Image of sticker of Octavia Butler from Meow Wolf Denver
This is the second letter in my series of letters to those who have most influences my theology and world view.
Dear adrienne,
I recently learned that I am not liberal. What the fuck?!? Turns out, I am a radical. Okay, to be more accurate, my heart and soul are radical and I am working my ass off to get the rest of me into alignment. I am untangling myself from notions like individualism, but as Maggie Osama notes, “[d]eeply ingrained behaviors, standard operating procedures and habits can be incredibly hard to break, even after a person’s heart has been transformed.” I have a life-long relationship with activism, but my own distorted concept of individualism has kept me from engaging, like you do, in true organizing for people power.
My life, which is filled with family, school, work, and activism, continues to be a testament to the cultural message: your worth comes from your productivity. Or as Rebecca Parker calls it, “Homo economicus”, as defined by capitalism, what she calls “the dominant religion of our day.” I joke that I need to be called “human doing” rather than human being. I swear to you that the values of unscheduled contemplative time and pleasure are valuable in my heart and faith, but not always in my actual life. I hate that I am still complicit in perpetuating the systemically oppressive idea of how our culture values worth. Dr. Julie Todd says it all:
I buy into the system that destroys life when I allow it to rob me
of my own fundamental, essential humanness and divinity. I allow
this when, in my incessant activity to change the world and confront
destructive systems, I make no room for the fundamentals of being human
and resting in God. I virtually reflect the economic and political systems I
claim to oppose by replicating its life-and-spirit denying character:
work-produce-accomplish, work-produce, accomplish. A radically spiritual
time and space actively cultivates that which hopefully becomes truly
socially radical– the spirit of creativity, resistance, confrontation, innovation,
subversion, transformation.”
These years in seminary are a testament to how challenging it is to live into our deepest held values within a toxic culture. I must find ways to serve the world through means other than sheer productivity. For ministry is not just about what we do, it is about how we show up. And as Rebecca Parker reminds us, “Love understood as self-sacrifice can harm life.”
This capitalistic grind is violence. As Bray McNatt says, “we have to be conscious of our own woundedness first...ministers are called to do things that challenge what hurts us most.” Even though this challenge involves personal work, you are one of the reasons I now believe that it cannot be done in isolation. It requires collaboration, support, and accountability. While dauntingly large issues dominate the landscape, there remains this small but mighty certainty that my real contribution towards healing this world must start to include the micro level and as you say, “I think this is some of the hardest work...it’s about deep shifts in our own way of being.” You are the one who inspired me to ask, “what would I be doing with my time and energy if I made decisions based on a feeling of deep, erotic, orgasmic yes? “
Your idea that “if the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression,” challenges me. I not only see “opponents” in colonial structures, consumer culture greed., but I have spent most of my life battling with my own body, creating more violence by perpetuating misogynistic, homophobic, and ableist damage. After all, “there exists frightening evidence that anti-body, anti-touch, anti-sensual attitudes are strongly correlated with high levels of adult violence of all kinds.” My distrust of my own body is deeply rooted in the many ways it has experienced violence, but why the hell am I continuing the patterns?
Thank you for extending my understanding of how I want to move through this world. I hold Emergent Strategies and Pleasure Activism as grounding for how I want to engage in building community and shedding old coping mechanisms that no longer serve me. I see new forms of resistance to violence through a love that exists in and for myself and hope that shift will open new ways for me to engage in my communities.
Love,
Beth
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