I started writing this Wednesday night after my sister asked
for a blog post, and I realized I hadn’t actually written much here lately,
even though I feel like I’ve been writing all the time. But lately I’ve been
using up all my writing mojo on academia-related things (job letters, a couple
conference papers), which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Writing these
materials has forced me to balance two necessary but opposing forces in my life
right now—saying “no” to the things I don’t want, while also saying “yes” to the
things I do. Deciding what I’m into, and what I’m not. I’ve thought a lot about
what I don’t need or expect from this new chapter in my life, and that approach
is necessary but by itself a dead end. So in many ways, it feels really good to
write a cover letter, because it forces me to remember how awesome I am at
teaching and research and to imagine what I do
want from a job. Painting an image of myself as a teacher and scholar has
been a shift away from this idea of “what am I not?” to “what am I?”
It’s easy for me to be negative about things—not in a
pessimistic sense, in which everything is terrible, but in the sense that I
have become adept at looking at something and realizing that it’s not for me. I
look at the goals I had been pursuing earlier in my graduate studies—the idea
that I would be a tenured professor at a research-oriented university with an
office with bookshelves and a window and maybe some kind of potted plant—and
think, “Maybe not.” I’ve spent a lot of energy on clearing out unhealthy
assumptions and preconceived notions about my future, about Life, the Universe,
and Everything. There are a lot of things I thought I wanted out of life that
I’ve decided aren’t actually right for me, and even more things I thought I
knew about God that I no longer believe.
In reference to God, there’s a word for that: apophatic theology. And having always
believed that growing close to God was about learning more things about God,
it’s been refreshing to realize that there’s a long tradition of doing the
exact opposite—contemplating what God is not. And this approach to the
attributes of God has, of course, much broader implications for how I relate to
the world. I see churches that limit who gets to do what based on reproductive
organs and businesses that try to discriminate against who they’ll serve based
on religious differences, and I think, “That’s not of God.”
But like I said above, deciding what I don’t want, what I don’t believe,
and what the world shouldn’t be like
is only half the process.
Last spring there were a bunch of blogs I quit reading, not
because I disagreed with them, but because the bloggers in question spent
almost every post writing about what was going on in the world and in the
church that was wrong. And there’s a
place for that. But it’s exhausting to only be fighting against, and not fighting for.
You can probably guess, having read this far, my general
feelings on Indiana’s
new RFRA. I don’t live in Indiana
anymore, but in many ways, it’s still home. I’ve heard lots of chatter about
what the RFRA does and doesn’t mean, and how it’s the same as, yet also dangerously different from, similar laws in other states (including my current state, which also has laws
protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender
identity).
To be honest, I don’t know enough about the topic to issue a
simple “this is wrong,” and I’m certainly not a Constitutional scholar (would I
be more employable if I were, do you think?). But I think Fred Clark at
Slacktivist (linked above) hit on what bothers me the most about this act—“the
language of RFRA is being twisted to turn an attempt to defend the rights of
religious minorities into a tool for defending the hegemony of religious
majorities.” Especially considering that the religious majority that this law
caters to is a tradition that worships a God who, while walking the earth in
human form, had a reputation for partying with sinners, asserted that he did
not come to be served but to serve and told his disciples that if they were compelled to cooperate with members of
a pagan occupying army to not only cooperate, but to do exactly twice as much
as required.
This is Holy Week. I hope I don't need to remind anyone what God did this week.
As Christians following our sacrificed God to the Cross this week, our focus should be what on how we can serve others, no matter who they are or what we think about them, and not on who we can avoid associating with. There’s a big difference between something being a right, and something being right.
So right now, rather than simply say “NO” to this so-called
right, I want to find something right to which I can say “YES.”
If you
live in Indiana,
please support these businesses. (also see http://www.openforservice.org)
