general : mackenzian

Don’t shut down

May 11, 2017 By mackenzian

New opportunities present themselves at every stage of life. Approach the aging process with courage and hope. Honor that which you have been, welcoming new possibilities for wisdom, objectivity, and greater knowledge of the Spirit. Realize that as time passes, new ways of receiving and reflecting God’s love will open.” —Intermountain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Advices and Queries

Jamaican culture used to include the convention that elders wouldn’t tell younger people their age. I’m not sure of the reason behind the rule, but Mario Martinez’ work on biocognition includes the advice that readers not to share their age no matter how old they are. People are easily caught in cultural understandings of aging.

And there are so many aging rules. If you’ve ever been told you’re “too young” or “too old” to enjoy an activity or make a certain decision, you’ve been subjected to social rules about age. It can be endearing to have elders want to include youth socially, and it can be frustrating to be rendered incompetent before you’re ready to wind down.

The last time I wrote about my grandfather, I said, “We need the long perspectives of time to learn well and take constructive action. And we need those who carry their wisdom in their bodies so it’s with them and of service to others wherever they might go.”

I still feel that way today, and Grandpa, in this post’s featured photo, is still one of my sample bodies!

Perhaps you too would like to enjoy and live well into your early 100s, hand-cutting sugar cane and taking walks around your yard in the sun. It’s not just length of life that Grandpa’s enjoyed; he also enjoys quality of life with the support of his local children and others. Overall, he’s is in better shape as a centenarian than some people thirty years younger than he is.

Bottom line? He isn’t meeting cultural expectations for people in his age group. He’s still active and social (and has all the same personality quirks he did as a younger man) and only convention says he shouldn’t be.

The Friendly advice to “approach the aging process with courage and hope” rather than fear is best applied when we’re young, just so we can keep practicing through the decades. As the Intermountain community wrote, “New opportunities present themselves at every stage of life.” That’s absolutely right—and it’s up to us to take those opportunities as they come.

More visible and less understood

May 10, 2017 By mackenzian

I first read the phrase “context collapse” from civic tech analyst Zeynep Tufekci and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom. For more than six years, Zufekci and Cottom have each written about how social media popularity collapses the boundaries between digital audiences.

By becoming extremely popular (“going viral”), information shaped for one audience can rapidly become information shared with all audiences. Even if an item’s original audience was sympathetic, once that item has gone viral, there are no guarantees about how it will land with its new audiences, which features they’ll fall in love with, and which they’ll reject, or why.

The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time.” —via Tom Critchlow, April 30, 2017

There are also costs to that heightened connectivity, and we don’t all share the costs equally.

As Tufekci wrote last spring, the same information highway that makes minoritized communities more visible and thus more vulnerable is the same network that fundamentalists and supremacists use to find one another and spur each other on.

Being social creatures means scanning our spaces for contextual clues: what, where, with whom, and why. Going viral means collapsing the boundaries that give each group its unique shape, and losing that context means losing perspective that would allow us to perceive others more accurately.

In fact, virality can often make it harder to interpret the Other. In the absence of local cultural knowledge, projection dominates and we all default to our habitual ways of telling stories.

In 2011, Facebook users were starting to express feelings of being over-exposed. and we were self-censoring to mitigate that sudden and non-consensual exposure. (I was one of these users.) Posts we create for our private pages become posts that our followers ask our permission to share, and a share from the right or wrong reader or mediator can mean the difference between open hearts and shiny eyes and a whole army of orcs in the comment section!

Consider what you know about original context as you encounter new stories and sources: how clear is it that these stories were designed for a different audience than the undifferentiated public? In what ways are you “reading other people’s mail”?

The way power works

May 9, 2017 By mackenzian

“Ouch.”

That’s what I wrote in the margin of Arundhati Roy’s The End of Imagination today when I read Roy’s critique of the political system in India, the electorate’s party choices, and the pervasive oppression of “counter-terrorism.”

In the post-9/11 world, power works in very consistent ways whether in India or the US: power represses, and repression corrodes relationships.

Roy outlines the Indian “Prevention of Terrorism Act” (POTA, 2002-2004), and its provisions were very similar to the network of policies, laws, and policing regulations that the United States has implemented since 2001: invasions and bombings of the Other abroad, mass surveillance and monitoring of the Other at home, heightened security in transportation, new identification document laws, and restrictions on travel and migration.

And as I read that law’s violent consequences for poor, Muslim, leftist, and marginalized people in India, I can see how these implications applied just as much within the US as beyond its borders. Power is consistent.

The Indian state’s proclivity to harass and terrorize people has been institutionalized, consecrated, by the enactment of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which has been promulgated in ten states… POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as judicial evidence… police torture tends to replace police investigation.” —Arundhati Roy

Roy argues that the judicial system is compromised when the state uses force to compel minoritized people.

If that’s the case, however, and force is ubiquitous, is there justice anywhere?

The entirely wrong approach

May 8, 2017 By mackenzian

Today, along with about 80 other people, I was verbally assaulted.

This is something of a routine experience on New York City subway trains: non-consensual berating dressed up as preaching, guilt-riddled fundraising pitches, and appeals for charity. They’re incredibly loud, they’re manipulative, and they all begin with the lyingest lie that’s ever been lied: “I’m sorry to bother you.”

This morning’s evangelist shopped an especially shouty blend of affirmation for his deity and warnings that judgment would follow us if we didn’t comply with his god’s indecipherable demands.

I left the carriage and hopped onto the one behind it, escaping the good news of General Zod until I changed train lines seven stations south… and the preacher did too.

He was still yelling when I got off the train a second time.

I doubt that anyone has ever told preachers like this that you can’t make up for a lack of substance by turning up the volume. If you have the entirely wrong approach for the people you want to address, you won’t get further with them by approaching them badly more often.

Sadly, there are lots of incentives for those who still do street corner and subway car preaching and panhandling this way. Sometimes people are cowed into compliance and give the demanded dollar. Social politeness makes it more likely that passengers will suffer in silence or evade the noise as I did rather than vocalize discomfort or directly challenge the speaker.

Some people also seem to draw a certain satisfaction from confrontation or dismissal, especially if that dismissal grows out of the content or rhetoric that the speaker has sown.

After all, some of the fundamentalists I know believe that though they have to teach the gospel “as a witness” to every nation, they’re only required to talk. They’re not compelled to talk effectively.

That philosophy lowers the stakes!

But if you care about being effective and not just about being loud, it also asks too much of the audiences you might speak to and asks far too little of you.

Labor and rest

May 6, 2017 By mackenzian

Have you taken a day of rest and restoration this week? —Evangelical Friends Church Southwest

Sometimes it can be helpful to read one of my cultural traditions from another perspective. I’ve read most about the Sabbath recently from Jewish writers and evangelical Protestant theologians.

But today my devotional brought me this query from Quakers in the southwest region of the United States:

Have you taken a day of rest and restoration this week?” —Evangelical Friends Church Southwest

Why, yes, I said to myself. Yes, I have. And tomorrow I have the hard-won privilege of being able to take another.

On International Worker’s Day six days ago, many around the world commemorated the rights, regulations, and conventions that labor movements have fought for over the last few centuries.

The standard eight-hour work-day—which divides the 24-hour day into equal segments for work, sleep, and free time—is one such regulation. The two-day weekend is another. I’ve valued it most when my jobs have required I work through either Saturday or Sunday.

(Yes, labor at churches is still labor! Ask your nearby minister.)

But evangelical Quakers aren’t asking about regular rest in solidarity with international labor. Nor are they following the Seventh-day Adventist concern for the observance of the Ten Commandments or “moral law” on a specific weekday.

Rather, the Friends’ interest is in living in acknowledgment of God throughout life:

First generation Friends on the other hand did not feel that God was calling them to observe a particular sabbath day – much to the consternation of mainline Protestants. Small wonder after their meeting for worship these Friends would open their businesses and serve their fellow humans with honesty and caring. These Friends were, in other words serving the Lord even though, government officials often arrested the true Christians for ‘breaking the Sabbath.'” —Arthur Berk

“We do not need to long for a particular day,” Berk explains. “He is present always.”

That principle of pervading presence is the community’s historical status quo, but some Friends are experimenting with the rite of disrupting their typical schedules and choosing not to work as normal anyway.

Some, like the Jewish and allied community of the Reboot initiative, choose to unplug from the internet and mobile technologies and recenter with family and friends.

Even when it’s philosophically inconvenient, humans love habit and structure. And sometimes that tendency can help us recover attention, presence, and grounding that our wider culture’s habits make it hard for us to live into every day.

Having access to these benefits shouldn’t be a matter of privilege, and part of seeking a more just world has to mean changing our social cultures so that it no longer is.

Radical acceptance

May 5, 2017 By mackenzian

Black and white picture of people protesting. — Photo credit: Alyssa Kibiloski

Radical acceptance just means that you acknowledge reality for what it is. If you accept the reality of the situation, you can stop dwelling on situations you have no control over (and even those you do) and move on with your life.

During a panel this week about the impact of religion on LGBTQIA people—religion as both trauma source and as a resource—I told a few personal stories and reflected back on a time when one of the only things that was helpful to me was the odd, old teaching “Resist not evil.”

RESIST! has become a contemporary rallying cry. But as I wrote in a recent post, hyper-vigilance is no way to live and rest is essential.

I’ve had to learn (and sometimes recognize I’m still learning) how to engage reality without resistance and not ceding my ability to imagine “otherwise.”

It’s not easy to cut arguments short, to not correct every misperception, and to leave others to be as fixed as they choose to be. And yet it’s a lot easier to do that than to spend energy in a reactive interpersonal cycle.

In a reflection on acceptance and contemporary politics, one social worker invites readers to practice “radical acceptance” about the challenges of their week.

Read it and see if there are any strategies you might apply to your own process.

Why it can be so hard to change our minds

May 3, 2017 By mackenzian

Left: A new concept with legs. Right: A brain with bug eyes and gaping mouth waving a sword in each hand. Speech bubble: “Have no fear. I will kill it with swords!”

If you’ve ever scribbled a rough denial in the margin of a book that challenged your core beliefs, you’ve experienced some of the emotional turmoil that the backfire effect relies on.

The last time I wrote about this psychological defense mechanism, I was myself in a state of mild resistance to the concept. No one working on public education or social change loves the idea that people are more likely to reject new information than they are to accept it.

Furthermore, in the era of viral falsehood, researchers are discovering that repeatedly exposing people to nonsense helps to build its popular credibility. People are also more likely to believe nonsense they see friends share alongside fact, and debunking lies doesn’t help.

Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects, and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people’s sense of themselves… Repetition of any kind—even to refute the statement in question—only serves to solidify it.” —Maria Konnikova, January 2017

It’s the amygdala’s resist-or-run response that can make encountering new information risky business. Read The Oatmeal’s account of the backfire effect for more.

Resilience for the marginalized

April 29, 2017 By mackenzian

TOGETHER, WE HAVE BEEN DOING HARD THINGS—FOR DECADES... NOT WITHOUT FEAR, NOT WITHOUT RISK, BUT TOGETHER, STRONGER THAN EVER... GOD IS WITH US. TAKE COURAGE. --M Barclay
I’ve been listening to my siblings in the United Methodist community and reconnecting with my siblings from the Adventist community this weekend.

On Friday, while I was offline, the UMC’s Judicial Council ruled that the bishops of the Western Jurisdiction (five states from Wyoming down to Colorado) had violated church teachings by electing and consecrating Rev. Karen Oliveto to serve as their bishop.

While some commentators have clarified that Bishop Oliveto was in fact duly elected, LGBTQIA people have heard loud and clear that their place in the church and in ministry is again up for debate.

And they’re tired, but undeterred.

M Barclay, communications director at Reconciling Ministries Network, asked allies yesterday to reflect on “what they will do” now that their church’s disciplinary machine is trundling toward them.

Last I heard, the Western Jurisdiction was meeting today to figure that out. But it remains a question for all of us who still participate in whatever ways in hostile religious traditions.

I turned the same question over with my Adventist peers today, too: What will we do? Our answers varied.

Most of us have lots of stories from our formative years in the denomination; its practices shaped both our subculture and us, and some of that conditioning persists even as we’ve grown, changed, or moved away.

What many of us have kept is a principle from R. Abraham Heschel: “My tradition,” Heschel once said, “not only gives me the right to speak in its name, but the duty.”

Defining that duty in ways that honor our wholeness without requiring us to swallow abusive rhetoric along the way is fundamental to our ability to move forward together and to keep engaging when there are very good reasons for us to stop.

Accounting for everyone

April 28, 2017 By mackenzian

I last mentioned the Outspoken series here in February, when Daneen and Stephen published the first installment.

The series features Adventist LGBTQIA people sharing their stories, families, and experience with their congregations.

In the most recent installment, about Philip, Alberto, Dahlia, and Nicolás, Philip and Alberto reflect on all the ways that their family’s life in their local church hangs on the comfort and welcome of the [heterosexual] members they’ve been worshipping with.

“We’re here and we’re a part of the Adventist family as well,” Alberto says. “Please take our membership into account when you make decisions that will influence the lives of us and our family.”

It’s incredible that this is still a controversial idea.

Watch Philip and Alberto‘s story online, and donate to help the producers publish the rest of the series.