A Still Life

In addition to planning and planting the garden, throwing open the windows to finally get fresh air and a breeze through our sunny home, and filling up the sandbox for another season of play, I love this season for the hope of flip flops, a sweet Spring dress, and a quiet stroll with My Love. (Few and far between, but I can hold onto hope, right?)

My sister-in-law introduced me to the folks at Shabby Apple who have many lines of women’s and children’s clothing with an added angle of creating clothes in an ethical way that also supports women’s lives around the globe. Each garment comes with a photo and story attached to spotlight Shabby Apple’s work in microcredit. In their own words:

Every $100 donation from Shabby Apple Dresses provides at least 20 women with access to financial services – and the chance to live a life without poverty.

It’s easy to run to Target and spend $20 on a new skirt for Spring likely made by anonymous women working in harsh conditions. I do it and usually feel pretty conflicted about caving into that conspiracy of comfort and convenience. It takes a little more effort and a few more dollars to make a better, more informed choice. It’s a small shift in awareness, but an important awareness that reminds me that each choice we make has the potential to impact people’s life’s in significant ways. When I wear this fun little number for an April wedding I’m performing, I’ll enjoy it for the Spring lovely that it is and for knowing I’ve supported a company that prioritizes more than the bottom line. So go check out Shabby Apple here and here!

In my continued thoughts on social justice, I have kicked around so many attempts at blog posts as follow-ups to this one, but I am struggling to articulate my dilemma. My husband and I bought our house in a diverse neighborhood for a couple of reasons. Honestly, it is the most house for the money we had if we wanted to continue living in the City; we did. Another reason, and one of the reasons we want to live in the City, is that we want to raise our children in community with folks who are different from us: racially, ethnically, socio-economically, educationally. I expected some drug issues, blighted buildings, and the occasional evidence of sex work.

What I didn’t expect was my reaction to having a dramatically poor family move across the street from me. If I were really to go into all of it, this post would be longer than anyone would read. Short version: 1400 sq. ft. home with 12-14 people living in it; 8 children (youngest belongs to a young adolescent); evidence of physical abuse and suspicion of sexual abuse; witnessed animal abuse; social behavior that is deviant from the dominant culture; physical destruction of the property in which they live. And that’s the short version.

For me, this is not about my interaction with people of a different race; I do not believe anything that goes on in that house is because of their race. The trigger for me is my reaction when those for whom I would theoretically have compassion move 50 yards from my front door. After a neighbor posed some questions today on that same social justice post, it prompted this reply from me:

If I encountered them as clergy on a church staff, my instant reaction would be some desire to “help” (as St. Philip’s [a neighborhood church] has). But as one who is living closely (I feel I don’t warrant the title “neighbor” here), I don’t want to see them or know them. I don’t want to get involved. I want the whole situation to disappear. For me, that reaction is deeply problematic because it is so opposed to what I claim to believe.

So I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the contradictions in the language of social justice within my Christian tradition. If we are comfortable suburbanites who never see the ugly, complex nature of poverty because we live in beautiful places yet we profess to care for the poor…is that problematic? Similarly, if we choose to live in places where we will live in relationship with folks who are different from us, what does that really ask of our lives? What do we give up and what do we take on? I don’t have answers but keep refining my questions.

My faith tells me to walk across the street, introduce myself, and attempt to sow kindness and love. Instead, I am angry that this tragic, neglected, unhealthy family is living on my street. And I am angry that so many people of faith choose to live in clean, “safe” neighborhoods where “those people” could never live. For people of faith who claim to prioritize justice, is caring for the poor simply about running some programs in a church and giving money to important causes? Or is it about a transformed life that mandates change in the lives of the wealthy as well as for the sake of the poor?

Again, I’m still refining questions.

Oh, Glenn Beck. For all his insanity and cruelty and darkness and pure evil and foolishness and stunning wrongness, the guy did manage to shine some light on the term “social justice” this year. So G.B. and Jim Wallis went back-and-forth with their double-dog-dares on what God really wants and who God really is and why social justice does or does not have a place in the purpose of the Church. Wallis wrote posts like this one on Huffington Post or through Sojourners’ own site (whose ”mission is to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world.”).

For many years now, I have considered myself a social justice kind of Christian. For me, to speak of Gospel means to speak of hope for transformed life here and now. To work for justice, then, is to live and move in ways that do seek justice, inspire hope, and move toward the kind of transformation that Sojourners’ mission statement articulates. Wallis lays out some of this in another post from his blog in response to one of Beck’s tirades:

Serving the poor is a fundamental spiritual requirement of faith, but challenging the conditions that create poverty in the first place is also part of biblical social justice.

Listen to what we teach: you start by practicing social justice in your own life, then you act for social justice in your family, your congregation, your community, in the most local way possible.

We start with God, not government (remember your diagram Glenn); we start with changing lives, not policies; we always start on the home front in our families, congregations, and communities; and only address public policies when we can’t do it ourselves. That’s Christian social justice, Glenn, a passion for the gospel and the poor– not for totalitarian government.

But most of this took place three months ago, and our culture’s attention span is far too short for anyone to continue this discussion a full 90-something days later, right! Why am I thinking about it today? I’ll save some details for a separate post. The short is: I’m in a mess of a situation in my neighborhood that leaves me feeling like I’m on Glenn Beck’s side of things. And I hate that. My family lives in a fairly diverse community that’s not rapidly gentrifying but is, instead, mostly just a bunch of different kinds of folks living together. There have been some really amazing moments sprinkled amidst a few harder ones, but it has mostly been a great place to live.

But now there’s a family living across the street from me that embodies the kind of folks who have been systemically squashed by our culture. I find myself asking, “How in the world does one seek justice or peace in this situation?” I also find myself wondering what kinds of changes one should hope for as, as Wallis puts it, a “social justice Christian”? Am I really saying I want to see transformed individuals, churches, and world to be more like me or the way I think life should be? Huh. Some uncomfortable questions to explore.

As I said the other day, I have at least half a dozen posts swirling in my head from my nine day trip. It was part annual conference and part family visit with a dash of vacation. My mother flew up from Alabama to drive the first leg of the trip with me, and she lovingly kept the kids for me while I participated in the meeting. After a few days, she flew back home, then my husband flew to meet us. We then drove across another state to meet up with his folks who had driven and flown to the family home near Aiken, South Carolina. That’s a lot of miles by car and by plane. That’s a lot of gas to fuel those cars and those planes.

As we drove the hours and hours on four different interstates, I watched the big-rigs drive by. These giant trucks weave in and out of traffic, they have special detour stations, gigantic fueling depots, and even their own special billboards marketing to their on-the-road sexual impulses. As I continue to grieve for the Gulf, my home, I watched these trucks and deeply felt my participation in oil dependence as each rig passed. Clearly, I am only willing to modify my life in minor ways to decrease the amount of petroleum I wittingly consume. I am trucking along on those highways just like the giant containers of mostly useless and unnecessary items that are passing by on those same roads.

My Love, the environmental conservationist, and I talked about this irony as we drove the 10 hours home in our non-hybrid (but decent MPG) car. So many people see only the overt ways we participate in oil consumption and give little thought to the subtle ways oil consumption creeps into our daily lives. Friends often roll their eyes when I start talking about the products I won’t buy, the distance I won’t drive around town, the suburbs I try to avoid and wish not to contribute my tax dollars, and the fact that I willingly pay more to do my shopping all in one location. This is not an exercise in self-righteousness. I really am trying to get at something, well…righteous.

Lauren Winner was one of the keynotes speakers at the conference I attended, and several years ago she wrote a great little book called Mudhouse Sabbath. In it, she connects her Jewish roots to her practice of Christianity as she reflects on lessons learned in various Jewish practices. My observations on the road, not unique to this trip but magnified by the images in my head of the BP oil geyser, took me back to her chapter on kashrut/fitting food. Winner is linking faith food practices to Barbara Kingsolver’s work and writes (emphasis mine):

Why is Kingsolver so committed to this culinary calendar? Because shipping food from greenhouses around the world is America’s second-largest expenditure of oil. (The first, not surprisingly, is our daily reliance on cars.) As Kingsolver explains, ‘Even if you walk or bike to the store, if you come home with bananas from Ecuador, tomatoes from Holland, cheese from France, and artichokes from California, you have guzzled some serious gas.’ To eat seasonally (and locally) is to enact a politics of reduced consumption.

If I drive 30 minutes across town because I have some great coupons that save me a little cash, I need to be mindful that there are embedded costs I’m not considering. Am I driving alone in that car all those miles? What costs are hidden in the products I desire? And I’m only talking about oil consumption here. We could get detoured in conversations about car exhaust and waste, fairly traded and fairly grown products, and assorted other veins of equally important justice issues.

There’s always more I know I can do, and there are plenty of contradictory moments and purchases about my life. I admire my friends, a family of 5, who share one car and do a heckuva lot of walking. I admire my youngest brother who’s spending a few months studying with the good folks at Polyface Farms to learn first-hand about sustainable agriculture and healing the land. And if you’ve read much of this blog, you know I have great love for Rev. Billy and his choir who are presently raising funds to continue their fight against mountain top removal in Appalachia. At the very, very least, these friends and not-yet-friends have crept into my brain and set up camp. They are with me on the road as I ask new questions and embrace different ways of moving and being in this world. Always new questions to ask. Always new ways to discover.

I am from the Gulf Coast, just two hours east of New Orleans and a quick drive from shrimping communities still reshaped by Hurricane Katrina. Some of my best and favorite memories of home revolve around the water. Whether the hope of Jubilee on the Bay, fresh shrimp and crab at the dinner table, falling asleep on a friend’s wharf, watching my parents slurp oysters on the half shell, or summer days spent at Gulf Shores and Dauphin Island, the water forever speaks to me of home.

I don’t have coherent words to articulate my feelings about BP & Halliburton’s oil spill in my Gulf. I cannot imagine it filling with oil. Savitri D wrote this week of the Gulf oil spill, “I weep. I get angry. I want to look away, I can’t look away.” My anger is so raw and almost paralyzing. I know my own addiction to oil is to blame. Yet my raw, pulsing fury for BP is more than I can stomach. Fewer safety measures means more bucks for big corporations and executives living far away from us back-woods, shoeless Southerners, right? If Massey & JP Morgan Chase can rape the mountains of Appalachia, then it should come as no surprise that BP or Exxon or any of their ilk can and will wade right out into my home waters and destroy them, too.

Right now I’m still too lost in the anger and disbelief of it all to move onto how I will respond. I want BP to suffer and pay. Do you know that they’re already trying to pay us off?! My instinct is to fight. Don’t they know about the University of Alabama School of Law? Surely they’ll discover that my home will fight for its oak trees, and we damn well plan to fight for the water that shows us life, gives us life, shapes our life. But that rage needs some reason and some rest. Better words will come. Clearer words will come. Sadly, I know they will not suffer. This is but a blip on their quarterly statements that will all smooth out with bonuses for all. Truly, it grieves me in a way I cannot describe.

I am enjoying this Spring; my soul needed it. We are playing in the soil just a little each day all around our home. We are learning how to grow from seed and how not to grow from seed. We are anticipating a bumper sunflower crop in addition to more zinnia, a growing perennial bed, reorganized herb garden, and the veggies awaiting planting this week.

Last week my schedule was overflowing with the goodness that was Virginia Baptist Women in Ministry’s annual Feast: festival of image, table, and word. Oh, to gather with so many lovely people was gift and nourishment and rest all at once.

Today my first post as a guest blogger is up on the new BWIM blog. I am excited to dream with passionate, creative women about new ways to share life thoughts, challenges, encouragement, and fresh ideas with each other. What does it look like to be a Baptist woman in ministry in this day? Why do organizations like BWIM and VBWIM matter for my life? The new blog offers a great answer.

Tomorrow I am leading my church’s monthly women’s group in a look at Earth Day and care for all creation. There are so many great resources available, and I am having such fun thinking of ways to connect this and this and this.

Oh, there’s so much more, but that’s enough for your and my reading pleasure. Happy Tuesday to you.

I keep plugging away on this writing project, and it’s fun to study and write for Advent 2010.  The words before me this week: 

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; 
       from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him— 
       the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, 
       the Spirit of counsel and of power, 
       the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD -
(Isaiah 11.1-2)

I’m thinking a lot today about this image of God’s Spirit resting on a leader who births the values of the kingdom of God.  The hovering, creative breath from Genesis 1 continues to create and inspire, even shaping a leadership marked by wisdom, justice, righteousness, and faithfulness.  

What would that look like in my lifetime?  What would a Spirit-breathed, justice-marked leader look like?  How would that leader work for peace?  What does it even mean to make peace in so many places of war?  

The world as it is and the world as it should be.  It seems I heard a leader talk about that dichotomy just a couple of years ago.  I still want someone to show me how to get to the should-be world.  I’ll help make it happen, I’ll roll up my sleeves and get to work.  Today, though, I’d just settle for the inspiration of that Breath on my neck as I dream and study and imagine.

I have many thoughts brewing this morning about: this year’s Christmas with an almost-four-year-old, the pornographic toy catalogs that raid my mail chute each day to seduce our imaginations away from the mystery of the Christ child’s birth, the failure of an attempt to express my hopes and feelings to some family who find me eccentric and over-the-top for challenging the culture’s ways.  

Rev. Billy blogged in the wee hours before heading out to witness before the crowds at Macy’s as he and the choir testify to another way of experiencing the upcoming holiday season: time not stuff, love not plastic, less not more.  While I often write and preach about the influence of the dominant culture on our lives and faith, he refers to the push of the demon monoculture.  It’s a push and swell to move us all into one homogenized mold of stuff stuff stuff same same same–from the big box stores to the uniform, McMansion suburbs.

I traveled to Appalachia almost two years ago and spent about twelve days going up and down mountains with a group of seminarians to learn about the unique culture of western North Carolina.  I read about snake handlers and mountain religion, I anticipated folk art and handmade wears, and I imagined standing witness to great poverty as we encountered folks our nation used and forgot.  That Appalachia still exists, but it has satellite television.  Truly, the demon monoculture started creeping up the mountain through the air.  As my traveling companion and I drove up and up and up and around the bend, nearing our destination we saw it.  There, nestled against rocks, founded on land that was blasted flat with dynamite, was a Super Wal-Mart. The demon monoculture had climbed the mountain and unleashed its discount prices.  

Our immersion trip became one not of understanding the old ways, the preserved culture, but of asking how the not-from-heres had literally and metaphorically changed the landscape of an entire region. In other words, how was the demon monoculture erasing the existence of a people?

Rather than resting in warm beds or visiting with family over coffee, way too many Americans spent last night in line for cheap stuff they don’t need so they came be more like the person across the cul-de-sac.  My family is observing Buy Nothing Day today; a tiny push back against the lure of shiny and new in hopes we might be saved. Won’t you join us?

After I watched the film What Would Jesus Buy? with my husband, I became quite intrigued by the preacher-activist-evangelist-performer Reverend Billy.  In recent weeks, I have started following him on Twitter and have even joined The Church of Life After Shopping for their Sunday Hour of Power (really a half-hour of power) with Rev. Billy and his wife, Savitri D.  The more I learn about Rev. Billy and Savitri, the more fascinated I am by their methods and message.  The Rev. just ended a run for Mayor of New York in which he came in fourth of eleven candidates.  I so admire his ability to speak boldly to power and the unique voices he and Savitri offer to and against our dominant culture.  As with this post today, the Rev. speaks poetically not simply against consumerism but for (in the language of my faith tradition) abundant life.

Perhaps I am fascinated by this pair because of my own interests in the language and ways of consumption.  I look at the Christian church in the United States and am often sickened and saddened by our unquestioning loyalty to the dominant culture.  Rather than instinctively understanding that our loyalties belong to a kingdom not seen, we all-too-often march in step with the unimaginative rhythm of the marketplace.  

In preaching on forgiveness and reconciliation today, I noted: it is all too easy for us 21^st century Americans to look at Jesus and grace as just another commodity.  I HAVE forgiveness, I HAVE salvation. They’re MINE, and it’s your responsibility to go get YOURS.  That’s a sad, unfortunate manifestation of modern thinking in our culture.  We’ve missed the stuff of Jesus’ teaching when we think the language of faith, the Way that Jesus talked about, is just something else to possess and consume rather than a path for our transformation.  

I’m fascinated by movements that push against fierce autonomy and mindless consumption, advocating for interdependence in community and simpler life.  I’m also increasingly examining my faith tradition for ways in which we’ve lost our collective imagination and ways in which our practices and theology have been polluted by a toxic culture of plastic consumerism.  I want to find and use my own bold, prophetic voice to advocate for change, to shine light on places of injustice, to inspire and foster imagination, and to rediscover who we as a people (not just a smattering of individuals) could really be if we lived more in community and less on our own.  I am thankful on this day for discovering good folks who are doing this good work.

Like too many citizens of this world, I failed to observe Monday as the International Day of Peace. Perhaps these folks and these folks and this guy, like me, will remember to pause, to shift and breathe differently. Anne Frank best articulated what I truly believe in my core, even on days when all seems lost.

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us, too, I can feel the suffering of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.