[Dialogue] 7/04/19, Progressing Spirit: Christena Cleveland: Growing Up in a White Male God’s World; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Jul 4 06:13:42 PDT 2019
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv9916234393 #yiv9916234393templateBody .yiv9916234393mcnTextContent, #yiv9916234393 #yiv9916234393templateBody .yiv9916234393mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv9916234393 #yiv9916234393templateFooter .yiv9916234393mcnTextContent, #yiv9916234393 #yiv9916234393templateFooter .yiv9916234393mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } I began searching for other images of the Divine.
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Growing Up in a White Male God's World
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| Guest Author Christena Cleveland, Ph.D.
July 4, 2019
One of the first things the Church taught me is that my blackness is abhorrent. I had just finished kindergarten and my resourceful mother had signed us up for every Vacation Bible School (VBS) in a twenty-mile radius. VBS was a cost-effective alternative to daycare, so each week she dropped me and my siblings at yet another church where our black bodies were engulfed by a sea of whiteness. A precocious child, I didn’t love the soulless VBS songs -- and though it wasn’t until college that I would encounter the term theodicy, I was already beginning to question how a loving God could possibly commit global genocide by flood. But I endured VBS because my mom told me to go and I prided myself on being an obedient child.
One time, as soon as our mom dropped us off at that week’s VBS, my brother John-John and I spotted a towering tetherball set. At the first recess break, John-John and I sprinted to the tetherball and got lost in a competitive game. We must have missed our teacher’s call to return to the classroom, because the next thing we heard was, “Get in here, you niggers!”
We both froze. The tetherball whizzed and spiraled around the pole.
As a five-year-old, I hadn’t yet acquired this new vocab word, but I instinctively understood that it was negative, and that it referred to me. I knew that my brother and I looked different from our classmates, and it didn’t take long for me to deduce that nigger was about my blackness and that it was bad. This rudimentary knowledge was enough to make me duck my head in shame as I ran toward the classroom.
I understand that not all white Christians are as explicitly racist as my VBS teacher. Many are implicitly racist. Some are anti-racist revolutionaries. But what shaped my childhood reality was the absence of messages from the Church that refuted my teacher’s proclamation that my blackness is abhorrent.
In fact, many of the messages I received implicitly supported her proclamation. For example, I often encountered illustrations of God as a white man that associated God’s goodness with His whiteness and maleness. As a black girl, I never saw myself in God. Consequently, it was easy for me to internalize the shame my teacher heaped on me. Additionally, much like the powerful white men whose social location was distant from mine, God felt distant from me. I’m not the only black kid to question my identity in light of the prevalence of white male god.
The late Black tennis star Arthur Ashe shared about his childhood experience with white male god: “Every Sunday, Arthur Jr. had to go to church, either First Presbyterian or Westwood Baptist, where his parents had met, and where he would look up at a picture of Christ with blond hair and blue eyes and wonder if God was on his side.”[1]
We don’t just encounter white male god at church. He is everywhere. For example, “In God We Trust” is printed on money next to a picture of a powerful white man. Each time we look at a dollar bill, we are implicitly reminded that God is a powerful white man. In my early adulthood, as I discovered how ubiquitous white male god is, and how much its racial-gender identity determines who is sacred and who is profane, I grew to hate white Christ. I hated it not only for its historical inaccuracy, but also for its exclusivity. I hated white Christ because its existence was a powerful social force that caused little black kids like me and Arthur Jr. to wonder whether God shared our black identities, whether God was near our black bodies, and whether God was on our side.
Ideas shape everything. In fact, social psychologists believe that ideas are the scaffolding of a culture; ideas impede or propel all that is possible within a culture. White male god rules Western culture. The more a person approximates white male god’s whiteness, the more desirable and holy they are perceived to be. Indeed, in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, darkness and blackness are often equated with ugliness and filth.
I hated white Christ and I was committed to dismantling its supremacy…by any means necessary. So, in 2016 when Christianity Today (CT) magazine invited me to become a monthly columnist, I saw it as an opportunity to talk to a pretty conservative Christian crowd about how Christ is not white. That year I wrote a non-shocking essay about the historical inaccuracy of white Jesus that shocked the CT readers. In response to that particular column I received about five times as much hate mail as normal and four death threats. The vitriolic response simply proved my point: that many American Christians are violently attached to the idea of a white god and are threatened by any suggestion that God is not white.
The overwhelming amount of hate mail and death threats simply affirmed that white Christ is a disease that infects people with anti-blackness. Consequently, I wasn’t at all surprised when, around the same time, America failed to resist Trump’s xenophobic and racist presidential campaign. Between white America’s general lack of support for the Black Lives Matter movement and its attachment to white god, I knew that a blatant racist could easily be elected in this country.
Then Trump was caught boasting about sexually assaulting white women.
I remember thinking, “I know from experience that white Americans typically lallygag when black and brown people are attacked and killed. But surely, they’ll rally to protect their own white women.”
But the white silence in response to white women being attacked helped me grasp that god’s whiteness isn’t the only problem. Up until this point, I had singularly focused on the problem of God’s whiteness when other problems remained, namely God’s maleness. My singular focus is easily explained. As a black woman whose existence is defined by intersectionality, I must navigate a society that is often unwilling to accommodate my blackness or my femaleness, much less both at the same time! So, I’ve often had to choose. In this case, I chose my blackness, focusing on the problem of white Christ.
But once I turned my attention to the problem of God’s maleness, I realized that I didn’t just hate white Christ, I also hated male Christ. A god who is exclusively white and male, or even predominantly white and male, is never going to be safe for people of color and/or women. Indeed, white male god is intersectional; we must be liberated from both its whiteness and maleness.
The idea of a white male god has ruled American culture for so long that it’s not at all surprising that the Judeo-Christian scriptures depict women as foolish and licentious, that mass incarceration disproportionately affects black and brown people, that a gender pay gap persists in the world’s most prosperous economy, that black and brown people are being shot incessantly by a largely white police force, and that men who have been accused of sexual assault sit on our Supreme Court. When the ruling idea is that the Divine is proximal to whiteness and maleness, and distant from blackness and femaleness, it follows that the culture’s institutions and humans will support anti-blackness and misogyny.
As both black and female in the aftermath of Trump’s election, I consciously found myself caught in the crossfire of anti-blackness and misogyny. I also realized that due to the limitations of my Protestant background, I didn’t possess a theological imagination that ventured beyond white male god. Consequently, I began searching for other images of the Divine. I didn’t have to search far. Just beyond Protestantism, from the depths of Catholicism rose the Black Madonna, a black female image of the Divine who is claimed by Catholicism but definitely not owned by it.
Within the span of a few months in 2017, I read every book I could find on Her, lingering on the images of Her. But I knew in order to truly heal from the wounds of growing up in white male god’s world, I needed to encounter Her face to face. So, in the fall of 2018, I spent five weeks in central France, walking over 400 miles to visit 18 ancient Black Madonna statues in remote villages. I’m not what anyone would call an “outdoorsy” person, but as I’ve reflected on the ways that white male god has wreaked havoc on me, I’ve become more conscious of the ways in which slavery, domestic service, devalued labor and environmental racism have antagonized black women’s sacred relationship to the earth. Though I was scared to walk so many miles, alone, and much of it across winter mountain ranges, I chose to take on the challenge of a walking pilgrimage. I wanted to experience the liberation of intentionally connecting with the earth, with my body, with the air, with the people who lived in the Black Madonna villages – and most of all with an image of the Divine who looks like me, experiences the world like me, and is beloved and holy like me.
~ Christena Cleveland, Ph.D.
Read online here
About the Author
Christena Cleveland Ph.D. is a social psychologist, public theologian, author, and activist. She is the founder and director of the recently-launched Center for Justice + Renewal, a non-profit dedicated to helping justice advocates sharpen their understanding of the social realities that maintain injustice while also stimulating the soul’s enormous capacity to resist and transform those realities. Committed to leading both in scholarly settings and in the public square, Christena writes regularly, speaks widely, and consults with organizations.
Dr. Cleveland holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California Santa Barbara as well as an honorary doctorate from the Virginia Theological Seminary. She integrates psychology, theology, and art to stimulate our spiritual imaginations. An award-winning researcher and author, Christena has held faculty positions at several institutions of higher education — most recently at Duke University’s Divinity School, where she led a research team investigating self-compassion as a buffer to racial stress. She is currently working on her third book which examines the relationship among race, gender, and cultural perceptions of the Divine. Dr. Cleveland is based in North Carolina where she lives with her spouse, Jim.
[1] Kenny Moore, “Sportsman of the Year: The Eternal Example,” in Sports Illustrated (December 21, 1992), 21. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Nelda
If/when ego is attuned or at Oneness there is no judgement or comparison. When ego gets disconnected from Source perception shifts… then that which I like I call ‘good’ and that which I do NOT like I call ‘bad’.
As the spiritual path unfolds before me if I have finally learned each experience has within it an opportunity to be drawn closer to the Source, to develop reliance and trust in that Source. My life has presented some intense faith provoking experiences. When I meet them with the anticipation of eventual blessing to be revealed, it is NOT necessary to (even though I do at times) become despondent and hopeless.
A: By Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Dear Nelda,
You pack a lot into your reflections. In response, I’ll offer some distinctions you might find helpful.
I would invite you to consider distinguishing the ego and the soul. By soul I mean our sense of self that is Being manifesting uniquely as you in each arising moment. You speak of the Source, and Being is the Boundless Source. You can think of the ego as your soul constricted by defenses, by armoring, by ignorance, by instincts. The ego imitates the soul, seeking the Source but unable to experience the connection, you might say, because of the boundaries it imposes to try to survive without being transformed.
You also speak of “perception,” which is helpful and accurate. Since the soul is Being being you, she knows her Source. Yet it is also true that the soul needs to learn how to trust what she perceives and what she knows. For the ego, the spiritual world is often reduced to the small, moral, superegoic field bounded by “good” and “bad” or “right” and “wrong.” For the spiritual journey of the soul, the focus is the inner journey home to the truth of who she has always been but has forgotten. In a sense, the ego’s unrelenting concerns (anxiety) dulls the perception of the soul and lulls her to sleep about what truly matters: union with the Source.
An essential quality within the soul is that of basic trust in the beauty and goodness of the Source. The ego cannot relax into trust because of the defenses, and so despondency and hopelessness arise. But the gift within the despondency and hopelessness is our realization that we can do nothing to acquire connection with the Source, or to gain value, or to become lovable. What we learn to do is nothing (wu wei, in Taoism), rest and relax in the arms of Being, because the Source is already the essence of our soul. This realization about the nature of reality moves the soul to engage in those spiritual practices (e.g., meditation, curious inquiry, service) that actually deepen her union with the Source without becoming lost in distracting egoic concerns about salvation or superegoic preoccupation with “good” and “bad.”
~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
Read and share online here
About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including “I Have Called You Friends“, “Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms“, and “My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You” and “Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland“. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Fourth Fundamental:
Miracles and the Resurrection, Part V
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
October 2007
Something clearly happened to the band of Jesus’ disciples at some point following his crucifixion that was profound, life changing and deeply real. We have no written records between 30 C.E. and 50 C.E. from any source that purports to describe what that experience was. However, we can chart some dramatic changes that occurred in that time span that can only be attributed to whatever that experience was. Let me state them quickly.
According to Mark, the first gospel, when Jesus was arrested, all of the disciples forsook him and fled. I read this as a literal memory since by the time Mark wrote, the Twelve were heroes, yet the memory of their abandonment was still clear. Jesus is even made to predict this abandonment and to refer to how it fulfilled the Jewish Scriptures, citing a verse from Zechariah to give that claim particular emphasis. I do not think people go to this length to justify or excuse the disciples’ behavior if that behavior had not happened. So I read this abandonment as literal history and believe that the facts suggest that Jesus died alone and that his disciples engaged in an act of unbecoming cowardice. Yet something happened to these fleeing disciples that changed them dramatically. When it happened, we do not know. The time frame of three days is clearly an interpretive and liturgical symbol to allow for the later celebration on the first day of the week which would be the third day from the crucifixion. Where it happened we do not know since in the gospels themselves there are two competing traditions. Mark, Matthew and the appendix to John argue for a Galilean setting. Luke and the regular conclusion of John argue for a Jerusalem setting. Most scholars regard the Galilean tradition as the more original, the earlier tradition, and the Jerusalem tradition as the more developed, later one. This conflict is, however, present in the gospels themselves.
How did whatever the Easter experience was actually happen? We do not know that either, but by reviewing the gospel material, we can pick up hints in a variety of places. The experience of the living Jesus that later came to be called resurrection seemed to have a liturgical context. Luke has the travelers on the road to Emmaus say, “He was made known to us in the breaking of the bread.” That phrase was in obvious liturgical use when the gospels were written. John’s appendix (Chapter 21) also suggests a common meal through which Jesus made himself known. The Book of Revelation uses the word “sup” or “dine” when describing what it means to commune with the raised Christ. The narrations of the Last Supper in Mark, Matthew and Luke carry resurrection connotations of the eschatological emphasis on the new meal that will be eaten in the Kingdom of God. John’s gospel, which has no last supper, refers to the cross as the place where the bread of life is taken, blessed, broken and given, but he turns the story of the feeding of the multitude with a few loaves and fishes into a great eucharistic feast and identifies eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus with the resurrected life that will be eternal.
While we can only speculate about the when, where and how questions, we can be much more specific when charting the effects. Something brought the fearful and fleeing band of disciples back together. What was it? Something empowered them with such courage that they never again wavered in regard to their vision. Indeed they were quite willing to die for it. What has the power to change cowards into heroes, to redirect the lives of a group so dramatically? Whatever Easter was it had to be big enough to do that.
The second effect that is obvious is that whatever the Easter experience was it changed the disciples’ understanding of God and how Jesus was related to that understanding. When we turn to the witness of Paul, who wrote between 50-64, he says in his epistle to the Romans that “God designated Jesus to be the Son of God” by the power of the “Spirit of holiness” and this designation was made operative in that God raised him from the dead. Long before any gospel writer had turned the Easter experience into a physical, resuscitated body, Paul had interpreted it as God raising Jesus into whatever God is and whatever God means. This transformation is then written back into the life of Jesus when, in the synoptics, Peter is made to call him “the Christ, the Son of the living God,” though, as it was later indicated, it would not be until the resurrection that Peter would understand his own words. When John has Jesus identify himself as being one with God and when Thomas is made to refer to him as “My Lord and my God,” the revolution was complete. It is quite clear that what Easter did to these Jewish disciples was to force a redefinition of God onto them so that forever after they could not see God without seeing Jesus as part of that definition nor could they see Jesus any longer as other than as deeply at one with God. It would be some four hundred years before the Christian Church would define this transformation in the doctrinal language of the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity, but the experience appears to have been connected to whatever it was that originally constituted Easter. People do not redefine God except when driven to do so by an experience that is undeniable. Whatever Easter was, it has to be big enough to account for this dramatic change.
The final evidence of change is a little more vague and a little more stretched out in time, but it is powerful nonetheless. Whatever that life-changing, post crucifixion experience was, it came to be connected in practice with the first day of the week. My own study of the resurrection has led me to conclude that the first day of the week was never the day of the Easter experience but was rather the liturgical day set aside to celebrate the Easter experience. My best guess is that somewhere between six months and a year actually separated the crucifixion from what came to be called the resurrection, but what I call the Easter experience to keep it more vague and less literally defined. I see evidence for this in all of the gospels, especially in John (Chapter 21), but time does not permit me to spell that out here. There is no doubt, however, that very early the disciples of Jesus observed the Sabbath in the synagogue and then gathered for “the breaking of the bread” on the first day of the week. By the time Paul wrote to the Romans, the first day of the week was so deeply established that Paul could refer to it simply as “the Lord’s Day” without any further explanation. Within a single generation, “the Lord’s Day” rivaled the Sabbath in importance even among the Jewish disciples of Jesus. This was long before Christianity became a predominantly Gentile movement. When it did move from its Jewish womb into the Greek world of the Mediterranean region, it was the Jewish Sabbath that would ultimately be dropped by the increasingly non-Jewish Christians and the first day of the week became the exclusive Christian holy day.
The change that created the first day of the week as a new holy day was, however, connected to whatever the transforming Easter experience was. Something clearly happened. Change in behavior, change in theology, change in liturgical practice all occurred and all cry out for explanation. The Easter experience lies under all of the explanations.
The last thing I want to note in this column is that the various explanations of the Easter experience found in the four canonical gospels, which were written 40-70 years after the transformation they purport to describe, are completely contradictory in almost every detail. For those who want to literalize the Bible, the startling discovery is that in the Easter experience, on which the Christian movement so clearly stands, there is total disagreement on details. Who went to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week? Paul does not seem know that tradition at all, while none of the gospels agrees on who these women were. Three went says Mark; two went says Matthew; an undisclosed number went says Luke; only one went says John. The only thing they all agree on is that Magdalene was central in that drama. Did the women see the risen Christ at the tomb on that first Easter? No, says Mark; yes, says Matthew; no, says Luke; yes, says John but only on the second look. Who was the first witness to “see” the risen Lord? It was Cephas, says Paul. Mark never records anyone seeing. It was the woman in the garden says Matthew. It was Cleopas and his friend on the road to Emmaus says Luke. It was Magdalene says John. Where were the disciples when the Easter experience, whatever it was, broke upon their consciousness? Paul doesn’t say. Mark says it will be in Galilee. Matthew says it was in Galilee on top of a mountain. Luke says it was never in Galilee but occurred only in Jerusalem and its immediate environs. John says it was originally in Jerusalem, but then he suggests much later it also occurred in Galilee.
So it is that we have an event that so clearly brought about substantial changes, making its reality hard to dispute, but when people sought to explain what actually happened, they disagreed on almost every detail. This points, I believe, to the probability that the experience itself defied all human limits and forced those who were impacted by it to explain in human language this inexplicable action that was of God, but its effects were expressed inside human life. That is what the Easter experience was and is. That is also why those, who want to literalize its physicality and make the explanation of 40-70 years after the event a requirement for being a Christian, misunderstood so totally both the faith they seek to follow and the gospels they read so loosely.
Neither the miracles of Jesus nor the Resurrection of Jesus can be understood as literal, supernatural events. They are far more, not less, than that. The crucial fourth fundamental, I think we can state with authority, does not defend Christian truth, but actually distorts Christianity badly.
~ John Shelby Spong
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Announcements
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Wild Goose Festival
July 11 - 14th in Hot Springs, NC
A 4-day Spirit, Justice, Music and Arts Festival
But it’s so much more than that. Author Brian McLaren sums it up this way: “At Wild Goose, people flock together to celebrate a way of life rooted in faith, justice, creativity, and beauty. It’s like a family reunion where you meet relatives you never knew you had. It’s a wild and wonderful convergence of stimulating conversations, campfires, music, kids, art, lawn chairs, prayer, fun, dance, frisbees, tents, food, sunshine, rain, laughter, and fresh air. There’s nothing like it, and I look forward to it as one of the best weeks of my year.”
READ ON ... |
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