I have never called someone the ‘N’ word or turned someone down for a job interview because they’re black. I would happily sit under a black pastor or live next to a black family, in fact I would welcome it. I am open to being friends with someone of any skin color. I don’t think I am better in anyway from someone simply because of the tint of their pigment. So how can I be racist? In fact, I don’t think I could be friends with a real racist, someone who sticks a confederate flag on the back window of their pickup and tells Little Sambo jokes. If you called me a racist, I’d fight you. I hate racism! So how can I be a racist?
When I paint racism in its bold colors, it’s easy to exonerate myself. Every sin has its blatant face–a conscious, intentional, flagrant show. Pride has braggarts, anger has shouters and name-callers, impatience has shovers and elbowers. Compared to those folks, I am a saint of humility and gentleness and patience. Pride has a thousand faces, and most of them are so well-hidden that I don’t even see my own, but failing to recognize it does not make it small or harmless. If anything it is more dangerous.
Like other sins, racism comes in two types: open and hidden, conscious and unconscious, and the unconscious variety is no less dangerous. The racism I hate I find in myself when I look closely enough. I don’t want to be, I don’t intend to be, and I’m usually blind to it, but I am a racist. Racism means to privilege my own perspective with reference to race, a cultural narcissism or self-centeredness, whether consciously or unconsciously done, and I fail regularly. There are many ways of privileging my own view, and the most common is simply a lack of initiative or interest to understand and make room for the other’s view. I have also discovered in myself racial paternalism, elitism, stereotyping, disinterest, criticism, pride, antagonism, disregard, suspicion, disrespect. I have been defensive to their criticisms, dismissive of their difficulties, arrogant about my own (racially advantaged) progress, unaware of their pain and powerlessness. Forgive me. I have sinned against you my brothers and sisters.
I have come a long way in growing out of this racism, but I still have a long way to go. To be a better brother to the African American community, here are some things I would like to develop. Learn to listen more carefully and humbly to what they say, especially when I have an instinctive reaction against it. Understand their perspective more deeply and fully within its historical context. Accept their criticism of my race, taking every occasion as an opportunity for serious self-reflection and evaluation. Sensitize myself to their issues, concerns, struggles, perspectives, and values and let these inform my daily choices. Identify and appreciate their unique contributions to our world.
Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
I Am a Racist 6 comments
The Spiritual Discipline of Idleness 2 comments
This is the unpublished conclusion to my post “The Spiritual Exercise of Shirking Duty”
I think God is telling me, “You’re going to keep spinning your wheels until you let off the gas. You’re here to learn the art of idling.”
Idleness as a spiritual goal? That sounds very wrong-headed. I spent most of my life trying to maximize every minute, sleeping as little as possible so as to make the biggest spiritual profit for God. Every activity, even entertainment, was scored on how useful it was. If I read books, it must be for my growth. If I took a vacation, it was at a monastery. Every meal with friends was to “sharpen iron with iron.” Pleasures without eternal benefits were wasteful and wrong, and slowly every simple joy was twisted into a duty. I was driven by the fear that God valued me for what I did for him, and it was never enough.
My beliefs have changed, but the shadow remains over those natural delights that would ordinarily bring me pleasure. When I try to simply enjoy reading, writing, music, hiking, gardening, wood-working, and the like, this imperious gravity pulls me to turn each one into something productive, cutting off its wings and tethering it with a burden of obligation. Since last winter my only sure escape has been solitaire, not because it is especially fun, but because it is especially profitless, and so I can’t use it for brownie points with God. While shuffling cards, I’m doing nothing good for the world; I’m just killing time. And as I’ve learned to trust God’s grace there in the middle of that uselessness, I have discovered pure grace, not “grace” in exchange for my good efforts.
DUTY: LOOKS GOOD, BUT TIES ME IN KNOTS
How can I rebuild my life around the joy of being who God created me to be instead of the slave-driven motive of duty? As long as I keep believing that God loves me more when I do more for him, and less when I do less, I can never find rest in his grace. To truly discover the riches of God’s full acceptance apart from my profitability, I may need to become more useless still in order to set my faith free from its false grounding in my own goodness. “The foolishness of God is wiser than men.”
GOING OUT ON A LIMB OF FAITH
So Life Goes On… Unfortunately 16 comments
At the time of my last post, I was finishing up my work for the school year at Lynchburg College library. I get furloughed during the summer months, which punches holes in our finances. Even when I am working, I don’t make quite enough to cover our basic expenses, so our savings are slowly dwindling. I applied for numerous summer jobs, but no one was interested. Three years ago I started a lawn service to try to cover the summer deficit, but I discovered that putting out flyers got me very few customers. Though I really enjoy yard work, I hate–really hate–sales, and in order to get customers I have to sell myself (the most loathsome form of marketing to me).
Being depressed gives me no energy for that kind of entrepreneur activity… or for most other things that are needed in this world to sustain life. I enjoy my library work, and it gives me a distraction from depression. Now I wake up every morning miserable, and though it doesn’t improve my feelings, I have fallen into the habit of doing house projects to distract myself. Hey, if there’s nothing I can do to make myself feel better, I may as well get stuff done.
But for the last few days, it all seems so pointless. Why should I pull the weeds or repair the rocker or wheelbarrow when neither the work nor the results give me pleasure? My active depression actually pushed me to work on projects just to help me get through the day, but for the last three mornings, I have not woken unhappy. So I still have very little energy, but now even less incentive… not that it matters. Nothing really matters. When life is reduced to simply finding the least painful way to survive each day, what is the point?
A Thin Ribbon of Grace 6 comments
Delayed by confusion, Anne at last flung herself from her seat just as the ski lift lurched into its ascent. The five foot drop stunned her, and so a kindly hand helped her into a small lodge to recover. Unfortunately, the kerosene stove inside increased her nausea. But as she lay there, a whiff of fresh, pine-scented air brushed her face. It trickled in through the cracked windows just enough to keep her from smothering under the acrid fumes. She called it “a thin ribbon of grace.”
Berly and I read this Lamott story weeks ago, but Sunday stumbled across her retelling it in a Youtube interview, and this time the phrase popped. When I am lost and broken and sick to my soul, I want God to fling open the windows of grace, but what I get is barely enough to keep me coherent, like a drowning man who is chucked under his chin just enough to keep his nose above this moment’s wave and then dropped again… like a malnourished child fed a few crumbs above a starvation diet. Survival grace. For those of us wishing for life to end, this frayed ribbon of grace seems less like love and more like torture. Why is God so tightfisted with His goodness as though He’s worried He’ll run short or we’ll fritter it away? What present consolation can we suck from the ending “happily ever after” if life’s story is “miserable until death.”
But Anne’s phrase whispered across my thoughts, enticing. Is it enough, this thin ribbon? I want a bank full of grace to draw on for my needs, but I am only given enough for this moment… sometimes barely enough. It’s true that I haven’t drowned yet, but every time the finger holding up my chin drops away, I’m sure the next wave will take me under. After all, I’ve been left spluttering for air many times. It’s a fact that I haven’t starved, but this is my last bowl of soup, and the cupboards are bare. Living hand-to-mouth is so precarious, so uncertain, so constricting, whether the shortage is literally financial and physical or the deficit lies deeper still, a hole in the heart.
In the desert the Israelites were completely dependent on God, and in spite of dining on a daily miracle, hunger was always just one day off, for forty years running. A thousand winters later, not much has changed for the children of God as they prove in their principal prayer: “give us this day our daily bread.” What is this addiction God has for pocket change allowances? Surely He doesn’t make us suffer needlessly. If He is truly a loving God, he must think this arrangement is a real windfall for us.
But as Berly points out, many of God’s children are jobless and friendless, homeless and hungry; some die agonizing deaths. We are not promised health or happiness or even sanity. Exactly what does it mean to claim that His grace is sufficient if it is not even sufficient to keep us breathing? From somewhere the thought drifted into my mind–His grace is sufficient for our hearts, the one thing that matters above all to us. In spite of life’s miserable suffering, we cannot deny that our hearts have not only survived, but grown. We are blossoming into the ones God created us to be. We have faced into our fears and discovered new strength, challenged shame and found love. We opened our hearts, and truth came in with insight, wisdom, and freedom.
But we are still tormented by depression. Something seems very wrong with our chosen path when we end up here. If we follow God as best we know how, should we not find peace, joy, rest, and fulfillment? Isn’t that what grace looks like? We want a life plan that works, that makes us feel good, accomplished, confident, whole, and if that’s the goal, our plan is clearly broken. But we tried other popular strategies, and they gutted our souls. Perhaps we’ve been measuring grace by the wrong scale. If our personal growth is the better gauge, then God has been truly lavish towards us, and if it comes to us through pain, we will welcome it gratefully. He sends a thin ribbon of consolation to keep our hearts from breaking, but his grace is not limited to this meager thread. His grace towards us has proven to be a river, not a ribbon, even if we cannot feel it or understand it.
Grace for My Frailties 6 comments
COSTLY SAVE
I am more productive just staying in bed than trying to multitask. When I try juggling tasks, I drop all of them, and one of them inevitably knocks over a vase. Unfortunately, I can’t even multi-think. I can’t keep two disparate ideas together in my head, however simple they are. The new thought drives out the old. I try to compensate with lists (which I forget to bring), notes scribbled on the back of used envelopes (which I inadvertently throw out), and pleas for Kimberly to remind me (a job she rarely accepts). I had a thumb drive with a to-do list that I cleverly kept on my key ring–can’t leave without it. But several times I almost left work with the drive (and my keys) still in the office computer, locking me out of both my building and my car at 2 a.m., so I took the USB drive off the key ring, and within a week I lost it.
Today I was working around the house and actually thought to keep a pair of reading glasses with me for small-print labels and dimly lit spaces. Hanging loosely around my neck they could easily get damaged, so I slid them to the top of my head (see, I’m planning!). As I was mowing, a tree branch knocked them off. I almost got down to retrieve them, but decided to grab them on my next pass. As I swung back by, I saw they lay in the cut grass, so I could just keep mowing and get them later. After three more passes I forgot and ran right over them. I found only a part of the mangled frame. I now know not to mow with glasses on my head… but next time I will forget I have them on my head or I’ll take them off for safe keeping and plop a book on them. This is why I buy $2 Walmart glasses. I have back-up plans for back-up plans… three or four levels of compensatory strategies.
It is a real disability–I’ve completely missed a couple days of irregularly scheduled work, wrecked our cars, and almost burned the house down. No amount of scolding or shaming on the part of others or planning and compensating on my part is going to fix it. When I clamp down on one thing, something else shakes loose. I’m grateful for a patient, understanding wife and a God who keeps an eye out for me. I still have my job and cars and house… and a supportive wife and caring God too!
My real back-up plan is God. I have to depend so much more on Him than many others do. His grace has such a bigger field of play in my life than in those whose lives are well-ordered. The penalty for not being able to take care of myself is that God takes care of me. Who could imagine a better arrangement? Happy frailties! (2 Cor. 12:9)
Cancer of the Soul Leave a comment
For 5 months now my long-term depression has been worse than usual. The last two weeks have been especially black. Sometimes it hurts so much I find it hard to breathe. There are moments of being okay on the surface… when I snuggle with Kimberly or cuddle with our dog Mazie, but it is like gasping for air before getting sucked under again. At other times I can distract myself just enough to keep the wolves at bay… I’m not getting bitten, but I still hear the howls, so it is far from a place of peace or renewing energy. I’m not suicidal–life is miserable, not intolerable–but for years now I have wished for my life to end. I feel crippled, lost, broken.
My heart goes out to those of you who struggle as I do. May you find some touch of peace from God today.
Tailwind 2 comments
Since I work till 2 a.m., Kimberly and I keep different sleep schedules, even on the weekend. Being the only one awake late at night can be very lonely, and feeling a bit lost tonight, I flipped through some TV shows—a little basketball, a bit of news, the tale end of 48 Hours, a CSPAN symposium of legal experts pontificating on Dr. Seuss (the ethics of Whoville, surprisingly interesting)… channel-surfing to try to ride out my negative energy. I wandered into the kitchen, looking in the frig and cupboards for something to fill my soul. But I came up empty.
Then I took a desperate measure… I opened Anne Lamott. For me, reading without a smidgen of positive energy is like trying to get a plane off the runway at 30 mph. Apparently God puffed a tail-wind, a penny miracle to aid my shaky effort to break free of gravity. This one time my sputtering spirit settled into a quiet purr of reflection. My life seems to be more stagger and flop than gliding, but I’m grateful for tonight. May each of you find a little breeze of grace today.
The Tarnished Golden Rule 5 comments
On my way to work tonight I turned from our winding, unlit street onto Hawkins Mill Rd, and an oncoming car flashed its brights. I looked down, saw the blue square on my dash, and flicked off my high-beams while responding with a surprised, “Oh, thanks!” to no one in particular. My mind flipped back two nights to our drive home from a school play. The guy behind me had on his brights, too intense even for the night-time position of my rear-view mirror, so I shoved it up against the roof and leaned right to avoid the glare in my side mirror. In less than a mile I was so irritated I wanted to pull off, get behind him, and power up my highs… just to teach him a lesson. I didn’t mention this to Kimberly.
My grace period for dumb driving is short. If the nuisance behind me had dropped his floods within a few blocks, I would have been grateful; within a quarter-mile, my “thank you” would have been sarcastic; after that, the dumb stamp would stick fast. Notice that I am even-handed. If I had kept my highs on tonight for another 15 seconds or a second flicker-reminder, I would have said, “Oh, sorry!” instead of “Oh, thanks!” And if I accidentally went a mile as a high-beam tailgater, I would have slapped my forehead with an idiot label. My good Christian conscience insists that I treat everyone equal before the law. It’s the golden rule in reverse: I only disparage others to the extent I disparage myself. Perhaps we could call it the iron rule.
Kimberly likes to keep things fair too, but her scales are those of grace rather than justice. She sees mistakes as a daily, inevitable occurrence and wants us all to live in acceptance of one another’s shortcomings. Wow, I think, no societal norms, no expectations, no standards? Ignore the stop signs and traffic lights; it’s every man for himself. I’m going to need an SUV. No, she says, just lowered expectations… sometimes people are late for meetings or forget to return a phone call or leave their high beams on, and that is okay. No one shoots 100% of their free-throws (she didn’t actually use the b-ball analogy). I agree with her. So how do I reach this new high standard of grace? After all, a 50-year rut is not overcome quickly, even by a perfectionist… especially by a perfectionist… or maybe ever by a perfectionist. Now that I think about it, perfectionism seems to have a Teflon grip on grace–the harder I squeeze, the quicker it squirts away. Grace falls into the open hand of acceptance It’s a gift, not a conquest.
Such wise sounding words, but what do they mean? Like those twisted metal puzzles I got as a kid–it looks simple, but I don’t see how to solve it. I can either work at being more gracious or not work at being gracious. So I set goals and standards and work hard to be nice and patient and accepting. Now I have a new standard by which to judge myself and others–instead of criticizing the late and forgetful, I criticize the impatient and demanding. Wait, something went wrong. So I stop working at it and just keep living as I’ve always lived, as a curmudgeon… hmm. Why can’t my spiritual journey be as uncomplicated as everyone else’s seems to be? I’ve sorted out this grace puzzle before, but it seems I have to re-learn it every time I stumble on another facet of my deep-seated legalism. So here we go again.
A Good Laugh 1 comment
My wife Kimberly had a headache today and in misery went to make herself lunch. “Tell me a funny story,” she groaned, So I started a tale about a clown that went to a nearby school to make balloon animals for the kids. I thought my clown would add humor, but he did nothing to make us chuckle. Okay, mistakes make good jokes, so my jester ended up making balloon animals that no one could recognize… and the kids criticized his work. I paused and said, “I’m clearly no good at telling funny stories.” So the inept clown naturally got depressed over his rejected creations and made them all commit animal-balloon suicide.
Kimberly chortled, “Wait till I tell my girlfriends that I asked you for a funny story and you told me about a depressed clown that performed balloon animal suicides for children.” I said, “Well, you have to know your audience,” and we both burst into laughter. “Why don’t I horrify our friends on Facebook with our bleak sense of humor,” I gasped, and the very thought sent me into paroxysms of laughter, howling and shrieking till the tears streaked down my face and my stomach cramped. If folks only knew! [Yes, I linked this to my Facebook page ;-)]
Why I Write 3 comments
Kimberly and I have been reading together Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. She is funny and gently provocative, mostly by relating her own shortcomings. We just read a chapter on forgiveness that sparked memories of a story I want to tell, a story of my own failure and awakening. But I’m only a mediocre writer among so many great authors, why do I want to add more words to that crush of voices? If I want to inspire, why not simply point folks to the riches I’ve discovered in others?
After brief reflection I realized that my impulse is not to share information, but to share life. It is personal and communal, a desire to reach out to others who can identify with my own experiences. Eloquence is much less important to me than honesty. So let me encourage those of you who write, even to an audience of two or three–keep gifting your friendship. Numbers don’t matter. And as readers let’s interact with those who write, share personally and make a connection in our comments. It will complete the circle of relationship offered and make our reading richer, more meaningful.
Janathan Grace Reflections 