Standing Firm (ish)

Our community group this year will be listening to various podcasts and focusing on the meditation and reflection sparked by those podcasts.  If you’d like to follow along with us, you can check out my notes here on the blog each week.

November 29th

Our family was out of town for a week following the Presidential election and last week was Thanksgiving, which meant a lot of travel for the folks in our group.  So we’re only just getting to this podcast but since we are all still unpacking the various thoughts / emotions we each have from the election, it’s still timely and fitting.

For discussion…

Orientation –> DisOrientation –> ReOrientation

We all have our reference points, our maps that tell us what is east and west, up and down.  Everyone has a compass by which they navigate their life.  This is known as orientation.  It is how we are oriented in the world.

Then something happens to disrupt our reference points; to tear up our maps.  This is called disorientation.

Many of us were greatly disoriented by the election of Donald J. Trump, a reality-tv star with no political experience who managed to win over someone vastly more qualified and significantly less racist/xenophobic/mysogynistic.

Eventually, with time and effort, we will be able to re-orient ourselves.  But it’s not an easy or comfortable process.

Defense of Division

When we are disoriented, the first thing people to do is divide.  We divide everyone into categories.  Good vs Evil.  Right vs Wrong.  It arises from a place of pain and can be helpful for a time when first you find yourself disrupted.  It allows you to survive and get your feet back under you.

But!  Here’s the rub.  We can’t stay in this place of division for too long.  If we refuse novelty and nuance, if we refuse to move out of the starkly divided camps we erect for ourselves, we will calcify there.  There is a time for splitting and dividing and there is a time for nuance.

Peter Rollins, who was on the show with Rob Bell, pointed out that disorienting events are like fires.  They can be used to warm you up and cook your food.  Or they can burn your house to the ground.  If we do not move from a place of division to a place of nuance, we will burn our houses to the ground.

So we must stand in a place of nonjudgemental observance of our disorientation and simply acknowlege what we are feeling (I am shaken, I am angry, I am devastated, I am confused) and stand firm in the midst of it.  This, Bell believes, is wisdom.  To stand firm in disorientation.  To remain calm in the midst of a terrible storm.

Legitimate Pain?

This was the section I struggled with most.  Rollins, who grew up in Northern Ireland surrounded by national conflict, ventured to say that when we move out of division (we are good, they are bad), we are able to see and scrutinize the nuance that exists in each and every story.  I’m all for that.  Yes, sounds good.With regard to Trump I’m not there yet but I hope to be at some point. What I wrestle with, though, is what Rollins said next.

He said that Donald Trump was an easy answer for legitimate pain.  If we are willing to ask the hard questions and hear the pain (unemployment, a sense of being forgotten or overlooked) that propelled people to vote for Trump, we would be able to allow for a view of the world that goes beyond good and bad, us and them.  Again, I hear that.   Absolutely.  It sounds like a kind and generous way to approach the national conversations we are currently having.

But here’s the thing: I don’t buy it.  Not much anyway.  The Trump supporters I know didn’t vote for him out of a place of pain.  They didn’t vote for him because they are unemployed or struggling or overlooked.  They are well-educated and sit firmly in the (upper) middle class.  So what about them?   The words of political commentator Van Jones keep coming to mind when I consider this…

“We’ve talked about income, we’ve talked about class, we’ve talked about region, we haven’t talked about race…This was a whitelash. This was a whitelash against a changing country.”

-Van Jones

What’s most interesting (annoying/infuriating) is that, of course, nobody thinks they are racist so these comments don’t penetrate in the way that they should. We cover them with other, more palatable reasons like economics and class so that even we ourselves need not look it head on. Looking closer, though, we see this:

Trump’s overt racism is not the only reason for his triumph, but it is a central one. Despite having run on anti-migrant, anti-Muslim and anti-women platform, his victory is already being chalked up to working-class economic disenfranchisement. This doesn’t make sense on two counts. Firstly it ignores working-class people of colour, who largely rejected Trump. Economic anxiety is not the exclusive redoubt of the white working class – African Americans and Hispanic Americans experience the highest rates of poverty in the US. Secondly, this narrative entirely ignores the middle-class white Americans who seem to have turned out in support of Trump.

Race isn’t the only factor, though.  I’m from a conservative evangelical background and I know that the main issue at stake is always, almost exclusively, abortion.  I get it.  But this doesn’t seem to me to spring forth from pain but rather from a certainty that the morality and electability of a person is determined soley by their thoughts on the legality of this one thing.  There is absolutely NOTHING about Donald J. Trump that is “pro-life.”  And to be willing to overlook blatant hatred and contempt, pride and so much that is vile because he might, maybe appoint someone to the Supreme Court who might, maybe overturn Roe vs Wade is unthinkable to me when there is so much at stake.

And how about the Trump supporters now painting swastikas in the subways and championing White Nationalism?  What about the folks at the Trump rally raising their arms to him in a Nazi salute and cheering the appointment of Steve Bannon, an outright White Supremacist?  What about the Trump voters now brazenly harrassing women and muslims?  I see legitimate hatred but t’s hard to see legitimate pain.

I’m curious to hear what our group thought when they heard this section because I’m still mulling it all over.  I want to be generous and kind and open-minded but… I’m struggling!  And I’m also aware that I’m looking at this through the lens of a someone who is part of the dominant culture in a “progressive” city and therefore NOT likely to be too terribly affected by Trump one way or another.  This absolutely influences how we process the election and the outpourings that will come from it.

For Meditation & Reflection…

Two Types of Hope

Rollins closed out the podcast talking about two kinds of hope.  The first is the kind that says “everything will be alright” and then sits back and does nothing. This type of hope is dying right now in the United States.  This is good.  The election disrupted and disoriented us enough that we now have room for the kind of hope that grows out of such disturbance.

The second kind of hope demands we do something.  The first kind dies and in the process we are galvanized to a new hope that says we must put our shoulder to the wheel of history and push and push and push.

If you remove the yoke from among you,
    the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
    and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
    and your gloom be like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually,
    and satisfy your needs in parched places,
    and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
    like a spring of water,
    whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
    you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
    the restorer of streets to live in.

Isaiah 58:9b-12

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