Thanksgiving Reconciliation: Coming Together at the Table

Thanksgiving Reconciliation: Coming to the Table - on family holidays in hard times - read on KateRaeDavis.com

Thanksgiving, as we recognize it today, was invented in hopes of preventing the war that we now refer to as the American Civil War.

The hope was that pulling together family around a table to appreciate one another would keep families together. That one really good meal focused on our gratitude and abundance would help mend differences. That war could be avoided.

Obviously, that it didn’t work.

Still, I think this is the history we should be telling about Thanksgiving this year. It’s a tradition on which we can build.

I don’t know what the table conversations were like in the year 1860. Did matriarchs, in hopes of keeping their sons alive, guide the conversation to each party’s investment in the policies and issues of the national debates? Or did they, like the matriarchs in my home, firmly guide the conversation back to the weather or the game when anything political began to surface?

Regardless of how we, as a people, have answered this question in the past, I know one thing to be true: Gathering around a table isn’t enough on its own. The meal alone doesn’t change hearts or minds. We can eat together and be at each other’s throats, even in the same moment.

I’m considering myself lucky that I chose Christmas to be my holiday with family this year. It gives me just a little more time to prepare myself. And it gives me an opportunity to celebrate the community I’ve found here.

But I also wonder if I’m losing out on an opportunity for reconciliation. My “friendsgiving” group is diverse in many ways, but not politically.

I live in Seattle, a notoriously liberal city. It stands to reason, both by location and by personal preference, that the majority of my friends are highly educated bleeding heart liberals. We grieve this election. We lament the racist systems of our nation, and the white supremacy that is becoming more evident and more powerful.

It might be possible that our humanity is no better and no worse than the white supremacists.

Which is hard to admit, but here’s the thing: White supremacists think they’re better than people of color, for whatever string of reasons. I think I’m better than white supremacists, because I’m more understanding and empathetic and aware of the impact of historical oppression on present systems and aware of my own privilege in those systems.

As long as we’re thinking we’re better than anyone, we’re standing on separate hills shouting, “God, I thank you that I am not like them.” All that’s different is how we define the them. “God, I thank you that I am not like the welfare queens and the homos and thugs.” “God, I thank you that I am not like the ignorant and the hicks and the hateful.”

Perhaps we could stand side by side as we pray, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner, consumed by hatred.”

The familial holiday table a hard place to be in, as a white woman. If I bring up politics, I betray my family. I betray our (not entirely unspoken) agreement to not acknowledge our differences. I betray my role in the family as a peacekeeper. I betray my role as a woman, which requires me to vigilantly maintain relationships.

And yet, if I’m loyal to my family, I betray my black and latino and asian-american friends. I become complicit in their oppression by not working for reconciliation, by not entering into uncomfortable conversations that might lead to new understandings.

The question isn’t if I will betray, or when. The question is who I am choosing to betray in each moment.

I’m hoping to be able to find a way to honor both my family and my friends.

If I can be curious about my family’s understanding, curious about their circumstances, perhaps I’ll be able to understand them. Perhaps my curiosity will spark their own. Perhaps I can listen deeply enough to understand their vote and their viewpoint, to be able to imagine a life that would lead to that understanding.

Perhaps my openness to their experiences will help them relax enough to be open to mine.

And if it doesn’t, perhaps I can be mature enough to deepen the relationship until they are.

I don’t have any delusions that reconciliation across my family will mend the national political conversation. But if enough of us did it, couldn’t it be the start of something wondrous?

As a child, my teachers and family pretended that Thanksgiving was about pilgrims and native peoples making friends. The story is problematic in lots of ways, though perhaps we can use it to practice ways of tolerating complex people in desperate times. Perhaps there’s a way to tell the story that acknowledges that hatred was born of fear, that fear was born of lack of understanding and lack of compassion and lack of imagination in desperate times. That’s a story that feels relevant.

This year, I’m telling the story of the modern Thanksgiving that was born out of the desire to reconcile before our nation was torn asunder. In our era, the table feels like an equally important gathering place. Our geopolitical lines are not drawn so neatly; it is every many cities versus their surrounding countryside, each state’s urban areas versus their rural neighbors. We must find a way to meet at common tables. Change for the nation will only occur through conversations founded on compassionate conversations that go both ways, in the context of meaningful relationships.

In our capitalist society, we readily see “coming to the table” as a metaphor for negotiation.

As a Christian, I am weekly formed to see the table as a place of reconciliation. A place in which bread is freely offered, with nothing asked in return. If I am metabolized into the body of that bread, perhaps I can freely offer my ears and willingness to understand without asking to be understood in return.

I’m not sure I’m strong enough for it. I’m not sure what other options I have.

God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

With Liberty & Justice For All

Examining the application of "liberty and justice for all" against the intent of the divine in Christian scripture - read on KateRaeDavis.com

Gun violence prevention. Marriage. Minimum wage.

Many of the major debates going on in the US today are multiple faces of one core debate. Which do we value more: liberty or justice?

We pledge allegiance to be a nation “with liberty and justice for all.” Which is a poetic and beautiful aim, but misleading in the way it joins the two values. Liberty and justice don’t hold hands so much as they arm wrestle.

Mary Midgley in The Myths We Live By writes on the way that our post-Enlightenment world is captivated (read: held captive) by the poetic simplicity of these concepts. Such simplicity, she argues, obliterates the tension of trying to value competing ideals.

“Enlightenment concepts need our attention because they tend to be particularly simple and sweeping. Dramatic simplicity has been one of their chief attractions and is also their chronic weakness, a serious one when they need to be applied in detail. For instance, the Enlightenment’s overriding emphasis on freedom often conflicts with other equally important ideals such as justice or compassion. Complete commercial freedom, for example, or complete freedom to carry weapons, can cause serious harm and injustice. We need, then, to supplement the original dazzling insight about freedom with a more discriminating priority system.”

Evaluating the notions of liberty and justice through the lens of scripture - read on KateRaeDavis.comI should note that Midgley is English, though the issues she raises in this paragraph are particular relevant to contemporary USAmerica. Unchecked capitalism and weapon-carrying are two freedoms that USAmericans seem to value more than other developed countries.

And to the same degree that we have freedom, we suffer the consequences of freedom in the form of injustices.

To reframe our debates in terms of the values of liberty and justice:

Do we value commercial freedom for corporations, or wage justice for families?

Do we value freedom for near-unlimited access to weapons, or justice for … well, all the individuals and groups who are targeted without trial; just about any group that is feared or hated (persons of gender and sexual diversity, persons of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, persons of certain religions, persons who happen to work at certain places or attend certain schools, or just happened to be in a public space)? In the gun debate, we measure the cost of rampant freedom in the death toll.

Do we value freedom for marriage or justice for marriage? This one is interesting in that whichever we prioritize, everyone gets to get married. So whatever values are informing anti-marriage sentiment, they aren’t very American. And — more on this next — they aren’t very Christian.

In scripture, liberty and freedom are a strong theme.

The words make most of their appearances in Paul’s letters, and usually as a command to proclaim liberty to those who are captive. To Paul, liberty is for the oppressed. Liberty is not for those who are already in power. Those who live freely have little need for liberation.

Paul actually makes it a point to caution on the use of liberty for those who have it or have newly obtained it. In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul writes “take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” He’s talking about eating meat; a modern parallel might be how I shouldn’t allow my freedom to drink alcohol to become a stumbling block to those who are newly confronting their alcoholism. But the spirit of his words apply more broadly: the freedoms of some shouldn’t make life difficult for others who have weaknesses.

Justice and her sisters compassion and mercy are also strong themes throughout biblical texts.

Compassion is most often used as a description of God or Jesus. Mercy, too, almost always comes from God. Throughout both the First Testament writings and in the Gospels we hear the refrain “He had compassion on them.”

Who are the “them” that the Holy One has compassion on? The blind, the hungry, the weeping.

Again, it would seem that the powerful, the full, the content, the ones who have their lives together have little need for compassion.

My favorite use of ‘justice’ in scripture is Jesus’s words to those in positions of power and influence. He acknowledges that they do what is right strictly according to the law, but that they’ve “neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.Jesus asserts that the spirit of “justice and mercy and faith” should undergird the law, should inform the carrying out of the law.

What would our world look like if we believed similarly?

What might this election season — or to dream even bigger — what might this country look like if “Christian Values” voters made justice and mercy their primary value?

If liberty is for the oppressed and justice and compassion are for those in need, citizens concerned with Christian values must ask, when considering public policy: Who do these laws favor?

And in wider society, Christians must unite as the voice asking: Who is held captive? What do we/they need to be freed from? What might we/they be freed to? Who has been treated unjustly, and what do we need to do in order to make manifest something closer to justice?

The only one who is fully able to hold the tension of “liberty and justice for all” is God.

Especially when we read “for all” conditionally. When people say these words, they rarely mean it. They seem to mean “liberty and justice for all 4% of the world’s population.” But the words were penned with the intent of a global all.

It is God who grants freedom, who leads the people of Israel out of Egypt. It is God in Jesus who shows what true freedom to love looks like. And it is God who will be able to deliver justice without preference or blindness, God who has compassion on us.

Liberty and justice are ultimately the prerogatives of God, and anything we do in their name will undoubtedly fall short of the ideal.

But I don’t see that as any reason for us to stop holding their marriage as our aim.

Thanks for reading! For weekly updates on all the blog’s posts (as well as access to the Free, Ever-Expanding Resource Library), sign up below: 

Stay spiritually connected and culturally current with latest posts in your inbox, once each week.


In the comments…

Do you tend toward liberty or justice? What has formed and informed that preference?

Who do you see as captives in contemporary USAmerica? Who is treated unjustly?

Christian Values Voters

Christian Values Voters - read at Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

Today, I’d like to add to the definition of “Christian values” Voters. Yes, this is religion and politics — our culture’s sacred taboos in polite conversation — brought together.

The Meaning of Wealth

First, some words from G.K. Chesterton on a Christian understanding of the trustworthiness of the rich. The presidential candidates’ net worth differs depending on who you ask, as does the meaning of their worth. Most often, I seem to hear candidates’ wealth discussed as a sign of respectability, responsibility, and trustworthiness. Our culture equates the accumulation of wealth with responsible citizenry, achievement, and moral goodness. For the record, both parties have candidates with considerable wealth. On the Dem side: Clinton is worth something between $15-45 million; Sanders around half a million. On the Rep side: the estimated worth of Drumpf is over $4,000 million (I find it helpful to remember that a billion is a thousand million); Bush around $22 million; Carson somewhere between $10-26 million; Kasich around $10 million; Cruz around $3 million; Rubio something under half a million.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Dover, 2004), p111-112:

Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man. […] If we assume the words of Christ [on the impossibility of a camel going through the eye of a needle] to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at he very least mean this–that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case of Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor. [,,,] In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.

Everyone is, to some degree, inclined to immorality, even if they have millions in the bank. Chesterton’s point is that we are all human, and any of us may morally fail and fall.

So then a better question than “how much wealth do candidates have?” is often suggested to be “how much do candidates donate?” But I’d propose an even more relevant question as: “What do candidates spend their wealth on: personally, professionally, and through donations?” Spending a small fortune on a private jet is not the same as spending a small fortune on a child’s college education. And I’m less impressed with someone’s million dollar donation if it went to renovating an opera house when there are people starving in our own country.

christian Values Voters on Literate Theology

 

Fear and Love

Below is a portion from Shane Hipps’s Selling Water By the River on love (which I think all Christians can agree is pretty highly ranked as a Christian value) and fear. I won’t add to the plethora of opinion pieces on the use of fear in this presidential debate, or the ways a certain candidate (ahem) is exploiting fear responses for votes.

Shane Hipps, Selling Water by the River (Jericho Books, 2012), p 86-87:

Darkness and light do not exist together. They have never met.

 

Darkness is always at the mercy of light. If you want to be rid of darkness, light a lamp.

 

In 1 John 4:18, he writes, ‘There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear. What John writes here is deeply insightful for two reasons. First, he does not use the expected dualism between love and hate; instead he sets fear at odds with Love. This is truly revealing, as it shows us that behind all hate is really a deeper problem of fear.

 

Second, we are shown that the relationship between love and fear is the same as that of light and darkness. Love and fear cannot occupy the same space. Moreover, Love and fear are not equal and opposite forces. Fear is always at the mercy of Love. One way to see it is that fear is actually the absence of Love, not the opposite. The lesson here is an important one. Love has no opposite. No force in the universe rivals it.

A candidate’s courage/bravado is artificial if the candidate is the one instilling the fear in the populace. It’s easy to fight an enemy when you know the enemy is a phantom you have created. Perhaps we should collectively take a few deep breaths to evaluate the legitimacy and source of a fear. Perhaps we should quiet the surging adrenaline we all experience in shouting matches, in order to listen for gentler whispers of love.

Christian Values Voters on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

Christian Values

These certainly aren’t the only criteria that Christians will — or should — use when completing their ballots. But we should certainly evaluate the culture’s equation of wealth with respectability. And the capacity for Love is certainly worthy of our attention and consideration. When we claim to vote with Christian values, we shouldn’t mean that we’re looking at candidates stances on one or two select issues (however important those two are, they are only two in a much wider, global picture). We should examine the wide array of Christian values that frame an entire person and their way of being in the world. And I do mean the world: it’s too easy to forget that the majority of the President’s job description is about foreign affairs, not domestic issues.


For discussion: If you’re Christian, what stances on issues do you look for in candidates? What life-values do you look for?

On Prayer & Policy-Making

Prayer & Policy-Making - Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

The divide is growing. In the wake of another mass shooting, the US has entered a now familiar liturgy: people demand changed policies; politicians offer prayers; nothing changes.

This time, rather than placating constituents, the prayers of politicians has been met with backlash. The New York Daily News released a bold cover: “God Isn’t Fixing This.” On twitter, #thoughtsandprayers was trending, with use ranging from a recognition of congress’s inactivity to blatant mockery of prayer practices in general.

Which of course created a backlash against that backlash: Christians defending prayer and speaking against such “prayer shaming.”

Part of what causes my heart to break so deeply in the midst of this conversation is that, across the illusion of the chasm between them, both sides have something beautiful to offer the other side. The Christians are correct in saying we should be praying; the secularists are correct in saying that there should be action.

What made Christianity radical is its anti-theist understanding of prayer, that prayer is never complete until it is followed by action. There are lots of articles and Bible-verse lists about how Jesus prayed: usually alone, often on a mountain or in a desert. But often the sentence about Jesus’s prayer is followed by a sentence about his action. Jesus prays and immediately after, he gathers and teaches. Jesus prays and immediately after walks onto the water to the disciples in a boat. Jesus prays and then raises Lazarus from the dead. Jesus prays and then is arrested and goes to the cross.

For Jesus, prayer seems to be the inhale he takes before exhaling into action. He is filled through the inhale prayer so that he may exhale into action through preaching and miracles. For Jesus, prayer and action are so interwoven as to be inseparable; the prayer is not complete until exhaled into action.

We Christians often end our prayers with the words “in the name of Jesus Christ” or “through Jesus Christ.” We pray in and through Jesus. We receive eucharist that metabolizes us in and through the Christ. We receive baptism that has brought us in and through the church, which we also call the body of Christ.

In these ways, we are living members of the Christ to whom we pray in and through; we pray ourselves into being part of Christ, and pray ourselves into becoming part of the answer to the very prayers we speak. Christian theologian Ronald Rolheiser reminds us that “to pray as a Christian demands concrete involvement in trying to bring about what is pleaded for in the prayer.”

For an everyday example: consider someone who prays for healing for a sick neighbor, but never brings a meal or offers to drive to the doctor. She does the inhale of the prayer, but never completes it in the exhale; she prays as a theist and not as a Christian.

The dynamics might be similar in our nation-wide conversation about gun violence and prayer. Non-Christian people are calling Christians to action; they are calling us to exhale our prayers into action. It is not always done tactfully, kindly, or lovingly, but if we are open to their criticism in the way that Christ received death, perhaps we can develop ears to hear how deeply, prophetically Christ-like their call to action is.

Likewise, Christians are calling the country to prayer. We are right to say that it is impossible to exhale indefinitely; we must inhale in order to receive the Spirit that Jesus breathed upon us. In our inhale, we begin to grow in the ability to discern God’s will for humanity. In our inhale, we begin to let go of what our own desire may be for the future of our country. In order to act lovingly, our actions must originate in prayer.

Secular society is calling the church to action; the church is calling secular society to prayer.

Both sides have something beautiful to offer. We should be praying. Prayer is not complete until followed by action.

Each could be a blessing to the other, if we all soften our hearts enough to hear it. It’s risky. A soft heart is a much more easily broken heart. But perhaps broken heartedness is not an inappropriate response to such circumstances.

prayer corner
Where I pray — and then write.