A Change of Heart

I hate Black Friday. I hate the loss of humanity prevalent when consumers trample other human beings in pursuit of discounted merchandise. More than anything, I hate the unjust practice of forcing workers away from loved ones on the night of Thanksgiving and the following day, so they can feed capitalist greed by serving both their employers and the people on a mission for sales. 

Yesterday, I expressed this hatred via snarky Facebook status, where I pointed to the irony of criticizing the commercialization of Christmas but participating in Black Thursday/Friday activities. But following a conversation with my parents, I had a change of heart and removed the status from my timeline. 

My dad pointed out that Black Friday, while absolutely feeding systemic capitalist greed, does benefit the lower class, a point that allows me to view the holiday with much more nuance and complexity than before. In other words, Black Thursday and Friday represent the only times in which some families can afford gifts for Christmas, a component to this issue that softens my heart to the people who participate in it.

Even though I still cannot condone a practice that unfairly forces the agency of workers under the mercy of corporal employers, especially on Thanksgiving Day, I must concede that I have misplaced my judgment and condemnation all these years. As a future pastor who discusses social justice every day and interprets the Bible with an anti-oppression hermeneutic, I cannot, in good conscience, support Black Friday; for the same reasons, I also cannot condemn the people who participate in it.

To be clear, at play here is not individual greed but systemic injustice. It is unjust to force workers who are at the mercy of a weak job market and low wages to work on holidays that should be spent with loved ones. At the same time, it is unjust to distribute wealth in such a way that forces people into fueling the very system that oppresses them. While individual consumers may buy into this system, it is often the case that there is no other choice, a reality inherent in this system.

For these reasons, I plan no longer to place judgment on the people who participate in Black Friday. It is not the judgment of people that will reveal the presence of God's kingdom. Instead, God's kingdom will be made known in the condemnation of systems of injustice, and when we work to deconstruct the systems that oppress and deny the humanity of God's creations.

The Power of Storytelling in Activism

When I heard the news of the shooting at UCSB on Saturday, I worked myself up into a tornado of anger, my body trembling at the dangerous reality of a narrative I had condemned for years: the friendzone. 

Next, I made the mistake of engaging social media. I read tweets attempting to pin the tragedy on mental illness, a scapegoat used to explain nearly every murder spree. Such a trope simultaneously reinforces stigma associated with mental illness and covers up any underlying and systematic forces that may be at play: in this case, misogyny (see Jessica Valenti's article on The Guardian). 

When I suggested that the force of internalized and systematic misogyny were at the root of Elliot Rodger's deadly actions on Saturday, someone accused me of misandry. This is when my feminism turned radical. 

When I call myself a radical feminist, I feel it important to explain myself, not because I owe it to skeptics of the feminist movement, but because I owe it to the wide-eyed, budding young feminists who are watching me. When I say radical, I do not mean Radical; I do not wish or fight for a flip of the gender hierarchy. I do not want matriarchy.

Sustainable gender equality and justice is still my goal. But owning the label as a radical feminist means I recognize that these tragedies are not isolated incidents. It means that I am attuned to the systematic sexism at play in these instances of violence. It means that I recognize the importance of other identities that intersect with gender identity in feminism: sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, race, age, etc. It means that I recognize the privilege it takes to express hurt feelings over generalizations a woman may make when she speaks out against sexism. It means that I must constantly educate myself and others. Finally, it means that I recognize what it takes to end injustices like the gender violence Rodger committed and to tackle misogyny: political activism, community, and storytelling.

The shooting shook me up so much that I only slept for two hours, uninterrupted, on Saturday night.  But the next day, I found hope in the #YesAllWomen tag on Twitter and on Facebook. 

People often accuse my fellow Millennials and me, the Me Me Me Generation, of slacktivism. Our concern for social issues that's somehow important enough to post about on social media but that does not extend to public action puzzles them. Indeed, sometimes I wish we would remove ourselves from the proverbial couches and act in the community. But that point ignores the power of community that happens when we share our stories on the Internet.

The #YesAllWomen tag featured women from all over the country who shared similar stories of unwanted advances, abuse, assault, and violence by men. Women expressed the fear of being attacked that is present everywhere they go. They shared stories of guilt and fear when they rejected advances by men. And they shared stories of men they knew in schools, in the workplace, and in homes acting with anger or violence toward them.

These stories will not deter the violence committed by people like Rodger, but they do bring women together, and they do serve as catalysts for community outreach and action. The #YesAllWomen tag showed that we are in this together, that all of our stories matter, and that we are through with silence. The tag is an act of social resistance.

Stories are what connect us, far more than any abstract claims. Stories bring out our humanity. They demonstrate our shortcomings, our brokenness, our suffering, and our pain. They put human faces to statistics. And they reveal that others are scared, suffering, and hurt, too. Stories say we aren't alone. Stories say there is hope.

Radical feminism means I am committed to sharing my story and to listening to yours.

In the Name of Being Honest

"[It was] so casually cruel in the name of being honest." -Taylor Swift

In a culture that I sometimes feel celebrates unity to the exclusion of diversity and urges homogeneity, I appreciate honesty and authenticity. In other words, I am attracted both platonically and romantically to people who express themselves with transparency and without apology or explanation. I like hanging out with people who would rather be themselves than anyone else. I like sharing space with people who speak from the true nature of their hearts and minds, rather than from their perception of what others will think of them.

At the same time, I value people who do this with kindness and respect to others. I strive to be like Ginnifer Goodwin's portrayal of Snow White on ABC's Once Upon a Time, and also like my dear friend, Grace, both of whom will greet everyone they meet with genuine gentleness in their eyes but won't shy away from telling people how they truly feel or telling loved ones what they need to hear.

Some may argue that honesty and kindness cannot go together, that kindness must sometimes be sacrificed in the name of being honest. But I think that is a grave misinterpretation of honesty. 

Oftentimes, people respond to disgusted reactions to their own unkind remarks with the expression "at least I'm being honest." But to me, this expression evokes bluntness, not to be confused with the virtue honesty, two words which I believe we should stop conflating.

While honesty, by nature, relates to authenticity, integrity, and an ethical principle for always shedding light on truth, bluntness is characterized by abruptness in speech and often a disregard for emotion and tact. A person demonstrates honesty when he/she says, "Pay attention to dynamics when playing the piano." A person exhibits bluntness when he/she says, "If I were a judge in the piano competition and you played this piece like that, I would want to rip it up." In the same situation, one person aims to elicit growth, and the other aims to tear down.

In fact, bluntness, while arguably a lexical foil of euphemism, a figure of speech used to conjure less emotion and soften the blow of a painful reality, often occurs for the same purpose as euphemism: hiding from reality.

Honesty takes courage, resilience, and guts. Honesty is standing up for truth, even if it takes quivering voices and trembling bodies. Honesty is nakedness and exposure. By contrast, people use bluntness as a crutch that somehow justifies their rude or unkind behavior. When people are blunt, they hide behind the thinly veiled facade of honesty so they can let themselves off the hook for the hurt they spark in others' eyes. 

Conflating honesty and bluntness discolors the virtue of honesty and at the same time obstructs the focus of the virtue: the healthy pursuit of truth and growth. 

In writerly terms, honesty is a constructive literary critic who values workshop and revision as a process of creativity. Bluntness, on the other hand, is a bad parent critic who hovers over writers' shoulders and hurls cruelty at them as they write, stifling both creativity and growth.

In biblical terms, honesty is the Gospel of mercy, grace, and justice; bluntness is judgment and condemnation. Jesus was honest, calling out injustices and hypocrisy, showing people how to love, and demonstrating through storytelling how current practices and behaviors were harmful at both the individual and societal level. While Jesus was radical in his condemnation of the internal structures of harmful systems and even individual practices of hatred and hypocrisy, Jesus greeted all people with love and gentleness. 

If we are serious about cultivating growth, love, and justice in our society, we should deconstruct two practices: (1) the conflating of honesty and bluntness and (2) the separating of honesty and kindness.

When both kindness and honesty meet, the result is a course of action: flipping over tables, washing feet, and shifting paradigms with parables, all in the name of remembering the least of these: all of us. 

Bluntness just crucifies.

Love is an Open Tomb

He withdrew about a stone's throw beyond them, knelt down, and prayed, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." An angel from Heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. -Luke 41-44



Holy Week has always been my favorite week of the Christian calendar, even ahead of the magic present in Christmastime and my Wesleyan ties to Pentecost. No doubt this results from the closet traditionalist in me who gradually fell in love with Jesus through liturgy, hymns, organ music, open table Communion, and Maundy Thursday seder meals. But this year has been the first time that the meaning of Holy Week clicked with me.

For Palm Sunday I attended Trinity Presbyterian Church in Topeka. I only lasted fifteen minutes of the service before crying. I cry often, but I only do so in private. At times I've joked that my tear ducts cannot release tears if they detect other human beings within a 200-foot radius. But the dark hymns combined with the dark scripture readings combined with the gradual darkness of the room knocked down my ducts' defenses. It was the kind of crying that required tissues and futile stifling, the kind of crying that had me bowing my head so that no one around would notice.

As I look 128 days ahead to my departure to seminary in Chicago, knowing full well that this new step will incite a new series of challenges sure to scare the Hell out of me, the Gethsemane passage smacks me in the face. In the passage, Jesus cries out from under an olive tree for God to take this cup from him. I often pray the same prayer. At times, I want to run from my call like Jonah did. Sometimes I'd rather inhabit the belly of the whale than do what God has called me to do. But I am moved to know that Jesus is with me in crying out to God in fear and confusion. I am in no way equating the struggles I will experience on my path to and in the ministry with Jesus's suffering on the cross. But as someone who has cried out to God to call someone else, I am comforted that even Jesus has done the same.

But Jesus goes further by praying next that God's will be done. Even in his moments of despair, Jesus can pray this without pause. And that is what I can't do. I can utter the Lord's Prayer in unison with those around me with much more ease than I can proclaim them with conviction. I can say that I trust God, but I stew over the unknown. I hear the words leave my mouth, but my heart would stop beating before it would bleed to death. 

Jesus asks for God's will, and Jesus prays it better than I do. Jesus prays it with the knowledge of his death by crucifixion, and Jesus does not waver. Jesus asks that God's will be done so that he can die with us, so that he can endure the pain with us.

Perhaps even more remarkable to me than Jesus's choice to die with us is his decision to rise and live with us again. After Jesus dies, his body is placed in a tomb. We tend to think of tombs and burial grounds as resting places for the dead. This rest implies peace. It is a kind of peace that is well-deserved after living a life of agony in a world complicit in its own suffering. But Jesus leaves his resting place. Jesus leaves the tomb.

The open tomb moves beyond giving us eternal life and represents a sacrifice of peace. The open tomb illustrates Jesus's love for us as he chooses to return to a world of chaos and suffering with us once again. The open tomb demonstrates that Jesus will walk with us in our calls through the despair, confusion, and fear. 

Jesus's resurrection is a triumph over death, of course, but it is also a victory over the pain and suffering prevalent in our world, as Jesus is present every day in bringing the kingdom to us by working and living with us to curb the destruction. 

Love is Gethsemane. Love is crying out to God with us. Love is calling us anyway and walking with us in that call. Love is crucifixion in our place. Love is resurrection. Love is Easter.

Love is an open tomb.

On Language Matters and Why Language Matters

Some people regard language, when reduced to its elements, as a naming process only--a list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names. This conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words; it does not tell us whether a name is vocal or psychological in nature; finally, it lets us assume that the linking of a name and a thing is a very simple operation--an assumption that is anything but true." --Ferdinand de Saussure, from Part One in Course in General Linguistics



This morning I contemplated petitioning for a gender-neutral pronoun to replace the singular he/she in contexts where the gender of the subject is unknown. I want a pronoun that can replace the he when talking about God, and that can crush the false gender binary beneath its feet. Some have turned to the plural they in these circumstances. But I've determined I'm still uncomfortable using a plural pronoun in a singular grammatical construction.

Some would argue that this attempt would be futile, that the words we use don't matter nearly as much as our intention or the meaning that the words convey. But try telling a writer, an English major, or anyone interested in language and culture that words don't matter, and Saussurian responses about how language shapes culture will smack those claims right back in your face like a rubber band.

English instructors in high school used to reprimand us for using the thesaurus in Microsoft Word to beef up our language and score higher on the word choice section. In retrospect, that was probably less about condemning us for cheating and more about making sure we chose the most correct words in our essays to maximize the effectiveness of the writing. Similarly, as a poet, I'm no stranger to how changing one word can alter the meaning of the line, the stanza, or even the entire poem. 

And so it is with culture. The way we communicate and the words we use to talk about issues largely shapes the way we think about these issues, which influences behavior. 

The Holy Bible uses male pronouns to address God. As a result, churches placed the man at the top of a gender hierarchy and pointed to God-breathed scripture for back-up. Because the Bible said it, it must be ordained. But I believe that the Bible described God this way because of the society at the time, not because it was actually God's plan.

I bring this up not to incite dialogue about the meaningless chicken-and-egg debate, but to demonstrate how language can reject an entire group of people. It shows how language can tell women that there is no room for them to lead in the church, to be equally respected by parishioners, to be disciples, or to follow Jesus.

But the way we use language does more to a society than reinforce sexism in church. It also perpetuates homophobia, the phrase that's gay associating being queer with being lesser. It can also cause people to question their worth, fat and skinny attaching numbers and qualifiers to a person's function in society. It can also trivialize the experiences of survivors of trauma and humanitarian crises, feminazi and grammarnazi pairing zealous enforcement of equal rights or adherence to grammar norms with genocide by Nazi soldiers, respectively. It can also reward the systems and mechanisms that continue to subordinate and oppress certain groups of people. 

Because I love language, I also know that policing language at the societal level doesn't work and that censorship is, by nature, oppressive. I would never call for political-scale reforms that outlaw language use. But I've determined to pay attention to my language on the individual-level. I want the way I speak to reflect the passion I have for social justice, for peace, and for humanity. I want to demonstrate my respect for human beings and their experiences. I want to speak like I care.

I want a gender-neutral pronoun so that I can simultaneously feel closer to God when addressing God and to show that I know there are people who exist in a spectrum between man and woman. I want to know that there's room for me, just as there is room for all others.

It's not about being politically correct; it's about using our language to demonstrate genuine acknowledgment, acceptance, and respect for the people that our society pushes to the side and tells there is no room for you here. 

It's about using language to flip over tables and deconstruct temples.

The Kingdom is Now

But the beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair. -Relient K

Today, news stations confirmed that Fred Phelps has died. 

As a native Kansan, a Topeka resident, a Washburn student, an affirming Christian heading into the ministry, a feminist, an activist and an advocate for the oppressed, and a human, I have forced myself to reflect on this event after learning about its imminence on Saturday. I've read articles written by several others who've also found themselves in the middle of a similar need to reflect, along with tenants of my Facebook and Twitter feeds. The expressions of love and forgiveness have struck me the most--I expected more mudslinging and protest threats from people than not. It humbled me to read testimonies calling for an extension of grace and mercy to Phelps.

But I found the calls for forgiveness, especially in the context of picketing and protesting Phelps's funeral, most provocative of all.

While I will always support the concept and practice of forgiveness and think it is one of the most powerful and cleansing experiences of renewal, the call to picket Phelps's funeral with signs saying "We forgive you," coupled with the call to "be the bigger person," strike me as a trite attempt to assert our own righteousness over Phelps. It comes across as a shallow and feeble attempt to let ourselves off the hook for our own practices of hatred. I will never condone Phelps's behaviors or the pain and suffering that these behaviors have caused, but the way I hope to respond to his death goes beyond "not stooping to his level" and "being the bigger person." To me, showing grace to Phelps isn't about making us seem better but making the world better.

Does God really want us to react by "being the bigger person?" Or does God want us to respond with love and forgiveness because that is the kind of world God wants us to create, and because that fulfills the new commandment of "loving your neighbor?" 

I want to be intentional about how I respond to this. To me, today is less about "being the bigger person" and more about living the kind of love and justice that we preach about daily. It's about extending grace and mercy to everyone, not just those who have extended grace and mercy to me. After all, Jesus extended grace and mercy to me, even during the dark times when I've participated in the bullying of others, caused suffering, and failed to employ the kind of justice I desire in the world in my own life. Today is about playing an integral role in this pivotal moment, where change will depend on our choices and our actions. Today is about demonstrating to those younger and more impressionable than us that gentle hands and kind words will shape the kind of world that we want to live in, the kind of world Jesus is working to create.

Today is about growing gardens from the dead ground and letting light flood over darkness.