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. 

Slow-Down Sabbath

Over the last two months, I have fallen prey to the panic of urgency and the paralysis of perfectionism. The intersection of these two is a painful and dangerous place to be stuck. And so I am stopping for a brief sabbath, a pause to reorient myself and gather resources.

There won’t be a blog post this week or next. I’ll return on September 20th with my full run, and a piece in The Resistance Prays [https://www.theresistanceprays.org], for whom I have been writing for about a year.

With gratitude,

-Rev. Jess

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

Citizen Christian IV: Rules of Life

I grew up an Episcopalian, and while they do attempt to be open and accepting, Episcopalians have many, many rules that are active within any Episcopal community. Not knowing them can be an obstacle for newcomers, and sometimes longtime members as well. Who can do what in the service and who cannot. Who can do what in a congregation and who cannot. What types of activities are allowed of by or within the church. All of it is documented in something called the Canons and Constitution, which dictate the parameters of all these things. And yet few Episcopalians themselves, people who attend and volunteer and sustain the church, know anything about these documents and how their lives are formed by them.

Throughout the worship service texts are instructions, called rubrics, that tell you where to go and when to sit or stand and if you might have a choice about that at a certain time or situation. Rubrics tell you all of the things actually, but most of the actions tasked are so ingrained by the congregation that they are done without reading anything, simply followed.

Those are the official rubrics, of course, as a seminary professor would say “Rubrics with a capital R” but there are always little rubrics as well, sometimes more ‘important’ to the Rule of Life in that place. These are the expectations, traditions, patterns, and placements that make a congregation unique, the choices that over time have paved particular pathways of what is possible. Violating these rubrics can cause anything from embarrassment to ostracism. But it has been my experience that people know more about these rules than the others, and that they are happy, even honored, to explain and unfold the traditions of that church for new members.

But now I am an American Baptist pastor, and my congregation couldn’t really be termed as fitting into any denominational structure. Little that we do meets the ‘warrants’ of Christian worship as established. I officiated a wedding for former members of a church youth group now grown, with an assembly of almost all traditional church folk, that left blank every single box down the checklist of such warrants, those required characteristics. 

But I contend that what we do IS Christian in a broad sense, and of the Gospel, and that while few Episcopalians would recognize it as such, we have a liturgy of our weekly gatherings. As we move into our fifth year of regular worship together, we have even developed small ‘r’ rubrics, such as the chanting of one particular song and the usual use of a particular poem as an ending prayer. But these things are also changeable, and do shift as per need.

We certainly wouldn’t pass the purity tests established by many religious systems. I recently learned during an odd exchange with fringe Evangelicals that although I am an ordained minister of the Gospel in the Baptist tradition, can tell the stories of Jesus like they happened to my brother, have formed my life to live out those stories’ lessons, and deeply love the usually eschewed Paul, I did not meet their criteria for being a Christian.

I am still not sure what being a Christian or following Jesus meant to them, because nothing they said had anything to do with actions or behavior. There did not seem to be any active Rule of Life other than casting people out of the ranks of the righteous due to unbelief or a near obsessive need to testify to others.

That said, I would be hard pressed to define the Rule of Life at Living Waters other than by a few things. Firstly, we have made a commitment that no one must go through something alone. A virtue of community is that we can collectively weave trust and vulnerability together to form a fabric that covers all of us. No one person has to be that assistant. And no one person has to travel alone. Secondly, I ask members of Living Waters to consider their own spiritual journeys as valid, sacred, and real. I ask them to consider, and act upon, how their own hearts, minds, and spirits call them into the Universe. I suppose our Rule of Life is community and intention.

We all have these small ‘r’ rubric lists, sometimes known and sometimes unknown, that define for us what something is, and if it be authentically that or something else. We see this active in Houses of Worship, sure, but these lists are also a prime motivator in the political sphere. What constitutes a ‘real Republican’ these days seems to be fluid and dynamic thing, and I certainly hope the conversation keeps going there. What makes a ‘real Democrat’ was stretched and pulled into heretofore unknown shapes via the Presidential runs of Bernie Sanders, but that conversation seems stalled. Certainly what makes a ‘real American’ is infused with racial, classist, gendered, and religious projections and expectations.

But far too often these arguments are only about what people THINK, and not what they do, advocate for, or endorse. This makes the crafting of policy near impossible. I believe that politics is merely the mechanics of our common life. But right now, politics is only a stage for shallow power, and we don’t have time for that nonsense.

Politics is all about the posturing and the platforming when what we need it to be is active, engaged, and responsive to real needs. Without Rules of Life, the Evangelical church has radically lost its way, becoming so disassociated from Gospel truths that endorsing Donald Trump as President seemed reasonable. With no actions expected, no lived lives as models, and no commitments on record, there is nothing to hold on to, nothing to compare to, nothing against which to say “this thing is so far from that thing that they are no longer the same thing.”

And so what might be our Rules of Life for an engaged citizenry? Actions of dissent against injustice on the regular? Frequent check-ins and accountability regarding policy development? 

I’m not sure exactly what that would look like, but I do know it’s needed. Our current political party system has failed. It no longer serves the people, and only perpetuates monied interests. Perhaps the answer is like unto what has happened in churches and other Houses of Worship, a separation from expected systems and a forming of new communities of faith. Is regionalism one of the answers for us politically? Smaller more responsive systems could incorporate more contextual needs.

Again, I am unsure how we should proceed except to say that we must examine our political Rules of Life, not our pet theories or opinions, and see where that focus on work can bring us.

Citizen Christian III: Gospel Truth

As a Southerner, church is expected. Synagogue or mosque is of course an acceptable substitute, and my hometown of Memphis has a vibrant and robust Jewish and Muslim community. ‘Where one goes to church’ is an introductory question, and even those who don’t really claim any faith often have an answer ready for that query.

But we still have the same separations along the wide spectrum of faith traditions that you’ll find in any American city. The left leaning Houses of Worship communicate, the right leaning ones collaborate, but little common interaction happens. So we grow up in silos as tight as any country church in many ways. 

As a teenager, I broke into some of the conservative christian communities when I was ‘outed’ as a Christian. I think act I fascinated the conservative church goers I knew, because I was a theatre person and known to be political. They started asking me questions and inviting me to things but it didn’t quite go as they’d planned. I got kicked out of a bible study (a great story I’ll tell another time), was asked not to return to a church that hosted monthly lock-ins, and occasionally got into shouting matches with friends in the halls.

The biggest distinctions and the thing that seemed to truly raise their ire, was some iteration of this conversation:

Them: But that sounds like a social justice Gospel.

Me: I don’t know any other kind of Gospel.

Them: We are saved by grace, not works.

Me: Faith without works is dead.

Them: People have to believe in Jesus.

Me: If they don’t do what he said to do, why bother?

In many ways, I dove into theological education in order to be better equipped for those conversations. But I now realize what an opportunity I missed timing wise! This was the 1980s, and I was receiving fruits from the first wave of our modern christian political complex. Little did I know then that the term “Social Justice Gospel” was coined by a Baptist theologian over 100 years ago. It isn’t new, leftie, or radical -it’s just the Gospel and it’s solid Christian tradition. Who knows how much of that tenuous ground I could have shaken up, kept from setting, if I’d just realized I was seeing glimpses of a coordinated, strategic attack on Gospel Truth.

Maybe ‘Gospel Truth’ isn’t a commonly used phrase in your life, but I grew up in the American South. Faith-based language permeates everything, and swearing something is the gospel truth is a promise of truth-telling. Unless said with a wink and a “Bless their hearts” and then you know there’s no truth anywhere ‘round at all. And so culturally, the meaning of Gospel Truth is fungible, movable.

Elected officials swear oaths of office most typically on a bible, as most elected officials claim to be Christians, but any text sacred to you is acceptable, which is interesting in and of itself. What exactly is being vowed here? The words spoken have to do with upholding the jurisdictional Constitution or Charter, and being accountable to constituencies. But there are never explicit moral or religious promises made. So why swear on a bible?

I grew up in the 1970’s when we all still said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning to start school. By the 1980’s, this had been replaced by a moment of silence, an interesting swap of patriotic vow for pseudo-prayer time. I didn’t learn about the addition in the 1950’s of references to God not only there but on our money until I went to college.

It also took time to learn more in-depth church history, and to discover the ways in which Christianity moved from an anti-Empire movement to becoming the moral voice of the secular powers, the frequent provider of the rationale for colonial expansion. 

Many years ago, I decided to stand but remain silent during any Pledge of Allegiance or singing of the national anthem as my own response to a growing discontent. At first, I would say the Pledge but omit the “under God” line, but that did not satisfy me. Eventually, I adopted the choice to remain silent, but then Colin Kaepernick modeled a new way of resistance. His actions and the vitriol that followed led me to think again about my relationship with vows. About what it means to swear on something sacred.

Where I’ve landed for now is no more vows. I’ve made marriage vows and ordination vows and upholding those is a lifelong journey. I think we need to step back more often, and consider what it means to align ourselves, swear something’s true, vow an allegiance, or adhere to a theory. We need more critical thinking. More prayer. More humility. And more integrity to what we say we believe and hold sacred.

Language and Control

I am a word nerd. I have an adversarial relationship with nouns, and they won’t stay in my head. But otherwise, I love language. I love its nuance, how 10 words can mean one thing but just a slightly different aspect of said thing. Or how one word can mean ten different things, depending only on context and use. Word choice matters greatly and has a significant impact in effect. Period. Sticks and stones may draw blood, sure, but words themselves DO have power. Power to illuminate and reveal, explain and describe -but also the power to obscure, deceive.

I grew up in the land of the subtle euphemism, the American South. I understand how carefully chosen words can soften a harsh reality -a terminal diagnosis or an expression of accountability. All our hearts are blessed regularly, and I also understand how seemingly polite words can hold deep barbs. And much to my surprise, I carry pieces of the Lost Cause narrative, a great example of how language and story are used to control. I’ll write about those revelations later in the month. 

I was getting a couple of degrees in the ‘90s when the term Political Correctness hit the mainstream conservative media. It was a term we in academia were using to describe an intentionally measured discourse, and it was a term the Left used as a self-critique. By application of that now well-known right media smear machine, ‘political correctness’ became the catch-all pejorative phrase for any pushback against racist, sexist, harassing, or otherwise oppressive language. 

But the movements towards excising cruelty from our language, and the emerging awarenesses of the power of naming, claiming, owning the wide diversity of our lives have only marched on, increased. It doesn’t really matter what mocking term Fox News used, the shifts were happening. These days, I even hear a backlash against the PC pushback itself by telling complainers not to be so sensitive about losing their ‘right’ to denigrate others, that changes in language aren’t an exercise of any thought police but rather a choice not to be an asshole. 

Although I do hear fellow leftists use it in an ironic way sometimes, so I suppose its use has come full circle.

I have been involved in the environmental movement since I was a child in the 1970s. I first started using the term Global Warming in the 1980s. By the late ‘90s, that same smear machine had begun to take Global Warming apart as a viably descriptive term. A few years later, it was reported widely as evidence Global Warming was a hoax for a sitting Senator to toss a snowball around the Senate chambers. Idiotic. 

Climate Change was a term more commonly used only within scientific communities. It was mostly about the various deltas, that is changes, in metrics and crucial data points, some of which have driven our comprehension of climate for centuries. Weather patterns. Rainfall. Snowfall. Air temperature. Ocean rise. Water temperature. Harvests and soil health. Infant mortality. As our ability to measure has become more sophisticated, we have captured more information. As we have more information, we can more accurately predict what kinds of changes are before us, and where those tipping points might be. 

The primary pushback against Climate Change seems to be an intentional confusion of weather and climate. Weather can change hourly. A place’s climate, the long term patterns of weather alongside all those other metrics, generally does not change noticeably in one’s lifetime. Michigan would be shocking with a new tropical zone and snow in Miami would shut South Beach down.

About ten years ago, the USDA recategorized Colorado as the slightly warmer 5b planting zone, although there are various zones throughout the state. This happened all over the US and another published change is anticipated. These shifts affect all manner of planting and harvesting, from massive industrial agriculture to your backyard garden. 

Floods and fires are increasing throughout the country, and as predicted the frequency and severity of storms is rising. And it snowed in Texas this year. Climate scientist Kathryn Hayhoe brilliantly upends the mockable Global Warming and calls it all Global Weirding, a phrase that’s accessible, funny, and true.

Which brings me to the topic that got me started thinking about words this week, about the use of language to control the narrative, to shift the perception of the truth. Of course, I mean the soon to be outlawed Critical Race Theory. And yes, it’s the same playbook all over again. An idea debated in academia, concepts studied as a framework for years as a way to describe lived experience, made its way into the common discourse and was vilified by the churn of the right wing media that simply cannot tolerate truth, and the required nuance of history.

We are right now experiencing an attempt by nearly a dozen state legislatures around the country to ban the use of teaching actual history, apparently because it makes some white people feel bad about themselves. And I get it. It’s intimidating to face. And for many, this fear traps them, keeps them from facing toxic remnants of history, structures of our institutions and systems that keep us bound, and the fatal and punitive realities of day to day life for nonwhite people in America. Unfortunately, these fearful people in such deep denial make public policy.

Many are right to fear this movement towards a more honest comprehension of our American History and how it forms us now. Education is dangerous for fear and denial and these are tools that address many aspects of our national history that we have never taught.  Most white people do not know about mass graves of Indigenous children, massacres of large Black populations, or the destruction of several Black economic centers. Interventions like reparations begin to make sense when you understand the long term patterns of intentional disenfranchisement and destruction.  And so they are clamping down, trying to make it illegal to discuss anything that challenges our whitewashed national narrative.

Words matter, and how we teach our national history matters. I am angry every time I discover a huge chunk that I honestly feel was intentionally kept from me in order to perpetuate a toxic system that benefits only me. I can’t understand being okay with not knowing the real stories as much as possible, and choosing a comfortable mythology.

I pray that good educators, anti-racism trainers, truthful curriculum writers, and members of Boards of Education with integrity will figure out a way around these capricious bans through the creative use of language. But honestly, it’s important to pushback against the co-opting of truth and education, especially because children and young people are involved. When we count on attrition or death to hasten cultural shifts (we all do this -all groups), we forget the kids. We forget that modeling continually instructs and that children repeat what they hear, ingest what they are fed.

Dear Governor Polis - Support SB 21-200

Join us on May 29 to make our voices heard on the need to pass SB 21-200 to fight climate change in Colorado: https://fb.me/e/3M0RNZg1J

________

Dear Governor Polis,

I am writing to express my concern and confusion over your threats to veto Senate Bill 21-200, Reduce Greenhouse Gases, Increase Environmental Justice. This bill seeks to ensure our transition to renewable energy through a lens of environmental justice by requiring the Air Quality Control Commission to enforce existing parameters, and bringing our statewide utilities into alignment with reducing greenhouse gases.

A veto would be a disappointing action, sir. Senate Bill 200 is going through a thorough process in our Colorado Statehouse. It has been heard by committees, testimony has been given, it has been debated in open session. It was crafted to align with the exact parameters established in your office’s Climate Roadmap. And you, our Governor, threaten a veto? A veto would work against the will of the people, the protection of Creation, and the care of those most deeply affected by the deleterious effects of pollution and climate change.

Already, you have not done due diligence in supporting the enforcement of groundbreaking state legislation passed in 2019. Rather than develop a scheme to implement the laws passed by our legislature, your office released a Climate Roadmap Plan in early 2021 that is without sufficient enforcement mechanisms but establishes reasonable goals.

Governor Polis, you ran for office on the promise that you would be an environmental champion and leader in moving our state to a green economy. Explicitly, you vowed to bring us to 100% renewable energy by 2040. You had a decent environmental record while representing us in Congress, and were always highly rated by the League of Conservation Voters.

But as Governor, you have not upheld your promises to the voters or those you made to Creation itself. I urge a change of heart. As a person of faith, I know that transformation is possible, that a hardened heart can be broken open. I urge you, Governor Polis, to choose a vibrant healthy life through a transformation of our energy systems, and to support the hard and good work done by our state Legislature. 

Thank you,

Rev. Jessica Abell