This week Twitter feel like a minefield, every arrogant or vitriolic one-liner like a punch in the gut. After reading Brene Brown’s Braving the Wilderness, it feels like witnessing the breakdown of society.
I read the book in two days; in that sense it was an easy read. But it was also a hard read—hard to hear her plea for a kinder and a less comfortable world—because that world is a place where we are open to each other’s pain. I have been much more conscious, in the week since that read, of the layers of pride and fear under everyone’s rhetoric; not because I want to diagnose, blame or dismiss, but just because when you’re really hearing people it’s all right there, right on the surface. It hurts.
Brown tells us about the dangers of using this rhetoric and letting that pain and anger run rampant. She reminds us that dehumanizing language is the breeding ground for dehumanizing behavior. She tells us what every revenge myth has already said: anger is a catalyst, pine needles on a fire, good for self-preservation and jolting into action and sometimes, just knowing you’re alive. But pine needles won’t actually keep you warm. They’ll burn themselves right up in a flash—and if anger is all you have to stoke your own fire with, you’ll run yourself straight to death in no time.
It has only deepened my eternal weariness of politics—even though Brown’s book itself is ultimately about the importance of taking a stand. I can hardly see a way to keep on caring about issue after issue when someone is constantly insisting that this is the one that’s life or death; this proves our enemies are trying to kill us. Even when I know it’s sort of true—each one is life or death to someone, somewhere—I don’t have the expertise or the energy to get involved with the government’s every move.
I refuse, especially, to pitch a tent in rage and call that home, just for the thrill of adrenaline it offers, while I slowly forget how to belong to civilization.
Still, I can’t just walk away from it all, because I do know life and death are at stake: they’re dealt by the budget, by harassers and protectors, by conservers and destroyers of national land. Policies, systems, and attitudes can treat people as subhuman, and I don’t get to check out, to simply wait on that dehumanization to occur.
There must be some way between fear and rage, and apathy.
Theologian Jurgen Moltmann offers us more words for that pain Dr. Brown asks us to witness. He doesn’t look away from the ugly in the world, but he stands firmly in the camp of hope; and he shows us how Jesus saves from fear and rage and apathy. Christ doesn’t save us all in the same way; salvation looks different for the oppressed (the dehumanized) and the oppressor—the inhuman. The inhuman need to be freed from their own will to power which has stripped them of compassion and peace. The dehumanized receive freedom from the inevitability of their circumstances and the probability that they’ll be turned inhuman themselves; they find dignity in God’s solidarity with their suffering, and there lies the courage and strength to carry on in the struggle to escape oppression.
Billionaires who demand tax cuts at the expense of children’s healthcare: how can Brene Brown ask me to dignify them with civilized language? Because their very inhumanity is so obviously a prison to them, they should rightly be objects of pity. And why shouldn’t I fear the foreigners pouring into my country at all sides? Because it is that very fear that dehumanizes, that backs people into inhuman corners, that fulfills its own prophecy, unless the courage and compassion of Christ flips the script.
Only when we hand our own pain and fear over to Jesus, and take on the terrible task of seeing others’, can we hope to make anything right.
Of course, the world isn’t divided neatly into oppressors and oppressed. Most of us could fit into both categories in some aspect of our lives or another. As much as those categories help me think about specific situations, the point is only this: love proclaims freedom for all. Love invites us to the level places to look each other in the eye. Love says come out of your fear and let go of your greed. Yes, it is a narrow path. Yes, the brave way hurts. But it hurts more to be apart, says God. All this pain, I’ve already borne for you. All that is broken has broken me…Yet I live again.
Do you think I can be allowed to believe in a politics of this audacious love? Will we find a way to be joyful, though we’ve considered all the facts?* Can we look beyond the horizon of today’s breaking news and act, from that far-seeing viewpoint, upon today’s issues—but most importantly, for today’s and tomorrow’s people? Will we believe, not only that God is with us in the suffering of today, but also in every step we take toward grace and peace and justice for all? Can we pray that the oppressor will be crushed—not by vengeance, but by the weight of conviction, before their own hopelessness and helplessness leach away their humanity entirely?
Hope did not live and die with Barack Obama’s presidency, friends. Hope is a clear, steady fire in the night; not a naive wish, but a simple knowing. Hope can be dramatic, but more often it’s a stack of books, a circle of friends, groundedness: those unsexy things that make your fire sustainable so you no longer fear the cold. Hope has to be met after pain has failed to kill you. Hope has always looked more than eight years out—to the life beyond death, the victory beyond defeat, to the kingdom coming and the savior who bears still the scars of love.
What’s feeding your hope-fire these days?
*Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”
Leave a Reply