What's on My Mind

Phew!  We're back from vacation, back from the slowness of summer.  It was a fruitful time, full of reading and reflecting, and it is bearing fruit for how we work and serve this year.  I know for me that part of that will be a return to more regular writing here, as I miss this chance to reflect and share.

What's been up for me this summer is dis-ease.  I've been reading Johannes Baptist Metz' collection, A Passion for God.  Metz was a founder of "political theology," indebted to the Frankfurt School of social theorists and to Karl Rahner.  He continually calls the Church to face the hard questions about God and justice and suffering.  He sees the danger to the Gospel and the Church in a facile happiness, and the subtle ways we abandon eschatology for a focus on our present satisfaction and personal afterlife.

Reading him makes me ask, What do I mean by proclaiming resurrection?  I don't mean to avoid the hard places and the pain, but do I end up doing that?  Am I just purveying my own "good news" instead of the Gospel's call to seek God in the midst of the monumental injustice and destruction of our time?  Where have I substituted my personal "salvation" for the health and wholeness of the world?  Where have I in fact abandoned hope in favor of optimism?

Metz' general challenge takes on specificity when I read it with Jennifer Harvey's book, Dear White Christians.  The Companions are reading it for our September group reading, and it's painful.  Harvey makes the case that no racial reconciliation is possible until white Americans face their own racial specificity and privilege, and work actively for reparations to overcome the legacy of slavery and colonialism.  She documents the failures of the American churches to respond to this challenge.  It is painful reading.

Now, let me say that I used to teach political theory, including the Frankfurt School.  I used to teach women studies, and lgbt studies, and I wrote about white women's need to face their whiteness and privilege.  That makes me more horrified to realize that I have just dropped the ball for 18 years (if I had the ball before!).  Since I entered religious life I entered an all-white world full of "nice" people bringing comfort to those who are weary.  The churches I've served have been shaped by the optimistic, happiness theology that Metz decries, even as their leaders worked to intervene in injustice.  I've insulated myself from the pain of the world, even as I pray daily for those in pain.

So what will I do?  I don't know, honestly.  I know I can start by just naming this, by writing.  I can start by asking questions and noticing where I'm settling for easy answers.  I can start by facing the painful truth that alone I can't do much.  I can at least stop letting it be OK.

I know this is a long post.  If you're still reading, please join me in praying to know what to do, from where we each are.  Pray that the Companions will begin a conversation that invites our transformation and really opens us to serve God in others.  And pray for our world as it groans under the weight of growing tyranny and oppression.  God, make speed to save us!