But I miss the carved out times and places for thinking that it afforded me.
When I first graduated I tried to force it, to write just to write and hope I found some inspiration once in awhile. I'm not convinced that was a bad practice but in the now nearly six years since I graduated from SNU I've learned a super valuable lesson.
Silence can be an incredibly valuable form of communication.
It's a lesson I'm sure my elders not only knew, but knew I couldn't learn it without putting my foot in my mouth a few too many times until I finally tasted the sweaty fungus tasting broth that my words had brewed. Full disclosure, I still put my foot in my mouth pretty often, but at least I realize much quicker that I've said too much.
In college especially I found myself lost in the allure of drawing hard lines in the sand and then blow harding until I was blue in the face about why being on my side of the line was better than the other. I was wrong plenty, but even when I was right, I was just a jerk a lot of the time.
Us versus Them. That was my way of life, and unfortunately it's become the way of society. Social media makes it too easy to get our opinion out there on anything, including things we don't know much about. It's an infection that is spreading under the surface and attacking our cells at a molecular level.
Silence is sometimes the best way to speak to an issue. But I feel like right now I have something I need to say and I hope you'll bare with me. It's been awhile since I tried to articulate my thoughts this much so this might be a little disjointed or seemingly chaotic.
I grew up Nazarene in a church full of welcoming and kind people. They were very much living with a mentality of "come just as you are." I felt accepted despite not being churched until I started attending in middle school. Despite having doubts about some scripture, despite being a little rough around the edges. That church loved me, they still do. I felt like I always had a home there.
With ONE exception. I never felt welcome to be myself when it came to politics.
I was raised by two parents who more often than not aligned themselves with the Democratic party. They viewed social programs as necessary for some people to get through rough patches. Are there problems with some of those programs? Absolutely. Do some people abuse the system? Absolutely. Do some people find themselves stuck in a life of constant dependence on that assistance? Absolutely. Do some people need that help to get by?
My family did.
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We didn't have a lot of money. They worked as hard as they could. Dad went to work while mom stayed home and tried to teach us from birth through school, trying to give us a head start on school (I'm a first generation college student so it paid off). I'm the oldest of 5 children. Money gets tight when you're feeding 7 mouths and when God blessed our family with twins I can't tell you how excited we all were for not getting just one baby in the house but two at the same time! But having two babies at the same time is expensive. There's no hand me downs and twice as much formula, diapers, etc. My parents were beneficiaries of WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) a government assistance program that helps families with their grocery provisions. In school we also received a lunch card under a program that provided free and reduced lunches based on family income and size. For $2 a week I could get the lunch in the cafeteria every day. Try making a full lunch for $0.40. It was a good deal and subsidized by the rest of the tax payers in the district who weren't receiving free and reduced lunches. Mom still gave me money so I could buy pizza on pizza day or go get the plate of french fries that cost extra. When you're in high school you can be selfish and not think about things like how complicated adult life might be for your parents who are maintaining a household of 5 growing kids, kids who were always wanting to keep up with their peers when it came to clothes, toys, and activities.
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In my church there were only a few families that were made up of people who were Democrats, at least who weren't hiding that they were. "Liberal" was a nasty word that carried with it an image of someone who was viewed as being perhaps "more sinful" than a conservative for lack of a better way of putting it. The Democratic party was identified almost exclusively by a pro-abortion and pro-same-sex marriage stance. In the Church that hasn't really changed has it?
For a long time I found myself in groups where people weren't afraid to tout themselves as Republican and either assumed there were no "liberals" among them they might offend with their words or didn't care. It was very easy to want to closet that part of who I identify myself as. It gave me a reference point that helped me empathize with the homosexual community despite not having a good understanding or exposure to them. I knew it must be even harder for them to be made to feel on the fringes of that micro-society.
What that did to me was make me defensive over time. I found myself arguing on everything, wanting to push back against the opposition and keep them from encroaching over my line in the sand. I figured if I gave an inch they would never give it back. They would move the line and continue to do it every time. I argued out of fear and anger, not a quest for truth.
This past election season was brutal. From the perspective of a Democrat the prospects weren't terribly encouraging. You had Bernie Sanders who I was personally a supporter of but who didn't stand a good chance of being elected because he was a self-labeled "democratic socialist" which was worse than a "liberal" to many, including some Democrats. Then there was Hillary Clinton who has the personality of a jagged rock and despite considerable political experience has had plenty of missteps. And then there were a few other people who were basically fillers and I can't think of their names because they were never going to stand a chance of becoming a President.
On the Republican side it was also a mess. You had Ben Carson who seemed like he had self-performed a lobotomy that rendered him in a perpetual state of relaxation, Mike Huckabee who went from a seemingly genuine and likable Christian man to an insecure kid at the lunch table who was trying to say vile things for shock value to fit in with his bully classmates, and then Ted Cruz and Donald Trump who seemed dead set on exuding a personality of old school American machismo.
John Kasich, who has gotten some good things done in my former home state of Ohio because of his ability to work across the aisle would have gotten my vote over any of the Democratic candidates because I firmly believed he was a man of integrity who was more concerned about doing what was right than whatever the opposing party didn't want him to do.
.......He never stood a chance.
This is the point I want to make with this post. That we as a society are no longer about what is best for our world as a whole but what our side of the line in the sand wants. Much like a sports fan we rally behind our team and want blood. Partisanship reigns today, even in the Church.
And I'm guilty of it.
After the election I admit I struggled. My foot was firmly in my mouth. I viewed (and still view) President Trump as a threat to human decency. In a game of partisan campaigning where both parties tried to demonize the other, Donald Trump was Michael Jordan. Bernie and Hillary tried to play the game but they weren't as good at tapping into the addiction that WE as a society have of being right.
Where I made my mistake was in unfairly categorizing all Trump voters as embodiments of all of his worst attributes instead of the best attributes of conservatism. I wanted to draw my line in the sand and fight. Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, etc. None of those things should identify us as much as American.
Maybe we should all be like NBA basketball players. In the days of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, of Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, basketball players didn't like each other most of the time. It was war. You were for your team and nobody else. Today that game is much different. Opposing players are friends who give each other hugs and handshakes before and after the game. Maybe you're a member of the Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets, Boston Celtics, etc. but you're a member of the National Basketball Association first and foremost. When a player gets a new record high salary the rest of the league celebrates because it means the players are pushing the ceiling higher for future generations. Look at how much money Michael Jordan was paid as a member of the Chicago Bulls and then compare it to the salaries of today. The players battle it out against each other but every year they come together around the middle of the season and play an All-Star game.
It's a friendly exhibition where guys don't play much defense and they all just have fun showing the world what they can do. It drives a lot of people crazy and this year was no different. Both teams played no defense and the score was through the roof. I couldn't help but think that the extra attention that was being paid to how "bad" this game was this year might be in part because we're growing increasingly combative politically and in every facet of our lives.
Politics weren't always a year round obsession. I'm young but from what I understand, politics didn't consume our daily lives like they seem to these days. We didn't constantly remind ourselves of our differences and let those things divide us. We found reasons to identify with each other. We may have been on different teams during election season but we got back together after it was over and focused on being Americans and wanting what was best for America regardless of who came up with the idea.
I wish I could have that world these days.
My denomination used to be this way too. The Church of the Nazarene was formed reluctantly by a group of men and women who found themselves clinging to their previous denominations on the fringes. They came from different regions and doctrines on a variety of subjects. Unlike many of us today, they focused on what made them the same. They called those things the "essentials of the faith" and it was that list of things that they clung to, likely tightest when they found themselves tempted to want to make mountains out of mole hills when it came to the things they didn't agree on. It was a denomination founded on holiness and compromise and humility. Nobody had everything figured out, just the super important stuff.
Learning about the origins of the denomination I grew up in while at SNU, I didn't recognize it from my experiences with it. Realize I'm talking about myself here too. I'm a Nazarene. We aren't (and haven't been) very good at compromise for awhile. Well intentioned legalism creeped into the denomination before I ever joined it and over time the list of "essentials" seemingly has grown (at least in practice) while the list of "non-essentials" is far more limited than it ever was.
Today many of us in the Church are focused on drawing lines in the sand. We focus on our differences and the things we're against rather than the fact that we are unified in Christ and the things Christ was for.
Maybe it's time we set some time aside from our regular combative activities and remember we're all a part of the same community.
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