The Accountability of Responsibility

Once upon a time I drew from a list of conventional conservative Christian morals to inform my decisions about what was right and what wasn't. My last post suggested a disruption in my relationship with these conventions. This raises the question: Without an immediate, intimate connection to the posits of Christianity what influences my lifestyle decisions? What prompts my ethical posture in the world?

Do I still believe in right and wrong? The short answer is: I don't think the differentiation between right and wrong is cut and dry. But neither do I think that striving to live well, seek righteousness, or pursue justice are inconsequential matters.

Something drives us all. Something informs our decisions. Here is the reflection paper I wrote for my Ethics class this week:

A decade ago I encountered the quote: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I believed that idea to be true. I am no longer so sure. Since coming to Chicago Theological Seminary I have encountered another idea, a different reality. I have encountered the reality that the world needs more than people who have “come alive”. Women, people of color, and indigenous populations require recognition of dignity that patriarchal and imperial cultures have long withheld. Many people in the world who are impoverished beyond the ability to survive need resources that will provide for the basic sustenance of life. The earth itself aches with urgency for us to pay careful attention to the demands we place on it, and it in turn demands that we attend to the natural ecological rhythms that sustain the diversity of life.

My first ethical considerations were informed by the only world I knew as a child. I was a Wesleyan evangelical Christian who believed that the Bible functioned lucidly as the ultimate authority in all matters of life. Such assurance granted me profound relief in making decisions. I accepted an exclusivist reading of the Bible and the testimony of my insular community as absolute. This acceptance of an external authority governed my behaviors and rendered me free of the responsibility to consider the implications of my style of life. I did not have to think about what was right or best or true. I was simply required to behave myself according to my community's code of conduct. Good behavior was primarily contingent on acts that I omitted, desires that I repressed, and ideas to which I submitted. Since then I have learned to think, and to question my impulse to be well behaved.

Life would be easier if I could still base my ethics on good behavior or on the simple question, “What makes me come alive?” But I can no longer, with a sense of integrity, ground my actions in such myopic concepts. I am troubled by a conflict. I remain convinced that, indeed, I must foster my dreams and drive for personal abundance in life. Yet that conviction is critiqued by an expanded consciousness including my recognition of personal privilege and exposure to the stretch of social and ecological injustices around the globe and in my neighborhood. I am not sure where my recognition of privilege ought to take me. How does my identity as a straight, white, credentialed, employed, sheltered, relatively affluent male inform and problematize my active intentions, ethical postures, and political stances? I think it depends on how my narrative intersects with the narratives of others with whom I am engaged.

Ynestra King wrote, “Practice does not wait for theory – it comes out of the imperatives of history.” With this insight I recognize that I may not be able to find or invent an ethical theory that will promise me absolute ease of conscience. But I must still act according to some driving principle. That principle for me is the responsibility I have to pay attention to relational encounters. Any theory that has proven influential has come to me on the heals of an encounter with an other that has resonantly prompted a shift in ethical posture. My ethics are based on how I relate to others – human and nonhuman. They are therefore relative, subject to the nature of the relationship at hand. This requires a careful measure of deliberation. I must address ethical decisions case-by-case and conversation-by-conversation.

I know of no absolute authority or standard that grants me the assurance that I have acted right. But I believe that, “Listening to all voices of subjugation and hearing their insurrectionary truths make us better able to question our own political and personal practices.” I am unwilling to dismiss my ethical responsibility by insisting that a sacred text, divine authority, or code of conduct has made it clear that I am to act one way and not another. I have to attend to my intuition, listening to my conscience, and I must reckon with the realities of my environment, letting my community impact me. This is a risky endeavor toward ethics. It is not sure. It provides a hazy accountability at best. But I think it is better to be aware of this than not. It is better to embrace the implications of my actions as my responsibility, rather than ultimately displace my decisions on an external source. I am responsible, and to a certain extent that keeps me ethical.

Metamorphosis Shown

I tuned in to Re:Sound on NPR while driving home from downtown this afternoon. It was Re:Sound #139 The Matamorphosis Show, recounting two stories of two people navigating an alteration of identity. I listened to half in the car, then streamed it online from my kitchen to listen to the rest. I cried big, honest, insistent tears at one point. I try to listen to my tears when they come. Tears seldom lie.

The first story is called Breaking Away. It’s about Luzer Twersky who was raised as a Hasidic Jew and decided, at the age of 23, to leave everything he was familiar with and engage secular society.

The second story is called Finding Miles. It’s about a man named Miles and recounts his transition from female to male, from identifying as Megan to identifying as Miles.

Each story starkly typifies the human experience of change, identity, and agency. Each narrative emphasizes the role of family, especially parents, in the person’s metamorphosis. Luzer experienced a sort of excommunication from his family, a shunning from his parents, when he confessed to no longer being a practicing Hasid. Miles used a long letter to come out to his parents as transsexual, and the way that they responded… that’s what brought me to tears. I hope you’ll listen to the stories if you get a chance. They demystify experiences that are not familiar to a lot of people, yet their experiences were incredibly resonant.

Earlier this month I came out to several of my close family members. My confession was more akin to Luzer’s, and the response I received was more akin to the one Miles received. But there were pieces of all of each of their narratives. I told my people that I am not an Evangelical Christian, which for some in my family is equal to saying, without the qualifier, “I am not a Christian.” I didn’t qualify my confession in order to try and squeeze into some alternate mold of Christianity. It’s just that as far as I’m concerned there is, and regardless of my lifestyle or beliefs always will be, something of my identity that is informed by Christianity.

But I am not a Christian. Not in any orthodox sense. I don’t confess Christian creeds. I don’t practice Christian habits. I don’t go to church. I don’t assert salvation through Christ alone, or posit that truth is found in the Bible alone.

I need to be careful, because I have dear friends who would align with many of my liberal views and my openness toward lifestyles that deviate from the Judeo-Christian moral norms, and these friends still identify as Christians. I’m so grateful for them. Grateful for my encounter with brands of Christianity that have room for me. I’ve discovered this roomy Christianity through voices such as Fredrick Beuchner, Marcus Borg, John Hick, and Catherine Keller; and I’ve discovered it first hand in community at CTS. But to be honest with my tribe, the ones who hold fast to the Christianity that I inherited but have since departed from, I have felt compelled to provide clarity, rather than incite confusion, by letting my confession be candid according to their terms. At least for now, at this stage, I have found severance to prove functional in communicating who I am and who I’m not. It’s emotional, for me and them. Parts of it feel like estrangement, other parts feel like unconditional love. But I feel more than anything the levity of honesty and the profundity of telling the truth.

Just finished reading...

Before I read it I thought the title referred to those in a society who are ostracized, lacking possession of either dignity or basic subsistence. But it's actually about a society that rejects possession as necessary.

It's about work, initiative - not as performance but as pure compulsion.

It's about confronting customs, disregarding laws, walking through walls.

It's about home, flight, empty-handedness.

It's about solitude and solidarity.

It's about partnership, its pains and pleasures.

It's about individuality and interval, relativity and return.

At first it seems to be about thinking about the world from a perspective that expects that other worlds exist, or at least acknowledging other realities.

But then it becomes something different, about perceiving time (the span of a day, a moment, the gap between birth and death) and perceiving space (the thing our bodies occupy, push against, evade, retreat from, return to) neither as confines to be broken or resources to be used, but as realities to be both questioned and engaged.

It's about risking death and risking disapproval, the latter being the more difficult of the two.

I definitely recommend it, but leave it to you, if any of these themes so compel you, to decide whether or not to read it.

Multivocality

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance…

We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation…

Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something… to become world…

Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion… is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough…

The love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

{Rainer Maria Rilke}

Letters to a Young Poet #7

Merging and surrendering, ebbing and flowing, bordering and protecting, practicing boundaries and pushing boundaries – these are the tasks in the breathing-in-and-breathing-out of human relationship, of being human.

This is true internally as much as it is externally. Diana Eck muses on the traffic of voices in every person, suggesting that our recognition of multivocality is the foundation for navigating the external plurality of perspectives in the world: “Our prospects for pluralism surely begin with our ability to give voice to the diversity of voices within ourselves, not all of which we exercise at the same time, but which comprise the complex web of connections we call identity" (Diana Eck, Prospects for Pluralism, 746). The appreciation of multivocality in all of its dimensions is the primary boon from my seminary experience thus far. What follows are a few brief reflections on multivocality, diversity, and identity.

Farid Esack’s essay, In Search of Progressive Islam Beyond 9/11, begins with an ‘Ali Shari’ati quotation: “It is not sufficient to say that we must return to Islam. We must specify which Islam” (Omid Safi, Progressive Muslims, 78). Individual religions function as a sort of microcosm. Islam is in itself an array of theologies, traditions, and cultures. Jewish identity draws deeply from its multiplicity of con/texts and results in a vast variety of midrashic (expounded and expansive) manifestations. The term “Christian” is an applicable unit of cultural classification, but Christianity is in no way unitary.

Religious diversity represents and affects the reality of global pluralism. In a pluralistic world, where difference matters, a nuanced understanding of difference is the difference between perpetuating old habits of prejudice and finding our way beyond mutual misunderstanding. "To bypass the pursuit of deep diversity is to fail an elemental test of fidelity to the world (Pamela Klassen & Courtney Bender, After Pluralism, 10). Our (multi)vocation as relational citizens of the earth is to delve into diversity, and to experience the intersections and explore the divergences within.

Navigating deep diversity is foreign terrain for every one involved. Diversity is essentially and perpetually foreign. Conflict is inevitable. Conflicting interests, conflicting expressions of ideas, and conflicting vocalizations of life experience are present in every encounter. Conflicts that are too volatile to ignore erupt, thus forcefully demanding the bulk of our attention. Attending to conflict in quotidian encounters, however, helps establish an understanding that conflict is not a thing to be feared.

Conflict is a navigable aspect of human relationship, and navigating conflict is a reputable means of personal, social, and spiritual formation. It is not a thing to be feared but engaged. Yet attending to conflict without fear requires that we must cross lines of difference with ears open to other voices. Cultural fluency is a core competency for those who intervene in conflicts or simply want to function more effectively in their own lives and situations (Michele LeBaron, Culture and Conflict). Fluency takes persistent attention. “In practice many of us are not adept at thinking through the issues of voice, so strident is the push toward the unitary, the unequivocal” (Diana Eck, Prospects for Pluralism, 753). Fluency takes practice. Fluency is difficult. Ignorance is easy, but with Rilke “we must trust in what is difficult” and honor the friction that results when bodies touch.

During our wedding ceremony my wife and I read our self-crafted vows and committed to a love that consists of two solitudes that border and protect and greet each other. We were careful not to commit precisely to the brand of marital love that our inherited tradition urged, where one is absorbed into the other. We were intentional about committing to a mutual relationship that would continue to contain and catalyze the multitudes that comprise us each. And then we took Communion. This image parallels the exploration of my own inheritance and vocation that I continue to engage in. As I craft a vision of my vocation (can a call be crafted?) I am often fixated on the horizon, but I believe I ignore my roots at my own peril. My relationship with Christianity continues to be tortuous. I am not willing to be absorbed by Christianity. I am committed to evading any simple categorization. But my multitudes unambiguously intersect with Christianity’s multivocality. I push against my inheritance, but I press into its soil for sustenance all the same.

Marc Gopin insists, “Peacemaking requires… a constant moral calculus of silence and activism, pushing the envelope and maintaining relationships” (To Make the Earth Whole, 98). The many voices of the many selves in the many traditions of the multitudinous world resound and clamor. To find peace within myself does not require the repression of my particularity, nor does it require a final conversion to a fixed tradition. To realize peace in the world does not require the silencing of differing voices, nor does it require some final act of justice. Making peace/shalom/salaam is being engaged in the calculated process of active contemplation and contemplative action as we merge and surrender with one another, border and protect our common dignity, and pour over the porous boundaries that make up who we are.

Ethos

When people ask me what I study they invariably put me to the task of telling them just what it is that I intend to do with a degree in religious studies once I graduate. I tell them this: I want to contribute to an ethos of religious understanding in our religiously complex and confused world.

My rote answer functions for those fragments of interaction with the people I meet from day to day. But it really isn’t sufficient in the end. It doesn’t offer much substance or nuance. It actually forces my listener to fill a rather gaping hole. They have to decide on the definition of “religious understanding”. They have to imagine what it means to respond to religious confusion. I think it’s okay, even important, to raise these sorts of questions. But as a student of religion and an advocate for peaceful engagement across religious and ideological lines of difference, the onus is on me to be more specific and to cast a concrete vision of what an ethos of religious understanding might look like.

That means that I have to do more than simply suggest that religious understanding is a possibility, something that I believe in. I have to address religious confusion head on.

The matrix of religious confusion tends to thicken wherever multiple communities are attempting to put a common resource to divergent uses. Jews and Christians, for instance, share a sacred text. This is a reality that could potentially enrich both communities, but all too often it results in either party claiming that their interpretation is authoritative. This happens between different denominations of a single religion as well. Whenever multiple parties make confident claims about a multivalent source, and when those claims don’t align, it is easier to retreat to the corners and cliques of certainty than it is to continue to engage each other across lines of difference. This blind privileging of one’s religious perspective tends to discount the validity of the religious other. The idolizing of one’s own perspective typically results from a cankerous closed-mindedness.

People suffering from closed-minds do not usually identify with their closed-minds. They identify as a sort of Christian, Muslim, atheist, humanist, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, animist, Pagan, or something else. Closed-minds are dispersed amongst us. Yet I really believe that authentically closed-minded people are a minority. There are Christians who claim their understanding of the Bible is the equivalent to universal truth. And there are Muslims who hold the Qur’an in similar fashion. And humanists who think that their assessment of social or scientific data is incontestable.

And you know what? I think it is important for these people, who purposefully or inadvertently glorify their view while espousing intolerance of others, to be able to openly make their claims. I think it is important for these people to bring their claims of authority into the public square, rather than retreating with them into enclaves of intolerance. They are welcome. I don’t say this because I think the world particularly needs closed-minded representatives from the many religious and ideological traditions. I say this because I think that they need people like me. And people like you. I think they need diversity. Which isn’t to say that I think they need to change their identity, or even concede their fundamentals. I think they can be distinctly themselves without keeping their minds closed to the others with whom they share the world. Encountering others is exactly what these people need. Encountering others in the world has the potential to both open their minds and amplify their identities.

In the chaotic matrix of multi-religious and trans-ideological engagement we are forced awake to the others whom we encounter. In public spaces designed for engagement and disagreement we all hone our identities, holding to those things that enable us to live ethically and creatively, while hopefully dispensing of those things that block our capacity for love and civic survival.

An ethos of religious understanding would look like an open field, wide open, even open to the closed. In the field we would explore personality, identity, and belonging without restraining any of them. We would look curiously and receptively at the others all around us. My vision of religious understanding is not about isolating or defining one religious or sacred truth over another. It is about being in open and confident relationship with others. These relationships are not a context for unilateral conversion; they are a matrix of mutual transformation and personal amplification. But this sort of thing requires that we all show up in the first place.

Buckskin Gulch

Hello old friends. I was away last week traipsing through the Buckskin Gulch and on into the Paria River and along the canyon it cuts. It's good to be back home... but oh was it ever good to be away.

I cherish times of being elsewhere, just as I cherish times of being near. I think that we all have to continually create our own mini-utopias; that is, our own little "no-places" of retreat and solitude and privacy. Just as we need to engage in the solemn practice of transparency and in the frivolity of personal divulgence. We must come and we must go. We must hold and we must share. And always we must be shifting our posture, craning our neck, fluttering our eyes open to the monumental moments of momentum that tumble us through life and into each other.

I took this picture last week. It speaks to me of movement, light, spaciousness, and timelessness.

Camino

I walked el Camino de Santiago a few years back. I backpack with my dad frequently (Paria Canyon in ten days). This looks like a special movie: The Way.