Giving Thanks

I've never particularly liked Thanksgiving. A holiday centered around food - especially food I don't like - just never particularly appealed to me. For me, Thanksgiving has meant family making uncomfortable comments about my eating habits, gathering around a big screen watching football, and being bored as everyone cheered.

But, the idea that there is a holiday that is, supposedly, centered around giving thanks for those blessings in our lives...now that's appealing. Every so often I try to sit down and count my blessings - meaning writing them out so that I get a visual of what they are (I'm a visual learner, what can I say?).

So, without further ado, here is my list of 10 things I am thankful for in my life:

1. To have the love of a God who challenges, stresses and pushes me to love other people as He loves me.
2. Having parents who were dedicated to showing me that love from the time I was born.
3. My dear friends. Listing names would be far too much, but I will say this: My friend Katy once told me that she noticed that when I get a friend, I treat them like gold. I never noticed it until she pointed it out, but I do want to reiterate the sentiment: You, dear reader, as my friend, are golden to me.
4. My education - I have been blessed to be taught by some great minds, and my schooling has opened a lot of doors for me, for which I am incredibly grateful. (Let's hope I can maintain this attitude when I'm writing checks for student loan payments this time next year).
5. Technology. While in some respects it has provided means to isolate people from each other, it's also provided the means for people to come together. For one, I wouldn't have gone to Oxford were it not for finding the website, and for two, I wouldn't be going to India were it not for stumbling across the trip on Faceless.
6. The generosity of those around me. The little fundraising thermometer in the sidebar there demonstrates how awesome the people who know me (and even those who don't know me!) are. I couldn't be going on this trip without you.
7. Art/Music/Literature. I hate to lump all these together, but really, I'd be saying the same thing about all of them. I believe that God chooses to speak through all means of art, in loud and soft voices, just as he speaks through the beauty of his creation. There is some kernel of truth in most arts, and I am thankful for that.
8. Forgiveness. I make a lot of really stupid mistakes, every day. And if it wasn't for my assurance in the forgiveness of a God who loves me, and a Christ who died for me, and a Spirit which intercedes for me, I would have no hope.
9. Humor. I believe God laughs at us a lot, and I like to think we can laugh right along with him.
10. And last, I'm thankful that, in a world that often seems mired in despair and hurt, we can still look up and have some hope that the God loves us, and that loving our neighbor is a means of showing that love. We are not without hope, as long as we have faith. And I am grateful for that hope.

So there you have it. A nice cathartic exercise that reminds me of how much I have to be thankful for.

What are you thankful for? Leave me a comment and tell me one thing (it doesn't have to be 10!). You may find yourself with a longer list than you thought!

I believe in the holy catholic church.

The other day, I heard a friend comment that she loves the liturgy of a high church service (i.e., Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian), but she wants a church where her faith can remain a private, individual matter. It's her faith, no one else's.

At the time, something about the statement struck me as wrong, but not being able to put together exactly why I felt that way, I tucked it away in the back of my mind, and decided I would think about it more when I didn't have a stack of student journals waiting to be deciphered and graded.

Now, 48 hours later, I'm still ruminating over the ideas of a private faith, and I think I have a somewhat coherent, though incomplete response to the idea.

The most obvious response is that Jesus didn't call us to a private faith.

Okay, maybe that's not so obvious. At the risk of oversimplifying and skimming over 400 some years of history, I will say this: since the Enlightenment, "religion" (in a broad sense) has been relegated more and more to the private sphere, separating itself from the actions of the State, and becoming more and more a matter of private thought. My coworker, then, like most Americans, is merely a product of her time: my relationship with Jesus is just that, mine, private and alone.

However, despite this overwhelming individualism and privatization of faith, Jesus didn't call us to such a thing. He didn't call us to say, "This faith is mine and mine alone, and I don't have to share it with anyone." No! Indeed, he gave us brothers and sisters to travel along with us, to be our companions, and he gave us the Church as the bride to himself, the bridegroom, His Body reflected in our individual natures.

Today in class, my professor read a section from a book I didn't catch the title of, but the sum of it was this: Protestantism is highly individual - it is the relationship of the individual with the individual; it is about a man's relationship with Christ. Catholicism, on the other hand, is about the relationship of the individual as a cell to the ever-growing and working Body of Christ. This, then, is the heart of why the statement of "I like the liturgical tradition but I want to keep my faith private" becomes so ridiculous. Essentially, it translates to divorcing oneself from the Body of Christ.

We Protestants speak a lot about the Body of Christ, but we use it as an individualizing force. I am a hand, you are an eye, that guy's a foot, etc. We each have our own separate distinct roles, which is all fine and good. It's one interpretation of Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 12. It is, however, an incomplete image, and allows too much room to say, "Oh, I don't have the gift of compassion" or "I just don't have to love my neighbor - someone else will cover that part." We forget that no matter what the role we may play, the one things that matters overall is that love which binds all parts of the Body together. We allow the Body of Christ to become this amorphous creature that has a million different faces (read: denominations) and a million different hands (read: doctrines), and we don't truly know what Christ looks like.

Catholicism, on the other hand, presents one unified face, but sometimes at the lack of the individual playing a role - there's a large problem (attempted to be solved by Vatican II) of the individual Catholic not understanding the Mass, which is why they go through confirmation. Clearly, however, as exhibited by my coworker, the theology of community doesn't always stick, and therefore the whole concept of the unified Body of Christ can be lost.

Now, this post isn't to bash Catholics or Protestants. It is more or less my own "writing out loud" so to speak, about the issue of the community of the Body of Christ. I have been to two Catholic services in my life, and clearly have no authority to speak on the inner workings of the Catholic faith. Having grown up Baptist, I can only speak to the evangelical tradition in American churches.

What I do know is this: the Body of Christ is one that stretches beyond the boundaries of denomination, it is both transcendent and immanent, and requires that your faith not be private.

It is, therefore, impossible to participate in a church that reflects the Body of Christ, impossible to live in relationship with Him - regardless of whether you view that relationship as an individual with an individual, or as a cell in a much larger Body - without community. I have become more and more convicted of this as I have grown up. The love of Christ is such that we cannot do it alone. Reflected in the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a social reality, and we humans, made in the image of our father God, are impelled to be social, communal creatures.

Regardless of doctrine, creed, or denomination, if you claim the love of Jesus as your own, it will not remain your own.

My challenge: to step outside the bounds, to begin seeing those around you not merely as those you attend church with, or discuss theology with, but as members of this gigantic universal Church that stretches across the bounds of time and space to include all of us who claim Jesus as Lord.

And the mark of those who who belong to this Body of Christ?

Matthew 22: 36-40: "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

__________________

Photo credit: Jonathan Kirkpatrick, a dear friend who lovingly puts up with 24 Americans invading his house every fall and spring in lovely Oxford. It is of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Day in Pictures

Everyday, I make some time to check the BBC News' Day in Pictures to get a literal picture of what's going on the world. BBC is very good about having balanced sources - they usually have one picture from each area of the world.

Today, there was one particularly striking image that I felt the need to share with you. It is a brickmaker in Pakistan, working and making bricks like the rest of his family. The catch? He's probably only about 8 years old.


This small child is spending his childhood making bricks with his bare hands. When I was his age, I was begging for more allowance, complaining that my brother always got a chance to do things and I didn't, and climbing trees. The thought of work was at least ten years off, and even at 8, I knew that if I played my cards right, I'd be able to enjoy what I did. I think at that point I really wanted to be a writer (not kidding).

I wonder what this child thought he'd be. I wonder what sorts of dreams and thoughts go through his head as he does work that would be monotonous and hard for adults. I wonder what life he would want if he had the opportunity.

It is because of the chance of making a difference in a life like this that I am learning how to love my neighbor. I want to be able to provide children like this young boy with a future that actually has hope, one that won't consist of joining their family in the factory, one that would allow them to run and play and be kids again.

Consider it: Would you want your kid to go through these same things? Then why willingly participate in a system that allows such things to develop? I am a heavily fair trade proponent for this very reason. We must be willing to make a change in our daily lives if we want to live out the second greatest commandment - Love Your Neighbor.

I believe I may have posted this before, but it deserves a re-post.

Orphans and Widows

Orphan Sunday from Christian Alliance for Orphans on Vimeo.

This morning, our associate pastor gave a moving and interesting sermon on the idea of orphans in our world. He told a story about how last night he was having a conversation over the health care reform with a friend, and commented that if the Church isn't doing its job in providing for the needy, if the Church isn't picking up Jesus' call to take care of the orphans and the widows, then someone needs to step in.

The friend then commented something that shocked and outraged me at all once: "I don't believe everyone in the church is called to serve like that. I don't believe that we all have a call to help the needy - some just have that gift, and others, others don't."

Instead of laying out a piece by piece argument in response to this rather outrageous claim, I will instead point to James 1:26-27: "If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

If that's not clear enough, here's Eugene Peterson's layman's translation from The Message: "Anyone who sets himself up as 'religious' by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world."

There is no doubt that the Jesus I know has called is calling and will continue to call us to a life of loving those in the most need around us. In calling us to love our neighbor, he is calling us to claim the orphans and widows and 'the least of these,' to look after them and let them know that they are loved, they are our brothers and sisters and daughters and sons. They have a family within the Body of Christ, and with those of us who have been given much to give much to others, they may find a home.

John 14:18: "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you."

"I am become a name."

If you had asked thirteen year old Dianna where she thought she'd be at 23 or 24, you likely would have gotten the typical response of "married, being an awesome rich lawyer somewhere, and ready to have kids." No kidding, I seriously thought I would graduate from college, get through law school in two years, and somehow have a sustained and happy marriage by that point in my life. I wanted to be "The Rainmaker" - yes, the one from John Grisham. It wasn't so much taking a case fighting for the little guy, but rather gaining the fame that would come with a big verdict like the one in the book.

Though by the time I had hit my junior year of high school, the details of this dream had changed - I no longer wanted to be a lawyer, but I wanted to be in law somehow. I thought "political pundit" would be nice. I could be the next Tucker Carlson, complete with an androgynous bow tie. The end goal, however I did it, was to become famous by 30. I wanted to be known by people; I wanted to be recognized on the street and have people take pictures with me. I wanted to be one of the "elite."

Never did it cross my mind that I wouldn't be well known by the time I was 25. I felt a sort of destiny about it - a sense that "this is what God wanted for me." As I grew older, the dream grew smaller - well, even if I'm not a movie star, I could still become a great writer. I'll write a screenplay! Or a book! To some extent, I still hold on to the latter half of that dream, but only partially.

I've come to realize that I've been dreaming in the wrong direction. The goal in life should not be to become famous - fame corrupts, as the recent Balloon Boy saga should highlight, quite obviously. It causes people make stupid decisions, just so that they would be known by others. Honestly, Falcon's dad probably doesn't care that he's getting prosecuted now because he and his family were the focus of the nation for two whole hours! The Heene family is known by most of the households in America. He got what he wanted: Fame.

The dream of 1999 Dianna and 2009 Mr. Heene are essentially the same: to be known and cared about by strangers. In particularly self referential works of art we see this idea highlighted over and over again -- movies like "Fame," and "Chicago," social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook are all about marketing yourself, making yours the name on everyone's lips. It's a particular quirk of modern culture.

We don't want to die unknown; we want to known that someone was affected by us, even if it's in a negative way.

We ALL want to effect a change.

Think about that for a minute: Hold that statement in your mind and let it sit for awhile. Maybe go drink a cup of tea and come back to read what I have to say next.

What if we decided to turn that around? What if we decide that in changing others, we don't care whether or not they know our names, whether or not they even know who caused the change? What if we decide, in donating money to build a new wing of a hospital or in making a law, that we don't need to have our names on it? I wonder, if we removed the possibility of fame attached to charity, how charity would be different.

What if, instead of seeking merely to be known by others, we chose to give others an identity? What if we chose, instead of merely throwing money at a problem and letting someone else deal with it, we actually traveled to that place, met the people there for ourselves, and learned their names? What if we knew that the homeless man sitting outside the local coffee shop is a war veteran who is now living in a motel down by the road, and is being kicked out of every place he asks for money to pay the hotel bill and get food?

What if, in creating art, in writing that song or that essay, our goal was not that people would be impressed by the author, but instead by the Creator? What if we simply focused on pointing others to Truth, not caring if they know who did it?

In trying to truly love my neighbor, I have realized that it means allowing myself to be anonymous, allowing the other person to take precedence over my own desire to be known, and realizing that I am known by the only one who matters.

You cannot love your neighbor if you are the only one with a name, and you cannot worship in community if you don't care to know the community around you.


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*Title from "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In India specific news, I am down to the last on the checklist of things I had to do before my trip, and it is one that will take some arranging - I have to get my immunizations. You also may have noticed in the fundraising thermometer that I'm finally halfway paid for the trip, which was my goal! Thank you! I am, of course, still accepting donations, and the photobook offer still stands, but I'm stoked to see how God has provided for me through you, my faithful readers. Thank you for enabling me, your humble narrator, to go into the world and speak Truth to those who need to hear it, and give identity to the nameless and faceless.

'Our souls will at last sink to hell.'

I'm taking a class this semester that I, honestly, wasn't expecting to be very good. The course examines the rhetoric of women in 19th century America in the various social movements they participated in. Being a 20th century British young adult literature enthusiast (check all the modifiers, there's quite a few), I wasn't really looking forward to taking this course.

I have been surprised, however, by how much I'm finding out about the ways my predecessors in America not only fought for their own rights, but loved their neighbor by fighting alongside them. One particular group of women struck a chord: The New York Female Moral Reform Society. The NYFMRS was formed to battle the rising tide of prostitution in New York City in the early 1800s. These women (and some men) discovered, upon researching the problem of prostitution, which involved on the lowest level simply talking to the prostitutes, that the main reasons most of them became prostitutes was not, as was commonly thought, because they were somehow licentious and devilish women. Rather, most of them were forced to because of economic hardship. Because of the way that laws about the rights of women functioned in 19th century America, a woman found it very hard to make a living once her husband had passed, or if she was unmarried to begin with. Many of them found prostitution to be a good alternative to starvation.

Fast forward to 2009. This is the same situation many women across the world are facing, especially in these economically hard times. As we see numbers of the hungry and the homeless increasing, you can be assured that the numbers of those being forced to sell themselves for sex has increased as well.

Siddarth Kara, author of the 2009 book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery writes that in traveling the globe to research slavery, "No discovery shocked me more than the extreme level of bias and socioeconomic disenfranchisement that millions of women face across the globe. These factors contribute directly to female vulnerability to slave traders when the surrounding political and economic infrastructures disintegrated." Kara goes on to tell us that in India, 15,000 women are murdered each year in dowry disputes, even though the dowry system is illegal. "Life for millions of women in South Asia is a process of terrible abuse," he writes.

Disenfranchised women, like those we find in various third world and developing countries, are those most at risk for becoming victims of sex trafficking. Similar to the situation of many 19th century women in America, the disenfranchised women across the globe believe that they have no other option, that this is what they must do in order not to starve on the street, or have their family starve alongside them. And like the NYFMRS, we must do what we can to remedy this situation.

What does this mean, then?

In the long run, it means changing the laws to give women more of a chance. It means cracking down on those who buy sex; it means targeted punishment of the men who operate to oppress women and create the demand for sex. It means a change in attitude across the globe.

Surely, these are high and lofty goals, but ones I hope I can see realized. But what little old you and little old me do, right here, right now? Kara offers us some possibilities:

1. Become Aware. Read, research, do what you can to learn about the sex industry and its connections with trafficking. Learn how the world economies fit together, even if it's just a cursory understanding. Begin to realize that the things you purchase, the actions you take, even if you're just one person in Waco, TX, USA, do make a difference.

2. Financial Support. Donate to NGO's. Donate to this trip I'm going on so I can learn more about the issue and do something to help. Kara writes that "Even if sex trafficking ended today, there would be over one million women and children in need of shelter, health care, counseling and vocational training." Aftercare is just as important as, if not more than, rescue.

3. Community vigilance. Pay attention to what's going on around you! In Central Texas alone, there have been around 7 cases of caught and prosecuted traffickers, just because someone in the community noticed something wrong and spoke up.*

4. Write a letter. Contact your Congressperson, tell them to get the ball rolling on enforcing international laws against trafficking, to provide money toward aftercare, to do something to change the disenfranchisement of women in the world today.

These are small steps, but ones that will make a big difference.

__________________

*http://www.slaverymap.com

**Title quote taken from The Advocate of Moral Reform, a periodical published by the NYFMRS in the late 1830s. It was said by a prostitute at a brothel interviewed for the first edition of The Advocate.

And you shall know them by their love.

As many of you know, I teach two sections of freshman composition at Baylor. Needless to say, this has put an interesting stress on my semester. Today, I took about half the class period and introduced the next unit - persuasion. I fortunately kept our discussion from turning into a political debate wherein the whole class disagreed with me, but I did manage to raise the question in some of my students' minds of "What does it mean to love your neighbor?"

I suppose I should rewind a bit.

I introduced the unit with an exercise in audience/authorship. My friend Chase posted an article a few weeks back that I just knew I had to use in class - Michael Moore's Open Letter to Christians in America. In this letter, Moore challenges Christians to think about what the relation between Capitalism and Loving Your Neighbor really is. Would Jesus be okay with some people getting a bigger piece of the pie than others?

Knowing that even just the name "Michael Moore" would raise some guards, I carefully edited it to remove any clues to who the author is, and presented it to my students.

The reaction in the first class was expected: "He's misusing Scripture! What is this? He takes those comments about the poor entirely out of context! He doesn't know his audience very well." Knowing that a debate on the veracity of his Scriptural references would simply take the class too far off track to do any good, I merely wrote their objections on the board, and questioned them. Again and again, I asked, "Did no one find anything positive in the article?" Not only were none of them persuaded, none of them seemed to even have questions raised in their minds about the issue. Christianity supports a capitalistic economic structure, no question.

I, quite reasonably, kept my mouth shut for most of the discussion, only prompting questions to guide them back to focusing on the writing because, after all, this is a comp class. I kept my mouth shut, that is, until the question of what it means to love your neighbor came up. Even then, all I did was ask the question: "Is it loving to take a large chunk of the pie to improve your bottom line? Is it possible to love both money and your neighbor?"

While it shut some of them up, the majority opinion chose to ignore the word "love" in the sentence. I was surprised at how quickly the concept was written off, especially by students whose lives have been surrounded by images of love, the idea that love is the highest possible good, and raised in families who told them, over and over, that God loves them.

What has happened to the concept of love in today's society? What does loving your neighbor look like?

These questions have become a consistent theme in my life, and not without reason. I live in the 16th poorest city in the nation, and I can't go to the post office without encountering a homeless person. While sitting at my kitchen window, I frequently see these two homeless people pushing shopping carts through my neighborhood - they're the same ones each time, and I see them about once every two weeks.

At one point this summer, I took the trash out at about 10:00 at night, and there was a man of about 40 years old rooting through our dumpster. I said hello, and he smiled widely at me, greeting me enthusiastically, seemingly unembarrassed to be found rooting through the garbage. I let him be.

That man, even if he doesn't live in my complex, is my neighbor.
The old lady, leaning on her shopping cart as she wanders through the neighborhood, is my neighbor.
The man sitting against the wall outside the post office telling me he only has $1.34 and just needs a little bit more so he can go buy some food...that man is my neighbor, my brother, my family.

What does it mean to love them? What does it mean to apply to the real world the somewhat trite, continually restated and reemphasized edict of "love your neighbor"? I think that may be the essence of the Christian life - learning how to work out that love for others as God loves us. Why else do we remain on earth when we are "saved"? It is so that we may love others.

Go and learn what it means to love.

(photo credit: Brandt Russo, of the group "Can't Ignore the Poor," taken in Skid Row, Los Angeles)