people of faith engaging creation and justice
Reprinting from McSweeney’s: http://is.gd/6HWOpB
Assimilate Or Go Home: Dispatches from the Stateless Wanderers2011 COLUMN CONTEST WINNER
DLM is a home-schooled pastor’s kid, a real life Bible-college educated evangelical in the middle of Portland, Oregon. Currently living in low-income housing with a bunch of Somali Bantu refugees, a husband, a baby, and a very cranky cat, DLM writes about her missionary dreams and cross-cultural schemes while ardently striving to put the “fun” in fundamentalism.
In the beginning, this is what I thought the cost of following Jesus would be:
I would embrace my inner frump, becoming one of those old women who are free from the tyranny of fashion, one of those women who wear the bad kind of Aztec patterns (short vest, pleated pants) not the currently hip kind. I would be so fair-trade, sweatshop free, eco-friendly, and social-justice oriented that I would convict and inspire people as I walked down the street (smelling faintly of patchouli and wearing a STOP GENOCIDE NOW T-shirt). Note: this fantasy stopped just short of me wearing granny glasses.
I would become an organic locavore, raging against the industrial food machine. I thought about eating lentils, learning how to cook kale and beets and parsnips and quinoa. How much better I would feel, eating only happy chickens and cows!
I would do without so others could have more. I thought about never having cable and never having a gym membership and never going to a restaurant that doesn’t use coupons.
I thought about actually living in solidarity with the poor, of being a radical obsessed with downward mobility. I thought: moving into low-income housing will be fun! We will become the heroes and best friends of everyone in the complex, our door will constantly be revolving with streams of children looking for a warm environment for homework help, refugees learning English while laughing and drinking tea, people popping in to borrow sugar or drop off cookies. Everyone would love us.
What I didn’t think about:
The amount of creativity it takes to make thrifted clothes look good. The horrible allure of inexpensive sunglasses and ill-fitting neon shirts. The amount of energy that is needed to shop for and cook food sustainably and seasonably. The way you begin to hate radishes with a passion.
How moving in doesn’t make you a neighbor. How living in solidarity takes so much freaking time and energy that at night you won’t be able to do anything else but lock your doors and collapse in front of the TV to watch reruns of House. How your neighbors are not goodhearted people who have been dealt a bad deck of cards (well, some are). Mostly, they’re exhausted single mothers who scream at their children and smoke at the playground, addicts and shut-ins and the mentally ill, refugees who use you up and then ask for more.
I didn’t realize the cost of human relationships. Of teaching boys to read in second grade, and then sticking around long enough to watch them pretend that they don’t know me in the elevator, laughing and joking with their friends, dressed head-to-toe in gang colors. Of watching the refugee girls I have poured my life into let their dreams float away, most never finishing high school and instead getting married at younger and younger ages, breaking my heart with each wedding. Of being friends with the sick and watching them die, witnessing relapses and abuses, standing by and suffering with people. And then taking those finite bursts of furious energy that you feel and running countless programs and classes and mobilizing volunteers and of it never being enough.
I never thought I would mourn the inability to go back, back to a time when the weight of the world wasn’t on my shoulders. The ever-present voice (I would say Holy Spirit) inside of me is only getting louder: The world is not right, the world is not right. That voices urge me to continue to read and to pray and to rush around doing, to corner people at parties and talk about famines, to pity the slacktavists (those who talk about justice but do not live it out), and to never stop ranting about the follies of an unexamined, materialistic life. I can’t catch my breath. As it turns out, the examined life is one of loud desperation.
To which, most people respond: just tone it down a bit.
From the church itself I am told to say a prayer or two, read another book, or (horror of horrors) “raise awareness.” Just stop bringing up the awful and the uncomfortable. There is a strong pull in the church to mirror the rest of culture. Gone are the dog days of hellfire and brimstone: today you are likely to drink a cup of fair trade coffee while a dude in flannel plays artful songs about justice (if you go to a church catering to people who read McSweeney’s or whatever). We want to be liked, admired, and successful. And so we build churches that cater to making very specific demographics feel supremely comfortable. Although it warrants no air time or conversation in the media, this is where the majority of us are. This is the middle ground of evangelical Christianity, the place where Jesus is sold as the key to a good life, and it feels pretty great.
So when confronted with the truth about the world (the inequality, the brutality, the injustice—the sin), what are we told to do? This is what I am hearing: surround yourself with people who want to talk about justice. Write some songs and put on a benefit for a hip cause. Write awful poetry. But give all your money away? Adopt older children from foster care? Volunteer your free time to teach English or citizenship classes or driver’s ed? Live with poor people? Stop buying stuff? Never have a savings account or a 401K or a “real” job? That would be ridiculous. Because Jesus would not want our lives to be ruined just because so many others are. Right?
But I think he would. God’s children are being raped, God’s children are starving to death, God’s children are dying of astonishingly preventable diseases, and you want me to tone it down? I am only now starting to realize that I can’t. I have looked hard at the facts, and by the grace of God I am starting to understand that I am not special. That I am one of God’s children, and I must do everything in my power to help my brothers and sisters.
My fear is that you will read this and say: good for her. That you will patronize me and put me on a different plane, or planet, or pedestal—one that you aren’t expected to live in. That you will find safety in the neat columns of words and in the soothing amounts of negative space sandwiching these thoughts. That this would all seem so unattainable and esoteric that you make a decision to never really engage in all that is not right in the world.
But if you listen hard, maybe you will hear that voice too. The one telling you that there is a reason you feel like screaming and crying when you watch the news, that lurking malaise with the American dream, that dark corner of your thoughts that is always asking: what else can I do?
I can’t promise the key to a good life, but I can tell you that Jesus wanted us to be all up in the human condition. He would have no problem telling you to sell all that you have and give it to the poor. And when you said no, you couldn’t possibly do that, he would look on you with so much sadness and so much love (for you, yes, but also for everyone else) that you might take a second and reconsider. You might start to dismantle, piece by piece, the walls you have constructed to keep the poor and the needy and the stateless wanderers so separate from you.
No joke: it is rough. Every day a chance for justice, every decision tinged with moral questions, every thought yearning to be in line with the kingdom of love. I am not the most fun girl at the party anymore. But I do sleep hard at night, dreaming of the world as God would have it, where all of his children were valued as equals.
I was just reading a fascinating article on creativity in the latest issue of The New Yorker and wanted to share some lessons learned as quickly as I could. The “quotations” are just offsets, not the article’s words:
Physical space has a marked effect on creative output. Building 20, on the MIT campus, was apparently one of the most outstanding “incubators” for new ideas ever. Because it had a confusing layout and was designed to be a temporary structure, one which housed a variety of different programs and projects, all sorts of people who wouldn’t usually interact were running into each other all the time (as well as altering the space to fit their needs).
I am retyping this post after seeing it vanish from my computer screen, so let’s see if I remember the other two lessons that I was trying to impart… . Ah yes.
Dissent creates spark(le)s. Brainstorming is not all that successful–a single individual can come up with a list of ideas much more speedily than a group of people can, and better ones too–except when participants have to defend and grapple with each others’ ideas. Apparently the very process of encountering a “bad” idea, considering the perspective of its originator, attempting to assess whether or not it really is “bad” and how, and then trying to improve or replace it, jogs the brain into forming different connections, wider leaps, more surprising shifts of perspective…and more actually good ideas.
And finally:
Proximity matters. The most successful published scientific research comes from participants who are no more than ten meters away from each other; distance of even 1 kilometer means a decreased likelihood of truly groundbreaking work.
Now what, I wonder, does any of this imply about our project for a Rule of Life?
In the first place, think it suggests that the communal aspect of most “regular” religious life in the past, which we have often considered simply a matter of necessity and (more cynically) co-surveillance, might in some way be a more important factor than we had bargained for. Or not. Maybe that’s just a bad idea I’m sneaking in there to spark your creativity.
Another, possibly dubious idea: that our rule framework should consider not only arrangements of time but also physical space… .
A very good sermon on how laws guide even as they change, recent work on a Greenblade project, and an uncluttered wall in the new digs: what do these three things add up to? The idea of framework. We need time to breathe as well as to act, for vivid stimulus and negative space. In fact there are an infinite number of things to do, and nothing stops us from being relentless about tackling that list except for the need to relent: the need to unwind and regroup.
How can we remember to breathe AND remember to act? There doesn’t seem to be a formula. It would be so easy to suggest yin and yang or the strokes of a pendulum, to do one set of things in order to relax from the other set. But this particular time of year is full of a sense of gathering and slowing down, and that’s a sign that things must happen in their own course.
No, we don’t have a quarter year to wind down and to stop. The work before us is too urgent, too left-undone and fragmentary and half-drafted. Mirroring the seasons can’t exactly be the answer. But standing still, to see what roots the sap is falling into, just might lead there.
Growers and customers share the joy of weird-looking heirloom veggies at the farmer’s market, but that’s not enough:
http://vp.mgnetwork.net/viewer.swf?u=c802b2c0f97b102eb207001ec92a4a0d&z=SLS&embed_player=1
Everyone has to “get the concept” of why it’s important to grow organic and buy local.
Having grown up near grandparents and cousins (&c.) who farmed, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to return to my ancestors’ farming ways. My first thought every spring is that the daffodils have bloomed and need picking, even though I haven’t lived near those daffodils for years. And around this time of year, my mind turns to dewberries, blackberries, cherries, figs…all long-lost friends, and it would sure be nice to reconnect with them.
Full disclosure, though, that part of what drives my reveries me here is not just an idle Golden-Age-seeking “return to roots” mentality but looking forward, as well, with an uneasiness about how dizzyingly far removed we’ve climbed from our foundations when it comes to food: we speak of “farm to fork,” but at the end of the day we pat ourselves on the back for making that distance fewer than 100 miles.
Enter the CSA! We were super-stoked to pick up the first installment of nature’s bounty at the shiny, hip town center that houses our local farmer’s market. Our anticipation was partially related to delay on the CSA farm’s part, because various issues regarding weather–you know, the seasons–had prevented the first crop from coming in by two weeks. (Just like with everything else, the farm reminded us, “girls rule” is the rule when it comes to Mother Nature.) And our anticipation was certainly rewarded: dark orange carrots, beautiful lettuces, tiny green onions (I just cooked & ate them all), and grocery-store-fine broccoli.
But what struck me most was the way that the goodness was conveyed… .
We received our CSA share in a plastic bag reusable, biodegradable, compostable bioliner (meant for us to reuse, biodegrade, or compost) contained in a box (to be returned) off of the back of a truck. Everything was washed and sorted and stackable. It was almost as if–or rather, it OBVIOUSLY WAS the case that–the farm we had chosen to sponsor wanted to make everything look as fair, as well-regulated, and as convenient as possible.
This sort of presentation is gratifying to a city dweller with too much clutter and not enough space. (In our heart of hearts we really all want to live like Kanye.) And indeed on that very same day I ran across Urban Farm Magazine, which taught readers how to grow chili peppers at home. What seems missing, so far, however–and, I suspect, will be even if we visit the source of our food–is the sense of mystery acknowledged and so quickly swept aside by our CSA’s quip about besting Mother Nature.
Children (like we were) in rural areas experience this mystery as wonder or at least a sense of closeness, when they pause to think of it at all; adults who have to put food on the table for their families no doubt experience it, on occasion, as fear. But there’s no mystery at all, I fear, in a cardboard box. You can’t unload the sublime from the back of a truck.
We all have dreams. Some are individual, some collective. For instance, L would be most happy if he could live in an old mansion filled with antiques, art, and secret passages. C would like to have and successfully maintain a vermicomposter. (Some dreams are more easily realized than others.) As a couple there are a few dreams we have had together. One dream was to have a cat; and we have been owned by the cutest, sweetest, most vicious kitten for over a year and a half now. With that aspiration achieved, we just recently made steps to reach our next goal: signing up for a CSA. This is something we have wanted to do for a while, but our incomes (or lack thereof) and summer schedules did not make it feasible in the past. Now we are eagerly awaiting mid-May when we can walk over to the farmers’ market on Saturday morning between the hours of 8 am and 12 pm to pick up our share. (We are also worried that we will be the ones arriving at 11:57 am and picking up the last lonely box and then returning home to wonder what to do with 2 lbs of chervil.)
Being plugged into the life of a farmers’ market…committing through our CSA to its wares…will likely mean that we do more at-home cooking. (We’re pretty sure that chervil won’t keep all that long.) There’s a hint of what that could mean for the rest of our life into today’s edition of the Washington Post’s “Express” paper, from an interior designer no less. In an interview with Kate Payne, author of The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking, “Express” asks the question on every young urbanite’s heart:
You encourage people to actually use their kitchens to cook. What’s wrong with using the room as a takeout menu storage center?
And here’s Payne’s response:
To be able to feed yourself with food of your own making, I think of that as empowering. You end up saving yourself money and saving yourself time, and you know what’s going on in your body. It’s this empowering feeling of making a few of the meals you consume and feeling good about them. And that eventually leads to hosting other people just by making more. Then, you can have a dinner party and have a space where people are enjoying themselves.
Seems like good guidance for a Rule of Life. If the farmers at the CSA are the equivalent of full-on monastics–growing their food, living by the rhythms of the land as well as cooking what they grow–those of us poor kids stuck in cities can do our part as well.
With any luck, we can draw from the wisdom of local food by cooking from our CSA–and then draw others to it as well through dinner parties and potlucks. (Even if we can cook 2 lbs of chervil, after all, it’ll take help to eat it.)
Maybe, in the process, we can make our tiny apartment more of a home.
One of the reasons we decided to write this blog on “making inspired choices” was to have an outlet to discuss some of the food choices we make, whether they are our decisions and whether we feel like we have a true choice.
I actually grew up vegetarian, so in a way that was not my decision–though I could choose to have anything I wanted when we ate out at restaurants, or at school, or at friends houses. This meant that when I was a child, my experience of meat extended to hamburgers, hot dogs and lunchmeat (perhaps not the best introduction to the world of animal protein). Even though I only rarely ate meat, it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I would actually choose to describe myself as a vegetarian. In a rural area, where many of my classmates’ families raised cattle, it was certainly not a popular lifestyle to maintain.
So I gradually eased into identification as a vegetarian. In college I took course in which for the final project a student reported on his interviews with people on why they had decided to be vegetarian. Surprising to me was the fact that each of the people interviewed had a conversion moment—usually an unsettling experience in which they realized where their food was coming from and how it was treated before it reached their plate. I never had one of those experiences, and have often described the way I eat as a product of my upbringing rather than for ethical reasons. Since I didn’t eat meat growing up, I never developed a taste for it, and don’t crave it they way others who may have actively given up meat might.
I will admit that I was exposed to seafood in my youth, and still do eat it occasionally. I have eaten fish more regularly since I made another food choice that wasn’t as much of a choice: in my early-to-mid twenties I began getting very bad headaches, sometimes several times a week, because I could no longer eat dairy products. Headaches can be caused a lot of things—stress, hormones, lack of sleep, foods we like to eat but our bodies have decided against—so it took a few years for me to figure out what the major issue was. Once I realized that milk products were the culprit, I decided to reduce my consumption, which didn’t seem to solve the problem. I realized that I would need to completely cut dairy products from my diet. When I did so I discovered a few things:
1) cheese is really just fat and salt
2) milk powder is in umpteenzillion processed foods, even in things you wouldn’t expect, and
3) I also had an intolerance to sesame products.
In short, I went from being a vegetarian who tried not to be picky to one who was picky about everything. I can’t go to ice cream stores (except the fancy gelato places that also have neat kinds of sorbet) or Chinese or Japanese restaurants because of the preponderance of sesame oil. It’s pretty easy for me to eat at Mexican, or Thai, or Indian, or Italian restaurants. The most difficult kind of restaurant for me to eat in, the one in which my order becomes a series of no statements, is, of course, American restaurants. We have all heard of the tyranny of choice, but almost no choice is also a difficult place to be in.
Which brings me to my last point, which is the difficulty of choices in American grocery stores. It is hard to be healthy in America. I just heard on NPR that before they are roadworthy, buses are now being tested for greater amounts of weight. The average passenger is now considered to be 175 lbs instead of 150. We all make a lot of lifestyle choices that help to determine that average weight, but the reality is that it’s hard to walk through a grocery store without putting processed food in your cart. When you have a long commute, or kids, or other responsibilities, it’s hard to find time to create a full meal from organic vegetables and whole grains that you just happen to have in your pantry. In a city that seems to be constantly gentrifying, it might be easy to get to a farmers market, but that doesn’t mean you can afford what’s being sold. Some of us might have strong wills and be able to avoid the onslaught of popular culture, with its overly large portions and extra fats, but for society to have some extra room on the bus we need to make different choices on a broader scale.
–C
We’re happy to introduce a new blog on the Greenblade site, “To Taste: Making Inspired Choices.” We decided to write a blog together because we share a life and, yes, even tastes–even as we also have different enough perspectives to make our variety of subjects interesting.
To Taste: it’s a phrase you’ve probably seen in recipes, a grudging acknowledgment that a cook’s discretion and preference can be indulged. To Taste is an invitation to mistakes but, just as much, an opening for inspiration.
To Taste: in a similar vein, the phrase can relate to inedible items. It’s another version of the phrase “to spec,” the creation of a thing in such a way that it fulfills a wide range of hopes.
To Taste: it’s also a verb, the action of trying something new and learning its goodness or badness, and whether we want to taste it again.
These are all ways in which we plan to interpret the title phrase of this blog, as we seek to make choices that honor our aspirations yet aren’t an affront to thrift. We have limited enough space, limited enough time, and limited enough opportunities to make this a pretty boring “lifestyle” blog indeed–except that we’re also creative enough to think of small, meaningful upgrades to the daily grind that can get us just a little more in touch with the rest of creation. We also like digging through the detritus of our culture–pop- and intellectual, historical and not-so-much, comparative and provincial. We hope to share some of the things that we feel make our lives tasteful and tasty: neat recipes; old cookbooks; our own experiences thinking about, preparing and eating food; and much more.
Although this blog is called “To Taste” and involves our own search for “inspired choices,” we don’t want to be arbiters of taste–for each other, or for you! But we do hope that writing this blog will give us an insight into how to make our scattered lives a little more coherent.
We’ll let you know how it goes.
