Intersections: Thoughts on Religion, Culture, and Politics

Remarks I shared at the first faculty assembly of the 2023-24 school year at West Virginia Wesleyan College:

This time last year many of us were understandably stressed about the potential of ChatGPT and later Chat GPT4 to destroy higher education as we know it—not to put too fine a point on the heights our anxieties could reach. A year later, we’ve probably all got stories to share and wisdom to offer about how we managed this chilling new thing in our discipline-specific ways. And we are likely still trying to figure out best practices for the coming year and beyond. Certainly, colleges and universities everywhere are scrambling to have the smart, winning position on this, whatever that might be.

What I’d like to do in my brief time here is note a couple of things that the emergence of this new technology reveals about the very old practice of teaching the young. I’m not talking about artificial intelligence in the broad sense—that catch-all term for cognition-like capabilities that will either save us or end us, depending on your point of view. Rather, I mean these text-based conversational AI agents like chatbots and what we are to make of them pedagogically, other than the enemy.

First, I wonder if we’ve paid sufficient attention to the ways these platforms can actually enhance learning, especially for students who come to us with gaps in the knowledge and skills we expect of them. Note to self here and maybe to you, too: we should cherish the students we get, not pine for the students we wish we had.

ChatGPT can be used effectively as a tutoring tool, generating things like individualized practice problems and questions, along with instant feedback. It offers personalized study advice for students who struggle to work smarter, not just harder. ChatGPT can improve accessibility to content for students with disabilities, like audio and visual aids, and provide them support services that aren’t always available in person or easy to get to.    

Second, how much of our angst around chatbots is because we secretly, or not so secretly, suspect that our students are just itching to pull one over on us? Another note to self here and maybe to you, too: let’s not communicate to students, overtly or even in subtle ways, that we expect they will cheat. That is a form of cynical defeatism I am prone to myself, but it’s neither fair or wise. I don’t believe that most young people come to college hoping to game the system or dupe their professors or scam their way to their degree. I think most of our students are dealing with responsibilities and heartaches and trauma we have no idea about, and that the pressures they feel to “succeed”—from family, friends, coaches, and our competition-driven culture—send some of them down a spiral of bad decisions that can lead to disastrous consequences. And some of those disastrous consequences are put in place by us because we’re persuaded that cheating is a student’s default mode (or the default mode of certain students) and we feel furious and helpless to do anything about it.    

Maybe our anxiety and fury about ChatGPT could be channeled into energy better spent in taking more seriously a collaborative model of education. Paolo Friere, the Brazilian philosopher, educator, and political activist, in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, criticized what he called the “banking” concept of education: the idea that teaching is an act of depositing information into the repositories that are passive, individual students. We know that this is not only an ineffectual way to teach but a dehumanizing one as well since, as Friere observed, all real learning is social and collaborative in nature: “The teacher and the taught together create the teaching,” he famously said. This is a model of teaching and learning that encourages active in-class inquiry, curiosity-led participation, and critical literacy—the skill set one needs in any discipline, and for any future vocation, to think critically about what one is reading, hearing, seeing, and to develop a critical consciousness that has the language and the ability to assess: is this fair? is is just?

This collaborative pedagogy can open our imaginations to ways of assessing student learning that don’t rely so much on the kinds of assignments that ChatGPT excels at. And even if you’re not persuaded by the collaboration model of teaching and learning, it is on us to design assignments that can’t be performed readily and convincingly by a chatbot.

And what are some ways that ChatGPT might help us with tasks we don’t love doing, like some forms of grading, generating quizzes, crafting practice questions for tests, and so on. Who among us doesn’t want more time for the lifegiving aspects of our vocation and more time for having a life?

Let me be clear: I am for embodiment. For presence. For human connection. In teaching and in life. And I have deep concerns about these generative AI platforms. I worry about the very loss of embodiment, presence, and human connection they represent. I worry about bias and inaccuracy. I worry about the over-dependence, the addictions, even, they can induce.

But the question is not: is ChatGPT good or bad? The question—which is the question for any technology, really—is: what sort of person will the use of this technology make of me? And: what habits will the use of this technology instill? And: how will it affect how I relate to other human beings? And: what practices will the use of this technology replace? And: what will the use of this technology encourage me to notice? Cause me to ignore? And: what was required of other human beings, of other creatures, of the earth, so that I might be able to use this technology?[1]

So we should do all we can to discourage students from asking a chatbot to compose their written assignments. Run those AI content detectors if you must. But this moment presents bigger challenges than that to us and to our students. It poses worthy questions that have been around longer than AI and ChatGPT but are newly urgent. I hope we are interested in exploring them with depth and nuance, both personally and collectively. I’d welcome such conversations.

Cheers to a new school year, everyone.

Thank you!

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[1] These questions are from Michael Sacasas’ essay “The Questions Concerning Technology” on his Substack “The Convivial Society.” He also talks about the essay on an episode of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show.”

Members of the Board of Trustees, fellow faculty and staff, families, friends, and especially members of the class of 2022:

It has been quite a journey.

Halfway through your college years, a global pandemic disrupted your lives and for the remaining two years completely transformed them. It did this to all of us, of course, but these were formative years for you; a time when the college experiences we take for granted were altered irrevocably or eliminated entirely. And while we all grumbled a bit, or a lot, and felt lost, and sometimes anxious, you handled the hassles and disappointments with grace. And we noticed.

Conventional wisdom has it that my responsibility today is to tell you to go out and change the world. I understand the sentiment behind this: we have faith in you, we see such promise, and there is so much reparative work to be done in this broken world. But the advice strikes me as a bit cynical, honestly, as well as an impossible burden to bear.

So on this important day in your life I want to suggest that you are called to something else. And “calling” is the operative word here. Many of you know your next steps professionally—what occupation will occupy the hours of your working life. Some of you don’t know that yet, and if you don’t, and if you’re a little uneasy about that, I hope you know that such openness can be a gift, a door of possibility to walk through, even with some trepidation.

But whatever it is you decide to do for money, your calling, your vocation is something else. You might get paid to be a mathematician or a mechanic, a painter or a professor, but your vocation is to live purposefully, gratefully, mindfully this one “wild and precious life” you have been given.[1]

And while this looks different for each of us, there are, I think, at least three essential elements to living out one’s calling in this world.

The first is beauty. We cannot be fully alive, fully flourishing human beings without beauty—the beauty of Creation and of supportive human relationships, the beauty of poetry, science, art. In the classical sense, beauty presumes integrity or wholeness.Something is beautiful (a painting, a peony, a person) when it is most fully realized, when it is utterly and altogether itself.

But brokenness, too, can disclose beauty. To attend with care to something injured or damaged—a friend’s wounded spirit, a distressed landscape—is to encounter a fragile beauty, which first requires the willingness to just be present, be with, and then the imagination to help gather the fragments into something whole, something healed.

I hope we have helped to cultivate a love of beauty in you during your time here. I hope we have expanded your idea of education beyond mere preparation for employment, such that it includes a calling and a desire to seek, enjoy, embody, create, and share beauty. And to do all this for no other reason than the sheer giftedness and goodness of it—the delight and deep joy of being caught up in the beautiful.

* * *

A second essential element for living a purposeful, grateful, mindful life is love. Love is the calling of each of us in this world. That we have evacuated the word “love” of its core meaning, which is to will and to work for another’s flourishing, makes it no less a claim on our lives. I hope you will carry the love you have found here in friendships and communities into the future that awaits you. I hope you will love those who are often deemed unloveable. By which I don’t mean tolerate them. Tolerance costs us nothing. Loving others–seeking their good, willing their happiness, choosing to spend time in their company because all persons have beautiful gifts to offer—this is the risky business of building the beloved community and of living more fully into our humanity.

I also hope you know your own belovedness. Isn’t it true that the hardest person to love sometimes is yourself? Some of you have had love withheld from you—something maddening and heartbreaking to those of us who have come to know and love you. I think of this line from the 14^th century Persian poet Hafiz: I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being. And as another poet has said, sometimes / it is necessary /to reteach a thing its loveliness.[2]

And I hope you’ll love the world. By which I don’t mean what is typically referred to as “the environment.” I mean particular rivers, creeks, lakes, oceans, mountains, glades, woodlands, trees, creatures, plants—all of whom have names and to whom we all are kin. I hope you’ll regularly find yourself happily lost on a walk in the woods. I hope you’ll dig in the dirt, plant a garden, and grow some of your own food. There is a cognitive richness and a moral significance to such physical labor. Don’t let a college degree and a desk job keep you from such pleasures that can, quite literally, keep us grounded us in this world. 

And if you are terrified by climate collapse—by the catastrophic harm that human action has visited upon the Earth, you should be. And you shouldn’t be optimistic. But you should be hopeful. Because hope is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba has said—something we have to practice every day: both a disposition and a will to act, even when we feel despair. Climate trauma is real, especially in places like Appalachia, and so is climate grief. And thus hope is not naïve. It is the personal and collective work of resistance to powerful interests that profit from the destruction of places, lives, and livelihoods. Do that hopeful work, not because you’re optimistic that all will turn out well but because such work is the right thing to do, regardless of how it turns out.

So love with hope: other people, yourselves, this bruised, abused, and beautiful world.

* * *

Finally, a third essential element of being true to the vocation of living purposefully, gratefully, mindfully is a commitment to justice. The philosopher and social critic Cornel West has said that “justice is what love looks like in public.”[3] But that hardly rings true to the lived experiences of so many people and to what we see around us every day.

Many of you know that we have established the Center for Restorative Justice on our campus. “Restorative justice” names a constellation of convictions and practices that redefines wrongdoing broadly and its impacts specifically. Where the modern judicial system focuses on offenders and their punishment, restorative justice expands the circle of stakeholders to include those who have been harmed and members of the community as well.

A core feature of restorative justice is the idea that harm creates social obligations—the necessity of taking responsibility, putting things right, repairing what is broken. This feature flows from a worldview that imagines we live—all of us and all of creation—in a web of mutuality, and that a rupture in that web is mended, or has the potential to be mended, less by arbitrarily applied punitive measures and more through the hard, often grinding work of conversation and collaboration, of encounter and risk-taking.

There’s nothing romantic about this and there are no guarantees. Restorative justice seeks first of all to tell the truth about what is going on. As a way of seeing and being in the world, it resonates with the theological anthropology of most of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions: no human being is expendable and mercy is not only for the so-called deserving.

Graduates: I hope you have gotten a glimpse of what restorative justice can mean for your own calling. I hope you will see no one as disposable, as erasable. I hope that when you cause harm, as we all do in ways large and small, that you take responsibility for it, do the work of repair, and that those affected by it meet you in a spirit of openness that restores you to them and to yourself.

* * *

So go from this place, dear ones of the class of 2022, to live beautiful lives, to love without counting the cost, to be fierce and tender advocates for restorative justice in this punishing world. Make interesting mistakes. Work with your hands. And your heart. Practice hope. And know that we will hold your wild, weird, beautiful selves in our hearts, as we hope you will hold ours in yours.

It has been quite a journey.

We’re eager to see where yours takes you next. We are cheering you on. And we love you.

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[1] Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” in House of Light (Beacon Press, 1990).

[2] Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow,” in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1980).

[3] Cornel West, Howard University speech, April, 2011.

“Open grieving is bound up with outrage.”

Judith Butler

My father died on May 15, 2020. The next day we learned he tested positive for Covid-19 on the morning of his death. He had been in failing health for almost a year, suffering the ravages of vascular dementia’s assault on the brain and the body. But the news of the test helped explain his rapid decline in the week or so before he died. My mother, my husband, and I had been with him in his last hours. We have tested negative for the virus and have developed no symptoms. Our current self-isolation isn’t much different from the sheltering-in-place we’ve been doing since mid-March.

It goes without saying that grieving the death of a loved one in the time of coronavirus is impossibly hard and heartbreaking and weird. Wakes, funerals, burials, flowers, food, visits—all the ordinary offices and familiar rituals of death that are part of the necessary grief work of the living have been disrupted, modified, or done away with. It is difficult to know what the lasting effects will be on those who have been denied the full power of these deeply embodied practices of mourning the dead.

What should not go without saying is that this pandemic has revealed who it is we consider grievable—whose lives are worthy of our collective mourning and whose are not. Among the tens of thousands who have died so far of Covid-19, it seems that prisoners are not as grievable as celebrities, and that we do not mourn African-American women from Chicago’s South Side as much as we do white men from the suburbs.

But what makes someone grievable? What status must be afforded a person or a community for all of us to meaningfully mourn their loss? In her book Frames of War, philosopher and social theorist Judith Butler suggests that “if certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense.” I am writing this on Memorial Day when Americans sacralize the deaths of women and men who died in combat, some of them personally known and deeply loved by us. But the frame of war necessarily makes other women, men, and children—human beings who do not register as real to us—targets for destruction. In our public grieving of our own war dead, inside the frame of war, those we have killed exist with “no regard, no testimony, and [are] ungrieved when lost.” Because this is true, we ritualize days like this not with horror but with sentimentality. We couldn’t manage it otherwise.

Frames are saturated with power. Given the ways that power works at the intersections of and through the frames of race, class, gender, ability, health, nationality, etc., higher Covid-19 death rates among black and brown people have to do with decades-long, systemic injustices like redlining and lack of access to good work and quality healthcare. The stresses of this kind of carefully constructed poverty are predictors of conditions like hypertension and diabetes—the comorbidities epidemiologists talk about and the illnesses which make our African-American and Latinx neighbors more likely than whites to die from coronavirus.

Butler also suggests that at the edges of the frames through which the world is organized for us, it is possible to apprehend, if we are paying attention, the precarious condition of all those whose lives are targeted in one way or another. And this apprehension of another’s precariousness is implicitly an apprehension of our own. She writes:

“The recognition of shared precariousness introduces strong normative commitments of equality and invites a more robust universalizing of rights that seeks to address basic human needs for food, shelter, and other conditions for persisting and flourishing.”

While human biology has humbled us of late—we are all precariously situated vis-à-vis this novel virus—we are not all equally vulnerable. The vulnerable have been mostly invisible. But what if seeing the vulnerable and grieving the vulnerable dead became the measure of our actions in these precarious times? What if we took the outrage that always acccompanies grief and put it to work?

• We might recognize that much of the rhetoric around the demand to “reopen the economy now” is really about disaster capitalism, which has always preyed on the most vulnerable.
• We might decide that the Church is, in Pope Francis’ words, a field hospital for the sick–the opposite of a self-referential, dispensary of goods and services to which we think we have a right.

“It is to the stranger that we are bound,” says Butler, “the one, or the ones, we never knew or never chose.” It is in this recognition that we have the hope of finding grievable every precious life lost to Covid-19.

 

In my Environmental Theology course last fall, my students and I read Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction novel Parable of the Sower. The first volume in an unfinished trilogy (Butler died suddenly before the third book was complete), the narrative unfolds through the journal entries of Lauren Olamina, an African-American teen who navigates life in a dystopian America in the mid-2020s. Social, economic, and environmental collapse force Lauren and everyone else to survive however they can in a frightening, dangerous world.

Many have noted Butler’s prescience in crafting the Parable series in the early 1990s. Late capitalism, climate change, police brutality, mass incarceration, gun violence, the mistreatment of immigrants—all are themes that inform the narrative arc of the series, with the second book, Parable of the Talents, featuring a presidential candidate whose campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again.” Butler may have had a sixth sense about the future but she was also writing in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s two terms in office. Deregulation, deference to the N.R.A., and the decimation of black communities in the war on drugs gave Butler plenty to work with as she imagined a grim social reality twenty years into the new millennium.

But I’m a theologian and college professor, not an economist or social theorist, and so I have found Butler’s work illuminating for other (related) reasons. Because I assign Parable of the Sower in an Environmental Theology class, we are already interrogating some of the intersections that Butler’s intersectional novel is built on: What theological claims can be made—from the perspective of several religious traditions—about the linguistic construction “the environment”? How is environmental racism an indictment of both public policy and spiritual practice? If climate science paints an increasingly dystopian picture of our planet’s future, is hope a now-vacuous theological category?

Lauren, the daughter of a Baptist minister, develops her own belief system called Earthseed, the primary tenet of which is “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” While this echoes elements of Christian process theology and may or may not be attractive to readers with religious sensibilities, the novel also draws deftly on Buddhist insights and the wisdom of the Bible, as the title suggests.

Lauren is a reluctant prophet but a surprisingly capable one. As she flees her family’s walled compound in southern California in search of whatever safety can be found, others experiencing the same stresses, fears, and dangers are drawn to her: people of color like herself, a mixed-race couple, migrants, young children. This motley collection of folks is a liability to Lauren’s well-planned, well-provisioned quest, but she gathers them in and leads them on, since she operates on the assumptions that everything and everyone is connected, that difference is a gift, and that the flourishing of one depends on the well-being of all.

The logic of interconnectedness has revealed itself in the Covid-19 crisis. We can infect each other, so interconnected are we through biology and by how we inhabit and move through space. And we can take care of each other, interconnected as we are through our shared vulnerabilities.

Unsurprisingly, injustices have also been revealed in this crisis, for we are not all equally vulnerable. Lack of job security and unpaid sick leave, for instance, have become even more acute burdens for millions of people. Is this, then, a cultural moment in which the privileged, in the words of another Butler—critical theorist, Judith Butler—might finally apprehend “the precarity of others—their exposure to violence, their socially induced transience and dispensability?”

Speculative fiction, like much science fiction, is social commentary. Butler’s Parable novels are less about predicting the future and more about imagining justice in the here and now. Her vast literary corpus has inspired the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice, the Emergent Strategy movement, and the podcast How to Survive the End of the World. These efforts operate from a place of fierce hope, from the conviction that other worlds are possible.

Václav Havel famously wrote that hope is “the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” This is why the worst thing, whether its climate collapse or coronavirus, need not leave us hopeless, since hope is not about happy endings. Covid-19 presents the opportunity to practice hope concretely—politically, economically, and legislatively—because it makes sense to do so. Humane measures already being implemented could be the beginning of a new political economy committed to liberty and justice for all, not just a few. Other worlds are possible.

And as Octavia Butler tells us, in the wise words of Lauren Olamina: “Your teachers are all around you. All that you perceive, all that you experience, all that is given to you or taken from you, all that you love or hate, need or fear will teach you—if you will learn.”

Observations, laments, wishes, and perplexities at the end of a spring-like, spring break-Wednesday. In no particular order:

1. Why do so many people think that ‘democratic socialism’ means ‘Stalinist authoritarianism’ and why has Bernie failed to put miles and miles between the two?

2. Maybe the posthumous disgrace Jean Vanier brought on himself and his legacy will allow particular L’Arche communities and the leadership of L’Arche International to enter a spotlight that was always too much on him anyway.

3. Fig jam (or orange marmalade) + Gorgonzola cheese + fresh rosemary on warmed naan, slid into a very hot oven for a very short time = delicious.

4. Churches are almost never good at resolving conflict. The more I learn about and implement restorative practices/restorative justice in my teaching, the more I see the lost opportunities for repairing harm and mending brokenness in ecclesial communities of all kinds.

5. Reading social media posts by persons whose political views differ from my own sometimes feels like exhibitionism. I’m routinely shocked by what is exposed: ignorance and lack of nuance, yes, but it’s the cruelty that astonishes me.

6. I am moved by students who, when asked to read Rowan Williams’s The Body’s Grace, write essays of such erudition, insight, and tenderness. I didn’t teach that difficult piece nearly as well as they wrote about it.

7. A short run on a spring-like, spring-break Wednesday evening does a body good.

I am in a remote place of scenic beauty working on a project that, in part, explores how the world is given to us only through language, and how there is an intrinsic link between the loss of linguistic capacity (our ability to speak truthfully, to wield language responsibly) and the loss of the world (its destruction by forces of hatred and self-interest and our culture’s willing and often unwitting collusion with them).

And in the wake of two mass shootings (I will not call them “senseless”—they make perfect, inevitable, heartbreaking, enraging sense to me), I’m reminded that what people “see” is completely connected to how language shapes our seeing. So if the U.S. is constructed for you linguistically as the story of American exceptionalism with its various plot points of dangerous outsiders and protect our own and democratic socialism must mean Stalinist authoritarianism and the founding fathers were evangelical Christians and guns are a sacred right and why keep talking about slavery and Hillary should be in prison and why can’t gays just keep it to themselves and who’s to say humans are really causing climate change and young, white men who shoot up night clubs and Walmarts are mentally ill and thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers . . .

Then we will not get past this linguistic impasse where what I see is the story of America as an imperial project from the beginning with its various plot points of settler colonialism and lies and conquest and extermination and enslavement and racialized capitalism and the fear of the other and fearful white men who have always held all the power and astonishing cruelty to the most vulnerable and an unwillingness to be the least bit self-critical and God in heaven can’t you see the climate is effing collapsing and why do we tolerate for one second more a President who is obscene, wildly incompetent, and culpable . . .

But can both of us see the dead bodies? Hear something of their stories? Name the failures of language that keep us from keeping bodies, all bodies, safe?

I doubt it.

“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.”

Hafiz Shirazi, 14th c.

Next week I’ll have my feet washed. And I’ll wash someone’s feet.

The Ekklesia Project will gather to explore the theme of The Church As Politics, addressing issues like “the rise of nationalism and the ascendance of populist figures, the widespread employment of racial and ethnic fears and grievances, attacks on governmental, judicial, journalistic and scientific institutions, and the increasing vulnerability of migrants, refugees and all displaced people.”

I’m writing the liturgies for our three worship services and I have landed us in lament. We will surface in speech and song–as many of the Psalms do–grief, rage, doubt, and despair. Wherever we may find hope in our time together–in worship, in the plenary sessions, in table conversations–I don’t want us to rush to it too quickly. It’s hard for people of privilege to sit with discomfort, to feel bereft of solutions, to resist the impulse to fix something (or someone).

When we wash each other’s feet, we’ll be reminded of the scandal of the incarnational faith we profess: how flesh and blood and birth and danger are central features of the story we live by, a story about poverty, homelessness, political oppression, refugees on the run, authorities asking for papers, sham trials, torture, and capital punishment.

When we wash each other’s feet we’ll be reminded that divine love meets us in ordinary things, in ordinary ways: water for washing and the touch of human hands. We’ll be aware of how much our bodies (our feet, especially) embarrass us; how we prefer to live our lives (and our religious convictions) in our heads.

The ritual washing of feet in the way of Jesus is a political act. It witnesses to an alternative social order (hence the theme: the church as politics) in which power is found not in military prowess but in suffering love; in which leadership doesn’t depend on ego and the diminishment of others but on humility and open-heartedness.

The ritual washing of feet in the way of Jesus recalls the upside-down social order envisioned in that bold, defiant proclamation of Mary (no docile maiden here): He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:51-53).

The ritual washing of feet in the way of Jesus signals radical dependence, not independence. It locates the truth of the gospel in human bodies–our own and the vulnerable bodies of our neighbors: the despised, the dispossessed, the detained.

The ritual washing of feet in the way of Jesus reveals that love is the only power that can bind people together and also set them free. From fear, from self-hatred, from the wounds of the past, from government cages.

No military parades or puffed-up politicians for me today. Would that the political order that fetishizes flags and demands my singular allegiance enact real justice–which, as Cornel West famously said, is what love looks like in public. Would that it had the courage to enact policies that say to every person: “I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.”

It would feel like the caress of loving hands on weary feet.

 

A post from 2011, reworked and reposted a couple of times.

I can appreciate how difficult it must be to craft a good baccalaureate or commencement address. The need to avoid well-worn pieties while also offering something meaningful and true. The desire to be funny but not flip, sufficiently serious but not heavy-handed, memorable but not (too) controversial. And the fear of being boring–that you’ll look out over the sea of faces and, oh my god, are they texting while I’m talking? 22-year-olds can be a tough audience; I don’t envy those who stand in front of them every graduation season and do their best to challenge and inspire.

But maybe we could retire that most tiresome of commencement clichés–the one which, in some form or another and with varying degrees of finesse and facility, will be dispensed to most members of the class of 2019, whether they’re graduating from community college or the Ivy League. The one that exhorts them to go forth and “change the world.”

Could we maybe set our sights a little lower?  What if we encouraged humility and tenderness, instead of the disguised workaholism we tend to ask of them?

What if we relieved graduates of the burden to go out and do “great things” and asked them instead to be attentive and useful, merciful and generous, wherever it is they find themselves? And not to stress about where they find themselves because sometimes when you find yourself in the place you least expected to be, you find yourself.

My hunch is that college graduates would be grateful to hear that their task is not to change the world. I think they know how deeply cynical, if well-meaning, this advice is. I remember one of my young Facebook friends posting: “Graduated yesterday. Today I save the world.”

A few years ago I had a student–a senior at the time–who, after reading Living Gently in a Violent World for our class, realized that all her academic work and life experiences had been preparing her for a vocation she hadn’t been able to name: to live in a L’Arche community where she would spend hours at a time feeding or bathing or otherwise caring for persons with profound disabilities. She understood that this would not be an exercise in charity or self-congratulatory do-goodism but would be damn hard work–yet purposeful work, transformative work. Work, that as the book’s subtitle suggests, reveals the “prophetic power of weakness.”

I think about Nicole at every graduation, as the considerable accomplishments of our school’s exceptional students are highlighted (and kudos to those bright and talented young people). But let’s face it, graduating from college to go forth and spend your days wiping someone’s dirty chin or butt doesn’t register any kind of social prestige. We might admire the selflessness of it but we hardly know how to claim it as a worthy way to spend one’s “career” after all the toil (and expense) of four years of college.

Change the world? If we can start with changing a diaper or changing our mind about what success is or how to measure happiness or what matters most in life we might have something to say to the students who are listening, who–despite being a little hungover or momentarily preoccupied with a text message–long to hear a word of grace for the uncertain world that awaits them.

Seven Last Sayings
Wesley Chapel
West Virginia Wesleyan College
16 April 2019

At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34

Have you ever felt abandoned? By a friend? By your family? By the church? By God?

Abandoned: ditched, deserted, disowned, discarded, isolated, repudiated, cast off, cast aside, cast out, left out, left for good, left for dead, forgotten, forsaken.

Abandoned.

I suspect that those who have felt abandoned by the church or by God are not here tonight. That’s one of the ironies of Holy Week, isn’t it? That those who’ve been most wounded by Christianity aren’t likely to be present to discover, possibly, the consolation, ironically, at the heart of Jesus’ own cry of desolation.

We pronounce no judgment on their absence. We do not shame the friends who cannot be where people gather to tell this impossible story about friendship and betrayal, terror and hope, exclusion and mercy, imperial power and divine grace. A story given shape and substance in the life of a first-century Palestinian Jew whose raw, vulnerable humanity can sometimes make religious people like us uncomfortable.

For, if we’re honest, like the poet Mary Karr, we have to say to Jesus who hangs helplessly, raggedly, a little comically on the Empire’s preferred instrument of torture:

You’re not the figurehead on a ship. You’re not
flying anywhere, and no one’s coming to hug you.
You hang like that, a sack of flesh with the hard
trinity of nails holding you into place.

It’s a scene of utter humiliation, utter abandonment.

And we shouldn’t try to explain it. The words of abandonment, placed on the lips of Jesus by the Gospel writers appropriating the Psalms, are a mash-up of Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew. Which might mean that we have to live with the limits of language, the confusion of human speech, and with the truth that sometimes we can’t understand each other.

As one writer has said, “We do not tell stories as they are; we tell stories as we are.” And sometimes our stories, and the stories of people we love and of people we despise, are stories of forsakenness, of “belonging gone bad.”

The silence that ensues from that cry of desolation on the cross—a silence we can’t explain away with our noisy clamorings—is perhaps the opening of a space. And perhaps, in time, some will be able to safely enter that space and without fear speak their stories of forsakenness, of belonging gone bad.

Perhaps we can say to our wounded friends: we will hold your stories of abandonment and we will trust you with our own wild and weird stories, and together, maybe—who knows, this is fragile, fraught work—we will tell a different story.

A story of a first-century Palestinian Jew who emptied himself of every possible pretension, every temptation to power, every seduction of Empire. This peripatetic Rabbi, breaker of boundaries, of social taboos, of unjust laws, who taught that sin is the “addiction to being less than ourselves.”

A story which invites us into its telling, and into the consolation that there is no where in our own or anyone’s godforsakenness that the vulnerable, humiliated, abandoned Jesus hasn’t also been.

It’s a start anyway. Can we tell that story? Can we be that story?