Telling Our Holy Story: The Silenced Majority Break Thru The Gates

image from forgtnrose

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh.

How old were you when you heard that sound in a worship setting ?

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh.

Please keep your kids (or your mom or your husband) quiet.

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh.

Real Christians are praying or singing or preaching - so please shut up.

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh.

A sound as at home in a church as AMEN.

The concept of a gatekeeper is at the core of so many communities of faith & practice.  Look at a community and you'll find someone who controls access to things holy, who monitors or oversees the actions of others, who is in charge of passage through a gate that is far more narrow that Jesus spoke of.

People with power, with expressed expertise, with privilege - we get through the gate.  People who know how to behave, who know their place, who have been briefed on the rules & the covenants.

More & more, I am drawn to what Amy Goodman refers to as the silenced majority, those who  have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful.  You know these people, right ?  The diaspora of people whose souls are unsettled, whose questions are uncomfortable, whose very presence can clear a room.

They have been told time & time again

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh

by the gatekeepers of a movement that follows a liberating King who hung out with the scum of the earth.

I was reminded of this last week when I read through a series that the inimitable Jenell Paris, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Messiah College & host of  The Paris Project is posting called cacklings from an emergent crone (first post, 2nd, 3rd).  I will not even try to excerpt her brilliance & those of her commenters.  kudos to all for their truth-telling.

And kudos to bruce reyes chow, for his truthtelling in this post  can we agree to disagree about homosexuality, where he names the reality - that most denoms & assoc of churches just can not even agree on the terms of discussion about ordaining openly gay men & lesbians.  Both "sides" want to scream & yell that this is not the case - all the yelling in the world sounds like  SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhhing to people who see things differently.

From my experience, sensitive new age gatekeepers are usually worse than the old version - at least old school gatekeepers will admit they gatekeeping.  The web is filled with stories of legacy gatekeepers, from denom leaders to media companies to governing boards.  I want to share two from my perspective that are just as pernicious:

1. i have seen this SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhhing in the emerging church phenomenon, both in the states & internationally.  hip young white males are at the center, pushing out people like  karen ward or maggie dawn or cheryl lawrie or Liz Rios or  holly rankin zaher or deb loyd...or, I could go on & on & on & on.  I saw this close up when gifted prophets like Rachelle, Karen & Jen were silenced, shhhsssshed out of the "conversation" becuz they were not appreciative enough or would not play by the rules or would not simply shut up.
2. i have seen this in the "progressive faith" vanguard, who rail against a strawman of orthodoxy.  in their rants, they too often fall into a mirror track - "we are the real people of good, they are bigots".  This happens every day in quiet ways, in the condescending way that progressives engage with savage evangelicals, talking down to them and stereotyping them without fail.  people who try to hold the tension, try to inhabit a middle space between the warring polarities are shhhsssshed into oblivion

I've spent more than my quota of time as a gatekeeper, shooting questions & proof texts as locks on the gate.  It took me a long time, but I have changed my registration to the silenced majority, rather than the gatekeepers.  I think Stowe Boyd is on target when he observed:

the edge dissolves the center

More & more, the locks have been picked, the silenced majority have moved on to a more welcoming patch in the meadow that is the beloved community, the doors  of the gate are swung open, even off their hinges.   People who have pushed the edges are dissolving what people see as the center.

The joy is that this is at the core of Jesus following story - that Jesus stood at the edges, dissolving & transforming the center, resurrecting a new boundary that mashed up what we think of as heaven & earth.

In this grand mashup, I am certain that there will be no  shhhsssshing - how about we start that practice now ?

Comments

[Liz Rios]

Hi there! Saw your post as I looked at my incoming links and you have point my friend. However, I am not surprised about the shhhhhhing why? Because everything usually ends up a white male thing. So I, instead of becoming bitter about it, go to where I am celebrated not tolerated. Perhaps this is why many of the ladies who believed and walked with Emergent in the early days are no longer very active in the "conversation" but are living the holy story out.