Heavy

There’s been a weight sitting on my chest since Wednesday night. It started when I had to turn my laptop off and go to bed when I read an article by the BBC claiming that there was no evidence that a shooting at a predominantly, historically black church was a hate crime. It continued through the day yesterday as more details emerged about the shooting in Charleston. And, it remains this morning as I process the outpouring of grief on my social media. This is not religious persecution. This is not just another example of gun violence. This is racism and bigotry in their ugliest and most violent forms. This is terrorism, a term that needs to be reclaimed from the North American news outlets that reserve it for Arab or black Muslims. Because if the primary weapon of terrorism is fear and terror, then the Charleston shooter is quite simply a terrorist. 

So first, do some research. Start with Twitter. It is, surprisingly, the least political and most human place to be in a time like this. Read @austinchanning’s tweets, and follow the threads of the conversation that was happening yesterday and today. Read her blog response http://austinchanning.com/blog/logical-conclusion. Read about the lives of the 9 people who were killed, and offer a prayer on their behalf (http://mic.com/articles/120967/the-9-people-you-should-be-talking-about-instead-of-dylann-roof). Hear the righteous anger of a college professor (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/06/black-lives-churches-matter-charleston-150618060102973.html) and a political satirist (http://www.ew.com/article/2015/06/19/jon-stewart-charleston-daily-show?hootPostID=42ac6908c1e4432eb8487bac728567f4). 

Here’s my two cents, a confession of sins of omission and some strongly worded advice. I have a complicated history with race. I grew up, a white child, in Mozambique and Kenya. Over the years as a missionary kid, I have appropriated race and culture to fill the gaps and holes of my own long lost cultural identity. As I have grown up and learned, I have started to realize the problems with my acts of cultural appropriation. As I returned to North America and saw bigotry and racism in blatant action, I have realized the privileges and the oppression that is written in the colour of my skin. But, what frustrates me the most is that bigotry and racism are not an inevitable part of the human condition. I went to high school with teenagers from a variety of races and cultures and religions, and we just disliked each other for normal high school reasons, not because of the colour of their skin or the country on their passport or their religion. There is no universal law that says that we have to treat people who are different than us with disdain or distrust, based on sweeping generalizations. And yet, here we are, people. Here we are. 

So, here’s where my confession gets personal. I was having dinner last week with some white, Christian friends. Over the course of dinner, the conversation moved towards Islam, with my friends making some largely benign, if rather ignorant remarks about the treatment of Christianity by Muslims. I made a choice in that moment to stay silent, to do the Canadian thing of keeping the peace. See, the truth is my Muslim friends always understood my faith better than my agnostic or atheist friends. There was a respect and curiosity from those who shared a common commitment to religion, an unpopular institution in our modern age. My parents have worked in two Arab, Muslim countries, and have found their local students and colleagues open and respectful about their faith. Beyond just my faith, I have Muslim friends who blow me away with their commitment to fasting for an entire month (Best wishes for Ramadan, by the way!) and Arab friends who amaze me with their commitment to generosity. Western culture and the western church could learn much from Islamic traditions and Arab culture. And so, every time I don’t speak up in defence of these much loved friends of mine, I don’t keep the peace. Instead, I allow ignorance to reign. 

The problem with bigotry and racism in all its forms is we rarely let the party in question speak for themselves. We make generalizations because we refuse to make human connections. So, here’s my advice. Before you make a comment about Islam or black people or Hispanic people or First Nations people or the LGBT community, take a few days or weeks or months, as long as it takes, to see the world through their eyes. Sure, we aren’t all the anomalies, the ones who pick up the guns or the bombs and kill. But when we use that defence, we risk forgetting that not too long ago, it was our white ancestors who held public lynchings and denied black people the right to vote and placed Japanese immigrants in concentration camps and kicked First Nations people off their land. So, even the ‘harmless’, throwaway comments that have been spoken in our families for generations are part of the problem. 

And, the most important word of advice I can give you? If you can’t take the time to learn human empathy and slowly work on your own ignorance, then just stop. Stop talking. Stop rolling your eyes. Stop making comments under your breath. Stop posting ignorant comments on your social media or your friends’ social media. Because people can see and hear you. Often those people are the young ones, the true innocents, who have yet to see the world through the lens of privilege that you do. You are responsible for the way that you influence the innocents. Jesus was pretty clear on that front with his millstones and such. 

Bigotry and racism are founded on bullshit. There is no way that you can condense the complexity of the human experience into a sweeping indictment of a people group. So, stop allowing bullshit to destroy the soul of your country, your culture and your communities. Just stop. 

So, listen well and speak truth. Peace and healing are empty words until we are ready to “beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks” and engage in the hard, ongoing work of confession and reconciliation. 

And for those of you who follow Jesus, treat your brothers and sisters, your friends and your enemies with the dignity that he demands. Love is the primary commandment, not your moral or political or social opinions. 

A Story

The sun is shining brightly as it slowly sinks toward the horizon. A cold wind blows my hair into my face, a remnant of an unforgiving winter and a fickle spring. Wolfville has finally come back to life. The skateboard park is back in use. Friends and couples wander the dyke trails, with dogs or children in tow. The barista chats away while I wait for my order. My peers make last minute NSLC runs. Turns out, our special talent for spontaneity and procrastination isn’t restricted to our academic endeavours. As always, I fail at doing the right 20-something thing on a Saturday night. All that awaits me at home is this blog post and some fantastic loose leaf tea I picked up last weekend in Mahone Bay. 

Once the fog of essay writing faded, I returned to one of my favourite pastimes, reading for pleasure with no reading list insisting on my progress. Today, I finished An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. This novel annoyed me and then charmed me, much like that boy in seventh grade that you always rolled your eyes at. I also recently finished Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s one of those books that just sits in the pit of your stomach, in the crevices of your brain, and the centre of your heart, burning through your misconceptions and illuminating the questions you wrestle with silently. 

These are all stories: a story of my walk through town, a story of a whiny, heartbroken ex-prodigy, and a story about a woman who is an immigrant, a blogger, and a lover (and much more, this is the brief synopsis). Tonight, it feels like these stories, along with the music of James Bay, Taylor Swift and Walk the Moon blaring through my headphones, help me approach my big questions. Like whether or not I should write an English honours thesis, and how I can beat my apathy regarding frustratingly slow re-entry into math-research mode. Like what I should do with my life next year, and where I should go to grad school. How I will stay connected to my widespread network of kindred spirits and heart family as my financial and temporal reality starts to bulldoze my long list of people and places to visit. If I can seek adventure and further intellectual depth post-university and still pick up my cross and follow Jesus. The easy questions… 

It doesn’t take too many Saturday night walks or John Green novels to remind me that I’m actually rather dreadful at being 20. Or maybe my fellow 20 year olds also spend their Saturday knee deep in written existential crises. As John Green and my friend Bri might say, this is my shout into the void. Not really a request for your answers or advice, although I will listen to those as well as I can. But just a few minutes to express my simultaneous frustration and deep love for my surroundings, the people that populate them, and the ambiguity that so often reigns. 

Why did I love Americanah so much? I’m so glad you asked. This book is funny and intelligent and so insightful. Its bare bones analysis of life, love, sex, culture, race, privilege, postcolonial spaces, politics, wealth (I could go on…) is startling, probably offensive to some, and profound. It’s also a love story about companionship and friendship and, dare I say it, soulmates. This love story is messy and broken by silence and shame, but it’s real love, somehow worth the mess and the baggage. 

I finished Adichie’s novel while I was at MarkEast, starting a 7 day study of the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Genesis is also startling, offensive, messy and profound. Shockingly, it does not explicitly endorse patriarchal power or a scientific account of our world’s origin. Instead, it presents the LORD God as a Creator who creates good things, makes humankind in His image, and provides again and again for his creation who are prone to being fickle, stubborn and self-serving. Yahweh Elohim is trustworthy even in a world governed by fatalism, fear and violence. 

I love literature because its stories illuminate my life by broadening the horizons of the world I see, promoting empathy, compassion and self-reflexive analysis. In the case of Genesis and Adichie’s novel, the ripples will continue to wash over my heart and head in the years to come. And my plan is to continue reading and searching, trying to unravel the mysteries of love and grace, why love drives us and breaks us and heals us, why grace puzzles us and delights us and offends us. And as I go, I hope that truth in all of its forms, from sun beams to manuscript studies to long chats with professors to chance encounters with golden retrievers to copwin strategies to a belly laugh with best friends to art, will continue to set us free.

“And the world will turn and we’ll grow, we’ll learn how to be incomplete. This here now it’s where we touch down. You and me let’s be incomplete.”

Incoherent

Last Saturday night, I sat on my bed in my parent’s apartment, cuddled up with Gandalf and Pippin, my two golden retrievers. I had to leave to catch my flight back to Canada from Dubai in about half an hour, and all I could do was sit and cuddle and cry. Eventually, my mom came in and I leaned in for a long, long hug. I say goodbye all the time, and I think I’m getting worse at it. 

When I’m in Dubai or with my parents, I always feel wrapped in this bubble, a love bubble perhaps. Even as I get more immersed in the heady exploits of academia and learn to see the world in different ways than they do, they keep me grounded and love me unflinchingly. My two dogs follow me around the apartment, ready to lick me, hop into my lap (a challenging feat for a good-sized dog), stare at me adoringly, and snuggle up next to me. 

It’s funny because my reality at school could not be more different. My roommates and I all live busy and often separate lives. Sometimes I’ll go through an entire day without much human contact beyond class, work, and the occasional “Hello, how are you?” in the hall. I think that there’s an innate loneliness about the process of leaving home and starting to take on the responsibilities of adulthood. 

I think we make a mistake, though, when we assume that this loneliness is a negative part of the process. Sure, a social life, friendships and human contact are all important things… I will not deny that I need others’ words and perspectives to get me out of my head. However, what I think is quite interesting and should end up being the point of this meandering blog post is that I have learned the most about love away from my bubble. 

I’m taking a course in gender/sexuality theory, which I’ve found to be a simultaneously frustrating and enlightening experience. Frustrating because theory can be dense and dry and sometimes the class discussion gets out of hand. But enlightening because the realm of gender and sexuality is one that I have been partially sheltered from, and in some ways, kept away from by the prejudices and so-called “morality” inherent in the evangelical church. 

Now, before you lose your heads in a fit of righteous indignation, this is not a manifesto on the topic of sex and gender in the Bible, because I’m neither qualified to provide you with a detailed theological argument for or against the issue or interested enough to pursue such an argument. I was talking to my friend Kim a few weeks ago about the preoccupation with moral truth that exists in the church, in specific reference to the issue of gay marriage. She mentioned a conversation she had had with an older church leader in the Mennonite church who had made the point that given the choice between the truth and love, we should always choose love, not just because love is the greatest commandment, but because we are subject to human fallibility and always run the risk of being wrong. Love is less risky, but significantly harder. Henri Nouwen, in his book In the Name of Jesus, notes that the Christian leader often chooses power as an alternative to the hard task of loving, of entering into vulnerable, messy relationships. Is that not what is really at the root of the church’s rule book? A sense of moral power? 

Now, before you have another fit, I’m not suggesting we scrap all morality. I do believe that certain lifestyle choices contribute to a healthier, more balanced life, which can lead to some super fun conversations regarding my stance on abstinence or substance abuse. Just ask my roommate, who called me a classic “good girl” the other day, a rule follower. But what I do know is that there’s not a lot of room in the gospel of Jesus for having your shit together. Because, that is, at best, an elaborate facade and at worst, a lie. I have found it to be true that I am most distant from the grace and love and acceptance of Jesus when I see myself as successful at running my own life. And subsequently, not able to extend grace to myself and harder on myself when I fall into less productive or less successful times. 

In this class of mine, we spend a lot of time talking about people's need or desire for a coherent identity, and the struggle of certain individuals to find coherence when faced with gender binaries or one normative sexuality. Now, I don’t want to reduce or presume to understand that struggle, but as someone who struggles to define herself both within and without her passport country, I get the struggle for coherence and the resistance against a prescriptive understanding of coherence. I have been learning to sit in my conflicting cultural/national identity, to live out of it with courage and vulnerability and grace. The least I can do for those who have different struggles with identity is allow them the same dignity and opportunity. 

And that, my friends, is why we need love bubbles. We need dysfunctional, imperfect people to surround us with love and hugs and unsought advice and dumb jokes because we recognize their humanity and our own by loving and being loved. So, I am thankful for my Dubai love bubble and for the Wolfville love bubble that is still under construction, for the many people in this town from all walks of life who continue to speak love and grace and challenge into my life. And I’m thankful for the lonely spaces too. For the space to think and observe and process. 

At best, my thoughts are fragmented; my answers are incomplete. But, my heart is softening to the inconsistencies and injustices of the world. I’m learning to recognize my own privilege, the sins of the past and present that I have taken part in by choice or by association. I’m doing my best to choose love, for myself, for the people around me. And when I fail, I’m sitting at the feet of Jesus, unqualified and broken, learning to see the world again through the eyes of the love that is even purer than a golden retriever’s. 

“What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.” - Henri Nouwen