as I consider the Incarnation of the Divine this year, I’m struck not by that infant but by his parents, a couple on a journey -not one they’d planned nor would’ve chosen, the trip to Bethlehem for the Census, but also their broader journey. An unplanned child. Visions of justice proclaimed by Mary. The flight to a foreign land for their safety, perceived by the dreamer Joseph. The parents of Jesus of Nazareth were on their own journey of life, one full of danger and protection, vision and purpose.
Among many of my professional and social groups, and certainly ‘at home’ in Memphis, I am one of those people who will say the unsaid thing. A lifetime of ministry has taught me the pastoral side of holding my tongue, not to avoid trouble but to respect a confidence. But when I was younger, I would often speak the unsaid things to shock or disrupt. I’ve learned that this agitation should be reserved as a strategy, and not used as a standard operating procedure, and in fact must be so in order to be effective.
Now, I am not alone in this, as frankly this sort of activity was encouraged throughout my childhood education by many of the teachers shared for a dozen years by about 25 of my friends from Memphis. I have become quite close with several of these folks over the decades, and something we all share is a willingness to say the unsaid things.
My mother always thought it was extraordinary that I attended two schools from 1st grade through my high school graduation, that it must have formed me in some significant way. Even my kindergarten was just across the street and down some from my elementary school, and many of us moved together from one to the other.
Not everyone from the 6th grade stayed together, but we only went to 5 or 6 places, and the cohort that showed up to 7th grade together remained friends at least through those rocky middle years. My high school class was one of the last to attend both Junior High and Senior High on the same physical campus, and I am absolutely sure this is why school tours are always a popular class reunion activity for us. We were there a long time. A long time.
One of these people with whom I was always in school recently asked me if I thought there was something special in the water at our elementary school that made us all think we could change the world. It was a serious question.
Which again brought up the question of what kind of effect these relationships have had on me, and the common lived life among us. Has it affected my sense of self when I’ve realized much of what formed me is also shared? Yes, I think so but in a very solid and grounded way. It does not feed doubt or cause me to question any thought as unique. In fact, it’s helped me feel not quite so alone as I’ve wrestled with whatever injustice or committed myself to whichever fight.
Because until perhaps the last 7-10 years, I *was* the only person saying many of the things I regularly preached and taught. I’ve been talking about white privilege with my fellow white people since I first heard the term in the 1990s. I have been advocating for environmental justice and Creation Care since I was a child. I have been mocked, reprimanded, and punished for demanding higher standards in regards to keeping children and youth safe from predators. I was raised to believe that protest is the highest form of patriotism and faithfulness, and I have spoken out in various ways all my life. Often alone.
Of course other people were doing the same kinds of things over similar issues in other places, and I am good at finding allies in unusual spaces. All of these movements have only grown over the last decade, rolling slowly into cultural norms. But there was something particular that I enjoyed about being different, voicing an alternative view, speaking the unsaid thing.
It set me apart, and gave me an identity as on outsider even when I represented the establishment. And as a white American, I will always at some level represent the establishment. Agitating in that space *is* important, but it’s also the safest possible place within which to act. There is a kind of power and protection in the maverick archetype, the troublemaker persona. And there can be real effects to the ripples caused, but not always for the disruptor, especially a privileged one.
I have to let that piece of my identity go, because wrapped insidiously within it are several ways in which I cede my life to fear and scarcity. When I assume I must be the one to say the unsaid thing, I remove the possibility that role is another’s. When I walk into a space assuming I will be the only one with certain concerns, I remove the need to search for allies and accomplices. When I assume I will need to say the unsaid thing, I do not listen well enough to hear when it *is* said by another in a different way.
But most importantly, I have to stand separate from this as a part of how I think of myself, my sense of identity and worth. It. Is. Not. About. Me. My identity is grounded within my own heart and soul, within my relationship with God, and my worth cannot be parsed to data points, even if those be in the social or religious realms.
I will continue to say the unsaid things, because politeness is not a Gospel value and sometimes, adherence to love and justice requires these things be spoken out loud. While I may say all the unsaid things, I must challenge myself to also DO the undone things, and act outside of the paradigm in which we find ourselves. And I will continue to both lean on and seek out others who also say the unsaid things.
“Take more time to say less” was excellent advice that I received this weekend while running a rehearsal of the upcoming Saturday Seminary Series on Scarcity & Abundance. It’s funny because this is the first piece of advice I used to give new Lectors in The Episcopal Church when I worked as a verger: “Slow. Down. If you feel like you are speaking too slowly, take it back another notch. Like you’re wading through molasses? Take a breath and slow down again.”
I’m new to this blogging thing and thought I would use these first three posts to talk about the mind, body, and spirit. I find most Traditions tend to have an emphasis on one of these. To me all three have to be treated with respect and held in equal value. This first post is about my process for the mind and why I use it.
Throughout all of my transitions, I've had relationships that I deeply value with people from different worlds. The martial arts world has been one of the most important to me, and where I have many friends. It was in that world that I really experienced the influence of philosophy on people's daily lives and people's spiritual lives.
In my portion of the martial arts world, most of the influences came from a secular or even atheist perspective. In order to be authentic and maintain those relationships, I listened for the language of the philosophy around me. I learned how philosophy helped to hone and guide people who didn’t have an overt spiritual life. This was interesting to me so I continued to explore what philosophy had to offer. Interestingly I’ve found that philosophy gave me something totally different then it seemed to give the people around me.
Most importantly, I found a language in philosophy for the ‘mind’ portion of the mind-body-spirit trinity. This allowed me to speak with people in their language and allowed me access to a whole new set of wisdom that I never would have had if I hadn't explored what philosophy had to offer. These sources of wisdom have transformed how I interact with my mind, my body, and my spirit. Having this language gave me words and processes to talk about some of the wounds and traps of the mind that come up when untangling the mess of a spiritual transition.
The practice and application of philosophy is a messy and painful thing. It involves standing your ground in argument even when you’re not going to win. It means examining and re-examining the essential moral and spiritual questions of the world from the lens purely of the mind. This process didn't end with me getting answers the way I thought it would. Rather it taught me that every philosophy or way of living has its own set of problematic and down right wrong answers.
This isn't the lesson that most fear, the one that breeds contempt, arbitrary behavior or nihilism. Instead it taught me that when I heard talk of the indescribable or the incomprehensible, the great mysteries of life, these are actually questions the mind cannot answer. They are questions for the body and the spirit. I’ve argued till the sun came up about the nature of will or the existence of good and evil. None of these conversations came to any sort of meaningful conclusion that didn’t involve a great deal of faith and assumption. It's these relationships that have helped me figure out that the philosophy I’ve built for myself is just one lens through which I interpret and interact with the world. When I recognized that this way would never answer my questions alone, I was able to put it into my tool kit instead of making it my life. After all the time arguing, I had learned where my mind goes and how it likes to interact with the rest of my being.
More importantly, it helped me to know where my mind and logic can be applied to my life and where that simply won’t be enough to feed me. This shift has given me a consistent and reliable voice to the mind in my life. This has given me a place to check in, a lens to look at the things I’m doing and experiencing. This view will tell me if things are way out of whack. As long as I don't mistake that voice for the end-all be-all of my decision making and experience, then it can serve to free me up in moments of absolute chaos. I have a deeply held and explored “logical” voice for any situation, a voice that I can trust as an honest expression of one of the parts of my being, and this allows me to focus on how whatever is happening is affecting my body and spirit. This voice of the mind is part of a larger picture. Philosophy can be one of the rocks to building a fulfilling life alongside the physical and the spiritual beings in all of us.
Ian Pirkey
