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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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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.

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Sabbath Wisdom: Texts and Responsibility

Almost every Sabbath morning, I share with my Twitter network a series of tweets rooted in an aspect of faith or religious ethics. These tweets, tagged #SabbathWisdom, are often inspired by study conversations or sermons at my church. This morning’s series was far more extensive than usual, and I decided to share it with you as well.

Much appreciation to everyone who participated by reading, favoriting, retweeting, or replying—especially @runtodaylight, Peterson Toscano (@p2son), Karl Nova (@KarlNova), Mx A. Hooker (@awhooker), and Bryan Berghoef (@bryberg).

Texts and Responsibility

Today’s #SabbathWisdom tweets inspired by my conversation yesterday with @runtodaylight and last night’s vespers at @SouthernNews.

When I read the Christian scriptures as the collection of texts it is, I see both exclusive and inclusive elements.

I’ve been reading that collection all the way through since I was 13 years old. It isn’t a one-theme library.

I’m being deliberate in this thread about not calling it “a book.” Packaging aside, our “bible” is a library, not a book. The library doesn’t have a single author, a single story, or a single theme. Whoever tells you it does is selling something.

So given the diversity inherent to the Christian scriptures, we have an awesome—full-of-awe—responsibility as readers.

We have the ability to express more wholeness or fragmentation through the stories we tell and the dogma we choose. We have the capacity to advance integrity or promote demonization through our reading and reciting. We’re part of a text-centered religion. The God we invoke from our scripture reading will overshadow everything about us.

Earlier I quoted Greg Boyd, a pastor + open theist who writes about how our God-images & reading train us for life.

“There is now a wealth of research demonstrating that violence in literature that is considered sacred is a powerful force in motivating religious violence. It can only be negated by being renounced.” —Greg Boyd, March 7, 2013 (and March 14, 2013)

He argues that our meditations on violence presented as moral in scripture trains us to accept violence as morality in life. (This isn’t an idea original to Boyd; he’s just said it well recently!)

So we who read these ancient stories and draw insight from them for our lives—our responsibility is indeed awesome. Our moral authority doesn’t come from our libraries. But interpreting and applying them is a moral act. We’re accountable.

I’ve learned I have choices in how I read my library, how I interpret its stories, how I apply them to the world about me, how I apply insights to myself & others, whether I wield my library as a machete, what collateral damage I accept.

And I’ve learned to judge my choices by their outcomes in my relationships and my influence on the world I live in.

When I was a child going to Sabbath School and singing songs with the other kids, two songs really touched me.

The first one was “Oh be careful little eyes what you see.” In retrospect maybe it should’ve felt like the Panopticon? But it didn’t. It gave me a sense of universal benevolence and safe presence in this world that I’ve never lost.

It also taught me that what I reflected on, what I did, how I lived mattered and shaped me. Taught me awareness.

The second was “This is My Father’s World.” I’ve felt like an exile in many countries and groups, but never on this planet. This song taught me a sense of belonging, co-ownership, & hope. I haven’t lost that sense either, despite religion’s best efforts!

“This is my Father’s world: Oh let me ne’er forget That though the wrong seems oft so strong God is the ruler yet…
“This is my Father’s world: The battle is not done: Jesus who died will be satisfied And earth and Heaven be one.” —Maltbie D. Babcock, 1901

Yes: My opinions about some of these themes have changed a lot since I first started reading the Bible for myself. But that doesn’t scare me. It’s proof that I’m not a dead thing. Life requires change, and growth requires learning.

Reading our scriptures & living them out w/ others merits care.
Insist on being humane in your exercise of religion.

I think this was the longest #SabbathWisdom thread I’ve ever written. Thanks for hearing me out, y’all. I welcome feedback.

Feedback

I respond in italics.

From @KarlNova: “I love your tweets. I love your heart and mind. I appreciate your train of thought.”

I love you too, Karl. 🙂 *hugs*

From @runtodaylight, re. sources: “Yes, if I recall correctly theologians call this ‘source criticism.’ It’s especially evident in canonical gospels:  Matt & Luke both know Mark, plus Q. John’s Gospel is MUCH different than synoptics, but in ‘closing canon’ the early Church deemed all four ‘canonical.’ Not so with other gospels, Peter, Thomas, which have a lot of same info. IMHO. The Westar Institute’s Jesus Seminar is a very reliable resource.”

It goes well beyond source analysis. There is multivalence (many-sidedness) even in works thought to have single sources.

@runtodaylight: “Agree. Didn’t mean to imply otherwise (link on Biblical criticism).”

What I’ve been talking about this morning isn’t so much who wrote what with which informants, but how we make sense of the themes and values within these stories, whatever their sources, and how we apply them now. Walt Whitman’s line “Do I contradict myself?” is apropos here. 🙂

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." —Walt Whitman

The study of our texts is so powerful in part because we are multivalent, both as speakers/writers and as hearers/readers.

From @awhoooker: “I enjoyed that you talked about how you used your ‘library.’ Important that our faith stories come from the voices of many.”

Thanks! I agree it’s important for more of us to share. Because of experience, I don’t resonate with the text drive-by model. So I want to encourage more text-religion folks to consider alternate and perhaps more healing ways to treat their texts and peers.

@awhooker: “I think a lot is lost when we come to the texts thinking that God spoke them word-for-word from heaven.”

Agreed. Yet even if God had done so, that speech is now mediated through us. And we can’t blame God for our translation work. (When I say “translation” here, I mean both translation of manuscripts and translation from text to life.)

@awhoooker: “If Christ is the Word of God who imparted the Spirit to us after his death & resurrection, I think we are the living words. So, yes, in a sense, our faith lives are translations of what we read, see, hear, & experience.”

Agreed. My communication background teaches me: We are the “speech acts” of God. 🙂

Thanks to everyone who read, faved, retweeted, or responded to the #SabbathWisdom thread this morning. You all enrich me!

If you’d like to join me in conversations like this on Sabbath mornings (Saturdays, usually between 11:00 and 12:30 Eastern), follow me or the #SabbathWisdom hashtag.

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From Science Fiction to Science Possibility

Dr. Ronald E. McNair was the second African-American to work in space (the first was Dr. Guion “Guy” Bluford), and died with his Space Shuttle crew members when the Challenger exploded shortly after take-off in 1986.

My alma mater, Texas Tech University, is one of 200 US universities that runs a McNair Scholars program for low-income, first-generation college students and graduate students from historically underrepresented populations. The program has been federally funded since 1986 as part of the Congressional response to the Challenger accident.

Three years ago, Dr. McNair’s brother, Carl McNair, shared with NPR how Ron had achieved his goal of becoming an astronaut. He achieved his goal because he dreamed and acted beyond the norms of his time. Carl has also written about Ron in the book In the Spirit of Ronald E. McNair – Astronaut: An American Hero (2012). In the clip below, Carl reflects on how both reading and Gene Roddenbery’s Star Trek: The Original Series inspired his younger brother.

A show came on TV called Star Trek. Now Star Trek showed the future where there were Black folk and White folk working together. And I just looked at it as science fiction, because that wasn’t going to happen really. But Ronald saw it as science possibility…

How was a colored boy from South Carolina wearing glasses, never flew a plane—how was he gonna become an astronaut? But Ron was the one who didn’t accept societal norms as being his norm; that was for other people. And he got to be aboard his own Starship Enterprise. —Carl McNair

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Sagan on Illiteracy

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin. Even if we hardened our hearts to the shame and misery experienced by the victims, the cost of illiteracy to everyone else is severe—the cost in medical expenses and hospitalization, the cost in crime and prisons, the cost in special education, the cost in lost productivity and in potentially brilliant minds who could help solve the dilemmas besetting us.

Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.—Carl Sagan, The Demon-haunted World

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Reading scriptures with a little humility

If you’re in a church service with me (or a non-religious lecture otherwise), you might see me tapping on my phone. It’s not because I’m not paying attention, but because I am: I use a bible app, take digital notes, and if something’s well said, I’ll tweet it immediately. This is a few steps ahead of the pen and paper notes and illustrations I’ve made during presentations for most of my life.

Sometimes a sermon comment also triggers a thought series. So it was this morning.


1: “If you’re going to understand scripture, you basically have to journey into someone else’s mind.” — GP, @newhopefulton #humility

The minister made this point while sharing some background on the “lost sheep” parables in the Christian gospels. It wasn’t his main point, but it helped to frame the information he shared about shepherds that the original auditors may have been more familiar with. More importantly, it reminded the congregation that the bible was not written as a single book nor originally addressed to them.


2. Challenge w/ “journeying into someone else’s mind”: all those someones are long dead + there’s limited consensus on how they lived.

I didn’t grasp the legitimate controversies in biblical history, archaeology  anthropology, linguistics, and interpretation until I started reading on my own. Though this discussion does happen in many mainstream seminaries, in churches it’s much less likely. This is a loss, not just for the local congregation, but also for the broader religious fellowship and for the quality of conversations we can have together.

Instead of conversation, one might hear that pesky debates develop only because Those People, who are Wrong, are foolish, haven’t read the right books yet, or have been deceived by Satan. These rationalizations mean that there’s “debate,” but not debate: whatever information could challenge our presumptions is automatically devalued and so never merits review.

No debate is possible if people aren’t working with the same fact base: failure to deal with data means defaulting on conversation about the data. Without common facts, no common sense can emerge. But once people have caught up, legitimate debate arises.

And when it comes to these sources, there’s no resolution because the data sources are no longer alive. The people who could’ve settled our questions about intentions, phrasing, explicit teachings and silences, and who could have fielded constructive criticism about their positions and those positions’ implications, are not here to speak for themselves or engage in a building dialogue with us. Traditions have also done a weak job of representing founders and their concepts without setting layers of cultural and institutional bias over those representations along the way.

Beyond what’s going on with the sources or the traditions, though, it’s the rarest of readers who isn’t infused with contemporary cultural or institutional bias in any way. I don’t know anyone who isn’t. I’m not myself: I’ve been shaped too. Knowing this has consequences.


3. Often what we learn through archaeology and history doesn’t affirm our pet theories about the texts or the characters in it. 

When we read texts like the Christian bible, we can expect to read the framing stories that communities have found valuable over time. We can expect to trace the cultural and institutional biases that emerged, were reinforced, and were challenged over the same period. But we cannot expect a single story about humankind or our religion of choice, and should no more expect ideological coherence from the text than we’d expect it from a cable reality show.


4. What saves scriptures and sacred texts for me is the premise that wisdom literature is not technical writing.
5. Treating technical writing like wisdom literature corrupts it. Treating wisdom literature like technical writing impoverishes it. 

I love technical writing, and not just because I’ve studied it or practice it. I love it because at its best, it’s a facilitation tool. It’s designed to ease users’ experience with a given technology, process, or interface. It’s a helpful way to become more smoothly accommodated to the world we’re in. Perhaps this fundamental purpose is why it’s not the sum of things.

With wisdom literature from several sources, from dualists and non-dualists, within and well beyond Christianity, I have a different type of reader experience than I do with technical writing. A story, poem, or reflection doesn’t derive its value to me from its usability, accessibility, or fact-to-fluff ratio.

Its value is in its capacity to inspire, to illuminate an aspect of human life, to make an insight more vivid, to create a space for meditation, to highlight possibilities my linear mind has missed, to spark my creative and constructive imagination, to challenge me to flourish and to keep becoming.

No matter how precise or persuasive a piece of technical writing is, these simply aren’t outcomes it’s fitted for. And wisdom literature isn’t about how to choose your profession or customize your new phone.

Treat a thing as the thing it is, and it will never disappoint you.

This post was originally titled “5 Tweets on Wisdom Literature.”