Magazine
EVERY DAY, BEFORE the coronavirus had us sheltering in place, I drove by a Confederate monument on the state capitol grounds near my home in Raleigh, N.C. It was unveiled in 1895 by the granddaughter of Stonewall Jackson, Julia Jackson Christian. Its 75-foot-tall granite column is a fixture of the landscape as people walk past on their way to work or sit on benches beneath its shadow, the shaft marked with the words “to our Confederate dead.”
The monument is strategically placed to assure maximum visibility. Everything about it is purposeful and planned. It makes a claim on the space—claiming the ground, the air, the power of public land with a particular version of history.
“To our confederate dead.” But the question that burns on the stone: Who does “our” represent?
Injustice, idolatry, and repentance
IN 2019, CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., was still reeling from the August 2017 Unite the Right weekend during which counterprotester Heather Heyer was killed by a white nationalist. Two local Methodist pastors—Rev. Isaac Collins and Rev. Phil Woodson—decided to gather community members for a weekly Bible study aimed at reinterpreting the Confederate monuments that mark Charlottesville’s public space. They called it “Swords into Plowshares: What the Bible says about injustice, idolatry, and repentance.”
The inspiration came from Jalane Schmidt, a public historian and religious studies professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who has co-led truth-telling tours of the monuments since 2018. Schmidt suggested Collins take up the work of theological interrogation of the history embedded in these monuments and how this history lives on in the churches and Christians in their city.
IT WAS COLD — even for northwest Iowa in November. And I was late.
I thought I could make up time if I took the back way, a route I’d driven many times before. But the one-lane bridge across the Rock River was out and, judging by the abandoned construction site, it hadn’t been open for a while. I had moved away four years earlier and was a little behind on local traffic patterns.
To locals, the region surrounding the Big Sioux River drainage basin—stretching across parts of Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota—is known as “Siouxland.” To most Americans, this is flyover country.
I grew up in Siouxland, crisscrossing the region for family gatherings, 4-H horse shows, and trail rides, but I knew my time there was limited. Through TV, I learned about life in the big city and what the rest of the country thought of hicks, hillbillies, and hayseeds like me. I learned that to be successful, I had to leave. And so, like many of my classmates, I left as soon as I could.
I went to college in Minneapolis and pursued a career in media; after graduation I spent time in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C., working on shows such as Monday Night Football and Good Morning America.
But on the morning of May 12, 2008, everything changed: Hundreds of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided an Iowa meatpacking plant, arresting 389 community members. At the time, I was a media producer for Sojourners, so I traveled to Iowa to cover the humanitarian response organized by Sister Mary McCauley, parish administrator of the local Catholic church.
Within hours of the raid, Sister McCauley had the entire community of 2,269 residents organized. When I interviewed her a few days later, the church was full of children still waiting to be reunited with their families. The church’s fellowship hall was filled with clothes, meals, and supplies for the children; community volunteers worked through legal paperwork on behalf of those detained. In a moment of complete chaos, community members rose to the challenge and stood together with their neighbors. It was at this point I realized the power of rural organizing. I was hooked.
Leveraging the gifts of the community
IN MARCH, AS the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus erupted around the world, rural hospitals in the U.S. faced a particularly grim reality: Like hospitals across the nation, they faced a shortage of personal protective equipment such as N-95 masks and gowns. But unlike their urban and suburban counterparts, rural hospitals were already struggling. According to a 2017 study, 41 percent of rural hospitals operate at a loss, a result of decreasing Medicare reimbursements, more patients with underlying conditions, and fewer patients with private insurance. “We’re stretched thin as it is,” one hospital CEO told the Washington Post. “We’ll improvise and make it work however we can.”
As cases of COVID-19 skyrocketed, I thought about McCauley and all the organizers like her that I’ve met in the 12 years since the Postville immigration raid. Many of the best community organizers I know would never give themselves that title. They don’t work for a campaign or an organization. Often, they’re just everyday folks who believe their community is worth fighting for.
IMMERSED IN THE enforced sabbath of shelter-in-place, it can be difficult to focus on anything other than the coronavirus and its consequences and to seek a return to “normal.” But it’s becoming clear that the pandemic is one of those rare, epoch-defining moments. When we finally come out the other side, the ways we interact with each other will likely be changed. Perhaps, more deeply aware of the brevity and fragility of life, we will take less for granted in our relationships, reassessing what is important and how we use our limited time on this earth.
MUCH OF THE country is still on lockdown to save countless lives by slowing the spread of COVID-19. The economic consequences for families, and especially for the most vulnerable people, are incalculable and rising by the day. The U.S. has the most confirmed cases of the disease in the world, with a staggering death toll. All of us have friends and loved ones who are sick or who have died, and hospitals in many parts of the country are under enormous strain.
It’s critical that—even as we stand apart from each other for our physical health—we find new ways to stay together for our mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Our physical health requires social distancing in a pandemic, but maintaining our spiritual health means we can’t let that lead to social isolation, especially for the most vulnerable. Even as we live more separated, we must find new ways to be together.
Turning from physical contact with others must not cause us to turn away from each other, but rather turn to each other in better, deeper, and healthier ways. How can we stay in even closer contact, over our phones and social media, with friends, family, and especially people who are alone; see what they need; and help them not feel so isolated and afraid? The answers must stem from active, creative, and innovative faith that leads to action.
IN 1998, I was 24 years old and had just been hired as an assistant to Harvey Weinstein, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Within two months, my new boss attempted to rape me in a hotel at the Venice Film Festival.
I wanted to report Weinstein to his superiors; instead I was silenced by an egregious and restrictive nondisclosure agreement that prevented me from speaking to family, friends, doctors, lawyers, or therapists about what happened. I was imprisoned in this silence for 20 years.
Two years after The New York Times and The New Yorker broke the Harvey Weinstein story, I broke my nondisclosure agreement. I also published an op-ed in The New York Times: “Harvey Weinstein Told Me He Liked Chinese Girls.”
I was deluged with messages of support from the Asian American community, from the Christian community, and a few from the intersection of the two. One message from a member of my home church stopped me in my tracks: “I’m so sorry you felt unable to share your struggles with us, back in the day. I wish we had been able to pray with you.”
Nondisclosure agreement aside, could I have come to my church for support at the time of the assault?
HOW HAS AMERICA honored its avowed commitment to human rights over the last four years? Fellow nations will consider that question later this year during the Universal Periodic Review, a quadrennial evaluation by the U.N. Human Rights Council to which all member states are subject.
The review, scheduled for this spring before postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, promises a thorough accounting of U.S. progress and failings on human rights at home. Given the Trump administration’s withdrawal from global processes designed to safeguard human rights and its dubious moves to redefine the scope of human rights protections, this review is vital.
Central to human rights and our modern conception of justice is the idea of equality. No one is above the law. All should be treated fairly, without bias or favor—a value reflected in the biblical juridical instruction to not “be partial to the poor or defer to the rich” (Leviticus 19:15).
This principle of equality animates the review, a uniquely democratic process in which every nation can speak truth to every other and none is exempt. “Universality, impartiality, objectivity, and non-selectivity” are guiding principles. With no regard for American “exceptionalism,” the UPR’s egalitarian structure aims to blunt the politicized use of human rights, in the U.S. and elsewhere, against adversaries alone.
WE DON'T KNOW the full extent of the coronavirus pandemic. We know of the many who have died as a direct result of infection. We know that whole countries have turned on a dime to shield themselves from the shadow of death as it passes over. We don’t know where it will lead.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, that paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.” Solnit reminds us that disasters and plagues sometimes signal liberation.
COVID-19 has forced the human community into mourning. In our retreat from the work-a-day world, it has imposed a global sabbath and Jubilee. Staring into this “cruel scourge,” as John of Ephesus described the Justinian plague in the year 545 C.E., can we also see that another world is possible?
The Jubilee legislation found in Leviticus 25 lays out a vision for “social and economic reform unsurpassed in the ancient Near East,” according to Robert K. Gnuse. The Jubilee laws declared that Yahweh was the rightful owner of all the earth, and therefore all Israelites—rich and poor—have an equal right to its abundance, within limits. In an economic system based on land and its produce, this was a radical transformation. The legislation undercut wealth disparities by preventing land speculation and by mandating debt forgiveness and interest-free loans. Finally, it ordered the release of the enslaved and those in debtors’ prison.
IN MY OWN interreligious instruction, I have become aware of the lack of discussion of Indigenous traditions. The very way knowledge is conceived of is at play here. Margaret Kovach articulates an Indigenous epistemology in her essay “Emerging from the Margins” as “fluid, non-linear, and relational. Knowledge is transmitted through stories that shape shift in relation to the wisdom of the storyteller at the time of the telling.”
As I have engaged Indigenous communities and scholarly voices in my work, I have sought to:
Bust up the category of religion. By this I mean I try to interrogate how interreligious encounters define religion and who is invited to the table, or what parts of a person we invite.
Since I teach at a Christian seminary, religion as defined by doctrinal and scriptural sources takes precedence. I found that many of my Christian students—for instance, those from Tonga—had a deep connection to Indigenous practices woven into their identity. But at seminary this aspect was reduced to “culture” and not given a place at the table. I learned to ask students to self-identify and opened the space to recognize that all forms of their spiritual practice were valid sources of scholarship. They were not asked to cancel or erase parts of their spiritual practice that were considered by others as less important.
MY GRANDMOTHER CAME to me in a dream. It was the first day of the COVID-19 pandemic and I knew I would not be able to visit her. My daughter had just come down with pneumonia; I did not want to put my grandmother at risk. When she came to me in my dream, through the front window, covered in a thin curtain, I could see her shadow as she walked onto my porch. As I neared the door, through the window I could see that she did not knock but instead walked over to the flowers on my porch. They were a gift from her to me. She touched each one and leaned in close as if in conversation with them. She never turned to knock on my door. I woke up.
I called my grandmother to recount the dream. She told me she had hoped I was taking care of the plants. Ruda (rue), sábila (aloe vera), and Corona de Cristo (Christ plant) adorn my front porch. I’ve since added rosemary, jade, and a few others. Care of the earth has always been imperative. In our current times, survival will depend on how we treat what God created to meet our basic needs.
EARLIER THIS YEAR, I almost did not finish writing the sermon I was scheduled to preach at a special Martin Luther King Jr. Day Social Justice Shabbat service. Usually, I am able to bring sermons to a close without problem; this time, I struggled. Really struggled. Instead of focusing thematically on racism, poverty, war, or any number of issues King spoke out against, I had decided to preach on fear. I felt called to name fear as the root issue beneath so many others, something we struggle with individually and collectively. Fear of scarcity, fear of the unknown, fear of the “other”: the immigrant, the unarmed black person, the queer, the Sikh, the Muslim, the Jew, or the white person now encountering you in your queer, black, immigrant, brown, Muslim, Sikh, or Jewish body.
I found that once I started being honest about the fears we hold and the fears we face, I could barely turn the corner, in a manner of speaking, toward hope.
Eventually, I was able to theologically pivot my sermon and conclude positively. However, that experience of being spiritually stumped with writer’s block said more to me than any happy ending ever will. Rather than yielding answers, my sermon gave me questions, which continue to resonate in the midst of a global pandemic.
“MOST OF OUR volunteers are senior citizens, but in early March we had to ask them not to come. At the same time, phone calls to the church were increasing: ‘Is your food pantry still happening?’ We didn’t know what we were going to do, so we put it out on Instagram to the community, like, ‘Hey, we need volunteers, and if you’re not immunocompromised, please consider coming out and helping.’ And we had a great response.
We’ve served record numbers of people at our food pantry, and our volunteer base is not from the church; it’s young hipsters, real estate agents, and people who are themselves food insecure but are wanting to pay it forward. We can’t give out hot meals anymore, because if we do, people naturally gather and congregate. The whole thing has become a lot less personal. While we’re serving a lot of people, there’s not as much laughter.
CONFESSION: I HAVE a bone to pick with the word “curated” this month. I’m finding that the word, while generally useful in art contexts, let me down during Lent this year.
Let me explain.
“Curation” evolved from the word “curare” (to take care of) but, as it exists now, covers anything from making playlists to putting on a painting exhibition. I don’t have an issue with the chameleonic nature of the term, though I know it’s beginning to vex actual museum curators. What is difficult for me to wrap my mind around is the fussiness that curation implies.
It’s synonymous with caring for objects and, subsequently, caring for an audience by displaying the objects in an interesting and informative way. But, as a representation of spiritual wilderness, Lent seems diametrically opposed to the idea of a carefully considered experience. In Lent, nothing is planned. This year, I simply showed up in the metaphorical desert and started walking.
Lanyards and Legislation
Camp Jened, a former summer program for teens with disabilities, is the focus of the new documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. Co-directed by an attendee of the camp, with an overview of the relationships and activism that began there, Crip Camp is immensely prophetic and empowering. Netflix.
THE HYMN “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God” is one of my favorites in the Episcopal tradition, usually sung on All Saints Day. It concludes with the line, “For the saints of God are just folk like me / And I mean to be one, too.” It’s a reminder of the people in our lives—living and otherwise—who are everyday saints, not canonized but important in our formation.
In Dick Johnson Is Dead, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson celebrates her father, one such everyday saint. Dick isn’t actually dead, but he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. How much of his life remains isn’t certain, but Johnson is determined to show him just how well he’s loved by trying to rid him of some of his fear of death.
Johnson does this in a darkly funny way that’s true to her dad’s mischievous streak: She collaborates with him on a series of staged scenes depicting his death from a variety of accidents. Dick is crushed by an air conditioner, falls down stairs, is hit by a construction worker’s nail-filled board, and more. “Everyone dies,” Johnson reminds us, even the people we love the most.
I WAS GOING through a period of grieving when a friend in my St. Stephens’ family told me about a centering prayer/meditation group that met Thursday afternoons at the church. I had never heard the term “centering prayer,” but I had tried meditation a number of times. “I’m no good at that,” I explained, but her quiet kindness was persuasive. Hey, maybe there was something in it for me, too. I thought I’d give it a try.
As I attended more sessions and read more and more about centering prayer, I realized that my initial reaction revealed what was impeding growth. Being good at something, succeeding at it, was how the hardworking, achievement-oriented me had (mis)understood this spiritual practice. That hardy, eager little self—going also by the name of ego—had served me well to get to where I had gotten, but it was often a handicap in the territory I was beginning (cautiously) to enter with my Thursday afternoon group.
I recall at one point complaining, as little selves are wont to do, that I felt like a too-large Alice crammed into a small box when I meditated. I was right. My robust ego, with whom I was overly identified, would never make it through the narrow meditation door and into the beautiful garden. No wonder I had been baffled by phrases such as “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Really? Wouldn’t Jesus want us to be rich in spirit? Poverty empties us for the hugeness of God. I had to let go.
LIKE MOST POETS, she is largely unknown, but 97-year-old Catherine de Vinck can live with that. She has a dozen published volumes to her credit, a collection titled The Confluence of Time that she is working to publish, and the love of Christians drawn to the sometimes-shaky Jacob’s ladder of contemplation and social action. Thomas Merton was among her readers.
“Nothing stands still long enough / for us to find the first imprint / to grasp the pure moment of origin. / How then can we see the world as it is,” she writes in her poem “Ever-Changeless/Even-Changing.”
THERE'S A THEORY in peacebuilding that it can take as long to heal from a conflict as the conflict itself lasted. Depending on whom you ask, the conflict in Northern Ireland lasted 800 years, 400 years, or 30 years. The Good Friday Agreement officially ended the violence in 1998. Any way you spin it, this place isn’t very far along the healing journey.
The violence here lasted so long that it became almost normal. In my last taxi ride during grad school, the driver picked me up on the Antrim Road. “Do you like living here?” I asked. “I liked it better in the good old days—20 to 30 years ago,” he said. “It weren’t that violent. It were a pretty stable time, other than the bombs and guns and murders.”
I asked him if he’d been affected much by the violence. “No, not too much,” he said. “I mean, there was the time I saw my brother walking down the Falls Road, and a black taxi pulled up, rolled down its window, and blew his head off. I remember seeing my mother trying to put his brains back in.”
IN HER LATEST book, writer D.L. Mayfield welcomes readers on a journey of seeing. This essay collection weaves an exploration of the desires embedded in the American Dream with stories of Mayfield’s own social justice conversion and portraits of her Portland neighborhood.
These narratives of how colonialism, capitalism, racism, and consumerism store themselves in privileged American hearts invite self-reflection. Mayfield challenges the American Dream’s toxic individualism, dividing the book into four themes: affluence, autonomy, safety, and power. “We do not care that people will suffer and die,” she writes, “due to our own desire for safety.”
Mayfield reflects on her own awakening and exposure to xenophobic faith communities, where she began to have “serious problems reconciling the Suffering Servant with a conservative religious agenda.” The text also walks her readers through the gentrification of her neighborhood and how her community is affected by travel bans, the U.S. education system, and other aspects of local and national politics.
(“Oh I’ll leap up. Who pulls me down?”—
“Doctor Faustus,” by Christopher Marlowe)
Now can I join this dance?
See, I am thinner than vacuum.
I can kneel toward the sun
at the very angle of prayer
and feel the counterpoint
pulse through my veins.
EARLY ON IN my training for hospital chaplaincy the spiritual care director asked each student to choose a biblical role model of faith. I chose the Apostle Paul. It wasn’t an obvious choice for someone raised as a feminist and aware of the damage done to women through interpretation of Paul’s letters and those attributed to him.
Despite that, I love the way Paul’s faith and humanity shine through his words. Even in his letter to the Romans, one of Paul’s last and most-polished, we have a sense of his limitations. He mixes confidence and humility, offering an unflinching look at sin: collective sin and the sin that is particular to each of us, broken beloveds of God.
I need Paul’s writing on sin so that I don’t grow too self-righteous. When Paul writes that we received God’s grace “while we were still weak” (Romans 5:6), I am reminded that I can’t claim righteousness before God on my own. It is only when we have an honest estimation of ourselves and our capabilities that we can engage in justice work without moralizing or neglecting to set good boundaries.
Taking sin seriously means not only fighting back against oppression but taking a hard look at myself. In my feminism, am I aware of and working to end the ways misogyny particularly oppresses black, brown, Asian, and Indigenous women, as well as queer and trans people? Do I put my own concerns first or truly seek liberation for all people?
June 7
With Us Always
Genesis 1:1-2, 4; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20
READING THE CREATION story in Genesis, I imagine myself deep inside a dark place, with the breath of God like a gust of wind. I recall James Weldon Johnson’s poem “The Creation,” especially as it is read by James Earl Jones in a short film featuring animated clay art by Joan C. Gratz. The darkness through which God births the world is “blacker than a hundred midnights / down in a cypress swamp.” From that rich blackness comes the countless colors of the myriad creatures that dwell on the earth.