responsibility : mackenzian

May 14, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Take a side

The prophets take a side.

In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann explains how the ancient Hebrew prophets diverged from the imperial courts of Pharaoh and the royal courts of the later Israelite kings. As well as imagining new ways for society to take shape, he says, the prophets took sides. They were partisan because their God and highest ideal was partisan.

[The God of the prophets] is the God who is alert to the realities, who does not flinch from taking sides, who sits in the divine council on the edge of his seat and is attentive to his special interests. It is the way of the unifying gods of the empire not to take sides and, by being tolerant, to cast eternal votes for the way things are…

Empire prefers reasoned voices who see it all, who understand both sides, and who regard polemics as unworthy of God and divisive of the public good… In an empire no god is for anyone. They are old gods who don’t care anymore and have tried everything once and have a committee studying all the other issues.” —Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

I chuckled at that last line. For more than a decade and a half, I’ve been studying how organizations talk about themselves and handle information, new ideas, and constituents, and I have never read a more succinct comment on the institutional drive to form committees.

While committees could be a way for these organizations to learn over time, they more often function as a way to stall discovery and change. Organizations use these structures to stand in place rather than search for new branches of the knowledge tree to explore. Shifts in framing and practice are minimal. And people can burn out tugging their groups forward or waiting for change.

It occurred to me, though, that even the capacity to become cynical, to have expectations that sour into disappointments, and to have a limited imagination for alternatives—these are all signs that many of us are more invested in our organizations and the current order than we realize.

“We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns,” Brueggemman writes. Skepticism shrinks our sense of what could be different.

The prophets in religions and in the rest of civic society are pushing against that limited imagination every day. To resolve climate change, for example, we not only have to accept that the climate is changing, but we also have to accept that our culture’s normals—transportation options, urban design, housing sizes, energy supplies—must change too.

With poor people disproportionately impacted by rising sea levels and least likely to have cash for modifications, the prophets of our time will have to take a side: with those whose self-advocacy is not typically acknowledged.

Reformers who merely hope to tweak the status quo back into right order won’t be radical enough.

January 28, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Find your people

Remember the story of the little red hen?

The little red hen asks for help with reaping and grinding wheat and making and baking bread, but there are no takers.

“Who will help me bake the bread?” she asks her farm friends.

“Not I,” they each tell her, and they leave her to complete each task on her own. But they all want to eat the finished loaf.

When I was in college, I read this story as a cautionary tale about group assignments!

Unfortunately for us all, life on Earth is a group assignment. I’ve become increasingly sensitive to the way that religion motivates or discourages me and others in my chosen groups to take up our portions of that work.

I’ve been asking questions like: How does our shared faith inspire us to move in the world? What are the lived consequences of the things we believe and teach one another in our faith communities? What do our religions mobilize us to do? How do we rightly orient ourselves to people like and unlike us? How are we compelled to act when our government is targeting other people and we’re probably not going to directly benefit from intervening, when we might even risk something by intervening?

Christian Dominionists have very clear answers to many of these questions, and they have for the last forty years.

Occasionally, evangelical Christians like those I was raised with have clear answers too. But I left a service today at a congregation that reminded me of my childhood church and am not sure what answers its members would offer if polled.

Reminder: 81% of White Evangelicals voted for a man who can’t name a single Bible verse & stands against everything Jesus ever said or did.

— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) January 28, 2017

I came home from church and spent an hour listening to the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary talk about R. Abraham Heschel with On Being’s Krista Tippett. During a charged, politically active era, Heschel managed to hold a deep, rich sense of his own religion alongside an equally deep and rich sense of responsibility for acting well in the world around him, not alone, but in solidarity with other people of faith and conscience.

Heschel once told an audience at Union Theological Seminary that people of varying religions shared the core experience of being human. He said that as such, they were mutually responsible for nurturing “the power of love and the care of man,” even and especially when tempted to withdraw into “parochialism” or “isolationism”—the consequences of common suspicion of difference and an inflexible belief in one’s own rightness.

There was never a time when any of us could really survive in this world by being the little red hen or her farm friends, but even if there had been such a time, today is not it. Our social challenges are much too large and much too complex for any of us to not need help from others or not need to pitch in with others.

As Eisen said from his own perspective as a Jewish man, “With humility we listen to God as best we can and do God’s work in the world as best we can along with others who likewise feel compelled to do God’s work in the world.”

We each have to find our issue, and we each have to find our people. I want my tradition to spur me more than it pacifies me as I work: it’s not enough for me to be nourished in my congregations while my communities are ablaze. I need to be fueled for action and matured for responsibility.

More and more I agree with Heschel that anything less than that is a betrayal and we’re all impoverished by it.

January 16, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Picking up the mantle

The best way to honor a mentor is to practice what they taught you.

It’s the application of the message that validates their work, not the affirmation or lionization they might attract. Their contribution to us all lies in what they taught and worked for during their lives, not in how we reinterpret them after they’ve died or been murdered.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading James Tabor’s book on the differences between Pauline Christianity and the teachings of Jesus and the Jerusalem church led by James and Peter.

In earnest since the 18th Century, biblical scholars and other students of religion have tried to recover the world and debates of the early church, because the principle seems to be that it doesn’t take long for a martyr’s convictions to fade and for their community’s mythology about them to overshadow their actual work.

I suspect that the legacy of outgoing President Barack Obama will be shaped in the same way: even when he was just a presidential candidate, the idea of Obama outshone much of his Congressional and local organizing records. Popular expectations did work in his favor to the tune of two terms as president, but perhaps popular disappointments would have been less severe if members of the public had been inspired to act more than we were inspired to idealize.

Writing about the contemporary legacy of Martin Luther King, the Rev. M. William Howard once said, “If [people] revere Martin, if they treasure his work, and his memory, then the next step is you resolve to pick up the mantle. There’s no way you can do that now without the capacity to analyze, and to strategize, and to be disciplined.”

Discipline, of course, is related to discipleship, the process of learning as if a pupil through association and practice with a mentor or teacher.

What we have of King today is his speeches, the reports of his contemporaries and relatives, and the multi-leader movement he participated in 50 years ago.

That movement has morphed as society has, but what hasn’t changed is that every era’s leaders leave a mantle of action and responsibility behind them, and our best way to honor them is to pick it up and wear it.

June 2, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Our Greatest Power

Photo credit: (c) Keisha E. McKenzie. All rights reserved.

I recently spent a week around the desert and red rocks of Central and Northern Arizona, and ended up at the Grand Canyon, an incredible example of what stone and water can do if given enough time. From the lip of compressed rocks, high above a river that’s carved dirt for millennia, my decades are a blip.

We can’t reclaim life as it was when the Canyon was wet and forested. We can imagine what it might become if we don’t get industrial emissions under control, and the National Park Service has begun warning visitors about the impacts of climate change on sites like the Grand Canyon. But not all of those impacts have arrived yet. That’s a good thing.

Where we actually live our lives is in the present. Here is where we get to choose how we interact with each other and how we manage the resources we’ve found around us and have developed to suit our needs, wants, and dreams.

One of the reasons that deeply transformative change seems so distant sometimes is because we projected it out into the future. We know we’ve never achieved the balance we want, and we rightly recognize that manifesting it now is a huge task, so it seems safer and a lot less drastic to say, “The next generation will change the world. Not ours.”

“When the next President is elected, we’ll be able to get more done.”
“Can’t wait for heaven; there’ll be no injustice there.”
“We can only hope.”

These are all statements that function as an escape valve: they release the tension of living in a world that doesn’t work for all. If we’re not on the frontlines of impacts, we can call for moderation and patience. And we can defer our own responsibility to act today because someone, somewhere, at some other time, will take care of it.

No.
Concentrate your energy, attentiveness, and creativity on today.

Be here now. Our greatest power is in the here and now.