three questions, one story, and some hope
three questions, one story, and some hope
February 2021
Hi friends. I wasn’t going to write an intro but seeing as how this newsletter is several days “late,” an explanation of some sort felt necessary. My explanation goes like this: we’re in the middle of a freaking pandemic that came home to roost at my house for the full 341 days of January. The six people I live with are back to normal. My symptoms are improving at a 2020 pace but I’ll take it.
Also, I attempted to get this off to you first thing this morning. L-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y the moment I opened my computer I heard a scuffle outside my door. 2.5 seconds later, I learned one of my people dropped their Zoloft on the ground and it was swiftly swallowed by our puppy. So instead of putting the finishing touches on my first newsletter, I called the vet. (Puppy is fine. Human may or may not have learned a lesson. I’ll report back later.)
The point is, it’s really as hard as it feels right now and we’re all doing the best we can.
Thank you for spending your precious life reading my words. I hope they encourage, agitate, and inspire. Grab a cup of your favorite beverage and feel free to hit respond when you’re done! (Audrey Short, make sure you read to the end;-)
The image of Kamala Harris with her hand on Thurgood Marshall's Bible is forever seared in my mind, unfortunately filed alongside strikingly contrasting images of the insurrection that took place just two weeks prior.
Experts and historians are discussing what punishment should look like for those who participated in the insurrection, both the breaking of glass and loss of life and the spreading of lies that led to it. Inciting and committing violence requires consequence and preventative measures must be taken to ensure this history does not repeat itself (again). And, I wonder what accountability for dangerous and violent actions looks like outside the prison industrial complex?
In her book Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and A Road to Repair, Danielle Sered points out that "if incarceration worked to stop violence, we would have eradicated it by now—because no nation has used incarceration more."
It doesn't work, she goes on to say, because the factors that drive violence also characterize prison: shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and a diminished ability to meet one's economic needs.
I write to you from page 80 of her 300+ page book, so I cannot yet answer my question—and the answer will not be singular, nor will it be found in a single book—but the subversive way to Beloved Community does not include putting people in cages. Not to mention, locking up the already radicalized and power-full is not a recipe for healing but one of further radicalization and violence.
Given the inequality inherent in our judicial system, it's unlikely even feigned justice will be served to those who participated in the January 6th insurrection anyway. Already, Riley Williams, the 22-year-old woman who allegedly stole Nancy Pelosi's laptop intending to sell it to Russia, was released from jail under supervision to her mother. Juxtaposed with Kalief Browder, a Black teenager who was held—without trial—at Riker's Island for over three years for allegedly stealing a backpack.
During his imprisonment, Browder was in solitary confinement for two years, a practice the UN has deemed a form of torture. Two years after his release, Browder hung himself.
Ours is not a broken and therefore reparable system—it is the American judicial system exactly as it was designed. And it is inhumane and evil. (See: Just Mercy the film or book, The New Jim Crow, and 13th.)
Maybe this is naive, but when contemplating how we treat people who are unsafe, I think of parenting. I've been forthcoming about the fact one of my kids has a diagnosed mental illness. When I speak of parenting "unsafe" and "harmful" behaviors, I am not referring to run-of-the-mill tantrums. I'm speaking of full-blown mental health crises.
In my home, I immediately separate the unsafe person from others. This allows them to express their emotions in a controlled environment, without the risk of harming anyone. Once removed, the pain underneath the behavior can safely surface and I validate the pain, validate the pain, validate the pain. At this moment their perception is reality and meeting physical needs for hydration and sustenance takes priority over setting the skewed perception straight. Once regulated, usually 24 or so hours later, is when I follow up to challenge perception and offer new ways of thinking.
Does this translate to white supremacists? I think some of it does. While I wouldn't go so far as to say every person who stormed the Capitol building suffers from mental illness, if mental health is a spectrum (and it is) then unlawfully entering a federal building dressed as a Viking, harming fellow humans, and/or constructing a noose is closer to illness than wellness.
The parenting analogy completely falls apart if we merely intend on separating violent white supremacists from everyone else and feeding them a snack. (Organic or otherwise.) But what pain and fear lie beneath their anger? What would it look like to hold them accountable for their actions while also validating their pain and challenging their perception?
Which brings me to the second question rolling around my foggy mind these days: What is the science behind people changing their minds and, follow-up, is anyone trying to reach far-right extremists?
I find it curious but unsurprising that white Christians prioritize sharing "Good News" through our "inner-city" service projects and yet I am unaware of a single church with an outreach to bigots.
We—white Christians—find the poor, houseless folks, and Black and Brown communities we ourselves have disenfranchised and redlined to be in "need" of our charity, but we do nothing to dethrone the monster of white supremacy in the suburbs and our church pews. A monster we have nurtured and whose tentacles reach into every facet of our society, killing those we insist on marginalizing, the witness of Jesus himself, and slowly, killing ourselves.
I will be the first to admit an outreach to white supremacists has zero appeal. And yet, a scandalously inclusive community is Jesus' idea. Sitting with people in their pain, affirming their belovedness, and offering a different way of being in the world is exactly what he modeled.
The risk for this type of work is not the same for everyone. As a middle-class, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual, white woman with minimal trauma history, my risk for engaging radicalized white folks is low. The risk level is not low for everyone and therefore not everyone's work. But it is the work for far more of us than we'd like to admit.
Defined by Dr. King and modeled by Jesus, the vision of the Beloved Community is one in which all people have what they need, where poverty, hunger, and homelessness are not tolerated. It's a world where we live like we belong to each other, the planet, and the Divine. A world where no one is thrown away based on the worst day of their life. (Even organic snack Viking guy.) An irresistible world, whose allure and peculiarity beckon even the hardest of hearts and disillusioned of minds.
How do we create this irresistible world? What does it look like here and now in the cold hard ground of COVID-19, late-stage capitalism, and intergenerational trauma?
It begins with our imaginations. It begins with believing in something we've never seen. With asking better questions and listening to the people most affected by the way things have been.
We don't have the luxury of time to imagine / ask / listen now and create later. We have to simultaneously dream and learn and build and believe and we've got to do it with the most marginalized leading the way because that is The Way.
Co-creating this world excites me. But my excitement is tempered by the fact that even when face-to-face with Jesus, rich men walked away, bloated with individualism and comfort.
Jesus' response offers insight into what we can expect in our attempts to bring heaven to earth. In the gospels, the rich man asks what he must do to inherit eternal life and emphatically states he has kept every commandment since childhood (every parent knows this is BS) and Jesus, knowing dude's perception is off, looks at him and loves him.
And it is in love that Jesus tells him to give what he has to the poor. It'll be worth it, Jesus tries to convince him. But the man walks away sad.
Jesus, also sad, turns to his disciples and tells them he knows how difficult it is to turn away from comfort and affluence towards something you've never seen.
While the wealthy man was looking for eternal rewards, Jesus tells his followers that no one who walks away from their toxic family or upwardly mobile career for his Beloved Community, for this yet-to-be-seen heaven-come-to-earth, will fail to receive a hundred times what got left behind IN THIS PRESENT AGE.
Here. Now.
If you know this passage, you know Jesus lists off what he guarantees we will receive—and the list includes persecution.
Jesus told no lies. When you stand in solidarity with the marginalized, the stinging darts (as Dr. King called them) aimed at them graze—and sometimes impale—you too.
And yet, Jesus says it is worth it—one hundredfold.
Are we willing to walk away from our comfort, our never-ending grind for the American myth, and as Sonya Renee Taylor says, our white supremacist delusion—are we willing to walk away for the Kingdom come here and now? Are we willing to flex our imaginations towards a world we've never seen? Are we willing to follow those the world calls last but Jesus says are first?
I don't have neat and tidy action steps for you, only a few questions that lead to more questions and a deep desire to fumble toward something more inclusive, more equitable than we can imagine, something like heaven on earth.
I hope we can build it together.
Book Recs
Technically I read Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work at the end of December but I have to tell you about it! I have been a huge fan of Akilah Richards and her podcast, Fare of the Free Child for years. I had high expectations for this book and she exceeded them. Akilah is someone I think of as an expert in several areas (parenting, unschooling, decolonizing…) and it was so refreshing to hear a bit of her personal story and how she came to be so knowledgable, which includes a lot of mishaps, as it does for all of us. I pride myself on reading books by BIPOC authors, but when it comes to parenting, most of the books I’ve ingested have been written by white folks. No more.
… how I parent is deeply formed by my decolonization work. To raise my children as free people, I need to be versed in freedom. I need to recognize it, know when it is threatened, and trust myself to act on what I know. If I viewed my children as fertile land to shape and design without the partnership of their own choices and curiosities, then I would be colonizing that land, those children.
I don’t know what compelled me to order Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson from the library. I can count on one hand the number of fiction books I’ve read in my adult life. (I’m not sorry if this disappoints you.) I read it when I first started exhibiting COVID symptoms and my anxiety was too loud to read anything else on my shelf. I DEVOURED this book in 1.5 sittings. A book about children who spontaneously combust was exactly what I needed—who knew?!
Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them, too.
I read On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King while laying on the couch exhausted from COVID and it fully lived up to the hype. That guy’s “show don’t tell” game is killer.
Pod Recs
I recently found Black History for White People because I listen to everything Propaganda says.
Speaking of Prop, his spinoff podcast, Hood Politics is super helpful in understanding WTH is happening politically in our country.
I got to interview Brandi Miller of Reclaiming Our Theology about the necessity of doing exactly that and it was a wonderful conversation.
This episode of A Tiny Revolution is an interview with Jo Luehmann on Decolonizing Our Faith and feels sorta like the 201 version of my conversation with Brandi. While it sometimes feels like Jo goes for shock value, she makes me think.
Audrey Short, please send me your address so I can send you a pair of earrings from Meant to Soar Designs and a bag of coffee roasted in my ‘hood from West Lou Coffee!