Pain Changes Us

I've written vaguely and in bits and pieces about this painful year in my life and some who know me well know that it has been pure hell.  Yet it has also changed and refined me in certain ways.  I don't lie anymore. Lies marked my old life and I refuse to mislead people anymore because I am incapable of being honest with myself.  When I say "lie" I mean "telling another what you think they want to hear in order to better yourself in their eyes."  It was a form of people-pleasing.

But I've changed in little, perhaps less important ways too.  I used to listen to news and podcasts 24/7; now I prefer music or silence.  I used to play video games for hours; now all those games are long gone and I prefer to spend my hours walking or sitting in nature. I used to think only as a male, but am now coming to slowly see how "toxic masculinity" warped my mind and theology.  I cry more and worry less.  I'm still deeply selfish and have a very long way to go, but at least I can acknowledge that without it suffocating me.  Many of these inward mental and spiritual changes are also starting to impact my body too; what we believe doesn't matter -- what we do is what counts.

Now I'm rambling, but this is all just for my eyes anywho.  I didn't tell my daughters of these changes, but their little minds were blown when they learned that I drink more water than Diet Coke now and that I've given up dried mango.  Lol.  I love those kiddos.

Smartphones and Teens

Proposition: I think that smartphones should be illegal to handle by anyone under the age of 18.  I certainly don't want my own daughters to own them until at least that age.

Rationale:

1) Smartphone technology is so new -- and so fundamentally unique -- that we do not yet know what its long-term impact might be on the individual human brain, let alone on the evolution of the brain for future generations (see recent Atlantic article on this).

2) The uncritical adoption of technologies which are leading us down the path of cyborg-like human/computer integration could very well also eventually lead to the end of our species (as proposed in Homo Deus).

3) Christians need to figure out how to be peculiar again or the faith with die.  I am attempting to raise my daughters to be Christians and this could be a counter-cultural practice that will help define our people for centuries.  But theologians need to think carefully about technological change to see if they agree that this is the way forward.

4) Benefit: our children will be forced to interact with the real, physical, embodied world and with real physical human beings/bodies/faces.  This will be their salvation.  The alternative is what we already see:  teens spending entire summers in their bedrooms on their beds with blue screens in their faces.  If this trajectory continues for generations, our physical bodies will gradually evolve into something almost inhuman as we integrate more intimately with our computers.

A Fish Named Pip

Pip was a small fish even compared to the other fish in his school.  More than anything, he loved his school, but you might also call it his "family."  It was everyone that he'd ever loved and known and they were a very happy school.  Pip liked to stay as close to the center of the school as possible because a few times while swimming together Pip would find himself on the outside edges of the school and he didn't like what he saw.  In fact, it really scared him.  The ocean was so very big and he was so very small.  Whenever he got to the edge of his school, he would look out into the vast emptiness of the ocean and it would fill him with a deep fear, almost a panic.  And so Pip made it his mission in life to be as committed to his school as he could be.  "I will follow all of the rules," Pip would tell himself, "because maybe if I do, then I won't ever be stuck out on the edge of the school again.  Then I won't have to look out at the scary place."

But as Pip grew up in safety and in the cozy comfort of the center of his school, there was a part of him that was mesmerized by memories of the open ocean.  True, he still feared it, but there was also something kind of alluring about it.  It made him wild with wonder and his imagination kept telling him that he should some day travel to the edge of the school on purpose just to see it again.  After all, he reasoned, he could always come back if he got too frightened.  Some of the other fish had told him stories about the "open ocean" and most of them were very scary indeed.  Evidently, there were monsters out there in the deep that were so much larger than any fish Pip had ever seen.  Some, they said, didn't even look at all like the fish in Pip's school.  The very idea sent shivers down his spine whenever Pip would think about it.  But usually he just doubted the stories.  "People like to make things us," Pip reminded himself. "It is the way of our people." Yet something deep inside of Pip -- you might call it his soul if fish have souls -- kept whispering to him, "Go out there and find out for yourself."

For a long time Pip ignored the voice inside that kept speaking to him.  He liked his life in the school.  He had made many good friends there.  In fact, he even fell in love with one particular fish that just drove him wild and he eventually married her.  She became his moon and stars and he loved her deeply.  They even had children together and built a nice family.  It was a charmed life, one that many other fish really envied.  They would look at Pip and his family and say, "I wish I had that.  They look so happy."  And, on most days, it was true.  Pip loved his life and was thankful for the sweet simple pleasures of his school and his new family.

But even during these years of great happiness the still, small voice inside of Pip never completely went away.  It kept inviting him to explore the edges of the school or -- and this was a very frightening thought -- to even swim out on his own someday, away from the school.  He wanted to know if there really were monsters out there.

But Pip shut these thoughts out of his mind.  "How could I possibly go take such a journey now?!?  I have a wife and family to think of!  I have a job and a profession.  I have a school that I love.  I would be completely insane to leave all of this in order to chase some silly, childish curiosity about what lives out in the open ocean."  And, reasoning in this way, Pip would manage to fall asleep at night... though as time passed the voice became louder and more persistent and Pip didn't sleep very well.  "At least the rest of my family is sleeping well," he thought.  "That's something."

That's when Pip's entire world came crashing down all at once. On a day just like any other day, without any warning at all a fishnet came down from the skies out of nowhere.  The school panicked and swam in every direction.  Everyone was trying to follow everyone else, but it was like the blind leading the blind.  Everything became chaos and confusion and all Pip could think was, "Where is my wife?  Where are my kids?  I can't see them!"  Pip swam faster than he'd ever swam in his life, searching with all the strength in his little body for the family he had lost, but as time passed and the fishnets disappeared and the school slowly started to piece itself back together, it began to ever so slowly and painfully dawn on Pip that his precious wife and kids were gone and it didn't seem like they were ever coming back.  This slow, dreadful realization took over Pip's little mind and he tried the best he could to think positively, but the pain was so great.  How could he live without his family?  The very thought of it made Pip wish that he too had been caught up in the fishnet.

Pip was still surrounded by fish within his school and they really tried to help him.  They all felt badly for Pip and what he had lost and some would say things to him like, "I have no idea what I would do if I were in your shoes.  I'm so sorry."  And, even though he was surrounded by so many fish who loved and cared for him, Pip felt alone and crushed.  Sometimes the other fish would try to encourage him, but Pip wouldn't even respond.  His sadness was more than he could bear.

After weeks and even months of living like a zombie-fish, one night Pip heard that little voice inside himself again, the one that he had heard ever since he could remember.  The voice said, "Hey there, Pip!  It's really terrible what you've been through.  But remember how you always wanted to go out and explore the open ocean?  Try to think of the disaster with the fishnets not only as a loss -- for it certainly is that! -- but also as the opening up of another opportunity.  This is your chance to go out and explore.  In a way, it is what you always wanted, even though you often ignored it."  Pip fought the voice though.  He didn't like the idea of going out into the open ocean alone, especially now.  The only things that brought him any comfort were those simple things he grew up with.  Still the voice wouldn't go away and it kept saying to him, "C'mon!  What do you have to lose?!?"  And Pip couldn't argue with that.  He couldn't think of what he had to lose.

So one night, feeling especially alone (even though he wasn't!), Pip did venture to the edge of the school and looked out into the dark open ocean.  It both frightened and intrigued him.  "Curiosity killed the cat," he heard his second grade teacher's voice say.  "Yeah, but... so what?" thought Pip.  "What if I do get eaten by a so-called monster?  What have I got to lose?"  Pip agonized over the decision for a long time.  He looked back at his old school and remembered with great fondness how good they had all been to him, especially after the horrible day.  But, looking within himself and staring into the open ocean, Pip realized that the open ocean itself was calling to him.  The open ocean was the voice he'd been hearing all along -- it was the voice "inside himself" but also "beyond himself." And that's when Pip realized that his deepest love all along -- deeper even than his love for his school, his ex-wife, and, yes, even his own precious children -- had always been this scary, wild, mysterious open expanse.

So what would you do, kids, if you were Pip?  Would you swim back to the safety of your school and to everything you've always known?  Or do you think Pip should venture out into the great unknown? That part of the story has yet to be told...

[Note:  I am not Pip.  There are overlaps, but they are not perfect.  In this story Pip is largely a victim and I don't really think that about my own story.]

Circle of Error

Wheels within wheels within wheels

Inhale and exhale
within

Waking and sleeping
within 

Worship and work
within

Holidays and Ordinary Time
within

Despair and hope
within

Depression and joy
within

Marriage and divorce
within

Life and death
within

Inhale and exhale

On this circle of error

I go round and round and round again

Sacrament

We sit in the hovel

Spinning tales within hash clouds

And over his harvest of grapes

I, a lost pilgrim

He, the lordly Host

A sojourner here, and a fool,

I habitually keep reaching for the plump, round choices of his vine,

my rabbi-sage watching, 

mirth in his eyes 

Chuckling his own prayer-joke to the skies

Supping with my Host, 

he points an ancient brown finger to... to what?

To what does my shaman direct my soul? 

Eternity is in this gesture.  

To where does the hand of the Ancient One guide me?

...

He points to the brown and smashed grapes,

He points to the runts, leftovers, misfits

Seeing but not understanding, 

Listening but having no ears to hear,

I am bewildered.

Yet he is laughing, praying

Pointing 

"Take and eat."

Who am I to question God?

Humbly I obey:

I Eat The Misshapen Grapes

... and they are the best of all.

Now, feasting, we laugh at Americans

and their love for the shiny

and how they have forgotten 

the taste of bruised fruit

But not I

I will remember His Salvation 

I am a stranger no longer in this land

For the secrets of the heavens are being laid bare:

eat the cursed grapes;

Consume the God-damned ones.

Their taste is sweetest.

The Gospel of Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Jeff, Who Lives at Home struck a deep emotional chord within me when I first saw it in 2012 -- a very, very dark chapter of my life.  I remember my then wife asking me why it had moved me to such tears and I don't think I even knew how to answer her at that time.  I was so utterly alienated from my True Self (for what I mean by this term, see Richard Rohr) that I could not perceive the nature of her question -- a question fundamentally about me.  Yet now I have rewatched this film twice within the past six months and I think I know what my soul was crying about in 2012. I was encountering the gospel of Jesus in this new story/Story of Jeff.  (By the way, the 32 f-bombs in this rated R film -- and its treatment of homosexuality -- means that most "good Christians" wouldn't even watch this mythical story.  Their loss, I guess.)

*Spoilers ahead*

Jeff constantly points away from himself.

Jeff senses a purpose to his existence which is mysterious and beyond himself.  He loves the movie "Signs" because in the end it is the half-consumed cups of water that saves everyone.

Jeff seems to have a "sixth sense" for what is going on around him, an awareness of the holiness of all of life (birds in the air, phone calls, infomercials, traffic jams, random people); everything matters, Jeff thinks, if we can see with the eyes of faith.

Jeff sometimes doubts himself and, in those moments, he is most convinced that the story is absolutely NOT about himself (which it is!  haha! the joke is on Jeff!).  After all, how could the story be about him if he is just a thirty year old pothead living in his mom's basement!?  What could be more irrelevant than such a man?

Jeff, precisely because he alone considers his own life completely expendable, saves everyone in the end.  His mother reconnects with life and love; his brother does too and the ripple effects carry on infinitely.  Completely unaware of his own agency, Jeff has single-handedly saved us ALL with his courageous act of self-sacrificial love and utter abandonment to even death itself.

Jeff is baptized into death, enters the roaring waters we are drowning in, embraces the chaos, and quite literally dies.

And lastly, of course, Jeff is resurrected.  It could not end any other way since this is the Gospel.

The Good Life and Living with Irrelevance

I was first challenged to think about the idea of living a life of irrelevance by Henri Nouwen, who has been a constant spiritual guide for me since college.  Nouwen, as many know, left a life of great success as a professor at an ivy league university in order to work in a home for the mentally handicapped.  Through this experience he discovered his true self and became a mystical, spiritual writer who has helped millions.  Ironically, it was only by leaving the academy that Nouwen became a true teacher to us all.  He found that "thrown in on the side" if you will.

I confront a similar choice in my life at this point.  I once believed my life was set out before me quite clearly:  I was going to finish my Ph. D, get a job as a professor (since I have always loved teaching), be a good husband and father, and die holding hands with a soul named Courtney Coates.  Up until the end of January of this year, I still thought that was my life.  Now all bets are off.  In some ways, I am a deeply broken man whose life has been wrenched from his tightly clenched fists and, utterly against my own will, I am starting to experience salvation.  The usually silly 90s CCM band Audio Adrenaline describes my condition in life right now remarkably well.  Laugh at the source if you will, but I think this song articulates some deep spiritual truth:



So now I live in my parents' home and smoke pot.  I have become as irrelevant as I think I can, but who knows?  Just when I think I have lost all I can loose, I sometimes learn that I can still surrender over more to my Maker.  "Pain has been the catalyst to my heart's happiness."  And so I thank God for the pain, I thank her for the struggle.  I seek to repent of the "toxic masculinity" that has invaded my life, practice, and thought.  I am abandoned to my Father in Heaven and my Mother in Earth, to whom I will quite readily and joyously surrender my body for good in her perfect, good timing.

The Elegant, Simple Solution to My Most Pressing Questions

I have spent most of my life devoted to learning about and finding God.  When others have opted to build careers, make money, earn degrees that actually assist one throughout life, and so on, I have spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on "theological education" because I have always had this insatiable hunger to know, find, and experience the divine.  I do not say this in a self-congratulatory manner.  In fact, I've come to the devastating conclusion that these decisions I have made are a monumental waste of time, energy, and resources.  Yet because I have invested so very heavily throughout the years in this pursuit, because I have become a cog in the institutional machine that is the church, because I have been unwilling to pay the extremely high social cost of facing any alternative narrative... I have suppressed my questions.

To be sure, they have bubbled to the surface from time to time, but only briefly and only long enough for me to stare at them in agony and then dismiss them because they are too painful.  No longer.  If Paul Tillich is right in defining religion/God/god as humanity's "ultimate concern," then this has certainly been the case for me.  I was once taught -- and quite strongly believed -- that if I really did prioritize this quest, if I really did "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness" then the rest would be taken care of.  This is why I moved to China for a year, it's why I went to seminary, it's why I not only became a pastor but asked to be appointed to a very difficult, dysfunctional, and impoverished parish, it's why I spent thousands and moved my family across the country to study under some of the world's most brilliant theologians at Duke Divinity School, and it's why I have spent the past four years working to earn a PhD and trying to figure out just what it is that makes this thing called American Christianity tick.  In short, I've been obsessed and tireless as I chase my "ultimate concern." For if the story that I inherited is, in fact, not true... if it is a tremendous hoax or what Richard Dawkins refers to as a particularly powerful yet deceptive "meme" that has strangely lived on within our species for millennia, well then not only have I wasted my time, thought, energy, money, and everything else, but something far worse must be faced:  We all are, in fact, just a speck of dust floating in an endless expanse of darkness, heading nowhere, and all the things we scurry about doing day after day signifies nothing.  The prospect of this horrifying emptiness has for so long filled me with such dread and trepidation that I have been unwilling to stare for more than a few minutes into the abyss.  Like Kierkegaard, I have at times simply WILLED myself to believe because I am just not strong enough to face the horrifying alternative:  it's just darkness all the way down.

Now surely some committed Christians will say that I am writing this from a deranged mind and they could be right.  Even Sigmund Freud claimed that any person who asks about the meaning of life is already psychotic.  And I admit that I bring to this long-standing human debate my own baggage -- and plenty of it!  I have PTSD, I am severely clinically depressed, I daily bear a suffocating religiously-induced guilt, and so on.  More than this, my wife of fifteen years has left me and I am allowed only very brief, supervised encounters with my two precious daughters.  So it is certainly true that I may not be thinking clearly.  I have never known that such pain was even possible. It is an ocean of pain and I am drowning in it.  But there is another possibility here:  what if this pain has finally awakened me from a very long slumber and forced me to face my "ultimate concern" on a deep, genuine, existential level that was, prior to this, not even possible for me?

So before I come out of the closet fully, I want to first pose the burning questions that have simultaneously obsessed and frightened the hell out of me for decades.  Then I'll make my full, honest, and sincere confession.

--

MY QUESTIONS

1.  Why does a supposedly omni-benevolent, omnipotent God allow such horrendous suffering in the world?  I'm not just talking about stubbing toes here.  I'm talking about irredeemable, unfathomable, and permanent suffering.  I'm talking about the suffering of the innocent -- of babies, of animals, of forms of life that bear no personal responsibility or moral culpability at all.  Even the suffering of rational and intelligent adults who perhaps bring some suffering upon themselves, even their suffering seems completely disproportionate.  Saintly, selfless women and men who die of cancer.  Parents whose children suffer and die before their very eyes.  Starvation, war, hurricanes, tsunamis, addiction, loneliness, and on and on and on forever and ever, Amen.  Why create such a world?  If the evolutionists are right (and they obviously are to anyone who has given it even a modicum of thought), then this entire world is founded upon the edifice of millennia of bloodshed.  The strong eat the weak and the weak die unavenged and forgotten.  If Mark Twain once quipped that there is enough evidence in the joint of his thumb to convince him that there is a God, then I would retort that there is enough evidence in the tooth of a tiger to convince me there is not one.

2.  Why, if God is so relational... why if as the Christians claim that the very essential nature of God is perichoretic, trinitarian mutuality... why if this God so loves the world that He sent his Only Son and all that... then why the hell is He so silent and inaccessible?  If He is indeed out there, then why do my screams into the night and the screams of millions of others go unanswered day after day, year after year, century after century?  If this God is so damned set on relating to me, then why -- after all my genuine, wholehearted searching and yearning and crying and seeking -- is He absolutely nowhere to be found?

2b. Personal example:  On the 30th of April I stood on the top of a tower in Dallas and looked over the edge for about three hours, deeply longing to throw myself off.  I had lost absolutely everything I had ever cared about in my thirty-six years of life and I wanted nothing -- NOTHING! -- more than to die and enter the everlasting rest of blackness.  But a small sliver of hope convinced me that before jumping I should perhaps cry out to this Supremely Relational One whom I had been taught is out there.  In my darkest, worst moment, in this moment of absolute surrender to death, I stood on that tower and pleaded and begged and sobbed and pounded my fist into the cinder blocks, screaming, "ARE YOU THERE?  DO YOU SEE ME?  DO YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ME? BECAUSE IF YOU ARE THERE, NOW IS THE TIME TO SAY SOMETHING, ANYTHING!  I HAVE NEVER NEEDED YOU MORE.  I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE ALONE!  I HAVE SOUGHT YOU BUT I HAVE NOT FOUND!  So speak to me NOW for I am about to die!"  For three whole hours I screamed and pleaded with the void.  Know what I heard?  Nothing.  I heard silence.  I heard the wind beating against the cold building.  Think about this, my dear reader: If I wanted to relate to you in some way, I could drive to see you or call you on the phone or hug you or chat with you late into the night.  There are any number of ways in which you and I could relate to one another.  But this GOD, this "all-relational-one," would not give me even the slightest hint or whisper or feeling or sight or evidence or ANY GODDAMNED THING to me.  All was silence and all was suffering.  I needed God and He abandoned me.  I searched, but He was nowhere to be found.

There is only one reasons that I did not jump that day... only one:  I, as a father, did not want to abandon my own children and cause them to suffer.  Does that make me a better father than God is?

--

Those are my two big questions.  They are related to one another and they certainly are not novel.  These are questions that are as old as humanity itself.  The oldest book of the Hebrew Bible -- the book of Job -- asks the same ones (and doesn't really provide any answer other than "you aren't God."  Thanks a lot, Book of Job.  Duh.)

Now for my confession.  I am coming out of the closet.  I believe there is one absolutely clear and perfect explanation for the two questions I have posed above.  If we want to look for a simple and elegant and powerful solution to these questions, it is staring us in the face.  We just have to have the balls to accept it.  There is no God.  He's just not there.  It answers my questions perfectly and unapologetically.

AND SO...

Marx is right:  God is an opiate for weak people like myself who cannot bear the pain of real life.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Feuerbach is right: God is just a projection of humankind's desires.

Dawkins is right: belief in God is a powerful "meme," an evolutionary trick of the mind that assists us in propagating our species.

Nietzsche is right: all that exists is man's Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.

Camus is right: It's just all suffering all the way down.

Epicurus is right: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?  Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Macbeth is right: 

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The sheer simplicity and brilliance of these conclusions can no longer be ignored by my inquiring brain. It's time I stop living within the Matrix and see things for what they really are.  God is not.  I hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.  

UPDATE:  I don't delete past published posts lest I forget where I've been, but this post came at the lowest of my low moments.  I am no longer there.  I now actually believe that God WAS there with me on my cross/tower on April 30.  But I will have to blog about that another time perhaps.

What Ta-Nehisi Coates and White Supremacists Have in Common

NOTE:  I'm not sure I still agree with my own post here.  - Greg, 9/14/17

Earlier this year I penned some reflections on the National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates entitled Between the World and Me.  With issues of race constantly providing the subtext behind headlines throughout the past several years, my choice to carefully consider the arguments and thoughts of the eloquent and now famous Mr. Coates was my own pitiful yet deliberate attempt to better understand what life in these United States must be like inside a black body.

Yet much of what I uncovered deeply troubled me as a Christian committed to the narrative of God's redemptive work in the world as revealed through the person of Jesus Christ.  Though Coates' book provides a much needed glimpse into the nature of life within black skin, it offers a profoundly anti-Christian solution to the problem of race in America:  violent resistance and endless struggle.  Critiquing the pacifist Christian thought of Martin Luther King Jr., Coates believes that blacks will never gain equality with whites by playing nice.  Sit-ins and acts of nonviolent resistance may make a certain amount of progress, but for complete equality violent overthrow of the systemic status quo can be the only solution.  

Ta-Nehisi Coates has become one of the
leading voices among black civil rights activists

Though the author does not state his aims quite as starkly as this, his solution to the inequality between races in America reveals itself in his mockery of Dr. King.  The arc of the universe, Coates retorts, doesn't bend toward justice! No, the universe that we encounter is purely "physical, and its moral arc [is] bent toward chaos then concluded in a box" (28). In contrast to Dr. King, Ta-Nehisi praises the violence and militant rhetoric of Malcolm X, writing, "If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.  He would not turn the other cheek for you.  He would not be a better man for you.  He would not be your morality" (36).  This is the activism of a man committed to a materialist understanding of the cosmos: There is no "God" and he will not "make right" all of the wrongs of our world.  If there is to be justice, it must be seized, not prayed for.  The oppressed cannot overcome violent oppressors while maintaining some semblance of a moral high ground since morality itself is a fiction created by the oppressors to maintain their power.

In short, Coates advises his son to abandon all hope of reconciliation.  The world has only ever known the law of the jungle:  either eat or be eaten.  In his most honest reflection on his nihilistic beliefs, the concerned father writes, "Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about this world is meant to be... These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope" (71).  Coates believes solely in struggle and the eternal recurrence of the same. Black power vs. white power -- these two can no more be reconciled than can a lion and a lamb.

Interestingly, this is precisely the worldview and ethical reasoning embraced by white supremacists. Since the election of Donald Trump, the hate-mongerers seem to be emerging from their caves.  The so-called "Alt-Right," a euphemism for white supremacists, are no longer consigned to obscure corners of the internet; rather, now they are giving interviews on NPR and other national news outlets.  Indeed, the new chief strategist and Senior Counselor to President-elect Donald Trump, Stave Bannon, has acted as one of the spearheads of this movement for years, according to many watchdog groups.

Jared Taylor in 2008

Perhaps the most vocal and prominent white supremacist today, Jared Taylor, openly posits that peaceful co-existence (let alone reconciliation!) between peoples of different races has proven itself throughout human history to be an impossibility.  Political power, according to Taylor, is a zero-sum game.  That is, if blacks or latinos or any other non-white group gain a certain amount of political power, they attain it only by forcibly removing it from whites.  Taylor's solution, therefore, is to create a completely white nation that excludes all other peoples from entry.  His message is simple: "Unless whites are prepared to exclude people [of color], then they will be shoved aside. ...I will fight [for segregation] until my last breath" (Quote is from an interview with Jorge Ramos in his documentary Hate Rising, which can be viewed here).

For Taylor, as with Ta-Nehisi Coates, beings exist by nature human in a state of struggle, competition, and violence.  If power and influence is to be gained or maintained, then it must come at the expense of "the other."  Put simply, Coates and Taylor agree on this: racial reconciliation is a pipe dream, a utopian fantasy that will never and can never be achieved.  The strong eat the weak.  And it is always, obviously, better to be among the strong.  

Christians stand opposed to both Coates' violence and Taylor's violence.  We who follow the Crucified God, who place our trust in the One who is making all things right, and who believe that one day the kingdom of God will descend upon this earth, bringing about the miracle of reconciliation between black and white, lion and lamb -- we of all people must devote our lives, our reputations, and our resources solely to the cause of reconciliation.  Though undoubtedly Christians are taught to stand in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed, meaning that the cause of Ta-Nehisi Coates may be embraced at least in part (and Taylor's completely rejected), the identity politics and inherent violence of both must be rejected.  Christians live according to a new pattern, a pattern that foreshadows the shalom of God's perfect reign which was revealed momentarily in the person of Christ and will be revealed eternally in us all at the eschaton.

The real division emerging within our society today is not between the conservatives and liberals, the urban and the rural, the educated and uneducated, the white-collar and blue-collar worker, or the religious and the secular; rather the real division is between those who promote reconciliation and those who, committed to their own identity politics, accept (even promote!) division and animosity as a permanent, immutable state of affairs.  Those who claim to follow in the way of Jesus know where they must stand.

Interview with Anne Stewart

Click on the link below to hear my interview with Miss Anne Stewart, a remarkable woman who grew up in segregated Mississippi and fled for her life to the southside of Chicago in the 1950s. Anne has been instrumental in the civil rights movement in the Chicago area as well as deeply involved in intentional Christian community at the Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston, Illinois. I hope that you enjoy her story.

First Interview