This is My Confession

Wendell Berry says that, especially now, to love a place is to open oneself up to immeasurable heartbreak.

Several years ago, I visited southern Mexico on a delegation committed to studying the roots of migration. I visited a tiny indigenous village in Oaxaca. The old men told me; “We have farmed this land since the time before Christ.” The young people, the few that were left, told me; “There is nothing left for us here. We want to stay, but there is no life left for us.” After thousands of years of farming, U.S. mega-agricultural policies and the effects of global trade like NAFTA had flooded the Mexican market with corn and beans, undercutting small farmers and destroying their way of life. The school had closed in the village—there were no children. And with no children, they had no future. I marked the traces of tears on the old women’s cheeks.  

One young man took us up the mountains to his favorite spot, a place that looked over the land beyond the village. It was beautiful. As I stood there, I felt the lump in my throat grow as I thought of the spot I had used to go to, back home, looking over the land I loved as much as the young man speaking now loved his. And I thought of how the little towns back in my hometown were also losing their young people and their future. I thought of how globalization and the global quest for cheap stuff and bigger profits had also destroyed those towns.

I have come back, back home with that favorite mountain view, to a wreck of an economy and often a general sense of despair. The dominant economy of this part of the world was, ever since the destruction and disappearance of Native villages, industrial. It was a boom and bust timber region, at the mercy of the timber market and the corporations who ran it. But, for a time at least, there was a hidden economy, one based on some sense of community and locality. Small farmers grew food and local craftspeople did their work.

Both economies are now gone. The timber industry crashed. The hidden economy faded away, as Wal Mart and other corporate chains put small “mom and pop” shops out of business and agricultural regulation and consolidation forced farmers to leave their fields fallow. Now, the migrants who fled NAFTA in southern Mexico pick brush or work in the few coastal canneries. Now, the descendants of our first peoples and old loggers alike camp out along the river. Now, farmers age and watch their children leave and their land returns to the forest from whence it came.

My homecoming is also a dirge, a deep sorrow for what might have been, for what has been lost. I grew up farming—canning, preserving, growing food, working in the soil, living off the land. I fumble to re-learn what I once knew. I strain to hear again the voices of the land and forest, the whispers of ancestors and of time before memory.

For now, I trudge into Wal Mart. I participate in an economy almost entirely based on the exploitation of the world’s people, including my own. I am surrounded with a wealth of natural resources, with the wealth of the forest and the streams, and I have forgotten how to live well with it, just as we all have forgotten how to live well with it. Nothing is more tragic than finding deep poverty in the middle of the abundance of the land.

This is my confession. Not only have I forgotten how to live and how to live well; I believed, for so long, the lie that this was the way things were—the way things have to be. That in order to succeed, I had to leave, to find success in the great cities and academies of the world, that everything back home was pedestrian and backwards.

This is my confession. My heart breaks with the stories of pain and loss I hear every day, stories that have touched and wrung my own life in deeply personal ways. My heart breaks when I stand with friends who are sleeping out in the rain and cannot get dry. My heart breaks to hear stories of hatred, when I watch people fighting each other for the limited resources available. My heart breaks to see the level of discouragement, the number of folks who turn to drugs to numb the pain. My heart breaks to see the land neglected and farms empty and Wal Mart a new central gathering space. My heart breaks to see us all swept up in a culture of consumerism in the midst of want, a poverty so terrifying in its implications and consequences as it makes the poor the willing participants of the forces that create poverty.   

This is my confession. To love this place is to open oneself up to heartbreak.

This is my confession. May God forgive me for the evil I have done and the evil done on my behalf.

This is my confession. May God give the grace to re-create and re-member the community of which I am a part.

These are My People

“These are my people; this is where I come from…” sings Rodney Atkins in his country twang. And it resonates deeply when I hear those words.

I have spent the better part of this last decade walking away from where I come from. I got myself educated. I lived in a few big cities. Like so many of my generation, I once thought I could leave behind my backwards town and become educated, sophisticated, and successful. All along the way, I was taught—subtly and not so subtly—to despise where I come from.

But I have never been able to escape the ghosts of my past. In my mind, I have never escaped from the girl who once rode at a full gallop across the field, my hair streaming in the wind. I still pride myself on being able to shoot straight and I still turn up the country music while driving down back roads. And, when I walked the streets of Boston one night and heard Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” blaring from some upscale bar, I danced. Right there in the middle of the street.

And now I’m back home. A lot of my people wear jeans and boots and they drive old trucks. They have gun racks and I would venture to guess most of them have a weapon on them somewhere. They are plain speaking and often hard living and they will fight you if you disrespect them. They love the land and they hate it too, a restless and discontented people who are tired and frustrated by a world that doesn't seem willing to give them a break. They love their neighbors—most of them, anyway, and those they don’t like they usually put up with. They are traditionalists and are irritated by political correctness, irritated by city slicker language, irritated most of all with an elitism that says they are of little worth or value. My people will stand up for their town with an almost unbelievable arrogance, but on closer look, you will find that this masks a thinly veiled sense of inferiority, a deep knowledge that late capitalism has left them far behind, and an even more profound sense of failure and hopelessness.

And l look around me and say; “These are my people.” For better or for worse, in spite of all the “edumication”, they are still my people and I am still theirs. For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, with our deepest failures and our best gifts, I love my people. I want them to know that they have worth and value in this world. I want to sit with the despondent man I meet on the street and the woman I sit down with in some crumbling apartment and I want them to know that God came to us in a tiny two bit town in the middle of nowhere and loved us.

And just as I embark on this crusade, they turn to me and they embrace me and I realize that my people offer me the greatest gift of all—the gift of belonging.

These are indeed my people and our futures are bound together—not because I have so much to offer, but because they have welcomed me home.  

 

For Love of One's People

 

There is so much that can be said on this day and I feel that no words of mine could possibly add much to the conversations swirling around Martin Luther King, Jr. As I now live far enough from major cities that I will not be able to join in the many marches ostensibly celebrating his message, I have time to reflect.

And one thing that has become clearer to me over the years, in my work and in activist circles, is that one of the core strengths of King’s work was that it was in great measure rooted and grounded in community and relationship. What I mean by this is that King was the powerful spokesperson that he was and touched to cord that he did because he was fighting and preaching and eventually dying for his people. Civil rights for Black Americans was not a cause or a crusade rooted in abstract ideals, but a living, breathing need coming out of the Black community. When white liberals and white clergy joined in solidarity, they were not core to the movement, but simply standing up with a living, breathing community fighting for their very survival.

My experience in activist circles in my generation has often been deeply disappointing. White liberal activism and liberal lobbies, whether fighting for “immigration reform” or “poverty alleviation” or “the environment,” are largely abstract movements spearheaded by people inspired by an idea, not by a community. They rarely have any relationship to the people they claim to stand with and, often, their pragmatic goals are at odds with the community itself (as in the case of immigration reform, with well-funded lobbies attempting to pass legislation that immigrant communities say is more hurtful than helpful).

We have come to view “activism” or “social justice” as a cause for which we can sign hundreds of random internet petitions. The danger with this is that such work is ungrounded. We fight for abstracts and causes we know little to nothing about. We get angry, not on behalf of those we love, but on behalf of a cause. We rail against a system or take out our angst on our designated enemies, without any sense of responsibility or community.

Martin Luther King has been well known for his words about love. What we have talked about less is that love can only be love if grounded in relationship and proximity (community). One can only truly love people one knows. Therefore, a struggle for justice grounded in love must be a struggle grounded in community.

King ultimately died, not only for an abstract cause of justice or freedom, but more specifically, on behalf of his people and community. That is what gave his life, and his death, such overwhelming power.   

A New Year's Practice....

I do not place too much faith in New Year's Resolutions, partly because I do not place a lot of faith in my ability to follow through with them. But, I still dutifully spend time at the end of one year and the beginning of a new year to look back and reflect. This year, I am so grateful to leave the last behind that I am not dwelling much on the looking back. Instead, most of my resolutions have to do with a commitment to become more fully myself, to enjoy more fully the things and people that I love, and to revel in being back home and back close to the land I love. Unlike previous years, I did not write a list of changes to make or a list of goals for ministry. Those things will come. Instead, I decided that I would find time to get on a fishing boat, that I would read with the kids, that I would get out hunting and target practicing with my lovely new traditional recurve bow. I resolved that I would indulge my own deepest loves and deepest spirituality this year.

One of my resolutions is more strictly religious, though. And that is to read the Bible through this year. As you all know, I grew up Baptist and one of the blessings that came with that was a deep love and knowledge of the Bible. Some of my earliest memories are of me falling in love with the Bible. I had it read through, and most of it many times, but the time I was 12. In my teens, I studied Hebrew and Greek so I could (attempt to) read it in its original. As much as I have wrestled with it and raged at it in the years since, I have never fallen out of love with it. I can still recite my favorite chapters and its language still permeates my own. But it has been a long time since I have read it through, just for myself and not for a seminary class or a sermon, and simply sat with it, verse by verse.

So, this year, I am reading it through again. And, as I do so, I will post my thoughts here. My thoughts on Abraham and Sarah and the Exodus, on the ancient law and on the prophets, on the stories of Jesus and the exhortations of Paul, on the visions of apocalypse. I will wrestle anew with the Bible--with its questions and its paradox, with its stories of love and of sin, with its joy and its terror.

It is truly said that the Bible is central to the faith of working class Americans--even those who are not religious. Somehow, the Bible haunts me, not only as an ancient text or a spiritual guide, but as read through the experiences and hopes and failures of my people, of my family, of myself. The Bible haunts me with my own collective history. As I read through the Bible this year, I want to remember and reflect on this haunting.