Several weeks ago, I wrote a diary about one characteristic common to “quality” faith traditions, those compatible with a quest for social justice. I am going to write about another of those characteristics, but this time, it’s personal. I’m telling my own story.
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(Special note: No links in this diary. I’m sick and tired of placing them :)
I was at one time very concerned with maintaining my relative position on a cosmic social totem-pole.
Here is what I remember.
When a rock n’ roll band visited Carmel High School over lunch break, a performer boomed into the mic—to applause from the kids—“We were over at Seaside High last Friday. After that, let me tell you how glad I am to be here, and how good all of you look.” Carmel had an educated, affluent, and mostly white population. Seaside was seven miles away, its economy depended at the time on a local Army base. Many poor and brown-skinned people lived there. I cheered at the musician’s slur, along with other white Carmel kids, because it reminded me that there were people lowlier than I felt. In Carmel, Seaside was a running joke, a sick and guilty one. This was in 1980.
I was fourteen, fifteen during the heyday of the “Reagan Revolution.” As Reagan rose to national prominence, promising the elevation of the worthy, my mother was steering me, unresisting, through hours of church each week. They took teenaged girls aside in the white cinder-block rooms and told us that the most important thing we would ever do would be to marry a righteous man and bear his children. I remember something else from those days, besides my goofy “feathered” hairdo, and besides my mad, doomed crush on “Randy,” a boy a year or so older I knew both from church and school: Randy got a birthday cake from girls his age at church. The girls weren’t friends of his. They were unremarkable in every way, he’d probably barely noticed them. But they presented him in a class with a homemade fudge sheet-cake.
Randy was tall and handsome and well-spoken. I’ve thought since that a gifted and fortunate young man, one at the center of fawning attention, might form an unrealistically lofty opinion of himself. He might start to believe he was God. I also might have started to believe Randy was God, and perhaps I worshipped him.
By my junior year in high school, several months into Reagan’s first term,
church was seeming awfully long. Shakespeare, whose plays we were studying in English class, on the other hand, aroused my interest. I paid careful attention to The Merchant of Venice.
…Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.
Shylock, no God, was rallying me personally across centuries. He was justifying revolt against those who denied his humanity.
I left home in my late teens. I broke as cleanly as possible with the church. I earned my bachelor’s degree from Berkeley. I began what’s been an ongoing, sometimes lonely, project, the unearthing, and critical appraisal, of my conviction that other people matter more and less than I do.
This was circa 1987. A deadly new plague stalked victims, whom I watched fighting shame and stigma.
subject to the same diseases,
I began studying faith traditions, struggling with different kinds of religious dogma, as if I would connect with the perfect religion, a “soul-mate,” and undergo a conversion experience. (I haven’t yet.) For me to respect the faith tradition I’m examining, to want to learn what I can from it, it must make a particular promise, audibly: that the needs, rights, and experiences of one, matter equally to the rights, needs, and experiences of another, very different. All are children of one Creator. We can’t see God’s Kingdom right now; we can only “act as if.”
To give one brief example of what “acting as if” might mean, and what religion, at its best, might make possible (by seeing what politics made possible), I go back to 2008.
During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama spoke about why common people and their human needs mattered. Obama won because more people than usually had reason to pay attention to political speech, believed his. In late-October of 2008, the local teachers’ union, five blocks from me, hosted volunteers after-hours to make GOTV calls to registered Democrats in advance of the big election. The offices were crammed and humming. People were elbow-to-elbow, many actually standing. I saw people of every age, walk-of-life, and color of the rainbow, with phones to their ears, talking to strangers. I blinked, and smiled. This is what grassroots political effort should look like, I thought. I sat next to a woman who, like me, was calling potential voters from a list. When somebody picked up at the other end, she always introduced herself the same way. She gave her name, she stated she was a Democratic volunteer, and then, before asking the person on the other end to “please make sure they voted on election day,” she said, “I am an old black woman.”
I am an old black woman. Then you remember a time before the civil rights movement, maybe you remember it clearly. You know how bleak oppression was—still is. You are speaking to people you never saw, and who never saw you, of your personal knowledge and memory. You are imparting your faith.
heal'd by the same means,
Whether Obama has lived up to the hopes of those who voted for him, is a much-discussed question, and none of my concern here. I’m merely noting a rare moment when people of every description, not knowing the future, acted together for the best. Powerful cultural elements normally police against this better.
The “divide-and-conquer” artists, the political demagogues and their funders, keep the masses down, and unthreatening. The natural empathy of traditionally privileged members of society for those less-privileged, atrophies.
If it’s other than baggage, religion bucks this trend. Within each major religious tradition, are teachings that mortals matter equally. I always search for that radical thread. Hinduism has been used to justify brutal social oppression, where the poorest and the filthiest are invisible to the rest of society. Their rights don’t matter. On the other hand, Hinduism promotes the idea that everyone in the world is God, in equal measure, so of course all people deserve understanding and help. Some of the New Testament reinforces sexism and homophobia; on the other hand, Jesus Christ himself not only fed the poor, he loved Mary Magdalene.
Perhaps I haven’t connected with a religion yet because I’m “not ready.” And what would “being ready” look like, exactly? It’s not the most important question to me right now. But I know what my criteria are.