freedom : mackenzian

April 10, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Contradicting our co-authors

I recently told a friend and client that we couldn’t afford to give up on people who’re different from us. Even if we don’t like each other, don’t understand each other, and our antipathy is entirely mutual, our destinies are tied and we can’t afford not to care.

We live on the same planet, there are no alternative planetary homes, and though we can vote each other off our social islands (and increasingly do), we can’t vote each other off our common rock except through the mechanisms of genocide.

I find that concept a lot easier to speak about and digest than the principle that we co-author one another’s identities.

This idea that I determine what I think of myself with others and not all by myself isn’t especially modern. But there’s some science in co-authorship. As Mario Martinez explains in his writings on biocognition, culture establishes meanings for common experiences and trains us in how to embody and live out those meanings.

For example, in this culture, many people pair phrases like “I’m getting old” with groans and complaints about creaky joints or reduced stamina. I’ve done it. The performance is based on an implicit belief that aging necessarily means losing physiological or psychological function and that pain is to be expected.

Such beliefs aren’t the whole story.

There is much scientific evidence showing that the perception of pain is strongly influenced by cultural contexts. For example, if you fracture your leg falling down a set of stairs that are badly maintained by your negligent landlord, you will feel significantly more pain than if you were to fracture it by diving off a cliff to save a drowning child.

Beliefs can wound, heal, and interpret pain based on cultural contexts.” —Mario Martinez

Our cultures teach us what to consider strange or painful. They teach us what to celebrate and when to mourn. As I shared in the last post, they also teach us how to interpret and value suffering—as discipline for a future blessing, perhaps.

Unlearning these lessons when they don’t support our health and well-being means that we have to contradict our co-authors: authority figures, relatives, religious instructors, and the cultures these and other figures represent.

Some people start contradicting co-authors as teenagers, but for others of us, unlearning and re-learning are processes that last much longer than our second decades. They can also provoke conflict, which makes sharing life on our social islands very challenging.

Martinez offers several questions to help his readers move through the processes of unlearning and re-learning unhelpful beliefs:

Identify your tribal and religious authorities to find the model of suffering you were taught. For example, suffering to reach success, wealth, wisdom, or heaven.

Observe what you feel in your mind-body when you discover how you were taught suffering. Was it a religious authority, a book, a teacher, a parent?

Who continues to remind you that you should suffer?

How do you punish yourself when you do something wrong?

Where did you learn [that you have to pay for your sins]? Is it affecting your health, wealth, or love?

Consider that rather than paying for your bad deeds or ‘sins’ with suffering, you can take corrective action.

Commit to applying your new corrective action next time you determine you have to atone for a bad deed. What authority must you defy [if you do that]?” —Mario Martinez

I appreciated reading these questions, especially during the season of Passover.

Buried in the story of the Exodus is the idea that someone had to suffer for Pharaoh’s stubbornness—many people, in fact. While there are many ways to interpret the other elements of this powerful story, there’s a sense in which the Hebrews’ freedom gets tied to others’ suffering.

That story is among the first cultural tales that ever taught me that eventual reward requires someone to suffer first. But all the better if that someone isn’t me!

I’m beginning to believe that this is a cultural belief worth defying. I’m also beginning to hope that as activists dream up major transformations in our social cultures on issues from climate change to capital punishment, we can learn to dream up freedom that doesn’t depend on our or others’ pain.

January 9, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Avoiding destiny, and making it

Jean de La Fontaine was a 17th Century verse- and fable-writer who spun ancient Greek tales into the rhythms of modern French poetry. One of the verses he’s most famous for describes the interactions between belief, avoidance, and inevitability:

On rencontre sa destinée
Souvent par des chemins qu’on prend pour l’éviter.

We meet our destiny very often by roads we take to avoid it.” —Jean de La Fontaine, The Fables, Book VII, fable 16

Fable 16 begins with a story about a man who sought to learn the destiny of his beloved son. Informed that his son will die, the man tries ardently to prevent that outcome, and he becomes overprotective. But he cannot avert his son’s “destiny,” and the son dies albeit in a slightly different way than expected.

“Caution blindly meant to shun that sad event” has no impact on the eventual outcome because “men fulfil the very fears engendered [by] prophecies.” Avoidance is merely delay.

The Christian apostle Paul once wrote that he’d never have thought of specific acts or been tempted to commit them if it weren’t for rules forbidding them. Then as today, a protective hedge provokes at least a few people to breach its boundary, and telling people not to think of purple elephants only invokes purple elephants everywhere.

It’s easy to interpret vague predictions after the fact as though they’d been specific. It’s also easy to defer our ability to choose and creatively respond in the present because of what we expect will happen tomorrow. Perhaps at least part of the basis for the gospels’ teaching on eschewing fearful living boils down to the fact that fearing for the future doesn’t enable one to master today.

La Fontaine ends his verse arguing that we aren’t fixed in any trajectory, but have the capacity to choose and to respond creatively to life as it comes.

Both expectations of inevitable progress or predictions of inevitable demise can diminish our sense of response-ability. Nothing seems to make us less likely to act than the sense that others pull our strings, even when those others are “the stars” La Fontaine wrote about or the gods themselves.

October 5, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Copeland: Deeper change is needed

The nineteenth-century notion of linear progress not only has collapsed but decayed. The cynical retreat of the nation-state, regressive programs of structural adjustment, repressive taxation, rising oil prices, gross inflation, market manipulation, food shortages, pandemics, drought, and wars have trapped not only the peoples of the two-thirds world but most of the rest of us in ‘a vicious cycle of increasing immigration, decreasing formal employment, falling wages, and collapsing revenues.’

“We need thoroughgoing, practical, genuine, systemic change in the present global order. At the same time, we sense a need for something deeper and beyond the moral attention that social justice accords to the distribution of the material and cultural conditions for human living. That something deeper and beyond, I suggest, is solidarity.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom

Solidarity is that empathy for the Other that impels us to act with them and for our mutual good. It transcends formal charity too: the system will never be able to keep up with peer-to-peer solidarity.

Crowdfunding is a powerful a way to move resources through society outside of institutions. And the tax code is still light-years behind a crowdfunding system that’s now more than a decade old.

We’re not quite at tax prep season yet, but if you design or participate in a crowdfunding campaign, don’t get caught out.

September 4, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Quote: What we’re freed for

From M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom:

Freedom from enslavement was freedom for being human. Only by analogy could the words of the Emancipation Proclamation change the order of creation, but it did remove God’s black human creatures from the plantation ledger.

Statutory freedom amended the social and political status of the enslaved people. It was now possible for enslaved women and men to begin to exercise essential freedom. The freed people now had the possibility of taking up the responsibility of human living without restraint.

In sum, that responsibility was this: to be a human subject, to be a person; to be [one who] consciously and intentionally in word and in deed assumes and affirms [their] own personhood and humanity…

Freedom from enslavement was freedom for loving without restraint… Freedom from enslavement was freedom for community and solidarity, for being human together.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, p. 48-49, emphasis added.

We’re not merely freed. We’re freed for life.

Any rule that limits freedom or encourages enslavement, that denigrates love or corrodes community, is an attempt to undermine the divine creative act and diminish the human person, and is thus illegitimate.

June 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Freedom delayed isn’t freedom.

I’d never even heard of Juneteenth until I started living in Texas. The international mythology around US abolitionism and emancipation is, like British abolitionist mythology, so thick that no one had ever told me it took the enslaved people of Texas two and half years to discover that President Lincoln’s executive order had taken effect in January 1863.

They spent two and a half extra years in slavery.
White Texans spent two and a half extra years deluded about their supremacy.
Two and a half years. Maybe a century and a half more, if we account for the life and death of James Byrd, Jr. (CN: lynching.)

I might not have believed the story of Juneteenth if I hadn’t seen the historical evidence for it, because it’s such a perversely perfect story premise: the people of Galveston are people forgotten in a network of soul-destroying laws and customs whose time has already gone. They don’t know they’re living in the future.

When the sun rises on January 1, 1863, nothing changes for them, and no one brings them the news that could help them to change their lives themselves. The war is over; they don’t know it. Their freedom is recovered; they have no inkling. Life continues as it always has, crushing them one by one.

This morning at work, the choir closed service with Jill Scott’s song “Golden.” (The lyrics are fairly simple.)

This song was playing in the background as I read President Obama describing Juneteenth as “a time to recommit ourselves to the work that remains undone.”

It’s that. It’s also a time to reflect on all of the ways we’re still waiting to inhabit freedom and wholeness we already are, freedom and wholeness undermined in contexts that would rather we be fragmented and compliant, not flourishing, not creative.

In the shadow of 103 of my siblings—LGBTQ, Latinx, Black—I can’t avoid seeing how easily my freedom and safety can be snatched if the raiders have enough brute force, enough fire power, enough doctrinal authority. I hate that something so fundamental to me can be so fragile.

And I’m looking for that news from DC that hasn’t yet made it to my life’s Galvestons. I’m looking for the word that restores the original blessings that are mine. If I’m part of communities that are free but don’t know it and therefore can’t experience the fullness of freedom, the very word, freedom, begins to lose its substance. As much as I’m embodied, as much as you can map my location and trace my life in time, my freedom has to be more than an abstract thing. Our freedom can’t be a theory. It has to be lived, material, as enfleshed and well-formed as we are.

Freedom has to filter into the very same policies, customs, channels, and systems that supremacism and enslavement did. Otherwise we can’t live free. That’s what restoration means: not that we port ourselves into disembodied space where everything’s alright and there are no worries, but that we restructure the world that is until it is the world it can be.

I’m cautioning myself, in the name of my ancestors, to stop looking to people and organizations for permissions that they don’t have the authority to grant or deny, and I’m authorizing myself. I’m not focusing on the ways that the world is committed to my limits; I’m focusing on the steps I can take, the new work I can begin, the facts that I haven’t yet seen because I’ve taken others’ stories about me for granted and haven’t fully claimed my own stories:

I am responsible.
I am capable.
I am free.

The work that remains undone is the manifestation of a world in which we can all flourish, in which we’re all free. Our visionaries have long proclaimed us free, but we still have to get that news to Galveston.

March 6, 2015 By Keisha McKenzie

Breaking Out of Holidays, Breaking into Life

The start of the 2015 Lenten season coincided with the birthdays of writers Toni Morrison (b. 1931) and Audre Lorde (b. 1934). Lorde died in 1992, just a year before Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Had she survived breast cancer, Lorde would have been 81 years old this year. Morrison is now 84. Both of them lived through the all-too-short public career of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, still better known to the world as Malcolm X. Many of us remembered Malik’s life and the 50th anniversary of his assassination on Saturday, February 21.

All three of these elders leave a legacy of full-throttle freedom, a world upturned and reordered through the creative, active word. All three also remind me of C.S. Lewis’ Aslan: unapologetic, unbought, uncaged.

I don’t come from a faith tradition that observes either Lent or Easter, but I did grow up in England where Shrove Tuesday (Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras) was also known as Pancake Day. As a seasonal nod, my mother sometimes made us pancakes. My favorite kind had batter mixed with pureed apples from the trees in our garden.

Now I’m far from that home, a new immigrant in a society shaped by the best and worst of faith, and a Seventh-day Adventist occupying the limen of my denomination, I’ve been reflecting on this season. What does it mean to learn from Lent here in the US? The calendar here is a long list of corporatized holidays.

Christmas doesn’t pass before pink paper hearts and chocolates adorn the stores. We barely have time to flee the Valentine’s ball before the Easter pastels rush into the spaces we leave behind. We all but save the nation through our spending and production—and stores and media platforms are all happy to sanctify our rites.

It made sense to me that by the evening of Mardi Gras, some countered with the sobriety of Ash Wednesday and the Lenten weeks. I saw several social media announcements about people’s plans to fast from Facebook or other social media platforms. As well as 40-day fasts, there were also hundreds of “giv* up [X] for Lent” announcements on Twitter. “The ‘giving up [X] for Lent’ tweets,” I wrote, “are a pretty interesting data set.”

As Verdell Wright noted, these tweets are ripe for quantitative analysis: what percentage of users are giving up traditional items—meat, fat, flour—or making modern Lenten sacrifices—alcohol, sugar, television, social media? How many aren’t participating at all, but rather ride the wave of conversation and meta humor about it all?

There are also qualitative notes to play. Richard Thomas, for example, tackles the oppression hidden in plain sight in popular celebrations of Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras beads—also used during LGBT Pride season—are manufactured outside the US in Chinese factories that don’t prioritize workers’ freedom or equity. So annual festivities on Bourbon Street, NOLA, are enmeshed with worker oppression 7,300 miles away in the manufacturing city of Fuzhou, China. David Redmon’s Mardi Gras: Made in China tells this story.

Thomas, however, uses Augustinian theology to assess America’s Mardi Gras: he argues that the festival masks economic relationships that aren’t free or equal, that undermine a telos (end or purpose) of increased human equality, freedom, and dignity. Thomas also focuses exclusively on Christians. Whereas I would universalize these proposed ends—Christians don’t merit a more beneficial end than other humans do—I question whether Augustine would’ve yielded his seat at the More Equal Than You table for new bosses on Animal Farm. (Other readers are more hopeful.)

The beneficial end that accrues to all people is an end that doesn’t rest on membership in Christian organizations or compliance with consensus. Mere existence and unconditioned humanity has to be enough. A “dignity” and “protection from exploitation” that only applied to some humans would be no more worth defending than the Christian slave-trading of John Newton.

"What if I told you... holidays are like caged revolution?" —@mackenzian — Original image based on still from the Warner Bros’ Matrix (1999).

So what if I told you that Lent wasn’t the only holiday period when oppression marries piety? Each November we see angst about stores open on Thanksgiving Day and excesses on Black Friday. I know that a great deal of the backlash is sincere. Much of it concentrates on a few short days between Labor Day and Christmas, on the micro-actions of ordinary people looking for deals for themselves or their loved ones, and others who can’t afford not to work. So little focus on the system and customary social order that Thanksgiving allows us to escape.

“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary… We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” —Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Empire is dangerous because it morphs just enough to still govern you while you sing nostalgic lullabies about its decline or observe the anniversaries of its death. Oh, I wish I lived in Dixie—hooray, hooray! For the great achievement of not recognizing that the old world has merely changed form and not passed away, we gain rest and family time we can’t otherwise afford to take. Paid holidays are breaks from a wearying routine, a life in which profits may be private but risks and costs are common goods.

The holidays prompt some talk about restructuring daily life. And perhaps, like the New Year’s Resolution, they also encourage people to make small, meaningful, and, we hope, sustainable changes.

The holidays also function as a steam vent, channeling personal and popular energy that might otherwise overturn the Temple or the Senate. Gil told us that the revolution would not be televised. It also won’t happen during paid vacation time.

Many of us benefit, if we work in traditional jobs, from the 40-hour labor week and the principle of the workless weekend. Progressive Christianity admires the debt forgiveness of the Hebrew Jubilee: land at rest, debts quashed, and slaves freed every 7th and 50th year (Lev. 25:1-55; Deut. 15:1-23). And the weekly Sabbath also suggests a telos, but is it a taste of liberty from a corrupt order on one day of the week? Or can we aim for lives of liberty and freedom no matter who we are and no matter which day it is?

But Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you.”

Fred Clark sat with this verse last quarter. Jesus’ phrasing echoes Deuteronomy 15, the chapter that outlines how jubilee would work among the new Israelite nation.

There will be no poor among you; for the Lord will bless you in the land…if only you will strictly obey the voice of the Lord.

If only. The implication is that inequity will persist only with sustained disobedience and disregard for the Israelites’ structures around labor, farming, indentured servitude and slavery, multi-generational debt, and wealth gained through the indebtedness of others. Yet even these laws and practices didn’t apply universally: Deuteronomy 15 shows that the new law would give very different protections to the Hebrew and “the foreigner among you.” This revolution is not for the entire human family.

The gospels’ writers make Jesus’ first major scripture reading a portion of Isaiah 61. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Isaiah and Jesus say in chorus, “because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

“You were bought with a price,” the free-born Paul later writes; “Do not become slaves of men.” Yet he also writes, “Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it. If you gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity…. in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.”

Freedom and favor for the prophets’ people. For all others, metaphysical freedom. Not everyone’s enslavement merits the song of Moses.

I’ve taken to using the hashtag “Get Free” when the status quo presses in and the yearning of my ancestors haunts me. This morning, for example, I remembered Bob Marley’s 1976 song, “One Drop.” It ended my dreamtime and stayed with me through the day.

Feel this drumbeat as it beats within
Playing a rhythm resisting against the system…

Give us the teachings of His Majesty
A-we no want no devil philosophy.

When my ancestors sought their freedom, they received the teachings of the kings, queens, and ruling class that didn’t prioritize their interests. In their name, Bob says instead “Rather than the teachings of a regional king, give us a more universal philosophy. Give us those teachings that enliven us and testify to our power in this life, not just in the world to come. We want no devil philosophy, none of the philosophy and ideology that encodes our subordination and empowers the ruling class.”

In some performances, Bob sings the imperative request, “Give us the teachings.” In others, he describes a continuous action: “You give us the teachings…” (“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?”) Either way, he contrasts the teachings and philosophy of the temporal Crown with the teachings of the Creator.

As we become more aware, as we wake up, we naturally choose what enlivens us and shed whatever chains remain. These days, those who nourish me are those who read this world with an eye for life, presence, and liberty; sense that there’s more than the already manifest; and aren’t willing to leave any sibling stranded outside. This is my community: those who’re pulling rights from wrong and healing this world as they go.

“There is a notion of paradise that says that the lion lays down with the lamb… By the way this is not natural. It ain’t natural, for the lion and lamb—because one of them eats the other.

“For the lion to lay down with the lamb means that the lion has to divest him/herself of its predatory nature. And the lamb must divest itself of [victimhood]. That’s when paradise happens. We look for a day when all the children are safe because all the children are our children.” —Bishop Yvette Flunder [40:26]

If the holiday is a caged revolution, then we reclaim all time as holy. If the approved revolution frees only a few, then the un-televised revolution throws open the gates to the world. We don’t know exactly what this degree of openness looks like, and we don’t yet have the usual authorities on board.

But some of us are feeling the rhythm beating within, and we’re breaking further into life every waking day.