This song is hitting me in a whole new way these days. Here’s verse 2:

Here we lay alone in hospital beds
Tracing life in our heads
But all that is left
Is that this was our entrance, and now it’s our exit
As we find our way home

I got this song stuck in my head yesterday as I walked back to the chaplain’s on-call room at the hospital. I had just held hands with two brothers and prayed with them as their father’s heart slowed to a stop after he had been taken off life support. After we prayed, I watched as they kissed his head, which still had a little blood on it from the trauma he had suffered after being struck by a car, and whispered, “Bye, Dad.” Tears stung my eyes as these grown men wiped tears of their own from their cheeks.

To get back to the on-call room, I have to pass the birthing center at the hospital. This was our entrance, and now it’s our exit. More than once in my short time in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) internship, I’ve heard someone comment on the irony of a hospital, where every day people die and babies are born.

Here’s verse 3 of the song:

“You were a million years of work,”
Said God and his angels with needle and thread
They kissed your head and said
“You’re a good kid and you make us proud
So just give your best and the rest will come
And we’ll see you soon.”

I’ve always thought that was a beautiful verse. But I’m thinking of “needle and thread” a little differently today. I’ve always associated it with creation. Now I’m thinking about it in terms of healing, even of death. What I’ve found–what even families of dying patient have told me–is that healing takes many different forms. More than one spouse or parent has told me that for their loved, death was healing, because it was a release from suffering for him or her. The distance between life and death is shorter than we realize–we’re closer to heaven than we’ll ever know–and that cosmic needle and thread can unravel and mend in unexpected ways.

I still don’t really know how to think about all I’m seeing and experiencing in CPE. I’ve never lost anyone close to me; in fact, I hadn’t even seen a dead person until just a few weeks ago. It’s challenging my theology in some profound ways. But what I’m seeing–and what the song “Needle and Thread” insists–is that it’s all about love.

Last night, I sat for two hours with a man whose wife had passed away. He told me what a wonderful woman she was, how special their relationship was, and how he knew, he just knew, that she was with him and would always be with him to guide him. He was overflowing with love for his wife and wanted to share it, and even though I was a stranger, he shared it with me. When I left, he hugged me. I had done nothing but be present and listen, but I had witnessed him expressing love and grief in an intimate setting, and in that had glimpsed the essence of what makes us human. What we are made of, the needle and thread that holds us together and binds us to one another and to God, is love. And love, somehow, is stronger than death.

All the blood and all the sweat
That we invested to be loved
Follows us into our end
Where we begin to understand

That we are made of love
And all the beauty stemming from it
We are made of love
And every fracture caused by the lack of it

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

From The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems (Random House 2005).

Many people have rightly condemned Gingrich’s comments and expressed concern about the racist, classist framework they evince. One of my favorite responses so far was the “Open Letter to Newt Gingrich From the Pastors of Poor Children,” published in the Huffington Post by a group of AME pastors. The letter rightly dismisses the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality, pointing out that not everyone has boots. “Get a job” is an unhelpful response to poverty; it’s like trying to teach a man to fish (instead of giving him a fish) without realizing that there’s a fence around the pond.

Here’s a snippet from the January 16 (you know, MLK Day) GOP debate that I found particularly troubling:

JUAN WILLIAMS: Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also said poor kids lack a strong work ethic, and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?

GINGRICH: No, I don’t see that.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Gingrich simply doesn’t see that. None of us can always be fully aware of all the ways in which we are blind to how our speech, actions and even just our social position can affect others. My issue is that he isn’t simply expressing ignorance; he’s refusing to correct it when it is pointed out.

Ignorance itself is a form of sin, especially when it involves our ignorance of our own brothers and sisters in the rest of humanity, because it is evidence of the profound brokenness we all experience as people. Such brokenness cries out for healing, but when the opportunity for education and reconciliation is denied, the wounds fester. My question to Gingrich is this: is it really more important to you to be right than to try and understand the concerns of those who have raised them–not, by the way, for political reasons but because they are deeply troubled for this nation and its people?

Of course, what frightens me even more in all of this is that some members of Gingrich’s audience cheered his response to Juan Williams. What is that about? Where is love and humility in any of this?

And, before I get accused of lacking love and humility (though certainly I do!), let me close with this: if I am accusing Gingrich and others of sin, it is one that we all share and for which we are all in desperate need of forgiveness and healing. Gingrich’s sin is my sin, and my prayer is that we all might allow ourselves to be made whole together, even (and especially) if it means admitting we’re wrong.

I had never seen a dead person before. She could have been asleep except for the jarring realization that she would never wake up. Her daughters touched her and held each other as they traded places between mourner and comforter. I listened to their reminiscing and how they bounced back and forth between past and present tense verbs to describe their mother, laughing one moment, crying the next.

The patient had come in just before Christmas, and the room was colorful with pictures, flowers and a smattering of holiday decorations. A balloon exclaimed “I love you, Mom” in a corner. The patient was an artist and a silver smith, so her own sketches populated the walls and bulletin board, and both daughters wore silver necklaces their mother had crafted for them.

As we sat in the room, it slowly registered with me that there was music on. When I caught the tune, it blew me away. The muted string instruments floating into the room were playing an Easter hymn whose words I knew even without them being sung: “Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son. Endless is the victory thou o’er death has won.”

I think that’s what hope is like: a familiar tune not insisting upon itself or beating you over the head with its lyrical content, but softly enveloping a scene of sadness and grief just beyond the realm of conscious recognition with its promise of resurrection.

It would have been inappropriate for me to point out the hymn to the family at that time; although they were a religious family and said things like “She’s not suffering anymore” and “I know she’s in a better place,” the deathbed is not a place for shouting about victory over the grave. Yes, God has conquered death, and this family knew that, but they were grieving the loss of their mother. In that sacred moment, the hope of resurrection did not insist upon itself but instead gently wafted through the air, present even when unrecognized.

Then a friend posted this video, and I just smiled:

Besides the fact that I spent most of my childhood acting and dressing “like a boy,” my education, life experience and relationships over the past few years have made me automatically critical of traditional gender dichotomies. Since I live in a world where I am sometimes policed for gender-neutral language and where rejecting old male/female binaries is the norm, I sometimes forget that not everyone thinks that way. Although, when I read this article about a teacher doing early education around rejecting gender dichotomies, I was both encouraged and made nervous because I knew in many places, such teaching would provoke an outcry from parents. I know not everyone is OK with girls playing with superheroes and boys playing with princesses.

But…seriously, people? Are we as a nation still buying power tools for men and sending the women on shopping sprees? (For the record, in my house, if anyone is handling power tools it’s my younger sister.) As I watched the holiday commercials this year, I felt like I’d fallen into a wormhole and been transported back a few decades; but no. No, even as 2012 approaches, we’re still OK with corporations telling us that men want their soup beefy and women have no other passion in life than shoe shopping. And that’s just sad.

The answer: to an illegal alien.

“Christmas, Undocumented” is Henson’s re-imagining of Mary’s journey through pregnancy to Jesus’ birth. It is gripping. It comes in two parts and will take longer to read than the average blog post, but it is worth it for how it contextualizes the birth narrative in a challenging way–what Henson calls “jarringly modern and political.” Gabriel becomes a coyote named Gabby, Mary a young immigrant named Ave, the stable a detention center for illegals, and so on.

If you think about it, Jesus himself becomes in a way what some people would call an “anchor baby”–though, as you’ll see, it doesn’t help Ave’s case.

How would Jesus be born today? I invite you to read Henson’s response and share your thoughts (either here or with Henson on Facebook), remembering that on this night Mary was not a middle-class woman awaiting a pain-free birth in a sterile hospital but a poor soon-to-be refugee girl straddling a filthy feeding trough.

“Christmas, Undocumented” Part 1 (PDF) // “Christmas, Undocumented” Part 2 (PDF)

Education in America is an embarrassment. The ways in which it systematically fails children of certain socioeconomic levels and ethnicities is deplorable. Unfortunately, few people seem to care about children other than their own; as long as my child is getting what he or she needs, I don’t care that other children are suffering. One question asked was this: “What is our obligation to other people’s children?” What, indeed? Should we care what kind of education another person’s child is getting if it doesn’t directly affect that of our own? And aren’t I perpetuating the problem in asking, because in saying “our” and “we,” I’m probably referring to a specific socioeconomic class that thinks it has that power to decide?

The film gives plenty of stats that I won’t repeat here. But a recurring theme was captured in one interviewee’s comments:

“It all becomes about the adults.”

The problems in our schools aren’t about the children at all. Children don’t lobby for neighborhood schools or send themselves to private schools, gutting public ones of resources. Children aren’t involved in teacher unions and don’t create the standards that allow ineffective teachers to keep their jobs. The problems in our schools are all about the adults.

But what the adults forget is that we are responsible for our children, and not only ours, but all children. Even if you don’t fully buy that, know that someone else’s child’s low performance can actually affect your own child in the long run–check out this TED talk by Richard Wilkinson on how economic inequality harms societies. In Christianity, we have the language of a body to express this: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (1 Cor. 12:26).

The thing is, society operates like a body, the whole connected to and affected by each part, more than we realize. If one child receives and inferior education, it affects the whole nation. We need to make education less about the adults, because in the end it’s really about all of us.

con·done [kuhn-dohn], verb (used with object), -doned, -don·ing.
1.   to disregard or overlook (something illegal, objectionable, or the like).
2.   to give tacit approval to: By his silence, he seemed to condone their behavior.
3.   to pardon or forgive (an offense); excuse.

A few weeks ago, I read an article about a church in Kentucky that voted to ban interracial couples from their congregation. It saddened and angered me for obvious reasons, but what got me was when the church said it “does not condone interracial marriage.” The use of that little word rubs me the wrong way because of where it crops up in my own denomination–but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I went to the dictionary because the word “condone” has always felt so…patronizing. Now I know why. By saying, “I do not condone” whatever it may be, we basically say, “Whatever this is, it is wrong, and I could look the other way, but I won’t.” Condoning something is not making a judgment about its rightness or wrongness; it is simply assuming that it is wrong and making a statement about what I, the person who makes this assumption, will (or will not) do in response.

The word “condone” shows up twice in the United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline (2008). Once its use is appropriate; once it is hurtful.

Here is the appropriate use. It comes in the paragraph dealing with civil disobedience, which (just for the record) comes right after the declaration of the universal right to education and right before the condemnation of the death penalty. (Yeah, the UMC’s been against the death penalty for over 50 years. Score one for my denomination!)

“We do not encourage or condone any form of violent protest as a legitimate exercise of free speech or civil disobedience” (¶164.V.F).

The word “condone” is the right word to use here. The use of violent means defeats the purpose of civil disobedience and is wrong (to this pacifist and many others, both pacifist and not), and it should not be overlooked or given tacit approval.

Here is the hurtful use.

“The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching” (¶161.II.F).

Much ink has been spilled–and many tears–over this sentence. I have much to say about it, but for now I am going to focus on this pet word: “condone.” The UMC declares that it will not overlook the practice of homosexuality, which it assumes is wrong. This sentence makes no statement about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality; it takes it as a given.

Whatever you think theologically and Biblically about homosexuality, this is problematic. It appears that the alternative would be to disregard or silently give tacit approval to a practice that, again, we are assuming is wrong. Moreover (and I realize this is a stretch, but go with me), when paired with the one other occurrence of the word in the Discipline, it puts the practice of homosexuality on par with violent protest in terms of presumed wrongness. The use of the word “condone” says that even if we were to change our minds as a denomination, it would be a shift to forgiving (or just ignoring) an offense, not to genuine acceptance.

What so often gets forgotten in any debate around homosexuality is that we are not talking about an issue; we are talking about people. What the Discipline is saying is that we refuse to overlook or forgive the assumed wrongness of the lives being lived by people who are God’s children. All I’m saying right now is this: let’s find humbler terms in which to have these conversations.

In addition to that, a very dear friend of mine recently learned that something for which she had been praying very, very hard did not happen. Walking with her through that, before and after the outcome, has been difficult for me. I don’t think she would call herself a Christian, so my whole framework for how to help her understand prayer is out the window; what’s more, she jokes (but, I wonder, perhaps actually thinks) that I have a special link to God, so my prayers really matter.

This makes me VERY nervous. For one thing, prayer is a struggle for me. For another thing, prayer isn’t something you can be good at; we’re all just infants crying out for food (stole that image from my dad’s talk). I prayed (and pray) for her not because I thought my prayers would work, but because I love her.

Because the thing is that prayer doesn’t work. It isn’t supposed to “work.” In Timothy Keller’s book The Prodigal God (Dutton, 2008), he looks at the parable of the prodigal son and points out something very important about the elder son: by his obedience and faithfulness, the elder son is actually trying to control the father. He believes that his being a good son will “work” on his father and win him favor. How often are our prayers–and so many other things we do–meditated attempts to “work” on God?

When Shane was in the hospital, I didn’t know how to pray; and now that he’s better, it’s almost harder to talk about what I think of prayer. Many people have declared Shane’s recovery a miracle, and that’s exactly what it is. But what does that mean? How do we talk about that? In his program on prayer, my dad pointed out that every time someone declares, “It’s a miracle! God answers prayer!”, it is always within earshot of someone for whom it seems God did not answer prayer. Who is in earshot, and how does that change what we think about prayer?

In talking to my friend about her unanswered prayer, I had to remind her: God doesn’t often get God’s way. I have no doubt that God wanted to grant her request just as much as she wanted God to, but we live in a world where people don’t get what they deserve and God’s will is not done.

So…what is the point of prayer again?

Here’s a quote from an article Andy Crouch wrote for the book For the Beauty of the Church (Baker Books, 2010):

“What we do in our churches, when we do what we should be doing, is unuseful! It is better than useful. Does prayer work? Should prayer work? No. Prayer does not work. It does something better than work. Prayer brings us into the life of the one by whom all things were made and are being remade.”

Prayer, like worship, like beauty–like love–is unuseful. It does not work. God’s will is not done because God gives us the freedom to be in a relationship with him, a relationship not of control but of love. Prayer, ultimately, is about building that relationship, conforming our will to God’s will–and having someone to cry out to when our prayers seem to go unanswered, because the listener grieves along with us.

Here’s the thing: although I’m totally comfortable with that conclusion and could go on about it quite a bit longer, it doesn’t actually help me with my friend with the unanswered prayer. She asked me the other day, “Why do I even pray?” And honestly, I don’t have an answer for her.

If prayer is about a relationship with God, do you have to have that relationship in order to pray, or is prayer part of establishing that relationship? There’s a chicken-and-egg quandary here that makes me uncomfortable, one I don’t have to deal with in the confines of a confessional seminary. Who can (or should) pray? Do we need to love God in order to pray? Or is God’s love for us all enough that anyone can pray?

I don’t have the answers, so I’ll close the only way I know how:

Dear God, I rarely know what I’m doing when I pray. Help me to be honest about my desires while praying for conformity to your will. Give me strength to continue to love and trust you in a world where your will is not done. Thank you for being a God to whom love is more important than control. Amen.

I’ll admit; the hope I have for what part I can play in reconciliation within the church has been flagging of late. I’ve become hyper-critical of my own social position to the point that I paralyze myself as an agent of change. Even the ways in which I try to help seem to perpetuate inequality by the sheer fact that I, a resourced, education white person, am helping. I always had the upper hand, the safety net, the power, and there was nothing I could do about it.

In the midst of all this self-imposed deconstructionism, I was aching for something constructive. So I was both convicted and refreshed when I read Justo González and Catherine González’s book The Liberating Pulpit (Wipf and Stock, 1994) for my preaching class this past semester. Weaving liberation theology together with homiletics, this pair further challenged my understanding of what is entailed in the question asked by Malcolm X’s little blonde co-ed, but it also gave me hope for release.

There is a lot in this book in the way of practical tools for approaching preaching resources and whatnot, but on the more conceptual level, there were a few points in this book that really blew me away. The authors point out that the typical response of liberal theology (which is different from liberation theology) to inequality is to ask, as the little blonde co-ed did, “What can we do?” This is not necessarily bad or wrong, but the problem is that in trying to do something to fix a problem, we both maintain and even more strongly assert our control over the situation. Acknowledging the ways in which we contribute to oppression is a first step, but even self-aware oppressors are still oppressors, and can sometimes become even more so in their self-consciousness. Those of an advantageous social position may have good intentions when they rush in to “help” the disadvantaged, but the power imbalance remains and can even be exacerbated.

Ouch. That was discouraging, and exactly the kind of thing I’ve been worrying about lately. In trying to fix the problem, I perpetuate it. But here’s the thing: it turns out the oppressors are oppressed too. I haven’t seen this captured anywhere more perfectly than in Wendell Berry’s book The Hidden Wound (here’s an old blog post I did on it). We are all victims of an oppressive system. The thing is, it is very difficult for the oppressors to see their own oppression, because to do so is to relinquish the power we enjoy (or for which we guilt-trip ourselves) as oppressors. White guilt is itself a way for people like me to hang on to the illusion that we are in control, because we can only feel guilty if we believe we chose our affluence and social position. The fact of the matter is that we are all born into an inherently broken system, and as Tim Tyson once told me, white guilt just doesn’t do anybody any good. According to González and González, that guilt is not enough–we have to realize that we are in fact powerless. It is only in that realization that we can begin to be truly free.

There’s a lot more in this book, but I’ll stop at that for now. In closing, I’ll remind us all that Malcolm X had a change of heart later in life as he thought back on the little blonde co-ed. He regretted how he responded to her. No, there is nothing any of us can do as long as we maintain the illusion that some of us are free and have power; we all oppress and are oppressed in ways both voluntary and involuntary. The good news is that there is grace enough to cover both.

***ADDENDUM: Kara Slade acting as proxy for Amy Laura Hall: “Dear One, JESUS is the agent of change.” Amen.***

“Yet often such guilt leads to the conclusion that we are guilty because we voluntarily chose such affluence. We created the problem and we can therefore alter the situation. The feeling of guilt is acceptable to us as long as we can also have the sense that we, unlike the oppressed we wish to help, are free and independent members of society. We can decide to assist those who are downtrodden to help them attain the status we have. It is not so pleasant to think of ourselves as both guilty and powerless.”

“We believe that we can ‘do’ something about everything. If something does not happen, it is our fault. We can fix it. And it certainly is true that, as Christians, we must do all we can in order to ‘fix’ that which must be corrected. Yet, it is also true that most of us are less powerful and less free than we think we are.”

“To discover that we too are oppressed, that our freedom too is curtailed by structures which dominate and even oppress us, would be shattering to most of us. Yet, until we make that discovery we cannot begin to be really free.”