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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

sociology

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Radical acceptance

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.

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A message I didn’t expect

Life flows through our relations with others.

An unexpected message from an unexpected source: Pope Francis tele-presented at this year’s TED conference on the topic of inclusion and social responsibility and used the parable of the Good Samaritan to underscore his points.

The more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly. If you don’t, your power will ruin you, and you will ruin the other.” —Pope Francis

We agree that “life is about interactions.”

Life is a perpetual conversation between people, things, and their environments, and none of us is an isolate. Even when the external world and other people are annoying, frustrating, or disappointing, not being able to ingest or digest their gifts means dying.

In some ways, this is a message that counters Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination. In the introduction, where he describes how the way of YHWH/Moses is different from the way of Pharaoh, Brueggemann underscores the idea that “the shaping of Israel took place from inside its own experience and confession of faith and not through external appropriation from somewhere else.”

The theologian views external influences on the Israelites as likely corrupting and diminishing and so worth dismissing out of hand. This is a move I’d expect cultic and exclusivist traditions to make: he could just as easily perceive these influences as nourishing, challenging, and enriching. God forbid the ancient Israelites learned monotheism or Sabbath from the people around them. God forbid there is so much room in our communities for the Other that they don’t have to question whether their sanctuaries and ours can be the same.

I sometimes hear that isolationism framed as good among members of my own tradition, and it seems very much contrary to the relational emphasis Francis speaks of in his talk.

“The future,” he says, “is, most of all, in the hands of those people who recognize the other as a ‘you’ and themselves as part of an ‘us.’ We all need each other.”

The video is 17 minutes long and transcribed in 22 languages. Audio is in Italian. I’d like to read your ideas on it; send me a message.

H/T: The Washington Post

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The consequences of belief

Perhaps we have no more important theological investigation than to discern in whose image we have been made. —Walter Brueggemann

Last fall, I learned from Professor Jean Sheldon about why it’s important to be choosy about one’s ideals, mentors, models, and gods.

“The picture I have of God today,” Sheldon wrote, “is the photograph others will take of me tomorrow.”

People may well rise to the level of their gods. We only rise higher or stretch further when extremely motivated. It’s too uncomfortable to do otherwise and there’s every possible social justification not to!

In his book on prophecy, imagination, and hope, another Old Testament professor addresses the same point Sheldon did:

If we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the ‘haves,’ oppression cannot be far behind. Conversely, if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper goodness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion.” —Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

Just as belief has practical consequences, so too claims of freedom should have material outcomes. M. Shawn Copeland once explained that we’re “freed for something,” not for freedom’s own ideological sake.

Our freedom isn’t to mimic the predictable patterns of the already is. There’s unpredictability, invention, and imagination in freedom. We’re free, instead, to live out an alternative: “a new social community in history,” and a new material reality.

Freedom means not leaving our ideals in their original packaging, never to be tested. It means being able to pull them out of the box, let the air and wind hit them, and get them as dirty as the construction materials they are.

It’s a vision that’s frightening only to empire and those of us whom empire has well-trained.

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On Understanding

Convenience of conceptual analogies is no substitute for usefulness or rigour. —R. Brennan & S. Henneberg

One understands a phenomenon only when one has a holistic view of [it], a view that integrates all of its known components and all of its known manifestations. —T. Bouldin & L. Odell

Image of atom | via Citra's Chemistry
Image of atom | via Citra’s Chemistry

Pulling a mechanical thing apart to see how it works is easy. Observing a living system in progress is not. Humans have predictable biological components, but we are more than the sum of parts and so are the living systems we create. We can miss worlds by only examining predictable bio-molecules and chemical interactions for insights into the world around us. 

One of the programs that I work with teaches students and educators how to recognize and navigate ten levels of reality:

  1. the bio-atom
  2. the bio-molecule
  3. the cell
  4. the organ
  5. the organism
  6. the family
  7. the neighborhood
  8. the profession
  9. the nation
  10. Earth

Each level has fixed laws, and at increasing levels there’s both increasing complexity and increasing fluidity. Earth: What people think I am (covered in flags); What I really am (no borders)
Research that fails to account for anything other than linear laws won’t adequately represent reality beyond level 4. Humans (Level 5) are not reducible to biochemicals, and neither are their cultural networks or systems.

What people think is real also becomes “real” by mutual consent, because our consciousness gives us the capacity to build rules and structures on delusions as well as on sound premises. So a study of What’s Really Going On has to include the individual and community mental maps we generate in our relationships, with families, neighborhoods, professions, nations, and as a species.

If you were to design a study of people’s mental maps, what would you be looking for? What would you ignore? What would you compare? How would you assess what you noticed?