It’s wonderful, isn’t it, to hit a piece of writing that runs right along ideas you’d just been mulling over and thinking of how to express? Not just your thoughts, different in some particulars, but right up next to yours:
Our congregational culture proves to be a barrier to many people who would otherwise love to be a part of us because they love what we love: the promise of personal and social transformation through free religion. Of what does this culture consist? From comments shared by Rosemary Bray McNatt, following on the heels of Paul Rasor’s lecture, this culture is a matter of aesthetic and lifestyle preferences: “We don’t own TVs, don’t like gospel and pop music and definitely don’t like rap, are unapologetic nature lovers, eat locally, say NO to shopping at Wal Mart, listen to NPR, love Garrison Keillor, read ahead in the hymnal to see if we agree with the words we are about to sing.” But, says Rosemary, “how does this allow us to encounter people whose experience of church is different? What’s their entry point into our congregations?”
Just for grins, how do I stack up against that accounting?
- Don’t like TV.
- Do like gospel, pop, and rap (and am left cold mostly by classical music)
- Love nature and get along well with my relatives who hunt
- Eat whatever’s cheap
- Shop at WalMart and have a Sam’s Club membership
- Listen to NPR for news and the occasional musical program
- Have gotten sick of Garrison Keillor and his small world
- Am more concerned about staying on pitch than the words I’m singing
Add that up and I’ve got about a half-unit of Ethnitarianism, maybe a little less.
I particularly take issue with lifestyle choices as a marker of enlightenment. The free market has a marvelous way of making collectively irrational, globally disastrous results out of the most rational and well-intended decisions, which is my pragmatic problem with substituting private choice for public planing. I also don’t like allocating virtue by what one can afford to pay for food. As I read recently:
When I discussed religion with Nicaraguans this past winter, we talked first theology, then social justice, then the specifics of social justice. Wow, did we have different priorities based on our cultural context. For them: things like food and stable government. For me, things like ethical eating and marriage equality.
This brought back an LA Times opinion piece:
I am black. I am a political activist who cares deeply about social justice issues. I am a lesbian. This year, I canvassed the streets of South Los Angeles and Compton, knocking on doors, talking politics to passers-by and working as I never had before to ensure a large voter turnout among African Americans. But even I wasn’t inspired to encourage black people to vote against the proposition.
Why? Because I don’t see why the right to marry should be a priority for me or other black people. Gay marriage? Please. At a time when blacks are still more likely than whites to be pulled over for no reason, more likely to be unemployed than whites, more likely to live at or below the poverty line, I was too busy trying to get black people registered to vote, period; I wasn’t about to focus my attention on what couldn’t help but feel like a secondary issue.
I’ll add it’s not just about black people’s issues. As Jasmyne Cannick goes on to say:
Does someone who is homeless or suffering from HIV but has no healthcare, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?
That describes a good friend of mine, a gay man in the Bay Area, a skeptic toward the drive for gay marriage. He’s got no real healthcare and he’s HIV positive, with good health due to his current access to medication. Gay marriage doesn’t do him any good. For instance, it doesn’t get the people in his extended gay family the ability to intervene on his behalf in health care decisions.
Anyway, read the comments to Cammick’s piece and you’ll see a mindset working similar to that Anthony David describes:
Pathways definitely taught me that Unitarian Universalism, as it is practiced in most if not all of our congregations, is an ethnic religion with cultural norms. Violate the norms, and you are in trouble. Free religion only in mind but not where freedom most fully and truly resides: in the heart and in the body.
You can’t escape from culture (though you can pretend to, which is easy), but you can change it (which is hard). Here’s another aspect of that culture:
…the whole thing, from first to last, was so solemn, so earnest, so suggestive of … overfunctioning. I sensed behind it all a larger pattern—a troubling pattern—which I will call “the Unitarian Universalist superego.”
Historically, our UU superego can be traced back to our Boston Brahmin forbearers, though the form it takes today reflects great distance from those social movers and shakers and the transformation of many years. Now it is a moralism that combines masochism with workaholism. Every evil in the world becomes our problem—its very existence suggests some kind of collaboration on our part, unwitting if not witting. And since we are interrupted Calvinists who have rejected the guilt-discharging techniques of our ancient ancestors without replacing them with anything else, the sense of guilt just builds and builds. Can’t get away from it. Our backs ache from the accumulated weight. We have become guilt-grubbers. We look for ways to kick ourselves.
I personally witnessed this recently, visiting another Unitarian Universalist congregation. A good friend of mine was to deliver a lay-led sermon on “Obama’s Accountability and Our Responsibility for his Promises”. Now, that’s a good topic and could generate a good sermon. Instead, it became a laundry list of items, some positive, some negative, with that same workaholism under it all.
Anthony David then moves, as my thoughts have been moving, to Mark Morrison-Reed and “The Perversity of Diversity” (diversity being right up there with tolerance in my personal lexicon of dysfunctia). One excerpt from his talk is, I think, apropos right here:
Our earnestness is sabotaging this project because guilt always deals cruelly with vision. … Trepidation encourages timidity. We’ve got to lighten up, laugh at our mistakes, apologize for our gaffes, and forgive the inevitable blunders.
And there it is: Perfectionism. The desire to be simply good. The inability to act from fear of doing something wrong. The noted science fiction writer John Scalzi gave over his blog to Mary Ann Mohanraj a few months back, or, as he puts it, “Mary Anne Mohanraj did me a mitzvah recently and did a thoughtful and very interesting guest entry on racism (two actually). She makes a two-part, nine-point argument in the first entry, and her final point there is:
You will get it wrong. This is what you should do.
And she tells you in the second part:
After all this — after your research and honest effort and cross-checking and passing the story by members of the community — odds are, you’ll still get it wrong. That’s okay.
Sure, it sucks when someone points out that that some minor character of yours feeds directly into a massive racial stereotype. God, that stings. Maybe you just weren’t aware of that stereotype at all, so it’s pure ignorance on your part. More likely, you were familiar with it on some deep unconscious level, inherited from the sea of racism we’re all swimming in, and it shaped your character-building without your even realizing it. Ouch.
But when this happens, and it will, the key is in how you respond to it…
If you, on reflection, agree with the criticism, then it’s good to note that publicly. Apologize, if you feel the need, although I’m often not sure that’s actually necessary. I’ve found that it’s generally enough to say, “Wow, I totally didn’t see that. Thanks for pointing it out.” And then move on, resolving to do better next time. You will almost certainly get better at creating character of color, with practice. You will mess up less often. (Or perhaps you will simply make different mistakes, and that’s all right too. Writing is in large part about the journey, not the destination.) Sometimes, if you work hard, with the grace of whatever gods help poor writers and fools (in Hinduism, I think that’s Ganesha), you may get everything exactly, perfectly, right.
Let me repeat the part to which I added emphasis:
And then move on, resolving to do better next time. You will almost certainly get better at creating character of color, with practice. You will mess up less often.
Why is this important? Back a couple of steps in her argument:
A lot of writers are hesitant to take race on — white writers are worried about writing people of color, and even people of color become hesitant about writing other people of color. I feel some of this too — in particular, I worry about writing black American characters. I worry about getting it wrong, being offensive, contributing to damaging cultural stereotypes, making people mad at me. I worry about this so much that I don’t think I’ve written a single black character yet. Coward. Yes.
(I find it fascinating that Mohanraj, whose fiction writing shows such control and mastery overlooked that she has written a black character in one of the stories on her site, a character who both cuts against the grain of some black male stereotypes and and with the grain of others, in an inconsistently lifelike way, a way that is integral to the story.)
If you start thinking about all the ways in which you can get things wrong, it’s easy to be paralyzed by that fear, to retreat back to only writing characters who are just like you, or so vague that they can’t possibly be mistaken for anyone real. But again — that makes for bad fiction. If you’re going to write well, you have to get past those fears. Your library of characters contains the whole human race, and you have both the right and the responsibility to portray any member of it in your work. You just do your best to get it right.
That’s as true of people in the world as it is of writers in the story. (This touches on my own personal theology, a faith in people and stories, not necessarily always in that order. I’ll make that digression some other day.) If you pick one thread to follow from this entry, Mohanraj’s pair would be of immense value to anyone accustomed to using story as a metaphor for life and interested in knowing the other.
As this blog entry spirals out of control, I think I’ll end with one more note from Anthony David:
What if, for example, this grace and this health were the focus of the opening worship at General Assembly, every year? Starting out, not by reciting an earnest litany of social evils and injustice, but by remembering and invoking the grace and the health in which we live and move and have our being? The President of the UUA, saying, “Here we all are, gathered together again, and the Spirit of Life is with us as well, within us and between us, leading us towards more strength and more healing and more peace. Let’s see where it takes us, in our time together. Let’s expect to be surprised. Let’s see where we go….”
Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
