This is the week in the Christian calendar when we remember Jesus starting his week on “Palm Sunday” riding into Jerusalem as a form of political protest against the Roman empire’s own procession on the other side of the city who were reminding Israelites that even though they were celebrating Passover, a holy reminder that God had liberated them, that they should not get any grand ideas. However, the same crowd that celebrated Jesus as a conquering hero on Palm Sunday encouraged Rome to kill him on Friday. And of course they did. We do the same thing. We rally around a leader who says, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” We rally around a leader who says, “I am but a humble servant; it will take all of us to effect transformation and liberation.” And when s/he tries to let us lead, we call for his or her head.

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Note: This is a devotional piece I wrote for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in October 2010. It uses some church-y references that I’m happy to qualify if anyone wants it “translated.” :)

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4:18-19, NIV

We’ve been talking about the joys of missional ministry in this region for a year now. I want to complicate it a little today.

Thirteen percent of African American men (1.4 million) are not able to vote due to felony convictions.

What could this possibly have to do with the church? more »

Two things happened today that have me asking the question: how do we foster up healthy conversation about issues on which we differ greatly?

The first thing was a fairly frivolous issue. I’m at the PANAAWTM conference right now (Pacific and Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry) and a fun and spry woman from Arizona brought some political/religious tee shirts. One tee shirt delighted me so much I posted a picture of it on facebook: “Patriarchy means never having to say you’re sorry!” A person from a local church in my region whom I like very much was really offended by the shirt, feeling that I was attacking all men. Most of you reading this post know that I’m actually quite fond of men and consider them (most of them) allies in the struggle to end oppression. But because our society doesn’t foster up clear distinctions about how to define terms, my valued colleague didn’t see the quote criticizing a system that robs both men and women of the fullness of their humanity; he saw me criticizing men. That may be because of a negative experience he’s had where he’s been unfairly attacked for not respecting women, or it may be that he is a big fan of Rush Limbaugh and really believes that feminists are trying to rob men of power that is rightfully theirs. Either way, he clearly experienced me as antagonistic rather than playful, and I may not be able to have a meaningful conversation with him now on that complex issue. But that’s largely about the dangers of facebook and its inability to foster complex conversation.

The other issue troubles me more. When the PANAAWTM conference came up, I was discouraged by some people in leadership within my denomination from inviting women from our first generation Asian American churches to attend, because those churches are historically fairly conservative politically and theologically, while PANAAWTM has served over the years as a haven for cutting edge progressive Asian American women studying religion, whether they are first generation or fifth. I argued back about why it might be lifegiving and that I would only invite women I thought were feminist in some fashion, but then I did nothing to follow up.

My mentor and friend JoAnne, did, however. And she invited wonderful, amazing women. But she invited exactly the type of women I had been discouraged from inviting: women from a church that had almost left the denomination because our denomination allowed churches to be inclusive of gay/lesbian leadership if those individual churches so chose.

I experience PANAAWTM to be a warm group of women who try to find commonalities with each other–during every break, someone chats with me about something we share in common, and I see them doing the same with others.

However, the panels are generally politically liberal, and they are sometimes a bit cerebral, and they are likely to include a reference to GLBT inclusion or questioning of atonement theology or supportive of a brown-skinned Mary, mother of Jesus.

At dinner tonight, a faculty member sat with the generous and kind and beautiful women JoAnne had invited. And after dinner she told JoAnne it sounded like they wanted to go home tonight because this was not the conference they thought it would be. It was not a church women’s conference, and it was very, very liberal.

JoAnne told them that she and I are on tomorrow’s panel as a way of subtly ordering them to stay, and my hope is that they’ll resonate in some way with the conversation we have tomorrow.

But if they don’t, and if this is the reason they don’t want to stay in conversation (or worse yet, my unity-loving denominational leader’s grave concern might be realized, that they decide this is the wrong denomination), I come back to the question: how do we talk across the divide? I’m in a denomination that says unity is its polar star, and the way we usually live that out is to celebrate our diversity but not talk with each other about where diversity means difference. TO me, that doesn’t feel like really being family. And it also means the only time we talk about differences is when they’re about to split us apart. (For example, churches are leaving our denomination because we won’t be explicitly anti-gay, while many of my GLBT friends feel abandoned by a denomination that won’t be explicitly pro-gay.) By avoiding the hard conversations, I’m not sure we buy ourselves much more than a little time. But clearly inviting wonderful women into a community of other wonderful women where they are exposed in non-dialogical ways to new and nontraditional ways of understanding Christ and the church is NOT the way to foster that conversation.

And so I find myself in a difference-averse denomination (or at least one that suffers from difference-discussion aversion), and I find myself worn out by the fights we have by waiting too long to discuss our differences. But I know no one shows up to the “let’s discuss our differences” theme parties. So I wonder how to create space for dialogue among people who collectively don’t want to discuss how they disagree and would simply rather walk away when they disagree too much.

I was riding Muni (San Francisco’s public transportation) back from the Landmark communication course I’m taking to a friend’s place where I’m couch-surfing during the weekend-long course. I was riding with another woman from the course, who also lives in the Castro (the neighborhood where my friend lives). During the ride, I discovered she was from Israel (I would have guessed Egypt, but the accent really was Israeli once she said it).

On Saturday night at 11 PM in San Francisco, half the passengers are drunk. My new friend commented on how sweet this friendly, affectionate young tipsy couple in front of us were. The man then turned to us and said, “Do you know where Castro is?” and my friend said, “We’re getting off there; just follow us.”

“How lucky are we?!” he exclaimed to his girlfriend, as if this were the best news in the world. She apologized for him, and my friend said, “No, it’s lovely.” Then to him, “I hear the accent–where are you from?”

“Lebanon,” he said.
My friend said a word or two in Lebanese and he lit up even more. He asked where she was from and she said Israel, and he got very serious (although still drunk and a bit dramatic): “Why must we fight?”

“I agree!” she said, sober but matching his passion. They chatted a bit, and I turned to the girlfriend and said, “We should send THEM to the U.N.”

She said a few shots of liquor would probably help any peace negotiation, they chatted, we chatted, he said my friend should become President of Israel and he President of Lebanon and they could end the conflict.

When we got off MUNI, my friend said it had been no coincidence–part of why she’s in our course is because she wants to contribute to creating peace in her homeland. Apparently the young man had mentioned his family’s home had been burned down and still he wanted peace. She decided to stay behind and get his contact information so they could have a sober conversation on the subject.

I can think of countless programs that have resulted in the re-humanizing of “the other,” so that people trained to hate each other learn to understand the other group’s humanity. Warring gangs in Boston putting on the musical “West Side Story” (with a real cop playing officer Krupke) and calling a truce. Kids from Israel/Palestine coming to a camp in the U.S. and realizing they liked the people with whom they were in conflict.

And yet policymakers and politicians do not focus on creating relationships or understanding very often. Even those committed to ending violence focus on statistics and perhaps anecdotes instead of creating space for people to really hear one another’s stories. (I acknowledge this is idealized–the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Committee created much healing but it also created a get-out-of-jail-free option for not truly repentant Afrikaaners, and a similar process in Rwanda, some have argued, was even worse.)

Perhaps the responsibility for this “knowing one another” process then must be in the hands of lay people. So how do we create critical mass to really affect change in the midst of conflict? Other than making my friend and the drunk guy from the subway the Presidents of their homelands, I’m eager for suggestions.

I’m smack dab in the middle of a weekend-long course on communication offered by Landmark Forum. (And yes, I have done several Landmark courses over three years, and yes, their sales pitch is a little overbearing, but no, they’re definitely not pitching any cult stuff. And so far everything I’ve gotten, which is quite a lot, has been a combination of cognitive behavioral psychology and zen Buddhism, and everything can be found in the bible. In fact, it’s surprising how often they make some profound statement and I find myself thinking, “Jesus said that!”)

The thing I’m struck by is how our communication not only impacts our relationships with others–it also impacts others’ relationships with each other. This sounds abstract, but I think of a conversation where my father encourages me to work harder for a good cause, I say that some accuse me of being a workaholic, and he says, yes, you should take care of yourself and not work so hard. When I point out the logical inconsistency of this, he laughs. Then I realize we’ve had variations on this conversation since I was 20. And then I realize I have this conversation with my boss, with my co-pastor, with my nonprofit colleagues, sometimes supplying my father’s side of the dialogue and sometimes my own. And then I’m surprised when that conversation and culture show up around me? We speak realities into being. We are more powerful than we realize.

I’m keeping this short, because I have to get back to class and I’m typing this from my phone, but I want to ask two questions: what has your conversation (in repeated patterns) created that you’d like to change? And what would you like your conversations to create?

For me, I’m done creating the culture of “do more! Stop working so hard!” I want to create a culture where we work joyfully, not heroically, and we rest restoratively, not self-indulgently.

My purpose in blogging every day(ish) during the season of Lent is to wrestle with complex issues in a public forum, hopefully in ways humble and vulnerable enough for other people to feel safe affirming but also challenging me, and engaging in an exchange of ideas as equals. So far, my posts have mostly tended towards the political, although through an experiential lens (that’s the core of liberation theology—we start by acknowledging how our lived experiences shape our lens on the world). Today, I want to take on a personal (and professional) issue, and do so in a confessional way. Now, I often experience that when I’m confessional, people respond, “Good that you realized you’re wrong about that issue which I was already correct about,” when my hope was that I was creating space for them to be self-reflective and confessional about something else in their lives. Nonetheless, I remain open to people affirming that I have a long way to go. 

There are three broad types of organizations affiliated with the Oakland Peace Center. There are direct service organizations (like the phenomenal Project Darries) which strive to provide supplies to people in need so that they don’t have to turn to violence out of desperation. There are advocacy organizations (like Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice) who fight for people’s rights to dignity, equal treatment and access to opportunities. And there are organizations that engage in fostering personal inner peace (through yoga and other effective ways of remaining calm and at peace even in the frequently stressful situations in which they find themselves). This last group include the Niroga Institute and Mind Body Awareness Project. This last group believes that their work on inner peace is part of the fabric of peace-filled communication and eventually culture change. (There’s a fourth group I would call Culture Change organizations who do non-political community building with the same values as the other three organizations, but without a strong investment in crisis response or political action—perhaps Connection Action Project would fall into this category; they do amazing work but I would be hard pressed to categorize it. And on a good day, First Christian Church of Oakland falls into this category, hard as I try to push it into the advocacy category.)
My confession is that I can talk the inner peace stuff. Intellectually I believe in its power. I encourage people to plug into it. I’ve even repeatedly invited leaders from Niroga to speak to and practice meditation with the church and with other organizations, too. I believe that the lives of people in highly stressed communities will be improved by access to tools usually only people with lots of resources can access, just as much as I believe in policy advocacy.
Just don’t ask me to do it.
I don’t think it’s that I believe I’m above it. I’m an internally balanced person who has done a lot of work to be in touch with my emotions, my impact on others, and my spiritual centering, but I know I still get thrown off by major emotional upheavals and can take a long time to recover from those upheavals. I’m also fairly zen, but I get irritable and frustrated with people I love, and I could no doubt use some inner peace training to go farther down that road.
I don’t think it’s just a show when I encourage others to plug into inner peace work, or when I talk about how the Oakland Peace Center works to create a connection among advocacy, service and inner peace as the legs of the stool that is true peace in the city of Oakland. I don’t think that leg of the stool’s shorter than the other legs.
But most of the time, when I’m engaged in a meditation practice, I can’t help but think, “Isn’t there something useful I should be doing?”
I’m writing today’s blog to say, “I know I have a long way to go. But I’m a little stuck.” I’ll go to the gym. I’ll walk the lake with a friend. I’ll lead community prayers in church. But I can’t convince myself to show up to the weekly yoga program at the Oakland Peace Center, no matter how strongly I encourage others to attend. I can maybe delve into nonviolent communication training because it’s about how I engage another person, but I can’t do visualization and meditation and all the things my spiritual friends can do for hours and that I know are part of how peace is created in the world. I follow a guy who went into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights to get centered before entering an incredibly hard ministry and tried to get away regularly for personal meditation, and the idea of a weekend-long silent retreat evokes absolutely no positive response from me.
I’m drawn to the organizations that do inner peace work in highly stressed communities because there’s an embedded justice element (we deserve the same tools as folks in wealthy communities, because we deserve inner peace, too) and am a little cynical about the ones that radiate a smug “we’re all you need” energy, because I suspect they don’t know what it’s like to live in a community where one becomes numb to gunfire and is used to seeing neighbors with their hands behind their backs as cops frisk them. But there are GREAT groups doing GREAT inner peace work, and I STILL don’t plug in.
So as I continue through this Lenten journey, I hope to figure out how to plug into that inner peace work.
Any words of solidarity or wisdom are greatly appreciated.

In a recent article about Michelle Alexander’s phenomenal The New Jim Crow, a book on the impact of the war on drugs on Black men and women, James Forman, Jr. of Yale Law School raised a criticism or two, including that he feels the book “ignores the violent crime wave of the 1970s and minimizes the support among many African-Americans for get-tough measures,” according to the article.

James Forman, Jr. is a brilliant scholar and comes from solid civil rights pedigree. His critique (soon to be released in the Yale Law Review) is not simply designed to swipe at the book in order to gain attention or diminish a colleague. While I might disagree with some of his analysis, the one thing that rubs me the wrong way is this: that African-American support for get-tough measures functions as a stand-alone argument.

When Nixon ramped up fear of criminality as part of his presidential campaign strategy, talking about the Silent Majority who were afraid of the uptick in violence and crime in America, there was certainly some code embedded in it: good upstanding White people should be taken seriously when they express fear of (Black) crime and criminals. And it’s how he won the election.

However, Black people heard the same rhetoric as White people, and they had the same response: We shouldn’t have to live in fear. Getting tough on crime will make us safer. Criminals should pay.

The interesting twist on this issue is that as crime has declined over the past two decades, fear of crime has continued to increase, and the ratcheting up of punishment has increased. (I know–it makes one ask the question, “Then didn’t getting tough on crime work?” The correlation isn’t to punishment; it’s to the economy. Crime and poverty are pretty strongly linked. Unless you’re talking about rich people who are statistically more likely to break small laws and steal candy from children. Really.)

African Americans are Americans. They are exposed to the same rhetoric, the same sense of pervasive fear as other Americans. So of course they’re in favor of get-tough measures on crime. That’s what we’ve been taught works.

Except that it doesn’t always. I’m going to get in trouble in a later post for seeming TOO tough on crime (because I LOVE Operation Ceasefire when it’s done in its entirety, Scared Straight intervention stuff and all). But for now, I want to name that just because people of color support something doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt people of color. It just means that people of color, just like everyone else, are capable of thinking in “us and them” terms. If I don’t have anyone in my family in prison, and I fear that my house will get broken into, I don’t pause to think about the ramifications of systemic racism in targeting my community for incarceration at a higher rate and often for illegitimate reasons with disproportionate sentencing. I think, “Stop bad people from breaking into my house.” (And that does happen. I’ve experienced it. It is scary.) Even if my cousin Supreet IS in jail, I might feel like he brought it on himself–I’m not more likely to look at the prison industrial complex’s injustices so much as look at Supreet and say, “Maybe we should be locking folks like him up; maybe it’ll teach him a lesson.” (Sorry to my real friend Supreet–although he is a little shady.)

Michelle Alexander’s point (or one of them) is that crime is decreasing, and yet sentences are increasing, and they are increasing disproportionately for Black men and women–meaning, they’ll get longer sentences for the same crime. She’s not saying our prison system is racist because people of color are opposed to it. And when we use that argument, we use it with the intention to disarm our opponent. And it’s not a sound or helpful argument, even when it’s effective.

Racism doesn’t exist because people of color say it exists. Racism exists because we can see patterns of discrimination that privilege one group and harm another. We can see patterns where rhetoric determines policy instead of facts. We can see patterns of communities that are biologically wired the same as other people who are failing out of school at higher rates, being pushed out of school at higher rates, and ending up in prison at higher rates, even though they come into this world the same as everyone else–no smarter or dumber, more or less gifted, more or less innately capable than any other group.

Professor Forman makes some helpful critiques, and he is clear that The New Jim Crow is a helpful and necessary contribution to our discussion about a broken system. I just invite you to be wary of anyone arguing “But my friend Gayatri doesn’t mind increased security measures, so you can’t be right about unfair discrimination against Arabs and South Asians in a post 9/11 world.” But that’s probably a different blog post.

He fumed about gay (white) men being the most oppressed group in the Disciples because our version of middle management (regional ministers—the equivalent of bishops or conference ministers) was afraid to trust that a congregation might like a pastor for who he was and then not really care that he was gay. The more he universalized his story and the more heavily he carried that mantle of oppression, the more irritated I got. Which is funny, because I care a lot about GLBTQ rights. And it makes me furious the ways the church has dehumanized faithful GLBT members and leaders by speaking in generalities when they know that their music program, their deacons, their after-church coffee set-up crew has GLBT folks forced to stay in the closet by their rhetoric, while those pastors and churches continue to benefit from the very gifts of the people they marginalize.
And yet something about the conversation was making me crazy. “You know that women of color sit in search and call for 18 months longer than white men and women as we look for ministries in which to serve, right?” I finally said. (Search and call is the process by which churches see the ministry applications of all the clergy who might be looking for a church like theirs—it’s a little like matchmaking, where the churches see our profiles and say, “Oh! That person loves to preach, is gifted in pastoral care, they have great references, and they’d be delighted to take a small church in a big city, a church like ours. Oh wait—how do you say that name? Hmmmm…anyone else we could interview?” Or that’s how it felt to me.)
“Yeah,” he responded with (in my head, at least) a curled lip. “Slightly less time than GLBT people.”
I came up with a great retort that night as I was falling asleep, that anxious/angry energy still churning in my stomach. “Buddy, that’s because you think you’re too good for a church like the one I’m serving. Your privilege tells you that you should get to stay in the community of your choice and pastor a church that financially sustains you. You would never have taken my church for $200/week and the honor of sleeping in the basement of the building. But women of color take all SORTS of churches no one else would take, and the churches are resigned to us, because we remind them they couldn’t afford a real pastor.”
But my retort might be beside the point (although I still kind of feel that way). My point is how easily I, a fairly public and proud queer ally, got baited into what my friend Jessica Vazquez jokingly refers to as “the Oppression Olympics.” If you’re from ANY sort of marginalized group, you know what I’m talking about: my wound is deeper than your wound, my people have suffered more than yours. I am not responsible for your pain because I have pains you could not begin to understand.
I’ve been in enough anti-oppression trainings to watch it show up defensively: “Well, I’m a woman; we experience all sorts of marginalization.” And that’s true, but often we go into that space to say, “I don’t contribute to the systemic oppression of your community because I don’t have the power to participate in it.” We treat our own experience of oppression as a get-out-of-jail-free card, instead of paying attention to where we benefit from some “isms” while suffering directly at the hands of other “isms.”
I’m pretty sure the guy I was talking with is a people of color ally. I think he’s participated in and even encouraged our denomination’s GLBT community to engage in some anti-racism work. So how did we end up in a boxing match? Jesus said we often default to “let me help you with that speck in your eye” while ignoring the log in our own eye. So I’ve spent the last 8 months since that conversation trying to work on the log in my eye. And I’m aware of the straight privilege that allowed me an interview for an associate minister position in a region that has explicitly disallowed gay ordination. And I’m aware that I can be considered for children’s ministries because no one holds ignorant, backwards notions about me as a straight woman. And I was easily able to serve as an ally to the people in my church who wanted us to have a more vibrant and thriving GLBT inclusivity commitment, because no one would have thought I was being self-serving (even though my GLBT colleagues don’t advocate for GLBT inclusion as a self-serving act either).
But I still wish I had had that retort while we were at the bar instead of when I was back in my hotel room that night. Because I can see his speck so clearly. Which is why we get a lifetime to practice self-reflection and self-growth.