I was invited into a couple of conversations this week that have changed me: one with my good friend will and one with an article about poetry.
will. we were talking about the church, the emergent church. we were eating sandwiches, or more accurately, i was devouring a sandwich with bacon on it as part of my own exercise to be less rigid generally...this time particularly in my vegetarianism. and we were talking about our desperate need to have spaces that we are wrong and wondering and that it is ok. confessional space (confession). that we are held in our wonder. if there's anything the broader church needs to hear from its leaders and its public voices, it's that they don't know. that not knowing is the place from which we get to imagine and imagination is the realm of faith. not knowing also makes room for other voices, other ways of knowing, more voices, more ways of knowing. it makes us richer and fuller and inspires us with what we ourselves couldn't have imagined and therefore, what we couldn't have otherwise believed.
so if this is the result of claiming boldly that we don't know, then what holds us back? a sense of desperateness that accompanies the myth of scarcity and power (part of white colonialist myth)? a deep, rooted fear that not knowing makes us irrelevant (part of a patriarchal myth)? whatever the myth, its taken hold of our potential to believe.
the poetry article: "written on the bones" by alison luterman in dec 2010 issue of the sun. i don't usually read the sun - the chiropractor for whom i work gave it to me much like assigned office reading and despite my nonchalance about reading it, i cried most of my way through it and walked away once again called out on everything it turns out i know but haven't felt. luterman is interviewing kim rosen in the article about the power of poetry - personally, culturally, spiritually. rosen proposes two ideas for why poetry has lost some of its place in the U.S. culturally: 1) because we "have forgotten to think in metaphor" and 2) because it requires "openness & humility" which she believes we have lost in our "drive for upward mobility" [i read: colonialist, classist, white culture]. She says, "maybe it [poetry] demands a willingness to be changed, to be affected, to reveal our wounds without denial or muscling through them." oh, kim. insight into my soul.
and insight i believe into another aspect of what holds us back from these conversations about diversity, justice, identity, and space. the truth is, that we desire change and growth so desperately, and yet to get to it, just to get to it, we have to do so much uprooting of the myths that some of those identities have built into us. and that is terrifying. and we need to be freed.
i have been taught to hold on to my power, my space, my sense of identity, and my security with an iron grip. and it turns out, once again, that the iron grip will be my death. and, will kill my community. i need to find ways to show up fearlessly to the questions about my identities and what they have to do with power and dominance and people whom i love. and believe that by doing so, i will be held by others. i might be challenged and i might have my pride wounded and i might feel displaced and i might be changed, but i will be held in love. i need people in my life who i do this for, and who will commit to doing it for me. and in the changing, i also believe there is my own healing, and the healing of my family and community.
i leave you with three quotes from poems in the article that are working on me:
"so long as you haven't experienced / this:to die and grow, / you are only a troubled guest / on the dark earth." ~goethe
"before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things." ~naomi shihab nye, "kindness"
"feel the future dissolve in a moment / like salt in a weakened broth. / what you held in your hand, / what you counted and carefully saved, / all this must go." ~ naomi shihab nye, "kindness"
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