Monday, March 30, 2015

Rights, doing right, and Holy Week



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)



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