No Right Angles in My Life: Emerging in Complexity

Julie Lyons is the editor of the Dallas Observer, the alternative weekly in the Metroplex.  When I was growing up in Dallas, I would eagerly await it's arrival - it seemed to contain all those was "other" and outside the bubble that I felt hovered just over Dallas.  There will always be a soft spot in my media diet for the Observer.

Last Friday, Julie posted to their blog an extraordinary piece of writing - Obama and the Hand of God.  It is a really wonderful example of holding tension, rather than simplifying complexities into consumsable narratives.

Julie (aka Bible Girl) starts by reflecting on the Obama rally she attended:

Barack Obama at Reunion Arena, February 20

It’s a beautiful thing, this vision of black and white together.

Yeah, I got caught up in it all. All kinds of thoughts and feelings were jostling inside of me. I was proud -- proud that my country would elect a black man as president; gratified that I would soon be listening to a leading Democratic presidential candidate of virtually unquestioned integrity.

The color line in the American church crossed my mind. How, in the one place where we’re not allowed to legislate inclusiveness, we choose to be separate. Now we are looking to a politician to deliver reconciliation and racial justice, things the church should have ushered into being with the most extraordinary force available to man -- the power of Jesus Christ.

Here at Reunion, at least, we chose to be together.

Most of all, I thought of my closest Christian friends. The majority of them are black evangelicals, and all but one supports Obama. We’d observed how his candidacy arose from nowhere and overtook the woman with the legendary last name; surely, we thought, God’s hand was upon Obama for this hour, like it was upon David, and Solomon and Israel’s deliverers. He would restore justice to the land; he would bring us together in peace and harmony.

One of my friends reminded me that, in 2001, a Nigerian pastor had prophesied to us that after the Bush years were completed, we would have a black president. We never forgot his words.

She then unpacks her own mind, heart & soul in regards to what we should expect from our leaders, using the prism of her own beliefs about abortion.  Let me just say that few things have disgusted me more than the craven manipulation that Karl Rove and his ilk have practiced around this issue.  That said, Julie's thinking captured something that nudges at me:

I’m one of those people who was never passionate about this issue until I had a child of my own -- kind of like the folks who don’t care about famine in faraway places until they see the pictures of starving children. God touched my conscience one day concerning abortion; today I passionately oppose it and call myself a pro-life Democrat.

I see it as an elemental thing: the value of life. You couldn’t identify an issue that cuts to the core more than that.

I won’t say I’m the deepest thinker on this subject. It’s just simple to me. I will put no other god before me, neither will I play God and make decisions reserved solely for him. Every time man has been given the power to decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die, hideous things have resulted.

The Middle Passage. The Holocaust. The Nazis’ extermination of the mentally retarded and gypsies. Genocide in Armenia, Rwanda, Darfur. The executions of innocents in Texas and other states. Abortion.

Julie then points to a an email from fellow Christian blogger, Angela L. Braden of Nuvision for a New Day:

“My heart bleeds when I consider all of the babies that are aborted every day. My heart aches even more when I think about how many mothers felt compelled to make a decision like that, rather than feel like they could face their challenge with courage and certainty of the future.

“I believe that we as believers should be taking the steps to make sure that mothers are not compelled to make those decisions. I feel that we should take steps to prevent people from being in that situation. If we give people the tools, such as work skills, financial counseling, education, equal housing and access to employment, I honestly do not feel that women would choose to end their children's lives.

“I feel that Senator Obama understands that as well. Yes, he may believe in legalized abortions. But he believes in giving the living what they need to live. Some of these so-called conservatives are creating and supporting policies that choke the very life out of those of us who are walking, breathing and living today.”

Reading Julie's moving post and Angela's email, I could not help but think back to Obama's run for the US Senate seat from Illinois, when Alan Keyes suggested that Christ Would Not Vote For Obama.  Obama talked about this in his speech to Call to Renewal in 2006, indicating it troubled him on a personal level, not simply as a political tactic.

In sifting through this, I connected  with what Rod Dreher had to say in this great commentary:

It seems to me no bad thing for American Christians to think more rigorously about how our nation measures up to the Biblical standard, and how God might be speaking to us collectively through historical events to call us back to obedience and fidelity. We so often assume that our national aspirations and intentions are consonant with the Almighty's, and that's a profoundly hubristic assumption. So many US Christians support the idea that spreading liberal democracy is a fulfillment of the Great Commission, a sort of divine mission civilisatrice for the world, that we don't even stop to consider how God might see what we do. Even the Chosen People fell away from the divine will, and suffered for it. Why shouldn't we?

In the Mars Hill interview, Keillor said that one reason we modern Americans are uncomfortable thinking about interpreting history in this way is that we are opposed to the idea of collective guilt. We judge individuals, not groups, in our legal system. We expect God's judgment to conform to that model. But insofar as the Bible is a reliable testimony of God's literal historical dealings with humanity, we are imposing our own model on Him, and it's baseless. He does judge nations. Neither the United States nor righteous Americans are immune.

I honestly do not quite know how to sort this out.  More & more, I wonder if sorting it out is even attainable.  Ethics for people who are trying to live into a Spirit life is gnarly & messy,  an execise in holding tension, rather than simplifying complexities into consumsable narratives. My sense is that the days of a symmetrical set of positions & implications were just one of many modern myths that is dying a public, violent death.  Ben Lee has a great lyric that there are "no right angles in my life".  He goes to give some advice:

so breathe
feel the open space
leave it all behind
coming into grace
no right angles in my life
there are no right angles in my life

I suspect he is right.  That I need to breathe the breath of God, feel the open space that is God's Kingdom and following other folks (like Julie, Angela, Rod & those I know & love) into grace.

In times like these, I find myself agreeing with Tony Jone's advice:

First, they're intent on finding and supporting politicians who will change the political landscape, those who will resist doing business as usual. This may not differ appreciably from many politically engaged Americans, but the emergents may be the generation of Christians to represent a critical mass, a tipping point to upset the political apple cart.

Second, emergents will look at political engagement as an art rather than a science. Therefore, they will artfully look for points of intersection and moments of potential cooperation with politicians on both sides of the aisle. The junctures of the gospel and political engagement are myriad, and they will surely not line up exclusively with the ideology of one political party.

But the independence of emergents does not preclude activism. In fact, it begets activism.

Comments

is it absolutely necessary to know the way to go on this voting thing?