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Iowa fell in line with Connecticut and New Hampshire this past week when their judges ruled it was unconstitutional to prohibit those of the same gender from entering into state-sanctioned partnership colloquially referred to as “marriage.”
Jacob and I could give a flying fig.
(Of course that’s not entirely fair. Gay marriage does register thoughts and feelings for both of us. In this matter I caution to try and adequately represent both of our views on the subject. But Jacob thought this would be a good time to post our thoughts on this here blawg, it being a big deal for most Christians. Still, most of this is my stuff, although we are basically on the same page.)
What I mean is that we’ve never felt comfortable with the state of X getting to say what marriage is or isn’t. States legislate in order to control social order and avoid chaos. Sometimes this is based on religious principles. Most of the time their legislating is based on philisophical humanism – don’t do anything that would hurt anyone else.
All this to say, what the state does is pretty different from what the church does. The church says to give up your rights, to lay down your life for your enemy (including your national enemies), to embrace poverty and the poor. As the church we learn practices that will begin to transform us into a vehicle of God’s reconciling love in the world, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the son of God, empowered by the Holy Spirit.
It’s because we believe in the potency of this transformative power that we tend not to get all up in arms when the state decides to do something the church considers questionable. Like claim that it can “marry” people. Marriage, as Christians understand it, is a lifelong commitment before God and community to honor the other, to persevere unto death, and to willingly welcome children to “disrupt” life. States legalize unions so that they can tax you. See the difference?
Theologically speaking, we can’t really read anything in the Bible that leads us to believe that marriage is intended for those of the same sex. We’ve done a lot of reading in the exegesis of homosexuality in the Bible and, while there are many intellectually negligent Evangelical readings of passages pertaining to this issue, the rereading in favor of gay marriage doesn’t hold up to reason. Most of the justification for gay marriage we read is emotionally driven. The general theme is, “can’t we just let people love one another?” The answer is no.
At the same time, there’s a reason why there’s so much emotion attached to these arguments. It’s an emotional subject because it involves the lives of real, flesh and blood people. Gay men and women have been imprisoned, fired from jobs, beaten, divorced from their families, and refused access to a dying loved one. Some have even been killed. As much as the Bible speaks clarity on this issue (at least to my reading), this has to be met with the reality of our situation. In particular, I always wonder how people ardently opposed to gay marriage plan on addressing the thousands of situations where gay men and women have adopted children. Would they just as well see these homes broken up?
There are also issues related to pensions for lifelong partners, access to health records, being added to a partner’s health care, sharing accounts, being the inheritor upon death, given access to their loved one in the event of an emergency. These are the types of protections that legal unions provide. And that is why it is blatantly unconstituional to deny these rights to gay men and women.
The last thing that Jacob and I talk about a lot is how strange it is that the church has taken so little issue with the remarriage of divorcees and instead fixates on gay marriage. The not-okayness of remarriage after divorce is abundantly clear in the New Testament. But most of our churches welcome remarried folks into church leadership, baptize their children, let them remarry in our sanctuaries, and have them in our small groups. No one would ever question the validity of these families or suggests that they break up. While I think Evangelicals have strong opinions about the Biblical teaching on divorce and remarriage, this doesn’t translate to a rigid practice.
Practically, I’d love to see Christians in dialogue using divorced remarriage as a way to think about how we welcome and treat gay men and women in our congregations. I think this could be helpful and productive. The reality is that, just like divorced remarrieds, gay women and men are Christians. They are members of our churches. They have children, they want to serve, and they want to be included fully in worship. In terms of state sanctioned unions, this shouldn’t even be a question for Christians. Everyone is guaranteed equal rights under our laws and this extends to those rights legalized by state-sponsored partnerships, call them marriage or whatever else you like. The real question is how the church will respond to the fact that gay families and couples are a reality. Even more importantly, these are people made in the image of God and they too experience lonliness, isolation, and fear in the same way as straight couples and families. How will we respond?
This was part of a brochure handed out to our congregation last week:
I pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ,
And to God’s kingdom for which he died—
One Spirit-led people the world over, indivisible,
With love and justice for all.
Just when I thought life could not get stranger I find out that John McCain is a closet Mennonite.
Okay, not really. At least not self-professing. But check out this short summary of McCain’s recollection of a “sermon” he gave while imprisoned in Hanoi:
One day I talked about the parable of when they asked Christ whether they should pay taxes and he held up a coin and said, “Render unto Caesar, etc.” My point was and still is that when we were flying in combat, we weren’t doing God’s work. We were doing Caesar’s work. So for us to go to prison and then ask God to get us out was not fair to God, to our religion, to our beliefs and to ourselves. It wasn’t a miracle that sent a SAM [surface-to-air missile] to hit my airplane. It was a guy, a technician at a SAM site.
I think it was important, a little bit for the stability factor, that it wasn’t God who was going to perform a miracle, end the war and bring us home. It was men. It was Caesar. I think the majority of those guys felt the way I did but we just had some, just as people turn to faith healing and that kind of stuff, we had some of that. A lot of times I would pray for strength and I think sometimes I got it. Pray for patience to get through the next minute when things were bad. I just don’t think it’s fair to expect too much out of what is basically not the Lord’s business.
I don’t agree with everything McCain says here but there are some key agreements I never imagined possible. McCain’s conviction was that the Vietnam war was outside the workings of God and that to ask God for a victory or even a rescue was out of the question. There’s some undeveloped but very poignant theology in this, something that points to the difference between Anabaptists and mainline Evangelicals.
According the article 23 of our Confession, Mennonites believe that governing authorities contrast the church in their institution by God to maintain societies. Every nation goes astray in demanding allegiance that conflicts with the demands of discipleship in the body of Christ. “Even at its best, a government cannot act completely according to the justice of God because no nation, except the church, confesses Christ’s rule as its foundation.” Nations call out to the power thirst of Caesar.
The Evangelical opinion is brought up in the NYTimes piece. The op-ed writer contacted a conservative pastor friend.
“As an evangelical, spiritual alarms start going off when I feel myself segmenting any element of my life from my devotion to Christ,” he wrote in an e-mail. Unlike a very personal Jesus providing critical support along a “faith walk,” Mr. McCain’s deity sounds like an aloof neighbor who keeps his lawn tidy and his hedge high, an exemplar of the kind of moderate, mainline Protestantism that launched countless evangelicals on the seeker’s path in the first place.
I don’t think McCain sounds like a mainline Protestant; I think he’s someone who, in some small way doesn’t want God to bless air missiles shooting down planes, regardless of whose side you’re on.
Unfortunately for the GOP this common ground John and I have come to has not changed my vote. This is because I don’t ever plan on voting for someone based on their theological prowess. It would be hypocritical to do so because, at the end of the day, our President elect is going to swear an oath that has nothing to do with Jesus:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
So I will take the theologically dubious Barack Obama who, I hope, will also interpret the Constitution in a way that protects our weak, hungry and vulnerable.
I had a great weekend accompanying my friend Joni to the l’Arche at Western Regional Gathering. Each year we have a get together/celebration of all the l’Arche communities in the West (CA, WA, OR). We met in Tacoma this year and had a very special guest. Each year Jean Vanier, l’Arche’s 80 year old founder joins a region for their gathering and this was our year.
This was a very special event because this is the last time Jean will be visiting a Regional Gathering. He’s ready to return to his home community in Trosly, France. He spoke poignantly about growing old and the need to spend time being present to his aging body, to give care to others and finally to receive care from others before he dies.
There were a couple things that surprised me about his conversations with us. He spoke very passionately about his need for Jesus, the sacraments, times of prayer and meditation. L’Arche (at least in the US – especially in the NW) has tended towards what I call a “lowest common denominator spirituality.” While l’Arche grew out of the Catholic church and the experience of being drawn to the crucified, disabled God, more and more our communities are called to welcome men and women from a variety of faith traditions. This has not been don
e well and more and more of my friends who join l’Arche are astonished by the secular humanism that is now the rule of our community life.
In other words, instead of finding creative ways to honor our diversity while standing near to the heart of the God of Israel who called forth l’Arche, the attempt of our community in Portland has been to try and see what we all have in common and to smooth over any potential controversy with tolerance. It’s nasty political liberalism, basically what a community for the disabled would look like if founded by John Rawls. Damn the doctrinarians.
Somehow I was under the impression that this was where Vanier stood on religious diversity. I was wrong. It was pretty clear that he was struggling through this issue and when we talked he directed me to some unpronounceable French theologians who have written on this topic. (Shocking fact 2: French theologians are writing about l’Arche.) But his own deep sense of religious conviction, his rootedness in Catholicism and his very specific call to be near Jesus were all wonderful revelations.
The other surprise was how often he spoke about the impending crisis the disabled in our communities will face in light of the new eugenics. Based on what I’ve heard, most people in my community are pro-choice, pro-eugenics, pro-euthanasia political liberals. Jean spoke about the consistency of our commitment to care for the weak – the unborn, the soon dead, the critically injured, the genetically compromised. I never hear anyone in l’Arche talk about the larger witness of our life to producers of knowledge. That’s because we have lived mostly cloistered from these issues.
I was very encouraged by meeting Jean and experiencing his unbelievable gentleness. Seeing him interact with our friends was the closest I’ve come to being able to understand God’s preferential option for the poor. Jean lavished his love on our weakest, our most profoundly needy. It was a beautiful thing to see, not only from Jean but from all the assistants. To see 200 people, half with disabilities and the other half finding joy and promise in them – it was the kingdom, my friends.
This past week I started to read the new book of essays edited by Brian Brock and John Swinton called Theology, Disability and the New Genetics. It’s a great volume with a wide variety of perspectives on the theology of disability. The authors are a man with a disability, a theologian whose son has Down Syndrome, a pastoral counselor, a special counsel to the Dutch embassy and several doctors. And Amy Laura Hall. Of course.
One of the most interesting chapters was called Aren’t We all Eugenicists Anyway? written by Mary Mahowald who is emerita professor of obstetrics at U of Chi. Her essay is about the different ways we attempt to control and channel our children and whether every instance of eugenics is bad. We all know bad eugenics – when Nazi’s attempted to create a perfect race by eradicating those they considered “less desirable,” the Jews. But eugenics, which simply means “good generation” happens all the time in much more socially accepted ways. The abortion of the disabled is one very obvious way eugenics is exhibited in our country. And with the rate of babies aborted with Down Syndrome at 90%, I would say very acceptable.
But what about prenatal vitamins, avoidance of certain foods and alcohol? These things are done so that we will have a “healthy child” instead of a “child with a disability” such as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, mercury poisoning or spina bifida. We make judgments about the kind of children we want by avoiding these outcomes. Then there are the ways we aim for positive outcomes. Baby Einstein “in the womb” educational tapes are all over the place. You can even attempt early language skills in utero. My eugenics happens with fish oil. I started taking 4 g of fish oil a day after reading a study about the developmental benefits on baby brains discovered by Australian scientists. Hand-eye coordination improved, instances of ADD/ADHD were lower and early vocabulary increased.
I take fish oil (and plan to breastfeed for at least a year) because I think it will help our baby be smart and able to hit a T-ball with above-average accuracy. I am making my desire for this particular type of child known through my supplements. At the same time I would not be disappointed with a child who did have ADD or spina bifida. I also think there is something disturbing about trying to teach your child French cognates in the womb.
I am somewhat of an ethical contradiction on this matter and I’m hoping this book will help me to sort out some of the complications around these choices and help us to answer the question why do we choose as we do?
What does it mean to want a child without a particular struggle? God has put many people in our lives with Down Syndrome, FAS and CP that have wonderful, flourishing lives. We don’t doubt that while there would be difficulties for us in having a child with a disability (as if there were not with all children) that there would also be great joy and wonder. But do our actions speak something else? Are we betraying our unwillingness (subconscious perhaps) to welcome a child with a disability? Or is there something “irresponsible” about not doing your best to promote fetal health and to give your child the best opportunities? Is not taking these steps inviting unnecessary suffering on a child? And what constitutes “health” and “suffering,” necessary or otherwise?
Ultimately I wonder, how can we love and accept our disabled brothers and sisters without reservation while at the same time wishing they were not as they are by avoiding bringing others like them into the world?
I don’t have any firm answers to any of these questions. Maybe the answer is that you do your best (within reason) to prepare your child to be developmentally competent in the world. At the same time, you prepare yourself to welcome whatever gift the Lord presents.
“Within reason?” “Developmentally competent?” Doesn’t this sound wrong and strange to anyone else? If you have insight, do send it my way. Sometime soon I’ll share about the chapter by Hans Reinder which I just started. He will probably have something helpful to say. And I have a theology crush on him.
One of the things I’ve been struggling with in class this semester as we’ve explored liberation Christologies is the relationship between corporate justice and individual culpability. I was writing my paper to answer the question (ha!) “Who is Jesus in light of race relations in America?” The question of systemic and historic oppression of African-Americans informs part of my thinking on this issue. My commitment to the reconciling Christ who calls us all, oppressor and oppressed alike to account for the ways we have failed in our love for God and neighbor informs another part.
Part of my exploration involved Jeremiah Wright who comes from the same stock as James Cone, the father of black liberation theology. I wanted to spend some time thinking about how Cone’s message sounds to people today. As we’ve heard in the past few weeks, people don’t really like what Wright has to say.
One side of me, the part that has rebuilt houses in all-black sections of Katrina, worked with students in segregated schools in Alabama, left grad school a month before a cross burning and who has black friends who are followed around grocery stores, can hear exactly where the militancy of Wright (and early Cone) are coming from. While I do think some of his comment, e.g. the US created AIDS to wipe out minorities, is unjustified and inflammatory, I mostly think Wright is prophetic much in the style of Amos and Hosea. These brothers also got in trouble for prophesying against their country.
I also seem to be in the minority with my discontent around Barack Obama’s reaction to Wright, especially his church sermons. It is this rhetoric that Obama spoke against in his race speech. Obama describes Wright’s “incendiary language” as widening the racial divide in our country, views which “denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.” Wright is said to have a “profoundly distorted view of this country.” While race is an issue that cannot be ignored and continues to be a central issue for Americans, the United State’s progression in affirming constitutional freedoms is a sign that racism is not endemic but rather something we can overcome, moving “beyond some of our old racial wounds.” I’m not sure O is being honest about how far we have not come.
The people we read this semester who most adequately speak to who Jesus is in this mess are Shawn Copeland and Rowan Williams. For Copeland there is less clarity regarding centralized community identity than for Wright or Cone. In the opening paragraphs of the essay we read she talks about experiencing her own privilege as a black, educated woman in light of a homeless black woman picking through garbage outside her window. Copeland presents a well-spring of competing identities: female, black, financially well-off, educated, academic, housed. Instead of naming self-referencing communities of color, Copeland asks, “What sort of Christological reflection is needed in our situation? What can it mean to tell the woman who searches my garbage that God in Jesus is also alienated, a stranger, a despised ‘other’?”
Copeland goes on to speak about the “way of Jesus,” the complication women bring to the Gospel, the lived experience of being always at “the disposal of the cross.” The way of Jesus is to love “concretely” the outcast as Jesus did. Yet she also speaks from the double oppression of black and female. How this is lived out is not entirely in self-determination or communal identity as Other but in the cross of Jesus where humiliation and brutalization are made known in our discipleship to the crucified one. The resurrection of Jesus is our grafted-ness into the initiated kingdom in the present realities of oppression which confront us. Christology is very much something which takes hold of us, something to which we are to avail ourselves.
To me this sounds so much like Williams in Resurrection. I’ve written about this before if you want a refresher on the thesis of the book. The pure victim provided by Christ puts our histories into perspective because we have each condemned the lamb of God. At the same time we encounter a Jesus who resurrects our past. One contemporary example of how this plays out is the plausibility of “black racism.” Denying black racism “carries overtones of the idea that the victimized group is intrinsically incapable of the kind of violence from which it is suffering” (11). Just as domestic violence against women exists in the white community so to does it exist in black and Latino communities. Just as this violence stands outside the iteration of Jesus’ life for white people, so to it stands outside the discipling of blacks and Latinos. Racism is evil “not because its victims are good, but because its victims are human” (11).
In a similar way, Copeland speaks of the God of the oppressed who calls us to the banquet table in full recognition of the suffering Other and the suffering Self. It is this recognition that puts us at the disposal of the reign of God, not simply because our identity as members of an oppressed community. Jesus resurrection is the point at which this transformation begins.
Yesterday we went to Pass it On, a children’s consignment sale that happens twice a year in Oregon. It’s a brilliant idea. Families can resell baby clothes (usually worn for a millisecond) and get back part of the profit. For us this is better than fair trade, better than organic. There’s nothing quite like reused and recycled.
The clothes were divided by sex. Since we’ve been waiting for this sale this is the first time I’ve really been able to encounter the deep gendering of clothes on the rack. There were some newborn “unisex” in the green and yellow shades but after that we faced two rows of basically blue and pink.
The boys section had mini Lakers track suits, fire engines, puppy dogs, lions, bears, button up shirts and every shade of blue imagineable.
The girls section was butterflies, bunnies, muted tones, ruffles on everything and rhinestones. I’m thinking, “I would never in a million years where this stuff! That would be humiliating!”
There was no mistaking when an item belonged to a girl. Even overalls had ruffles on the cuffs and there was a preponderance of pictures on the butts of these jeans. Some of the boys stuff could go either way.
I’m particularly aware of these sorts of dichotomies and feeling the need to assign them meaning as we prepare to welcome a child in the summer. I’m also reading quite a bit of feminist Christology in school. One of my supplemental readings this week is Beth Fekler Jones’ Marks of His Wounds: Gender Politics and Bodily Ressurrection. Beth (fellow Dukie; this is her dissertation) argues that the feminist politics which seek to deconstruct gendered bodies is inconsistent with a doctrine of the resurrection. Instead of seeing absolute power at work in gendering or none at all, as the church we understand gender difference to itself be redeemed from the power structures of sin (misogyny) and its consequences (anorexia, genital cutting, slef mutilation, suicide) through the resurrected Christ.
I agree with Jones’ that in the church is one locus for the transformation of gender politics through our particular acts as a church. I appreciate Jones’ attempt to retain embodiment but also don’t want to be too cheery about the way sin works on the particularities of both the masculine and the feminine in our fallen world and our faith communities. In one sense, the gendering of our child to one extreme is present even in the clothing choices presented to her. These attempts at normalization are stiffling.
I also continue to be deeply troubled by the church’s failure to gender by allowing power-shaped identity to creep past the doctrine of the resurrection. The Wild at Heart movement, with its lonely warrior rescuing the maiden and preparing for adventure is the most insidious simply because it it is so wide-spread. But many others have also used the story of our faith to reify fallen gender identity. I could write a book with my thoughts about Eldredge. Suffices say that my thesis of discontent is located in the taking at face value disordered gendering as normative and then attempting to overcome masculine and feminine articulations of this culturally induced panic attack without ever parsing out what’s really going on here. Exurbanization, displacement from the private sphere, dislocation from food sources and production, culturally reinforced stoicism and removal from child-rearing are much more important to scour than to simple say “this is what is in every man’s heart.” Bullocks.
So, Babe Flo-Bix, we hope we can find for you a little space where your gendering will be dictated by love rightly ordered in a community of those who seek to call forth your redeemed self while recognizing that already sin is at work on your body. I pray we can help you see how Christ has made all things new and that the potential for this newness, while incomplete, can be practiced daily in our life as the church. I hope I can be sensitive to the ways the world tries to disembody you, declare your body evil and deconstruct your enfleshed self. I pray my response will be to guide you ever so gently towards the One who called you into being.
God help us.
Second wind! I started this earlier in the week. Kind of on the long side…
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When I left for Alaska last week I took Rowan William’s Resurrection with me. This is one of my favorite reflections on Easter and the one book I own with more passages underlined than not. It was a good choice for this particular immersion program. Resurrection provides naming for the particular ways Christians can better understand our place in confronting the way our privilege has exerted and has flourished at the expense of an Other’s culture, language, sovereignty, economic viability or freedom. Great for a trip that focused on issues of tribal identity, conservation, language death and our role in shaping the history of a people.
Williams starts by establishing the “pure victim” who is Jesus. While the rest of us are caught in the web of oppressor and oppressed (White Man, black Man, White woman, black woman), Jesus stands apart from these intricacies as the one who, “when he was suffered, did not threaten” (1 Pet). It is this victim who came not to condemn us, but certainly to judge. Jesus is our victim; it is I who put him on the cross. Jesus confronts this in each of us just as he confronted the disciples who returned to their nets. It is in this Jesus that we find the pattern for every other victim of our presents and our histories.
Williams writes, “The formulation, ‘Repent and believe,’ stresses that God’s forgiveness cannot be abstract and general: the authentic word of forgiveness, newness and resurrection is audible when we acknowledge ourselves as oppressors and ‘return’ to our victims in the sense of learning who and where they are” (14). The memory and the wound must be exposed through encounter. Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances reveal the disciples’ failure and desertion. But it is only as Jesus exposes this memory can it be recovered so that the faithless ones are renewed and sent back into this world. As we confront our historicity we too “learn to act and to hope.” The confrontation is a painful process and Jesus pulls no punch with the deserters. “Peter, will you feed my sheep?” Jesus implores of the one who “would never leave” him.
So we find ourselves among the Tlingit and Haida people where only 50 fluent speakers of the language remain, all over 60 years old. We find ourselves among a people wrestling with land rights, tribes mistrusting tribal corporations which the United State hoisted on them to ensure “proper spending.” We encounter the symptoms of cultural trauma: alcoholism, spousal abuse, neglect. We are walking through clear cut tribal-owned forests where white environmentalist sneer as the desperation for native jobs and resources crescendos. We are being handed “Pure Sitka bottled water” and “native Alaskan Chocolate” from Brazil, economic development that our over fishing and global warming have made necessary to replace subsistence living practices.
Here we are.
We heard stories and more stories, sat the feet of tribal elders, watched in hope as young people showed off traditional dances and stories, wept with women whose sons were bullied in school and waded through the heavy complexities of tribal culture clashing, sometimes violently with an encroaching Western world.
But one of the most fascinating exchanges of the week was with a white administrator of Mt Edgcumbe high school, a boarding school established in the 1970’s for students from around Alaska. If your tiny tribal community had no HS, that’s where you went. Native boarding schools used to be places of deculturation, where native students came to be Westernized. The early photos of students from the northern slope, people who had never spoken English at home, who spent the summers at the fishing camps looks just like my mom’s high school year book.
The woman leading us around was very uncomfortable with any questions that hinted at this kind of past. When one of my students (a native King Islander) asked, “what are you doing to help the early generations at Mt E reconcile the past of this school?” she essentially said, “not our problem.” There were overtones of “we don’t see color here” and a lot of wondering about where our questions were coming from. At one point she stopped her tour and unprompted said, “look, we are about looking to the future at this school. This is now a great school! Can’t we just focus on that?”
Resurrection came back to me again:
“No amount of the rhetoric of ’self-transcendence’ can substitute for the recovery of self, the self as the memory of the crucifixion and crucifying: there are no dead selves discarded or buried to be the foundation-stones of new identities, because God is the God who opens up our graves and gives back our past.”
I understand where the Mt E administrator is coming from. We all like to think we can forget about what happened and move on. But at the other end of every moment of colonial complicity there are a people who are deeply exposed to historic cultural trauma. This is happening in Iraq, it happened in the South with black people, it happened on the reservations and it is happening in Alaska.
The hope is that the one we crucified has risen. Jesus tells us to see in his reconciliation to the redeemed disciples hope for our complicity in the crucifixion/crucified. We have to remember the boarding schools, to engage in repatriation, to listen to the Tlingit language. These are acts of our remembering, not on our behalf but as people in the line of those whose choices brought us here, knowing that we have already made the choice for our benefit at the expense of others a hundred thousand times. To refuse this is to “be trapped in fantasy, in blindness to yourselves and to the reality confronting you.”
And somewhere in this painful confrontation our name is called.
One of the best parts of this trip happened when I wasn’t there. Part of our group was visiting a domestic violence shelter in Sitka which is run by this very hip, very inspiring Haida woman. She really loved the group, their questions, their enthusiasm. But one student, Brian, a freshman, really had her captivated. They talked for a long time after one of the women played a traditional song on the drum about emerging from the darkness of the ice cave. It was a celebration song.
After they talked a while the woman told Brian to hold on and she went and got a drum from her office. It was a beautiful drum she made out of hide and ligament. It looked like she spent a lot of time working on it. The woman said it had been in there a long time, that it was “waiting for someone.” The someone was Brian. She told him to take the drum as a reminder of all the he had to offer the world as he worked to address problems like domestic violence. It was a very moving event.
I think this was one of Williams’ “creative protests,” those moments that names the nameless, empower for the work of the Good and restore us to right relationship with those we have historically oppressed. I hope this moment is repeated in all my students, and in me, throughout our encounters with our selves and our past.
“My self is to be given away in love, not because it is worthless, but because it is supremely precious, given to me by the hand of God as he returns as my memory. Out of my story the Spirit of the risen Jesus constitutes my present possibilities of understanding, compassion and self-sharing. My identity as lover in the community in uniquely coloured by the loves which I have already struggled, failed, learned, repented.”
