The Ebenezer Project
UPWARD & ONWARD TOGETHER
Wellness & Self-Care in the Age of Despair
Posted on June 21, 2018
Reading Time: 5 minutes
A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
– John 16:32-33
Concrete buildings and steel cages. Hurricane aftermath of Puerto Rico. The crisis in Venezuela. Rohingya refugees. South Sudan. Contaminated water in Flint, MI. Pipeline fire in Hesston, KS. 17-year-old, Antwon Rose shot and killed in the back by police after a traffic stop. The DAPL in sacred indigenous lands.
I often find it hard to disentangle the continuities of oppression waged upon the marginalized community without noticing the politics of whiteness. I, like many other women of color, have and experience an inordinate amount of trauma. And, when western political powers utilize language like “zero tolerance,” more often than not brown and black communities are disproportionately affected.
In the Age of Trump, as some have come to call this period, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, sexism (to name a few), while practiced throughout the history of America in, perhaps, more latent ways, has emboldened the alt right and empowered many white evangelicals to align themselves with (sometimes, by way of intentional complacency) and publicly endorse white supremacist ideals. Many are affected. Many are terrified. Many are impacted. Me too.
In the Age of Trump, as some have come to call this period, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, sexism (to name a few), while practiced throughout the history of America in, perhaps, more latent ways, has emboldened the alt right and empowered many white evangelicals to align themselves with (sometimes, by way of intentional complacency) and publicly endorse white supremacist ideals. Many are affected. Many are terrified. Many are impacted. Me too.
To borrow from Christena Cleveland’s blog, “Wellness in the Age of Trump”:
Many of us feel compelled to act – to speak out, to protest, to advocate, to gather, to comfort, to fight for justice. But for many, particularly white people, this is the first time they have attempted to act effectively under duress and anxiety. This is the first time that the oppression feels personal to them and they don’t know what to do. For others, particularly people of color, this is yet another trauma on top of a lifetime of traumas. Many of us have been fighting for years. We’ve reached our physical limits and we’re weary. No matter the reason or racial identity, many who feel compelled to fight for justice find themselves deterred by listlessness, hopelessness, perplexity and fear. Me too.
As a Jesus follower, I am convinced that before we can sustainably give from ourselves, we must first be firmly rooted in His undying, love and actively rooted in a community in which nourishes, forms and fortifies our renewal and commitment to Jesus’ justice leadership.
We can’t keep fighting, absorbing and healing from traumas, and hoping in the face of disappointment without a fortified and formed spirituality that directly speaks to the issues of injustice. The beautiful thing about our current blatantly-unjust political climate is that it is a holy ground for this type of spiritual formation. We are formed, fortified and even reborn in the liminal spaces and during the shadowy times. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés so beautifully says, “Like Mary, we often give birth – in the middle of nowhere, unaccompanied, with the most meager of circumstances – to the God of love.”
As, I have struggled to hold each of these (and many more) realities, I found myself working through a series of self-care practices. And, I found myself revisiting what it means to live as a faithful, resurrected people in times of despair. The Bible has a particular phrase for repentance, metanoia, which, depending on your linguistic interpretation means in Greek to change one’s mind, or penance, or in English, to turn around and walk in a new direction.
This definition of repentance is particularly helpful when applied to living authentically and openly as a faith community in a (I am applying this particularly to the western world, although it can be applied widely) world which operates on the politics and supremacy of whiteness.
As Christians, navigating these tensions while proclaiming the everlasting love and redemption of Jesus can be exhausting. Many feel lonely, angry, hurt or incensed. Me too. But, I remain convinced that part of the hope in Jesus means that we too must die an intentional, daily death to sin, and in this death, we are resurrected to proclaim hope in a hopeless land.
As I have been exploring the concepts of lament and repentance, I stumbled across this book: “forgive us: confessions of a compromised faith” by Mae Elise Cannon, Lisa Sharon Harper, Troy Jackson and Soong-Chan Rah. I like this book because it intentionally and powerfully uses voices and stories of persons/cultures/communities whom the Christian church has historically oppressed to speak truth about injustice and reorients confession to one in which is corporate rather than solely individual. A particularly moving excerpt from the Foreword by Dr. Mark Labberton and Reverend Jim Wallis below:
“No one comes to repentance and confession easily. That’s the point, of course. It requires two things few of us like: taking responsibility and embracing a kind of death. This is not the good news we like living or proclaiming. But we must acknowledge our complicity or entanglement in systems and patterns of sin and injustice, and we must die to the illusion that such history can be escaped. If we are to mirror the new life that is the resurrection, dying precedes rising. Repentance and forgiveness precede reconciliation.”
1. Lament
I am increasingly convinced that lamenting is a particularly difficult practice for the western world. One of my racial justice mentors explained this phenomenon by equating it with a key function of white supremacy. White supremacy, she articulated, often discounts the validity of body truths.
Lamenting requires listening andpaying attention to one’s body and holding the tensions of fear and anger – emotions which are often discounted as irrational and unnecessary. As I practiced lamenting this week, I found myself naming injustices and noticing where I held each injustice in my body. I listened to and stayed with my breath as I allowed myself to feel the injustices I was naming. After 90 seconds, I named another injustice and then committed to listening to my body for 90 seconds, and continued this process throughout my lamenting session.
2. Truth
I have found it helpful to follow a time of lamenting by remembering and focusing on God by naming whom God is: compassionate, healing, loving, all powerful, all just, gracious, good, etc., One of the ways in which I also fortify myself is by listening to music. It was helpful to use music as a fortifying tool in my time of lament as well.
Below are a few links to some of the songs I have found particularly powerful this week:
Kyrie Elieson– Chris Tomlin
Pie Jesuby Celtic Women
No Longer Slaves by Jonathan David and Melissa Helser (Bethel Music)
It is Well– Kristine DiMarco and Bethel Music
Pieces– Bethel Music
God I Look to You – Francesca Battistelli
3. Humanization
Resentment is such an easy thing to allow to root in our hearts. If you are anything like me, it is incredibly hard to listen to let alone pray for our current administration. As a POC and as a woman I, like many other minority women, am acutely and intimately aware of the impact of our current administration’s detrimental and profound accusations and decisively hateful rhetoric. I have been trying, to practice the Resentment Prayer – praying for those by asking for qualities we desire in our own life for them, ie; health, safety, etc., because part of loving our neighbors is loving all our neighbors. In this step, I attempt to name and pray for each member of our current administration’s team and this week, I added different ICE agents.
4. Formation
As I ended my time of lamenting and self-care, I refocused on what my vision of racial justice entails. For me, I long for a sustainable, shalom-oriented, God fearing, intentional world invested in the inherent well-being and value of all humans. While, I often think about this vision in terms of my local community/country, I wanted to revisit what it means to have this vision and what tools and strategies are required to work towards this vision. For me, humanization of my neighbor is a part of this journey. Lamenting is a part of this journey. Connecting is a part of this journey. Whole body listening is a part of this journey. And truth-telling is a part of this journey.
What is your racial justice vision? What tools does it require? What are your acts of intentional, rooted, resistance? As always, I am interested in hearing from you.
Shalom always.
Let the Little Children Come to Me: Whiteness, Immigration Policies and Christianity
Posted on June 19, 2018
Reading Time: 6 minutes
The politics and radical liberation of Christ insists on freedom from all masters. This includes whiteness. Christ’s death not only liberated us as a faithful people, but radicalizes us to proclaim the entirely dangerous notion of love for the stranger and for self. May it be so!
“The Gospel of liberation is
bad news to all oppressors
because they have defined
their “freedom” in terms of
slavery of others.”
– James H. Cone
In the many weeks since the Zero Tolerance Immigration bill has gone into effect, I have devoted some time, between contacting my senators and congressman, into more fully researching the politics and historiography of whiteness, the radical theology of Jesus and the historical framework of Immigration Policy in the United States.
While, perhaps for some, these components may not seem interrelated, I have found it both exceedingly informative and critical to investigate their interconnectedness. Indeed, it is plausible to suggest that recent zero tolerance immigration policy is the direct production of policies and ideologies developed and fostered over time.
This is not to argue that the current administration has not fostered a culture which, perhaps, made this policy more likely. While this is certainly true, it is equally important, if not more so, to consider how we got herein order to discern how to act.
First, it is helpful to provide a brief history of Racism and Immigration Law within the last two centuries. This timeline is located to the left and is by no means comprehensive.
For a larger image of the timeline, click here.
For a more complete timeline from the Racial Justice Equity Organization, click here.
As I began to investigate the complicated yet interconnected history of religion, politics and whiteness in America, I couldn’t help but notice the ubiquitous and pervasive theme of Americanized power and privilege asexistentialism. While immigration policies and zero-tolerance sum games are often visible bad actors what remains under-investigated is the ideology and theology of whiteness and how these understandings critically inform the contemporary.
To begin, perhaps it is best to define whiteness as the union of both identity and agency as described by Barbara Fields, Professor of History at Columbia University, paper published in International Labor and Working-Class History, entitled Whiteness, Racism and Identity:
“[R]acism unseats both identity and agency, if identity means sense of self, and agency anything beyond conscious, goal-directed activity, however trivial or ineffectual. The targets of racism do not “make” racism, nor are they free to “negotiate” it, though they may challenge it or its perpetrators and try to navigate the obstacles it places in their way. Even as racism exposes the hollowness of agency and identity, it violates the two-sides-to-every-story expectation of symmetry that Americans are peculiarly attached to. There is no voluntary and affirmative side to racism as far as its victims are concerned, and it has no respect for symmetry at all…. race denotes a state of mind, feeling, or being, rather than a program or patter of action, it radiates a semantic and grammatical ambiguity that helps to restore an appearance of symmetry, particularly with the help of a thimblerig that imperceptibly moves the pea from race to racial identity. Whiteness is just such a thimblerig. It performs a series of deft displacements, first substituting race for racism, then postulating identity as the social substance of race, and finally attributing racial identity to persons of European descent. By those maneuvers, it is possible to reinstate the orthodox pieties” (2001, pg. 48-49).
This definition firmly situates whiteness as that invisible normative in which all other races are both rendered visible and, although contrary, invisible and are also racialized. Arab terrorist. Black vandal. 16-year-old white female, missing. Consider, the ease of media outlets which utilize whiteness as the standard.
What exactly does anyone, journalist, legislator, pastor, teacher, ICE agent, do when they racialize the immigrant? For example, ICE Agents, having recognized the man as a Mexican, arrested him on the spot. There was no dialogue or negotiation, just as mass deportation was no matter for dialogue or negotiation during the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930’s and 40’s.
The notation of race here is particularly important to recognize because a function of racism is to forbid its objects to function as anything other than a member of specific race. Consider the implications if the blurb had read: ICE Agents, having recognized the person as a man, arrested him on the spot. While, perhaps, the critic would argue this as a stretch, when deconstructing ideologies of whiteness and politics, it is important to understand why, how, and from whom such ideologies and policies are constructed.
Because, the historiography of whiteness has been detailed and described in length by many academic scholars, I will not invest any more time articulating its functions and features. However, for those of you whom are interested in increasing your understanding of whiteness, I will include some resources at the bottom of this blog post.
While the history of the United States is one which remains firmly situated on the politics and supremacy of whiteness, it is hardly arguable to suggest that the zero-tolerance policies as invigorated by the current administration is surprising. However, this should not be mistaken for an advocacy of careless complacency or mediocre activism.
Indeed, as illustrated throughout the depraved and unjust policies foundational to America’s history, it must be everyone’s duty to speak out against injustice. And, as Christ followers, we each are called to name evil and speak truth to power.
As a Christian and follower of Jesus, I have found that the call of Jesus is one in which effectively shatters the westernized ideals and idols of safety and security.
Jesus continually calls his followers into the way and relationship of and with other people.
Jesus calls his followers into the way of policies, legislations and governmental acts.
Jesus calls his followers into the way of walls and pipelines and contaminated water because Jesus calls us each to do the work of restoration, resurrection and redemption.
In the Gospel of Matthew, one is reminded again of what it is to follow Jesus: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’ and to ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
As Christians, we are more than equipped to do this work, for we are not equipped by our own strength but by the eternal well of Jesus. And, as Christians living in a land formed on the bones of marginalized persons, we must also reconcile with a history of complacency and a reality of easy deniability.
I have found hope and conviction in the late James H. Cone’s writing, particularly this following excerpt regarding the role and history of the church and racism:
“The Christian community, therefore, is that community that freely becomes
oppressed, because they know that Jesus himself has defined humanity’s
liberation in the context of what happens to the little ones. Christians join the
cause of the oppressed in the fight for justice not because of some philosophical
principle of “the Good” or because of a religious feeling of sympathy for people
in prison. Sympathy does not change the structures of injustice. The authentic
identity of Christians with the poor is found in the claim which the Jesus-
encounter lays upon their own life-style, a claim that connects the word
“Christian” with the liberation of the poor. Christians fight not for humanity in
general but for themselves and out of their love for concrete human beings.” – James H. Cone The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
As, I have grappled with the zero-tolerance immigration policy, I have come to find renewed hope in two understandings:
1. The hope of the Christian faith rests firmly in the hands of a good God. And, God is fundamentally situated on the side of justice. God was present in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed. And, “God declared victory out of defeat, life out of death and hope out of despair.”
2. The Church, in order to remain faithful to the Lord, must become intentionally anti-racist by making a radical and decisive break with the politics of whiteness and race oriented supremacy.
As I think about the zero toleration policy, I am reminded yet again of how policies rooted in historic, often unchallenged, whiteness, will continue to defend and protect white supremacist ideals. Let us be clear that God has not ordained the separation of children from their parents. No. White men have called the protection of whiteness existentialism and, by way of governmental power, have defended and protected whiteness by naming it ‘god’.
The politics and radical liberation of Christ insists on freedom from all masters. This includes whiteness. Christ’s death not only liberated us as a faithful people, but radicalizes us to proclaim the entirely dangerous notion of love for the stranger and for self. May it be so!
As you enter your week, may each of you go in love, for love alone endures. Go in peace, for it is the gift of God. Go in safety, for you cannot go where God is not.
Additional Resources
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism – Robin DeAngelo (Book comes out on June 26, 2018).
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack – Peggy McIntosh
So You Want to Talk about Race – Ijeoma Oluo
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race – Beverly Daniel Tatum
The Invention of the White Race – Theodore Allen
White is a State of Mind – Melba Patillo Beals
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Freire
Ain’t I a Woman – bell hooks