Kicking tables, clearing space

I try to maintain a pretty even keel, and sometimes I look pretty successful (at a Parents Association meeting last year when I was trying to listen while B cavorted around the conference room, another mom told me she admired how “zen” I was about it. She should have seen me trying to get Queen Mab out the door that morning). I’m naturally a pretty passionate person, though—I feel things deeply and my instinctive reaction is to yell about it or cry (about both good and bad things). But that’s exhausting, and I have a child whose emotions are just as difficult to regulate as mine. So I’ve put a lot of work into practicing calm and patience and peace, and on the whole, I’ve gotten better about it (hence the zen comment)—feeling my feelings without necessarily splattering them all over the place.[1]

But of course I can’t just will myself into it like “BE CALM, YOU!” (as much as my husband has tried to tell me to “just calm down!” Nice try, honey). I’ve had to be careful about avoiding things that set me off if I’m not mentally prepared to deal with it right at that moment, especially online, where everything in the world could theoretically pop up on the screen in front of me. So for example, I try to limit Facebook to staying in touch with people I care about and following my favorite bloggers. This certainly includes discussion about all kinds of hot topics, but if I find that I’m spending too much time agonizing over whether or not to reply to any particular person or page’s posts that I strongly disagree with, I unfollow them. Because either this is a person whose posts are mostly just going to make me angry and I had better protect any real-life relationship by not letting the things I dislike about them constantly appear on my screen, or because they and I just don’t have the kind of relationship to safely have the intensity of discussion that their posts are calling for. There’s no hard and fast rule for this, or percentages of cute-baby-picture : ill-researched-“satirical”-meme that I follow, just an effort to pay attention to how I feel. Other times, if a friend just tends to share a lot of frustrating posts from one particular page, I just hide the page and continue enjoying their cute babies/funny cats/interesting anecdotes.

Lately this approach has been wildly inadequate, because the questions and fears are too big and the conversations and arguments about national security against terrorism versus protecting the victims of that terrorism have been bleeding all over the place. It’s impossible to open Facebook without stumbling across thousands of comments from people I don’t know, claiming to share my faith while saying things about refugees that chill me to my very soul. My hands start shaking when I see calls for massive acts of violence, for reviving the old Japanese internment camps, callous suggestions that war orphans just go back where they came from.

And there I go into online-social-justice-warrior mode. It starts off feeling awesome and righteous, but I’m sure you can imagine how it ends up.

After someone I trust very much privately pointed out to me that maybe I was getting a little carried away, I took a few deep breaths and tried to figure out what to do with all this energy I have. Because I know that anger, especially against injustice, isn’t a bad thing in itself. I mean, look at the Old Testament prophets! And didn’t Jesus go around overturning tables?! If I didn't figure out something, I was going to end up looking for more tables to kick over.

A few minutes later the same person who had (metaphorically) taken me aside  suggested, “Let your sadness spur you on to good works -- being the hands and feet -- you know? invite the broken to YOUR table as a way of pointing to His.” At the same time Esther Emery shared this good word: “We…do well in the world not by multiplying and extending our outrage, but by multiplying and extending our relationships.” 

I started to wonder about that story of Jesus overturning tables. He was so angry, and then what? What did he do after he starting throwing furniture and kicking people out of the Temple? I realized that while I've heard that story so many times, I hadn't heard much about what comes after. So I checked. According to Matthew,

“Jesus went straight to the Temple and threw out everyone who had set up shop, buying and selling. He kicked over the tables of loan sharks and the stalls of dove merchants. He quoted this text:

My house was designated a house of prayer; 

You have made it a hangout for thieves.”

And the very next verse says, “Now there was room for the blind and crippled to get in. They came to Jesus and he healed them.”

His anger cleared out the clutter that was getting between him and these people who needed him, and then filled that empty space with healing and compassion, "multiplying and extending" relationships with other people. These healings were probably small things to everyone around him, affecting only the poor and marginalized who had little to no influence on society. I bet those loan sharks and merchants set up their tables again as soon as he was gone. The whole thing probably just seemed like an awkward blip in the middle of a long day, but they mattered to the individuals who met him, and he'd made a very clear point about who belongs in that sacred space. It's a story that has resonated for years, even if the immediate effects seemed negligible.

The still, small voice sometimes has to repeat itself a few times to be sure I get the message. I'm very glad, though, that it sometimes speaks to me through the internet, since that's where I usually am when I need to hear it the most.

I don't have the power to solve the world's problems. I can't protect anyone from terrorists and extremists--I can't even make anyone to understand what seems so clear to me! But if my outrage leads me away from mere anger and into relationships and small acts of love, it will be enough.

[1] For example, I try to take a “gentle parenting/attachment parenting” approach (because they have the most useful parenting tools for me for trying to parent my intensely passionate kid without letting my own intensely passionate self become a big jerk about it), but I’ve unfollowed all but a couple parenting Facebook pages because of a few too many comments or shared blog posts that said things like, “My precious angel has never once made me think of laying a hand on him aggressively and anyone who feels differently is a monster,” (to which I respond with all kinds of words I can’t write here in case someone shares this with one of my grandmas).

A letter to my alma mater

It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.(…) For the first of all the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid counsellor the best. -G.K. Chesterton (The Defendant, Chapter 16: “A Defense of Patriotism”)

I first read this passage in my Advanced Christian Thought class in high school, and it comes to mind whenever I encounter some pseudo-patriotic variant on the “love it or leave it” theme protesting any criticism of the United States. While my opinion of Chesterton has shifted over the years (he’s an excellent writer, which cleverly disguises the vapidity of many of his arguments), being introduced to his work was only one of the many gifts I was given at my high school. Covenant is my alma mater in the truest sense—there I was encouraged to grow into the earnest overthinker you all know and love, to paint the walls (literally) with the colorful overflowings of my imagination, to think deeply about art and literature, and to look for the movement of God in even the most mundane circumstances.

I love my high school. And because I love it, Chesterton expects me to be its “most candid counsellor.”

Since I graduated in 2004, I have become increasingly conscious that while I had an amazing experience at my school, many LGBTQ students did not. And furthermore, while we were encouraged to discuss many aspects of Christian faith and practice from multiple angles, questions of sexuality and gender were not among them (heck, even the possibility that women could be pastors or equal partners in their own marriages was never honestly explored, which caused me no end of trouble for the first few years of my marriage). It took me years to discover and then independently fill those massive gaps in my understanding of human experience. There are too many stories that can’t fit neatly into the boxes on a table of “the Christian worldview” (in fact, the suggestion that there’s only one “Christian worldview” is laughable).

A large group of alums sent our high school a detailed letter back in August explaining these concerns and other, related problems. I sent my own letter, signed by my husband and his brother who are also alums, and we waited for a response. When it finally came it was underwhelming. Like Chesterton, it was well-written but with little substance. Disappointing, but not surprising. 

So here’s my letter. If nothing else, maybe it will be helpful for someone else who's come to the same sinking realization I did, that the way I had been trained to read the Bible had somehow put me on the wrong side of Augustine of Hippo's admonition that “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.”* 

I truly believe that the people who responded to our letters sincerely think they're showing love to their students, but if your students consistently feel marginalized and dehumanized, I suggest you reconsider your definition of "love"—you keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means.

August 31, 2015
Covenant Christian High School Administration

7525 W 21st Street

Indianapolis, IN 46214

To the board and administration of Covenant Christian High School,

As Covenant alumni who benefitted greatly from our education there, we are writing in support and affirmation of the August 25^th letter from Marianne Richardson et al. Their requested changes to Covenant school policies are necessary for the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of not only Covenant’s LGBTQ students, but all students of every orientation and identity, by better preparing them to be loving, compassionate members of their communities.

Covenant’s core values as listed on the school’s website include

• Loving Community: a joyful pursuit of Christ in faith, hope, love, freedom, grace, and truth. 

• Human Dignity: all persons are created in the image of God and deserve of love and respect. 

• Academic Integrity: passionate, careful, honest, and charitable engagement with ideas.

• Church Solidarity: dedicated to a thriving local and globally diverse community of God.

A community that casts out its own when they fail to live up to expectations is neither loving nor in pursuit of Christ, especially when those who are being cast out are already marginalized by society and at a dramatically increased risk for suicide, homelessness, and assault. Neither does this treatment of these marginalized individuals respect their human dignity as being created in the image of God.

Furthermore, Covenant’s refusal to acknowledge alternate perspectives on human sexuality as held by many faithful biblical Christians gives the lie to both the claims to academic integrity and church solidarity. Currently Covenant cannot honestly claim to envision the “total preparation of the student” because upon graduation, many of us are totally unprepared for and completely flummoxed by the mere existence of ordinary individuals such as an office mate who is both lesbian and Baptist. This represents a failure of Covenant’s model of Christian education, in that not only are LGBTQ students further marginalized by the very people who should have shown them the most radical love and acceptance, but even straight, cis-gendered students are ignorant of the lived experience of faith and sexuality outside Covenant’s walls.

We challenge Covenant to live up to its values—to lovingly embrace all their students in the community of Christ, to respect them as children created in God’s image still learning what it means to live out God’s will for their lives, to welcome generous and respectful debate, and to embrace the whole church even when those diverse limbs and organs of the body of Christ have similarly diverse beliefs about the Christian life.

Erin (Hall) Kissick (Class of 2004)

David Kissick (Class of 2004)

Scott Kissick (Class of 2006)

*(Since I blame Augustine for Western Christianity's unhealthy fixation on sexual sin, I think it's only fair to enlist his support in trying to alleviate some of the symptoms of this pathology.)

(and here's a link to the Google Doc version)