Identity & Worth -The Unsaid Things

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. 

Lack and Plenty

I grew up in the American South but was born in the plain states, near the Yanktoni reservation in South Dakota. We visited our grandparents every summer, giving us a respite from the Memphis heat and providing us a small dive into the world of crop farming and small town rural life. Post retirement, my grandparents were leaning into being farmers and I learned a lot about how important things like soil quality and water access could be key for survival.

The thing is that the American South is fertile land and flush with water. I had never before considered what it was like for the LACK of water to be the problem. Floods and rising waters like creeks that washed out roads and bridges were the dangers around water at home. Well, that and the Cottonmouths, sneaky river snakes.

Now I live in the American Mountain West, and our relationship here with water is much different from both the agricultural plains or the river rich South. Here, fire can consume 150,000 acres in an afternoon and there isn’t enough water anywhere to put it out. On the edge  of the Continental Divide, we are very conscious of water. We know that what falls on our western slope flows into the Pacific, and is “owned” by many communities along that route. Water that falls on our Eastern side feeds into the plains rivers and eventually reaches the Atlantic.

And so water reclamation is the name of the game. How can we capture and re-use water? How can we stop its use by the extraction industries? How can we close some of our water systems and not be so wasteful? How do we shift our relationship with water from one of commodification and control to one of respect and asset-based building?

As long as our stance is one of lack, we will choose poorly. Lack is blinding, and creates looping dark holes in our minds that fulfill all their own expectations. There are also dangers to being in a context of plenty without awareness, as this leads to complacency and an assumption of abundance when in fact, control is being seeped away. This very nearly happened recently in Memphis, TN, when the now canceled Byhalia Pipeline threatened the integrity of the Memphis Sands, a huge aquifer that supplies clean water to the region.

We don’t balance lack and plenty well. We tend to live wholly in one or the other. This isn’t a simple matter of whether one sees a glass with water in it as half full or half empty. This isn’t about pessimism or optimism, although their shadows of cynicism and naïveté do reflect this conflict between lack and plenty, this tension.

This week I am preparing for a Seminar Series I am doing on Scarcity & Abundance. And I’m wrestling with the various ways in which we smack right into both these things. The more subtle bits will make themselves known.

And so water again bubbles up. It’s fundamental, as we ourselves are mostly made of it, the planet is mostly water, and we require it to remain alive. And yet for much of our lives, many of us have never considered water -where it comes from, how it gets to us, where it all goes. We turn the tap and it flows. Usually. But even if you live in Flint, MI, or along one of the compromised fracking field routes, your toilet flushes and your laundry works. You can get water FREE at most restaurants. (Remember that one. It won’t last if we don’t change.)

One of the many ironies of this situation is that right now, very few of us actually drink enough water. I know I don’t and I even like water! (I’m told by many friends the reason they don’t drink enough water is that they hate the taste. I don’t get that. Even hard water is interesting.)

“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.” -Joni Mitchell

We bounce between lack and plenty, and it may be true that we often don’t realize it. I used to be a youth minister and had a special affinity for Middle Schoolers. One of my favorite games to play with them is something called “I Want, I Need, I Have” -swiped 100% in name, if not totally in content, from The Journey to Adulthood curriculum, a progressive Protestant course that attempts to equip young people with what they need to be functional adults.

This game invites a deep inventories not only of items but of attitudes. We catalogue belongings each young person may ‘own’ or have access to, what they don’t or can’t get, what they believe they need to be certain things or claim certain identities. The game invites an exploration of the balance between want and need, something I wish more adults had a handle on.

For all of our own human issues with this tension, and we have wrestled with lack and plenty for a great deal of our history, the last 100 years have had the added layer of mass media advertising. And that industry has been all about perverted images of both Lack and Plenty. Perhaps a piece of the whole conversation must include some deconstruction of messaging techniques themselves.

Fear is also deeply entwined with Lack and Plenty. I can hear blues notes behind me as I think on this, and am struck by how familiar a story it is, the embracing of the fear and then its alchemy into empowerment and fuel for action. And I wish I couldn’t, but I also hear the screeching riffs of angry mutterings as fear hardens hearts and closes borders.

We live in a time of Plenty. We have all we need, yet all we see around us is Lack. And Lack is there -a lack of justice, a dearth of compassion, an abyss of accountability. But within each of these struggles is also Plenty, for when they are based out of love, our actions are generative.

“I have come that you might have life more abundant.” -Jesus