact African-American communities, permanently and physically dividing them. As an adoptive Durhamite, I've learned a great deal about how NC-147 (the Durham Freeway) did just the same here. Race is in the ground, but Dianne pointed out that when toxic waste is in the ground, it's harmless; it's only when you stir things up that it gets into the air and starts causing problems. That fact, she says, tempts people to want to simply leave things alone and not deal with them, to say we're post-racial and move on; but the earth inevitably will be stirred up, and the poison will continue to sink deeper into the ground, so that even when we don't face it directly, somehow things persist in being really difficult.

My father later said something similar, that many people are reticent to talk about race because they feel like we've been there and done that, we're past all that. In response, my dad quoted John Perkins, a great civil rights activist, who talked about the hidden wounds of white Christians: "No one ever put a chain on another human being without tying the other end to himself." Perkins says that it is hard for whites to see how race continues to hold them captive and to make it difficult for them to see the freedom Jesus offers. For some reason, this reminds me of my 8th grade history class, when we talked about the Holocaust and how in dehumanizing the Jews, the Nazis actually dehumanized themselves. That has always stuck with me, and that general idea continues to come to mind when talking about race, class, or anything like that.

Bishop Alexander stated powerfully that reconciliation cannot come about just through legislation; we must be reconciled to one another in Christ. He says that there needs to be some kind of hope to counterbalance the despair that is often a logical conclusion to the difficulty of attempts at reconciliation. However, he says that the civil rights movement was nonviolent not just as a strategy but because there was a hope there that fought against despair and anger. We need to continue to cling to that hope and work, as so many have for so long, towards something that we may not see the result of in our lifetime.

All this conversation reminded me of a wonderful sermon given in Goodson Chapel this past Thursday by Th.D. student Mack Dennis. He was discussing the John 4 passage about the woman at the well, particularly in the context of how we so readily categorize and separate ourselves—Jew and Samartian, black and white. He talked about a documentary that I saw several years ago and commend highly to anyway, especially Durhamites; it's called Durham: A Self-Portrait. Mack recalled the part that talked about how the city morgue was segregated for a very long time, how sad it was that even in death we could not be side by side. However, he said that perhaps even sadder still is the fact that the morgue is desegregated now, but we living people really are not.

Mack closed with a story about the birth of his son. When he was asked to fill out the form for the birth certificate, he left the "race" section blank. The nurse came back after a few minutes and nearly shouted at him, "Did you leave the race section blank on purpose?" He responded, a little afraid, that he guessed he did. "Good," she retorted. "I know just what to put then." Not until a month or so later did he find out what she had put down. The birth certificate came in the mail, and there in the "race" category, there was this word: "human."

Now, I am not suggesting we turn a blind eye to race or start declaring ourselves "colorblind," because most often when I've seen that happen, it's really just white people pretending they don't see race and ultimately whitewashing the world. I believe that God made and loves diversity and wants us to be able to revel in and appreciate each other's differences. But we must never forget that as many as we are in terms of ethnicity, background, class and culture, we are one in our humanity. Jesus' blood runs the same color as all our blood, and his blood runs to cleanse us all of our sin, especially the sin of separation that would divide us according to our blood, our skin, our status. The image of God has impressed itself on each of us in a unique way, and we can give thanks that our God is bigger than any racial category, yet close enough to walk with each of us in our wounds, whether they are obvious or hidden, sustained from without or self-inflicted. Praise Jesus whose blood covers us all.