One of the things that I hate about Jamaica is the hate that is completely culturally acceptable and expected towards anyone gay. It’s unacceptable that homophobic violence is at best given silent approval and at worst explicit encouragement by Christians (and the church) there. The video above gives an idea of how bad the problem is. Honestly, my only surprise in the video is that the guy is still alive. I have more that I can say about this, but I’ll leave it there for now.
Over the past month, I’ve had at least two online conversations where I’ve realized that the idea of a broken world was a fundamental assumption beneath the words I was saying. I had a couple of other directions to go with this series on my current personal theology, but I think it may be best to go here for a little bit.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that the world is broken. We can see negative effects of hatred and greed all over the world, and in almost every aspect of life. Hatred and greed are systemic problems, and we are the architects of the system of our demise. This brokenness is the opposite of shalom, that state of harmony with God, God’s works, and God’s creation.
We were created for shalom, but from the appearance of the first human being, we’ve chosen to reject it, and embrace hatred, selfishness, and greed. We’ve chosen, and continue to choose our independence from God over our harmony with God, and as each of us makes those choices, we become broken people. We are a society of broken people, and as such the systems of the world show this brokenness. And so every system(including religious systems) we try to create to alleviate this brokenness, fails. The truth, borne out by history, is that we just don’t have the strength to fix the brokenness on our own. But all of our systems do point towards shalom in different ways, but like the proverbial blind men, we only perceive a piece of the elephant.
So for now we remain broken, and both our planet and our people suffer for it. It’s a suffering of our own making. Like I said at the beginning, we are the architects of our own demise.
I wrote this poem about 5 years ago in a creative writing class. It feels as true now as it did then.
Bastard Child By Richard L. Daley
People call me a bastard child
Of several countries.
And they look down at me
Because I am not a true native
Of Here,
There,
Or that Other Place.
And I become a specimen,
In a zoo,
With an accent.
My language, they say, is a bastard child,
Of many tongues.
And all this music that flow past my lips
It’s nothing
But the corruption
Of better languages.
‘Cause decent people don’t understand what mi have fi say
And if they do,
They ignore my shouting in the streets
My culture is named a bastard child
Of places far away with its
Indian foods served to the beat of
African rhythms played at a banquet in a
Traditional Christian church,
And all the women wear hats
To cover their
Multihued,
Multiracial,
Hair.
And that leaves me,
The bastard child
With the locks of indentured servants
Mingled with the curls of stolen slaves
With the massa’s skin tone in my palms
And on my soles.
The sing-song voice of a Trini
Speaking the spread out, brawling words
Of a Yardie.
I am the bastard child,
Unclaimed.
Because I can’t be classified
Because the chains have not yet been made,
Nor the iron bars forged
Nor the concrete walls built
To contain my spirit
And to keep my Bastard soul
Earthbound.
So as I continue biking to work a couple times, I start learning about my own level of fitness, how quickly I can get there, and how tired I’d be when I arrived. For the most part things like that were consistent. There were some days, where the ride would, for no apparent reason, take longer and be much more difficult, and other days where it would be surprisingly easy. The reason remained hidden to me until I started noticing the wind.
While I was taking the bus I never cared about the wind, beyond how cold it would make waiting at the bus stop. But as I started biking I realized that the wind could make as much difference to my commute as hills did, and to handle it correctly I had to adjust my speed, the gear I was pedaling in, and my expectations according to how the wind was blowing.
In the same way, there are intangibles that can have as much influence on the success or failure of any effort as the tangibles. Things like culture, attitude, perception, vision, relationships are key intangibles that we should be paying attention to, particularly in ministry. Instead, we work on all the tangibles, things like program, curriculum, software and wonder why it’s so much harder to do the same thing today.
Similarly, we often substitute the tangible goals (e.g. number of attendees at a racial reconciliation workshop) for the intangible goals that are at the heart of what we are working for (e.g. having people dedicated to being anti-racism). We’ll often hit what we aim at, but it may not be what we want.
