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To Study Portuguese
When I was younger (well, any day in the past is when I was younger, but stay with me here), I worked in an environment where many of my co-workers did not have English as their first language. The most common language they spoke was Portuguese. Because I’m curious about things I don’t know, and because I really wanted to be able to talk with them and understand them better, I decided to add classes in Portuguese to my college courses. I took a year of Portuguese hoping to get familiar enough to be able to listen to them, and perhaps even to have a real conversation. I remember at…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 9: White Superiority
[Edited 2/23/2019 A point of clarification on this post: the indented portions are quotes from the book by Debby Irving, “Waking Up White.” Along with several other people, some who are posting in public, I’m going through the book chapter-by-chapter, attempting to think out loud what I my responses are and what my desires are. While I am attempting to be truthful, I am also attempting to be sensitive to my friends and family in the wider community, including my friends and family who are of non-European descent. If something I write seems injurious to you, please do let me know—while my intent is one thing, I realize that impact…
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Prayer to Persephone
Today’s post is just poetry, this time from the sublime Edna St. Vincent Millay: Prayer to Persephone by Edna St. Vincent Millay Be to her, Persephone, All the things I might not be; Take her head upon your knee. She that was so proud and wild, Flippant, arrogant and free, She that had no need of me, Is a little lonely child Lost in Hell,—Persephone, Take her head upon your knee; Say to her, “My dear, my dear, It is not so dreadful here.”
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I’m Just Here to Dance
I had an interesting question the other day: are Christians good? The subject came up because there is a defense offered by some Christians (and some people outside the faith, I imagine) that we Christians are “good” by dint of the Savior redeeming us from sin. We are given a new, God-inspired and -directed nature. Our sins and our past are washed way into the sea of forgiveness. We have God’s very Spirit in us to remind us and prompt us and even empower us. We can move through love into the Kingdom… All the theology comes to mind, and I could write like this for a long time without…
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Trying Every Doorknob
What do I do about the things that I see that I think aren’t right? What do I do about the situations where injustice occurs, where oppression is maintained, where there is no room for the human and the person and the needs to be understood, much less addressed? So much is a giant system that is rolling on unchecked, and all I have are these small tools and weak commitments that are easily broken by adamant obstacles...
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 8: Racial Categories
“The biggest problem with America’s idea of racial categories is that they’re not just categories: they’ve been used to imply a hierarchy born of nature. Regardless of how racial categories came into being, Americans have been cast in racial roles that have the power to become self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecies.” There’s some great things in this chapter which pulls apart racial categories using a great analogy of dividing people arbitrarily into groups based upon hair color. Each hair color is associated with a type of achievement based upon who-knows-what, but there is some assignment done that people accept. (Work with me here. It’s analogy.) Now, over time, the original philosophy of…
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In the Fields of the Lord
I guess I’m on a kick of listening to acoustic, and finding intriguing (for me) albums that have that just-right touch of delicacy and strength. The album Work Songs by The Porter’s Gate is giving me much rest right now even as I consider the work to be done. I’m energized by the idea that the gospel means something, and that meaning is more than a theological nicety. Now don’t get me wrong. Theology is a noble art and field of study. I absolutely do not mock it or think it powerless. Honest. At one point I thought my love for the study of God and the things of God…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 7: The GI Bill
“I couldn’t shake the duped feeling—duped and infuriated to have inherited a legacy that contaminated me with injustice.” This chapter just slays. It nails the center of gravity in American white racism—Economics. Money. Power. Fear. Greed. Exclusion. Hatred. Willful ignorance and blind indifference. These are all here, but it boils down to economics. The earliest Africans brought here in August of 1619 were brought here as economically advantageous assets to white landowners, white entrepreneurs, white households. Chattel slavery was economics—how could you grow tobacco and cotton for the world market at competitive products at a profit if you had to pay your workers? Jim Crow was a de facto extension…
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Little Things with Great Love
I’m snowed in today (and have been since Thursday), and though we may get some relief this afternoon what with the sunny weather, it’s still quite cold and icy. Although it’s Sunday, the traditional day for church, most churches in our area are closed. We don’t expect snow like this and to last as long as this, so in many communities snowplows are either not available or they plow only the mains streets—and not us three miles from the center of town in a rural neighborhood. So we wait for the rains to come again, as they always do, and we occupy ourselves with activities that can be done usefully…
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Review: When They Call You a Terrorist
Yet another reminder of James Baldwin’s words* “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, is a deep book, y’all, and it is not a philosophical treatise of the meaning and purpose of “Black Lives Matter” as something that is plopped down into life, shoving aside other things, just one of many interests in the black community. This is the story of one person growing up–and growing up–to see the world around her with an acute eye as to its hostility to her and her…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Civil War, American Exceptionalism, faith, history, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 6: From Confusion to Shock
“Racism wasn’t about this person or that, this upset or that, this community or that; racism is, and always has been, the way America has sorted and ranked its people in a bitterly divisive, humanity-robbing system.” I suppose everyone needs a hero, and I suspect everyone wants to be a hero. This chapter explores the idea that we can want to resolve terrible issues in our culture and in our world, and we can even attempt to do so—all while being completely unware of what we’re doing and why. There’s an impulse to do good when we think we see a problem and we think we see the solution. “I…
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It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
You know, as we get older our sleep cycles shift. Used to be that I could sleep straight through, night after night, for six hours. In bed by 11pm, up at 5am, without an alarm clock. Fairly predictable. Things have changed—without my desire!—so that my sleeping patterns are irregular. I am desperate to get to bed before 9pm, I sleep until 1 am, and then I’m wide awake until 5am, where I sleep another hour then I’m up for the day. I don’t spend my time in bed tossing and turning. That does no good. I’m up. I’m thinking. I’m woke. I read, and sometimes I write. But recently I…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 5: Within the Walls
“For me, part of the waking-up-white process is acknowledging that I’m a recovering lemming*…I never considered that the space I was taking, or the resources I was using, might be being withheld from another to make it all possible.” I found this chapter to be provoking and troubling, and I lead off with this twinned set of quotes. So much of my experience is similar author, not in fulfillment but in similar design. The creation of whiteness, and its enveloping me with its cocoon, led me to believe that this is just how things were as a child and even as an adult, that it was reasonable to expect others…
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Waking Up White, Introduction
Debby Irving mentions her childhood in a privileged New England family. An interesting article was posted Thursday by the New Bedford Historical Society, about Black Native American whaling captains. Notice the reference to Moby Dick. Interesting, nearly 1600 whaling trips originated at Martha’s Vineyard from 1715 to 1928. A Black Native American friend of ours descends from the Algonquin who met the pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620. He married a white friend of ours of Danish heritage. He also has Navajo heritage. Both have been Baha’is for almost 50 years. https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2018/08/16/whaling-captains-diversity-flourished
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Are #BlackLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter Opposite Sides? A Conversation
An interesting conversation in church this morning, Our pastor, after reading a few books about race and conciliation (Including Jemar Tisby’s “The Color of Compromise”) talked about this issue of conciliation, and as part of the message brought up two parishioners. One, an African American member of the congregation, and one a police officer, also a member of the congregation. He had them sit next to him and answer questions, and I found a few things useful: The men were able to explain the meaning of the hashtags – BkLM is about saying “black lives matter, too” and BuLM is about acknowledging the risky nature of policing. The hashtags do…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, faith, family, history, justice, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 4: Optimism
“By pretending the world was virtually problem-free, my family culture left me grossly underprepared to solve problems.” The 50s and 60s were a time in America unlike any before or after. We had won a war (with the uncredited assistance of Russia who lost 10 million men and 14 million civilians to our 410 thousand men and some civilians), there were no real economic challenges (Soviet Russia was a political challenge, but who knows how much of it was hyped up to win votes?), we were prosperous and confident and expanding. Scouts and YMCA and camping and museums were all out there for our entertainment and enrichment, and we simply…
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Believe
Something I think about every so often is how we are sometimes two people. We are people who think we are driven by facts and logic. And we are the people who are driven by our fears and our hopes. I think about this today, during Black History Month. We are driven to think that we celebrate all people, that our country is a land of opportunity, that anyone can succeed. Black History Month celebrates the success of black Americans. Anyone can succeed if they just try. And we shy away from an uncomfortable truth that such a belief is not based upon facts. It’s based upon naïveté. Some people…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 3: Race Versus Class
“Which one is the real issue?” The temptation when confronting a difficult issue is to find a subsidiary issue, make that primary, resolve it, and be done. So it is with race and class. These two issues can be conflated but they are different, and the easiest way to show this is that we can move up and down class hierarchies, but we cannot move out of our race. “Race” is used as a distinguishing and exclusionary element in every class. There are a few interesting stories to illustrate this point—perhaps the most disconcerting is the one where Dr. John H. Franklin, honored by President Clinton with the Presidential Medal…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 2: Family Values
“One of the things my white mother could not teach me was to honor feelings of outrage.” This chapter is a short one—about family origins. What kind of family did you grow up in? My family is like all families, I suppose, in the sense that we half-invented it and half-followed existing models. That’s how you survive. In this chapter the author talks about the long history of her own family and how that controlled her own behaviors: it was instilled at an early age. Now, of course it was an all-white environment, but there was more. There was the subtle inculcation of values that established the author as white—and…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 1: What Wasn’t Said
This chapter* opens with a provocative quote by the author: “‘WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALL THE INDIANS?’ I asked my mother on a Friday morning ride home from the library.” Gotta tell you, this not a question I had growing up in the 50s in the middle-class white suburbs of Los Angeles and Orange County. “Where are all the people of color?” I did not ask because for me the world was white. I cannot remember a single person I met before the mid 70s who was black except for our neighbor’s maid, and I tell you this with a sense of shame and embarrassment that I never knew her name,…
- #WakingUpWhite, Books, Celebrate Recovery, challenges, history, justice, Life Recovery Skills, racism
If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see
James Baldwin* said this, I’m told: “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” I can’t find the source of this quote, but it is widely attributed to him, and as I see no one protesting that these are not his words, I’m gonna go with it. Which leads me to the main purpose of this post: to introduce you to a new project I’ll be undertaking with a few friends, a journey to read the book “Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Race,” by Debby Irving. I’ve not read this before, so the plan is for each…
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Jesus of the Scars–Edward Shillito
Today’s blog entry is just the poetry from Edward Shillito “Jesus of the Scars” by Edward Shillito If we have never sought, we seek Thee now; Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars; We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow, We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars. The heavens frighten us; they are too calm; In all the universe we have no place. Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm? Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace. If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near, Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine; We know to-day what wounds are,…
- American Exceptionalism, Celebrate Recovery, faith, family, history, justice, Life Recovery Skills, questions, racism
What Would You Do If You Could Bring Conciliation?
This is a review of the book “The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism” The key issue that continues to break America’s soul is racism. Full stop. One hundred fifty years before Yorktown there was Jamestown. 1619 was the arrival of captive slaves of African descent, sold to English settlers and colonists looking for cheap labor that could be used for profit and personal success. By 1667 Virginia had passed a law perpetuating the eternal status of chattel slaves; in the last half of the 18th century the same people who held self-evident truths of liberty also held black humans as property to be…
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The Barley Soup Recipe
So this was a tasty dinner tonight: barley soup, from a recipe a friend gave our family for Christmas (along with a few of the ingredients: barley, broth, basil, thyme, canned chopped tomatoes). Add to this a pound of ground or diced beef, carrots, celery, and spinach, then do some magic. Only as we were making the soup we were reluctant to follow the recipe. “That’s a lot of carrots! Let’s use half.” and “I don’t think we want that much celery. Let’s use half.” And finally “Way too much spinach!…” We thought that the proportions were wrong, and we were being directed to put too much into the soup—we…
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New Year, New Labels
In thinking about the last year, I’ve struggled to place myself theologically. I am raised Protestant, became a Christian through the efforts of evangelistic movements like Campus Crusade for Christ and InterVarsity, have learned much from my experiences in Calvary Chapel (at the “Mothership” in Costa Mesa), and have bounced around in churches for a bit, but essentially staying always in churches that feel theologically comfortable. (I don’t expect any church’s doctrine to be a complete parallel to my own; I just like the essentials to be in alignment with me: who is God, who is Jesus, who is Holy Spirit, what is the nature of humanity, what is the…
- American Exceptionalism, Celebrate Recovery, essays, faith, history, justice, Life Recovery Skills, racism
Feats of Clay
Our heroes are flawed. Our villains have moments of redemptive grace. We live in a complex world, where we cannot depend upon someone being just someone, but instead they are always many things. I bring this up because Christmas 2018 is half-way over. (You do celebrate the 12 Days of Christmas from Dec 25 Christmas Day through January 6, Epiphany of the Gentiles, of course?) And in Christmastime one of the more popular carols (“Christmas hymns”) is the fantastic, overwhelming, joyful “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” It’s one of my favorites, both in the tune and in the words. Charles Wesley wanted a song that was solemn and majestic, befitting…
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Come, Desire of Nations, Come
Come, Desire of nations come,Fix in us Thy humble home;Oh, to all Thyself impart,Formed in each believing heart! Merry Christmas, everyone. Verse by Charles Wesley, 1839 Image “Nativity” by Brian Kershisnik
