Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

Christianity

How purity culture feeds rape culture (sex and shame part five)

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Fifth in a series, explained here.

A common theme among people I’ve talked with is the understanding that parents or teachers meant to protect them for safe and fulfilling intimacy, though the lessons unwittingly barred them from it in one way or another. I’m grateful to all our authors for contributing to a conversation that doesn’t seek to condemn or blame, but to heal and to empower.

TW: brief description of assault

My parents were raised conservative Baptists.  From the time I was a small child, my parents made sure I knew that they had only ever had sex with each other.  My cousin got married when I was seven, and though I personally saw no reason for the outrage, my mom assured me that their marriage did not erase the fact they were living together beforehand.  When I asked why it mattered, she said you could never be too sure that the person you were marrying wasn’t going to change their mind, and it was best to be certain before you got too close.

When I was thirteen or fourteen my dad told me that his high school girlfriend had wanted to have sex with him but he’d been strong enough to deny her, and that nice girls didn’t tempt people they cared about.  Shortly thereafter Mom gave me the “boys only want one thing” discussion, where it became my responsibility to circumscribe my behaviors lest I unwittingly cause the downfall of some weak boy.  They were my parents.  I believed them.  I wanted to do what they told me was right.  So I became very careful about how and if I touched people, just in case I touched them in the wrong ways or got too close.  I still struggle with this.

After high school (during which time I didn’t date) I went to a small college just far enough away that my parents weren’t involved in my day-to-day decisions.  I made friends who drank and went to fraternity parties and I felt young for the first time.  The parties were fun, and on those evenings, for a short while, I didn’t have to be the person who carried the entire weight of the world on her shoulders.

One evening my sophomore year I was standing in an alley between two of the fraternity houses when a group of young men came up to me.  I was wearing something moderately low cut and was a little drunk.  They liked the way I looked and wanted to kiss me.  I clearly told them no.  It didn’t matter.  They kissed me and touched me for a while, and I was so afraid.  In my mind it was confirmation that everything my parents said was true.  While I know it could have been much worse, I remember feeling like I deserved what I got because for one evening I had felt pretty. I told some friends about it the next day.  They laughed.  I felt so foolish.  I waited a decade to mention it to anyone else.

I was 30 years old before I allowed someone else to touch me, and before I allowed myself to touch him.  I was 30 years old before someone I wanted kissed me.  I was 30 years old before I found someone who made me feel safe, someone who saw me and wanted nothing from me, other than to make me feel good.  It was an incredible gift while it lasted.

Now, as a single person trying to figure out the world of online dating, I often feel as if it’s too late—that there was some kind of learning curve that I missed out on.  While I know that isn’t strictly true, it’s something I confront every single time I go out with someone new.  Will he understand?  Will he interpret my inability to touch as disinterest?  How do I be me while still giving off the appropriate signals?  Do I know someone who will let me practice touching them?  Oh god, how would I explain the need to practice?  And I still feel like damaged goods.  Every. Single. Time.

I know my parents did the best they knew for me, and in many ways my upbringing was wonderful.  I’m a functional member of society and I’ve had lots of great opportunities.  But I wish they hadn’t pushed (what I now know is) their body stuff off onto me.  I wish they’d have let me be me, and, more importantly, I wish they’d have used something more than fear and shame to teach me about sexuality and intimacy.

Sexual violence is pervasive in American life (and throughout the world): half of women and at least one in five men in the U.S. will be victims at some point in their lives. Sadly, sexual violence is also becoming a theme of this series. If you’ve experienced sexual violence, know that you are not alone and that you deserve respect, autonomy, and safety. The people at the National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673) can direct you to those who can help you on your journey.

Today’s questions, in light of this crisis:

How does purity culture diverge from rape culture?
How does it intersect?

What does an emphasis on boundaries communicate about the way the world works?

What qualities (joy, courage, anger, empowerment) or experiences have helped you replace fear or shame in your life?

part one

part two

part three

part four

it was your forefathers who killed them

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It is Friday afternoon when it flashes across as I thoughtlessly check my Twitter feed: Black Lives Matter. Panic seizes me. What has happened this time? It is Philando Castile, his shooter has been acquitted, as if it was never Jeronimo Yanez who was on trial for firing seven times into an unarmed man’s chest, into a car where a baby sat. It was always Castile on trial, the judicial system only a conference in which everyone agreed in the end: it took 49 stops in 13 years, but we finally got him for driving while black.

I am unable to believe it. It was not even a murder charge. I am angry that I was so naive, that I believed police officers should not be allowed to shoot any person seven times. It is Friday afternoon. I go quiet and numb. It is a privilege to go numb, and I do it anyway.

It is Saturday morning, and it is the anniversary of the shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church. Maybe I should have gone to the Unity Walk today, but excuses and misgivings proliferated. Charleston seems to treat the shooting as a family tragedy, not as a public one. Not as a terrorist attack. This is hard for me, this politeness, this murmuring and the talk of hope; and the pretense that Dylann Roof was such a deranged outlier that white people can sufficiently distance themselves from him by expressing sorrow for the Emanuel Nine. But it’s not true. Fear of Black people put up walls around whites’ homes in 18th-century Charleston. Fear of Black people sent Roof into that church. Fear of Black people sent seven bullets into Philando Castile’s car. When white people let this verdict go by without acknowledging all this, we are allowing the system to call black people Others, subcitizens who do not actually bear rights to arms or to due process or to life. When white people pray for healing without working for justice, we are following the footsteps of the Pharisees. You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of wickedness. You give God a tenth, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them.

I was not here for the attack and so I do not go to the march, do not want to seem a meddler, and tell myself uncertainly it was good not to take myself so seriously. I do not get to be a fixer here, I tell myself for the thousandth time. I do not get to put the Walk on a checklist that proves I am trying hard enough. I pray, and pray, and pray. I pray I am becoming a good friend to my Black neighbors. I pray I will show up for justice, and not just for sorrow. That is all I know I can do. There is very much I do not know.

It is Saturday afternoon, and Bill Cosby receives a mistrial. I am watching who is upset about which trial. Few have said anything about either. Maybe they are also numb. Maybe they are exercising their privilege to ignore the news, like they exercise the privilege to drive around without fear, to move their arms in front of police officers. The privilege to broadcast their sexuality or visit people’s houses without the implication that they cede all rights to their bodies.

Social media on a Saturday is not the place to evaluate who cares about what. I know that. But it feels, everywhere, closing in on me lately, like justice is being mocked. Like might makes right is winning in politics and in the courts and in churches and the local school. And I don’t know who else feels that way, except a few who say so, on their pages or on the phone. They make me feel that I am not crazy.

It is Saturday evening. I am not numb anymore. I am searing; I am sick. Why does the man standing with a gun get the benefit of the doubt while the seated, unarmed one is scrutinized? Why does the comfort of some take precedence over the very lives of others? Why do we refuse to see these questions as connected?

Am I crazy? The people who say they are sick of hearing about “justice”—do they know the Gospel better than I, education-addled, do?

I am overwhelmed; I offer my crushing feelings and my swirling thoughts, my desire to act, to the Author of justice. They look small and silly. But others have made this same absurd gift.

Arise, Lord! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless.
Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself,
‘He won’t call me to account’?
But you, O God, do see trouble and grief;
You consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you;
You are the helper of the fatherless.
Break the arm of the wicked and evil man;
Call him to account for his wickedness that would not be found out.

The Lord is King for ever and ever;
The nations will perish from his land.
You hear, O Lord, the desire of the afflicted;
You encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
Defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
In order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more.

I light a candle and I begin by speaking up in this raw voice, with more faith than I feel: we are not crazy. We are not alone. We are looking for each other. Sunday is coming.

To the earnest ones

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You are allowed to be deep. You are allowed to care too much what people say to you and you are allowed to need a rest from absorbing the pain of people around you, pain they think is hidden. You do not have to be cavalier about things and you do not have to hide the things you care about most. You can be earnest in a sarcastic world; please, be earnest in a sarcastic world. The world needs overserious people and even, sometimes, wet blankets. There is no amount that you Should care, feel, or love. You do not have to wrestle yourself into nonchalance. No, you are not mistaken; there is an undercurrent of urgent beauty and great pain in everything, in everyone. You do not have to laugh often for your laughter to change the world.

You are allowed to be shallow. There is no one to tell you how many minutes per day must be spent in deep thought, and no one to tell you when you have gotten to the bottom of things. You are welcome to delight in sports, lipstick, cat memes, and cupcakes without guilt and without complication; you can sing songs without diagnosing your motives and enjoy movies without analyzing society. It is no one’s responsibility to know and understand everything. It is no one’s responsibility to tell you how much fun to have, and if anyone dismisses you for being joyful, childlike, absorbed with some little thing, tell them that the thing is a metaphor. Whether or not it is a metaphor, this thought will occupy them for sometime. Maybe they will come to see that we all deserve to be innocent at least some of the time. Maybe they will come to see that there is a particular grace in delighting in the world as it is.

You are allowed to be a stubborn overthinker and intransigently irreverent, all at the same time, in whatever proportions occur to you. There cannot be too much levity, nor can there be too much solemnity for this world. You do not have to be correct and you do not even have to be Healthy. What if we were all Healthy all of the time? That is the worn-out stuff of dystopian fiction. Do not let people use Healthy to enforce their personal orthodoxies. Do not be cajoled out of the gift of your own perspective. When we try too hard to meet such standards, we fall through some veil: where we had been listening and learning from others, we are flipped into the realm of self-consciousness and often, accidentally, self-obsession.

Here is the truth, anyway: the most honest, comfortable, bright delight shows out from those who have faced the depths. And levity does not preclude solemnity any more than loving someone keeps you from letting them go. Laughter is trust; it is allowing absurdity to have its say; it is surrendering your lungs and your voice to the unexpected. What a relief that there is the unexpected. What a relief to let people be sometimes, even though they are Unhealthy and Wrong. What a relief to let ourselves be, even to let ourselves care too much. How good to give up an obsession with others’ comfort and begin to believe who we are.

If you are too emo, they will call you adolescent. If you enjoy too much silliness, they will call you adolescent. Only to be obsessed with practicalities is considered adult; to forget that great questions, guiding values, joy in small things, the rush of encountering others once occupied your thoughts. Make the time for all of this. Indulge impractical questions about the meaning of things during meetings. And do something utterly outrageous every once in a while—even if it is only to have ice cream for dinner or lay without thinking in the sun, though the world is full of pain. These are all gifts we bring to the world, simply by our being, our encountering. These are how we carry our full selves into the things we do. These are the foolish, earnest love the world so deeply, deeply needs.

Inspired by David’s life and particularly his dance, 2 Samuel 6.

I am lonely and it is OK.

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There is a thing we do not always like to tell people who are graduating from high school or college, with the result that they hear of it in whispers and snatches—a specter they, too, try to ignore. And some of them escape it; they go home, or they go to graduate school, plopped down into a new life with a readymade cohort of like-minded young people. But most of us go to jobs in cities new to us, seeking adventure and success, and we find them, but we also encounter that specter. Its name is loneliness.

There are different kinds of loneliness, but we do not have names for them. It would be nice if we did. If we could throw out an offhanded comment like, ‘I’ve got a bit of the usual topodoloria that one expects three weeks after moving somewhere new,” instead of having to stay mum or else burst out: “I wish one single thing felt familiar in this place besides the coffee mug I’m carrying around obsessively because it reminds me of home.”

We need words for the loneliness of a long-distance relationship, the unreasonable rage at happy, cuddling couples when it is still weeks til you hold your person and something finally unknots inside of you. The ache of being single and wanting not to care, but thinking you would do anything to avoid one more engagement photo in your feed. The effort of trying not to weep at a party because you only wish you had people to feel safe with. The disappointment of a perfect summer evening when you have no one to give a beer on your porch.

Why does saying “I’m lonely” feel like admitting weakness, like if you had to foist the news on people that you had a disease? In a culture so far removed from the tribes and villages that have held most humans in history—a culture designed for loneliness—we don’t know how to talk about it. (I imagine this conundrum is even worse if you are male.) So we eat food or watch porn or shop to assuage the emptiness. We scroll social media looking for the rush of momentary connection. We hit the gym or log extra work hours because if we can’t feel fulfilled, maybe we can at least appear successful.

Well, everybody, I’ve done all those things and they were hardly even momentary fixes and I am done being afraid of it. I’m lonely. And it’s not because my existing friends (or my husband) are inadequate; and it’s not because I am abhorrent; and it’s not that I am inordinately needy. I fall well within the normal human range of neediness. Here is why I am lonely: because I moved. Because people my age move constantly in my culture and no one is supposed to make a big deal out of it. But you don’t find and love and trust your people overnight, the people who make you snort-laugh and tell you when you’re being dumb and are good at giving you gifts. It takes a lot of friend dates, awkward party situations, mild rejections by people who are too busy for you, testing of sense-of-humor waters, weekend nights hiding with Netflix because it’s all so exhausting. What it takes, like anything worth building, is time and effort.

Meanwhile, you will be lonely. At least some of the time, it will occur to you that you’d like to share something with someone, and there will not be anyone, and it will ache.

Here is how to live with the ache:

First, you must ignore your feelings. Not the ache itself, but the momentary feelings that keep you from making and being a friend. Read this article. Trust the rational voice in your head—the one telling you that calling a faraway friend is what you need when you’ve reached the end of your feeds; or that that one person deserves a third or fourth chance even though you’ve already grabbed a magic marker to label them annoying; or that drinking alone is unhealthy and it would be better to walk, bake, or color through that ache.

Then you really must put on your confident pants and go to the damn party. (Or the church, or the meetup, or the networking event.) Yes, you will be out too late and spend several awkward minutes standing alone next to the food table. Yes, there will be obnoxious people and fake people there. But the people you’re wishing for aren’t going to come knocking; they’re putting on their pants to go to the party and maybe make small talk with you and maybe accept your invitation to coffee or trivia. Think of your beautiful friends walking around other cities and going to other parties. Your people are out there.

Trust the process. Be patient with friendships in early stages. Grow a plant from a seed. Be faithful to the little tasks of tending them. Know that the ache, though overwhelming, will not overwhelm forever.

In the meantime, pray and pray and pray. Jesus was so lonely, dear heart. How often have you wished for the head space to reach toward him? Let the ache push you to God. Be still. Pray for others. Is this not a gift, to ache for connection, to feel the gaps in the universe where we have been broken from each other? Grow more tender and more grateful. Become a person with names for lonelinesses, and give the gift of recognition, and look the lonely in the eye and share something with them. We are already more connected than we can know.

Sexual Harassment for International Women’s Day

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It may be a failing of mine that I don’t like to feel as though I’m on a bandwagon; so I’m not always keen on celebrating things that hardly seemed to exist before social media, like International Women’s Day. A certain amount of naivete, too, has in the past made me wonder how much we still really need to celebrate women, at least in the developed world. I thought, a year or two ago, that “feminist” wasn’t such a radical label.

Today, though, I was followed by a man in a car for two blocks on my walk. “Be my friend,” he said. “I like that. You’re cute. Princess. I like that.”
“I’m married,” I said.
“You sure?” he replied. He knew it didn’t really matter. He knew it was a calculation, the way of saying please go away that usually seems least likely to incite physical violence.
“I’m sure,” I said. If you don’t respect the demands of civility, of humanity, please at least follow property law.

Last week my neighbor was suspended from her high school for reporting sexual harassment.

Our president has bragged about sexual assault.

I wish that feminism were just a matter of working for equal pay, or for the rights of transgender people to exist.

Instead, feminism is still fighting for women’s physical safety in broad daylight. At school. In the office. Women are still waiting for the day we do not go outside expecting to be demeaned, intimidated, or attacked for sport or spite.

The book of Luke passes the Bechdel test* right away.  I’ve been reading and rereading the beginning of this book for a few days now, enthralled most by its celebration of the rich and joyful friendship between Mary and Elizabeth. The two women are prophets before they are mothers, secret bearers of a wide and deep vision of the future. They have been faithful where Zechariah, the priest, was unfaithful, and they see now beyond a doubt that the Lord lifts up the humble. I can’t stop thinking about them, the older woman and the younger, preparing together for the births of their new boys, marveling at the work of God.

We are not allowed to forget, in this gospel, that every moment of Jesus’s ministry is borne up by women, women who bear and maintain life, women who offer financial assistance, women who do not abandon him at the cross and women, again, who are the first to believe in his new birth out of death. He insists on naming those unnoticed roles that sustain all of us with their everyday faithfulness: they who cook, clean, tend, mend, and bury, holding up the world in these tasks we deem small only because they are so ubiquitous. So necessary and precious.

The Christian doctrine of creation tells us that God is the sustainer of the universe, in some sense recreating us all at every moment. Creation is not an event about which we must decide whether it happened thousands or millions or billions of years ago. It is an intimate, involved embrace of all that is at once beautiful, mundane, and yucky in this world. It is a recurring yes, an ongoing artwork—and, perhaps, a tedious, exacting, unappreciated one. God is at work in the splashy sunsets and the wild-eyed desert prophet. God is also at work in the clouds drifting overhead at night, and through the prophet’s ungloried mother. Women and servants meet this humble God in our own work. She sees us and we see Her, different than do the powerful and celebrated.

*The Bechdel test is a cultural barometer asking whether two female characters in a work talk to each other about something other than a man.

We say that feminism is the belief that women are equal to men. This has come to be parsed in many ways, but I think one that is often overlooked is the belief that traditionally feminine ways of being in the world are equal to traditionally masculine ones. I think we fear putting women on a pedestal; the pedestal doesn’t have to be so high, after all, before it becomes a prison of its own. But launching certain women into the C-suite shouldn’t come at the expense of the women who will never have the money for childcare, the education, or the social clout to climb the corporate ladder. Or, for that matter, the expense of men who want to go into caring professions, but fear losing prestige. Moreover, we must recognize that many women who succeed in the C-suite do so precisely because they lead distinctively: seeking consensus, drawing connections, and caring for whole people, rather than defaulting to a top-down model or convincing employees to ram their way to success by sheer willpower.

Christian feminism, in particular, should recognize that part of our duty is to follow our servant-leader, Jesus, in a way that leads downward. Many men have worked hard to pull the heart of our faith away from service, humility, simplicity, and sharing; but they are ultimately inescapable. To celebrate International Women’s Day, for me, is to celebrate these virtues, not to mirror the patriarchy’s contempt of them. Some of us, it’s true, have lost ourselves in them, and have not much reflected Christ until we recovered other virtues like rest, self-love (dignity), confidence. Still, I do not think women’s safety or equality will be achieved until society recognizes, not only that women can be as stoic, as strategic, as strong and unflagging and dogged as men, but also that emotion, intuition, and human connection are themselves sources of strength worthy of reverence. Let us not rest until men have begun to learn, too, from us. May we assert our rights to live without fear, to take up space without reprisal, to have our gifts and talents not only used but recognized, and may we do so for the sake of the world. May we make a place that is better for caretakers and maintainers, for the weak and the vulnerable, for bodies and babies; and may we do so for the sake of the God who is incompletely imagined until we see her laboring in their midst.

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the secret reason I was burning out

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I’m linking up today with Amy Peterson in celebration of her book release! Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Change the World is very much on my wish list. Spiritual memoir, social justice learnings, beautiful writing: check.

For my own part, I’m not going to claim that I won’t forever be on some misguided quest or another. Here are some thoughts for all of us along such a journey.

I had always thought Santa hats were a dumb charity item. In the week leading up to the church’s famous Christmas dinner for our homeless and poor neighbors, one of the parishioners had dropped them off. “For the kids or whatever.” I thanked the well-meaning person but grumbled in my mind; I’m frustrated by this dollar-store brand of Christmastime charity. My feet shared the under-desk space with the trash bag of hats.

There were indeed a good number of kids at the dinner, and I plopped Santa hats on the heads of a brother and sister, thinking about how the hats would be in the real trash by tomorrow. A nearby adult asked for one, and I blithely passed it over to her. Then, at least in my memory, I was suddenly surrounded by twenty grabbing hands. Someone yanked a few hats out of my bag. “They’re for the kids,” I kept repeating, trying to hand them to the closest kids or parents I could see, but all the grabbers were adults. The hats quickly disappeared and some of those who hadn’t gotten them were angry with me, kept asking, examined the bag. Maybe I would’ve just been sad and a little banged up if one of these people I’d never met hadn’t spat, “You are a racist.” The utter nonsense of that statement, given that almost everyone who’d gotten a hat was the same race as the speaker, somehow made it crystal-clear what I had just seen. It was the purest embodiment of greed I’d ever encountered, everyone reaching to take before they knew what they were taking, snarling at their rivals, this man bitter and victimized when the trinkets went to the children.

At that statement I just dropped the bag and walked away. A friend (who happened to be homeless) offered to talk, but I needed to be alone. I needed to be angry that people had come to abuse an event so lovingly crafted by my church. I needed to be sad that anyone could be as upset as my name-caller while surrounded by Christmas carols and a feast. I needed to hate, hate the systems that had trained poor people to grab whatever they could from strangers at Christmastime, because there would be nothing the rest of the year, because these one-off events kept them nameless and faceless to us, because they knew that the Santa hats had been pocket change to the person who bought them.

I have never liked Santa hats, and I never will.

People who volunteer or work for nonprofits often feel like we’re not supposed to share these things. You know that someone will ignore everything else you’ve said and use your story to confirm their stereotypes of others. And people don’t like when nonprofit workers complain about their jobs; and you are grateful, in the end, for these moments. They’re reality checks; they’re empathy builders; they’re the moments that transform.

For a long time a huge part of my identity was wrapped up in my nonprofit work. I couldn’t have told my Santa hat story a few years ago, when it happened, because I was afraid of scaring off donors and afraid that my liberal friends would police my tone; but I also couldn’t have told it because I couldn’t quite fit all those terrible feelings into my picture of myself and the world. It wasn’t OK with me to just be upset; it wasn’t OK with me that others might hear the story and think I’d been naive or uncaring; it wasn’t OK with me that the problems I encountered in that moment were so much bigger than me, my actions, and my organization. I needed to only tell hopeful stories because hope and realism couldn’t coexist in my picture of who I was and how I mattered.

Instead of telling these hard stories, we just say, over and over, it’s hard sometimes, but it’s worth it. Over and over we want to appear strong or nonchalant, and hope others can be convinced to join our work. It’s worth it, we say, and we do mean it, even as we’re losing energy, becoming jaded, burning out. We tell the good stories back to ourselves and stuff the bad ones away. Or worse, we tell ourselves we’re too privileged to deserve these stories, that admitting we were hurt, frightened, or surprised by something constitutes some sort of betrayal of someone else’s greater pain or fear.

That is a lie, and we need to tell each other so. And we need to tell these stories. We need our friends to know what we go through. We need our donors to know that we can’t fix people. We need our volunteer recruits to know what they’re getting into.

And we need to know: that our careers don’t have to be made up only of stories with morals. That even the upsetting realities we face are better than the pleasant fictions others dwell in. That the things we encounter have made us better, stronger. That we, as people, matter more than the roles we play in our organizations.

For some of us, the difference between excitement and burnout is as simple as the difference between the stories we’re holding, and the stories we think we’re supposed to tell about ourselves.

May we have the courage to ask someone for the stories in their hands.

How to stand tall in the noise of these days

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I am reluctant to speak into the din of these days.

An observation: we have reached a point where the two major sides in our debates are both driven by fear. Our president was elected for his projections of strength: for promising to protect us from bad hombre immigrants, from the globalized market, from terrorists, from the pace of social change. And now his policies have stricken terror into the hearts of his opponents—worried for themselves, for minority friends, worried about international relations or about creeping authoritarianism.

Though the cacophony appears to address many issues, in the end we are mostly responding to threats. We all perceive our particular threats to be very real, while dismissing others’ fears and blazing with disbelieving outrage when they dismiss ours. In our anger we cannot see how lonely this has made us. We feel the loneliness, but not consciously; the ache only fuels our outrage.

The Ph.D. in political science whom I keep on retainer who is my dear friend tells me that the biggest protests work, even when they’re not supposed to, even when no one expects it. So I will go to the protests. But I won’t be outraged; it’s not in my nature. With Paul I will proclaim that we all have gifts differing and I will thank God for those who do outrage well and righteously. I’ll be the one giving out water bottles, or crying. You’re probably not supposed to cry at a protest, but I’m mostly sure that’s what I’ll do.

What is in my nature is to passionately declare the extreme urgency of everyone sitting down and thinking some more. This is an unglamorous and unpopular vocation. Thinking sells best when paired with a vice—traditionally pipe tobacco or whiskey. Outrage is brighter, the work of a moment, and pairs well with that comfort food, superiority.

Still, even the most active of activists is already acknowledging that our task won’t be over for a long time, and we’re going to need something that burns a bit slower. I hasten to add that, while we must equip ourselves for a long-haul future, we have a yet lengthier past with which we must also deal. This crisis did not develop overnight, as if caused by some particular genius of Trump’s for villainy. This is the overflow of ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years. If we accomplish political goals without any mention of these things, they will only fester. The colonization of rural places, for instance: extracting resources from a place while systematizing contempt for its people. The abandonment of national politics to lobbyists and of local politics to the dogs. The abandonment of our minds to our screens. The utter lack of restraint on our consumerist desires, so that each side accuses the other of entitlement with great accuracy and total hypocrisy. And an extreme failure, on all sides, to know the oppressed, to sit with them in their pain, to share bread with them.

These things, of course, cost more than five minutes and 1000 words. These things rarely go viral.

But perhaps, I concede, the past is a discussion for another time. Perhaps what is before us, just today, is to excavate and banish our fear. If you are a Christian, you have no excuse for it; if you are not, let me assure you fear remains a hindrance to you. It is not naive to resist fear. You may be aware of a danger without giving that thing power over you. To the contrary, once fear is acknowledged and set aside, you are more agile, more perceptive, less prone to mistakes. Once fear is set aside, it clears the way for that most searing weapon: love.

I read an article several days ago about what to do, the basic actions that would be essential to resisting the extremism we’re witnessing. I found it wise and compelling in its simplicity—things like interacting with your representatives; seeking out reliable news sources; taking care of yourself (in the long term, going to bed on time and eating your vegetables); learning about privilege and oppression; getting to know the people in your community who stand to lose the most. And as the list went on, I realized that these were all things a truly excellent citizen would be doing regardless of who was in power. It was comforting and intimidating, I suppose, to realize that all anyone needs to do to stand up against a bullying President is become a truly excellent citizen.

What was, for me, conspicuously absent from the list was becoming aware of any new development within ten minutes of its occurrence; scrolling through Twitter with increasing indignation and despair; firing one-liners or articles at people on Facebook who would then be compelled to recognize the error of their ways. As the days have gone by, I’ve felt more and more antipathy towards the hot takes and the outrage machines and even the copied-and-pasted Bible verses. So much blame for our situation goes, in my mind, to our penchant for preferring the viral to the true; to our self-righteous armchair activism; to our willing deliverance of our attention to the antics of national figures, at the expense of understanding the goings-on in our own cities and states.

Do you want to drive out fear? It doesn’t happen when you get a good grasp of the situation from twitter or even from the news. It happens with love. Have the courage to love yourself without the safety blanket of self-righteousness. Have the courage to love someone else without assuming you already know who they are. Walk around your neighborhood and talk to the people you meet. Plan an uncomfortable dinner party: invite someone different from you. (Have lots of comfort food.) Call your representatives on behalf of someone else even though it inconveniences or terrifies you. Read about an issue you don’t want to face. Take up that habit you know you’re supposed to do—riding your bike places, donating to charity, praying for your enemies.

Pray. Pray more than you tweet. Pray before your political calls. Pray for the country. Pray for refugees. Pray before you eat. Pray before you buy. Pray with other people.

Read books. Gather with friends. Don’t think about doing good deeds; do them. Be aggressively present to your own life, your place and time.

Be still. The Lord will fight for you. The noise will take care of itself.

Dylann Roof and me

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I heard the truth about my town in Georgia—home base since I was 13—over the radio, from a woman in Philadelphia. It was a Terry Gross interview with the author of a book released last summer about the history of Forsyth County. Maybe it was a run-of-the-mill interview, sometimes even if you’re a Terry fan they’re a little boring, but to me it was bizarre and hurtful and fascinating and horrible all at the same time: hearing a man’s voice in the little car speakers reciting the details of two lynchings that took place on the town square where I had purchased a marriage license two months before.

To be more precise, it was all of those things after the fact, because my response to overwhelming awful things is always immediate dissociation. At the time, I thought mostly of the classrooms two blocks from that square, where they’d taught us about the formation of the KKK on Stone Mountain but not about the lynchings in our town. Not about the weeks after the lynchings when every black person in the county was driven out of their homes. Not about the family that tried to quietly return and woke up to dynamite under their house. Not about the fact that there’s no record of who survived and who didn’t.

There were rumors, of course, about whose fault it might be that our county, even in the 2000s, held far fewer black people than any other in Georgia despite its rapid growth: a few white hoods in the 60s, a sign warning black people out before sundown. But those rumors held no lynchings and no expulsions by night riders and certainly no mention of the massive protest in the 80s, residents demanding they be allowed to keep their county white.

In December I wrapped gifts, packed an enormous duffel bag, and in the last second before leaving Charleston for home I downloaded the book. It’s a quick read, really just a chronological telling of events. I’d expected a bit more from it—a primer on how to feel or what to do would have been nice. Instead, there were the happenings, then the end; and then I wandered about the county, visiting friends and the Dairy Queen downtown, in a state of surreality, seeing the 1910s superimposed over every place that composed my beloved home. The stolen homesteads of freed slaves forgotten beneath stately churches; the site of the rally, now some of the county’s most valuable retail real estate; and always, the lynchings of teenagers in the square.

I don’t know if it is merely naive or some much more serious moral and imaginative failing, but it was one thing to know of lynchings somewhere in those mountains, and another thing to stare down a picture of one across the street from Sal’s pizza place. It was one thing to hear rumors that black people had been unwelcome on our streets long ago, but another to read with what inhuman ferociousness their absence had been enforced up until my own lifetime.

I have not spoken much about all this. I am just beginning to grieve the place I thought I knew.

Even when we speak about the importance of history, we often act as though it is a collection of case studies that might sometime offer useful analogies to our own time, rather than recognizing that it is a part of us. We are learning every day, too, that this is no metaphor, our very selves shaped by history: trauma is passed on through human DNA as surely as injustice is passed on through our institutions. It is the privileged who study history; it is the oppressed who remember it. I came to adulthood asking why so much is wrong with the world. Those who bear the brunt of the wrong have always known.

And at the same time that it’s easy, once you start, to trace the series of events leading my people to have things so much easier than others, it’s impossible to quantify my own individual part in any of it. It’s nothing: I never asked or hoped for things to be this way any more than the victims did. And it’s infinite: my family came to Forsyth for its peace, prosperity, and Good Schools, all of which were uniquely available because of the county’s history and uniquely available to us.

It is crass to speak of quantifying such things anyway. But, I think, even the sagest of “woke white people” can unknowingly hope to do so, as if that might be the first step to erasing the hurt. In the interview through the car speakers, I recognized a certain instinct in the book’s author: a desire for absolution. As weeks went by and I tunneled down into my own distress, I found at the root of the pit in my stomach was an absurd hope: maybe if I do enough, or give enough up to others, I can become innocent of this.

But none of us will ever be innocent of it.

The Bible speaks often of communal sin. This, like most things in the Bible, is inconvenient, if not incomprehensible, to the individualistic myths that make up the American way. Some well-meaning people who have worked very hard not to commit sins will probably always refuse to comprehend it, protecting instead the idea of their self-made virtue. In so doing, they will refuse to understand the basic fabric of the world and perhaps of God: that we all belong to one another. We can’t stand up a self unattached to the others who remake us every day, any more than the squares of a quilt can be without the others.

I don’t know how anyone makes sense of history and its injustices without feeling this fabric under their fingers.

The Bible also speaks often of communal redemption. Thanks be to God, the un-innocent belong at the family table.

Now I live in a city that has prospered from the products of slavery since its inception three hundred and fifty years ago. We are still getting to know one another, so I cannot say much about what, exactly, this means for Charleston. But I can say that the city will never become innocent of the shooting at Mother Emanuel, certainly not by deeming a single life valueless and then offering that warped nothing as if it could be a sacrifice to justice.

Everyone is angry at Dylann Roof, but behind the anger lies fear: fear that he might be one of us. To entertain the idea of Roof in prison for life is to imagine him as something other than a monster that must be put down. It is to face the fact that a man, mentally sound enough to represent himself at trial, found little evidence in the society around him to dissuade him from the racist alternate reality he’d chosen. That man believed he could start a race war by carrying out his crime in the right city: what was once a city of enslaved people, ruled by a fearful and violent minority of white men.

Perhaps the victims and their families should be the ones to sentence Dylann Roof, but they are not. And we all sit in silent judgment of him: a jury of his peers. To leave Roof alive would be painful, to say the least. It would inspire justified outrage on several fronts. But to kill him means to label him irredeemable, while somehow maintaining that we are not. That is false. By killing him, instead, we further damn ourselves in the belief that the history that inspired Roof can be purged by wiping him out.

To leave Roof alive would be to look into his hate-filled face and force ourselves to recognize the fear, supremacy, and violence that every day enslave us all. Only when we stop settling for the scapegoat will we finally reach the beginning of our own repentance.