so then you will know who you are

Yesterday, Cal Turner, Jr. (a big time financial donor to Vanderbilt and Project Pyramid) spoke to a class that I am in. As the CEO of Dollar General for 40 years, Cal Turner engaged a business model that allowed him to cater to the needs of the working and lower classes while involving thousands of employees in the management and profits of the company and still he managed to out shine people like Jack Welch in shareholder profits. He was very wise, funny, and smart about the business of mixing God’s work with the business world. For me, this was the most striking thing that he said:

“You must find where you feel the least adequate but where there is the most need, because it is in that place where the opportunity for the most impact lies. What is your greatest challenge? Are you willing to accept the freedom of accepting your greatest challenge? If your work has an underlying mission to it, your work can help you understand who you are. So then, when the (whatever you call it in the halls of Divinity school) hits the fan, you will know who you are.”

vivaldi in the afternoon

In the summer of 2006, my friend Andy and I were teaching English to a group of male Haitian adults in downtown Les Cayes. My impression was that they knew English well enough to produce something such as a thank you note but not well enough to have a successful job interview. The men who came to this class traveled across town, after working for 12 hours that day. Some of the men were agriculturists, others were artists, and some were masons. I am unaware of their ages, but I would guess a range from about twenty-five to forty-five years old.

Having access to reliable electricity, we decided to engage the students in a writing exercise involving music. We played a couple of movements from the Vivaldi baroque masterpiece “Winter,” from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” We asked my students to listen and let their thoughts go where they may while writing in a sort of free-style manner about whatever it is they were feeling or remembering during the listening experience.

I engaged in the exercise too. I sat with my eyes closed. I dreamed about a rabbit running through the hills of upstate New York, chasing a smaller animal. I saw bright greens and blues. The sun was shining. Then the rabbit took a nap under a tree. The gentle breeze blew the weeds in the grass. My thoughts were very peaceful and serene.

The final part of this exercise was to share our writing with the group. Coming out of my day dreams about bunnies and fields, I was not prepared for what my students had dreamed of. Gregory the artist, spoke first. With tears in his eyes he began describing a woman with a child in her womb. He went on to describe her brutal murder by the machete of a ton ton macoute. Still covered in dust and concrete from the day's work, one of the masons said that the song reminded him of being a small child in Camp Perrin, running away from the ton ton macoute, as he tried to hide his little brother in the bushes. A third student shared a similar tale, while detailing the haunting dark glasses and Baron Samedi like outfit of Papa Doc.

I was unequipped to offer my condolences for what happened at the hands of an American supported (understatement) Cold War dictatorship from 1953 to 1986. I didn’t even want to think about what my home country was responsible for since 1986,(or the hundreds of years of sins before 1953, for that matter). I also didn’t know how to express my sadness for having stirred their hearts by playing Vivaldi. It was as if these painful and terrorizing memories remained right under their surface. Perhaps they wanted to educate me about the modern day collective memory of the Haitian people. The role music had in this made me long to ask them questions about the drumming in vodoun ceremonies, but in an attempt toward humility, I refrained.

This story depicts the individual embodiment of unjust social forces such as poverty and violence. The lived experience for Haitians under the dictatorship of the Duvaliers has manifested a terror settled in the depth of their being which is also easily accessible under the surface of a silenced people. In his book Pathologies of Power, Paul Farmer details how in this silence lies the pent-up anger born of innumerable small indignities and of great irremediable ones. Whether heard or not, there exists millions of experiences of sorrow within the greater structural sins of the story of Haiti.

Derrida said, “there is no life beyond the text.” But history can be done better when knowledge is used with personal narrative. The narratives of my students can not be found in the worldly accessible history of Haiti, (with the exception of some pro-Aristide literature which is actively and unfairly silenced and discredited by Haiti's close neighbor, the United States). This is part of the collective memory of a people. As a first step toward reconciliation and justice, their story deserves to be heard.

crystallized in their present form

By definition of faith in eternal life, Christians are called to live in the future. St. Augustine asserted that there really is no “now.” Psalm 90 reveals that God views creation without a lens of time. In Hebraic and Christian sacred texts, time is often associated with the unchanging of the godhead. The Mayans were obsessed with time, and believed that the past was a clue to the future often as a means of anticipating things like war and drought. Ancient Babylonians thought similarly. In the 19th century physicist James Maxwell said time was a continuous running line with an ordered series of events. Eliade debunked this and said that time is a means for us to order things. He said that in all non-Western cultures, time is viewed as cyclical. In the case of Buddhist tradition- time is many layers of cycles and repetition. Newton thought that time was outside of us; whereas Einstein believed time was in relation to things.

Now we live in a scientific world with scientific examinations of time, but individuals still have the intimate experience and understandings of time as we sift through and sort out our own lived lives. While writing a paper last year surrounding Niebuhrian ethics and the notions of self, I came across this quote and it has continued to stir my imagination.

My past is with me now; it is in my present as conscious and unconscious memory; it is here now as habits of behavior, of speech and thought, as ways of cutting up and dividing into shapes and forms the great mass of impressions made on my senses by the energies assailing them from without. My interpersonal past also is with me in all my present meetings with other selves. It is there in all my love and guilt. The self does not leave its past behind as the moving hand of a clock does; its past is inscribed into it more deeply than the past of geologic formations is crystallized in their present form. As for the future, the not-yet, it is present in my now in expectations and anxieties, in anticipations and commitments, in hopes and fears. To be a self is to live toward the future. – H.R. Niebuhr

everybody wants to be found

but then what?

oikonomos

As a graduate school student in “middle Tennessee” - - we could call it "central," but don’t get me started on that tangent - - and as a woman likely to be dressed in black, speaking with a sharp accent, I am often asked, “Kate, where is home?” My answer varies depending on my mood. The response I am most comfortable with is some variation of, “Well, my parents live in California, but I grew up in New York state, and I lived in DC for nine years, off and on, usually on.” The question, “where is home?” resonates initially as a geographic concern, but there are other aspects to take into account.

Robert Frost said that Home is where they have to take you in. Others have said that Home is where everybody knows your name. And your name is just a symbol for your story, so Home is a place where everybody knows your story. Home is a place where you can count on being confronted, loved, and hoped for. Home is where there is a place at the family table for you, for sharing and conversation. Home is where the storytelling happens. Family meals are where people gather to tell their stories.

God was the first homemaker by creating this world for God’s people and God’s work, therefore, Home could be described as a place where there is access to the conditions of life.

I spent this Thanksgiving at Home with my dear friend Angela, and her family Emily, Wayne, Eric, and Anna. It was good to be Home.

fleets and harbors

America started the official stop-watch on my four days of thankfulness. On Friday I can once again be the greedy consumerist. In honor of the clock ticking, I’ve decided what I am thankful for.

A therapist once told me, “You are the commander of your own ship.” As a child, I regularly stared at a cross-stitch: “A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are made for.”

Through grace, I have seen that I am not a ship out at sea, alone and commanding my own destiny. In the eyes of psycho-therapy and the market system, I suppose I am a loner. If there were fewer material resources in which to place my faith, I would probably have had a stronger belief in community at an earlier point of my life. Community takes a lot of work to stand over and against the individualistic structure of this society; and for me, that reinforces the necessity of it.

So this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for my fleets and harbors, past and present.

clanging metal

Shortly before Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination he was asked by a journalist, "where do you find inspiration for your work and preaching?" He responded, "Your question is very timely, for just now I have come from my retreat. If it were not for this prayer and reflection with which I try to stay united with God, I would be no more than what St. Paul says: clanging metal."

The journey of my own life has been one of constant tension between lived meaning and clanging metal. Many friends & family have honored me by suggesting that I write a book. Finally, (and it might be too little too late), this blog is an endeavor to tell my own story: the journeys of the past, the experience of the present, and my hopes for the future. I hope it will be as humorous and insightful as the concrete experiences have proven to be. Story telling is a gifting process, and I want to give my life away.