Before I get into the post, I want to address some critical points in which understanding this post will make sense. 1) These are my thoughts, observations, and reflections on things I have seen throughout the pandemic and in Christ Kaleidoscope. In other words, I am not complaining, nor is this an evaluation of people. It may be uncomfortable to read this post, but this is not coming from a place of condescension or anger, but from a place of discipline in acknowledging my own vulnerability. 2) This particular post requires much more than what I originally anticipated. Originally, I wanted to give a brief overview of my experience of the pandemic and connect it to American society and pop culture. I mean, I can still do that! However, I know myself too well to be satisfied with that plan. Meaning, this post would require some theology. 3) The theological literature on “place” and/or “displacement” is not a discipline that I am too familiar with and not as easily accessible to the general public. Therefore, it requires me to look into more academic and “heady” literature. I confess that I don’t think I fully understand the theology of “place”, but I will try to distill some of the more digestible thoughts. Was this an excuse for me to read academic and theologically heavy works? You tell me. 4) This is not a post on how the pandemic affected my mental health, but it will shed some light on my mental state throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are curious how I am doing now, I am doing great and I am grateful that is the case!

J.R.R. Tolkien and Lord of the Rings

 As a World War I veteran who notably fought in the bloody Battle of Somme and lived through the most destructive war in our history (World War II), J.R.R. Tolkien and his experience with both world wars reflected deeply in his work. Tolkien hated allegories and never meant for anything from Middle Earth to directly represent something in our world. However, his ideas, thoughts, and understanding of war and the human condition clearly leaked into his written work. As a result, in regards to a soldier’s homecoming, he knew and understood the experience that soldiers would feel after being confronted by the fears and sadness of war – a sense of displacement.

LOTR The Return of the King – Homeward Bound

The moment we find our four hobbits back in the Shire and in the pub is a poignant one. The director, Peter Jackson, beautifully captures the feeling of displacement for our heroes. Not because the other hobbits are completely oblivious or don’t care, but because the Shire hobbits lived experiences no longer match with Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin anymore. Therefore, the feeling of “not fitting in” and isolation creeps up on them. They look at each other and think “what do we do now? After all we’ve seen, after all we’ve experienced, how do we go back to our normal lives?” However, all is not lost for our four heroes and we see that they begin to joyfully acclimate back into their old lives (more or less), but somehow we still see Frodo feeling off. The clip ends right before we get to hear Frodo’s monologue:

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”

This movie quote is quite dramatic (I mean it is a movie); however, Frodo’s speech gets to the heart of what Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin were feeling at the pub the night they came back home. 

I have watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the years and I understood, intellectually, what was going on during the pub scene. However, after living through COVID-19 for two years now, I can say with absolute certainty, I truly understand what Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin were feeling in that moment of silence surrounded by joyful drinking and laughter. 

Two Realities During COVID-19

On September 20 of 2021, The Atlantic published a story, Another Truth About Remote Work, that clarified Americans’ misconceptions about the prevalence of working from home. The Atlantic commissioned a poll from a Canadian-owned market research and analytics company called Leger. The poll asked Americans to estimate how many people had worked from home during the pandemic. The results were not entirely surprising: those working remotely tended to overestimate how many people were doing the same.

“Seventy-three percent of survey respondents who had teleworked because of the pandemic guessed that at least half of American employees had done the same. But the actual number of people who worked remotely because of COVID-19 was, at its highest point, roughly 35 percent, way back in May 2020. Let’s skip ahead to last month: About 90 percent of surveyed respondents who worked from home in August because of the pandemic guessed that at least 40 percent of American workers did too. In reality, only 13.4 percent worked from home in the final month of summer.

Part of the reason for the discrepancy comes down to basic psychology. Human beings tend to believe that other people are like us, that our thoughts and opinions are more common than they actually are, the sociologists I interviewed for this story told me. But when I answered that question so wrongly back in March, I felt a pang of embarrassment; I was out of touch. “People don’t have a great sense anymore of what the lives of others across the economic divide look like,” Jonathan J. B. Mijs, a sociology professor at Boston University, told me.”

The media coverage, in regards to working from home during the early parts of the pandemic, talked about Zoom fatigue, how to be more productive at home, and the 11 most comfortable pants to wear when working from home. Christ Kaleidoscope is hardly the exact picture of what all Americans were doing and dealing with throughout the pandemic – majority of people in the community were working from home and staying put. Understandably, it was tough for all of us to stay away from family and loved ones during a global pandemic. While I am glad I heard stories of people playing video games together, getting into a sourdough bread-making phase, staying in shape, or starting new hobbies, I could not help but recognize that I was living a different kind of reality than 98% of the people in CK.

During the winter surge of late 2020 and early 2021, every day I counted how many sirens I would hear from outside as a sort of game to myself. I eventually stopped counting after a while, but I think on average I was hearing a total of 20 sirens going off a day. I would come out day in and day out seeing multiple fire trucks and ambulances parked outside the Emergency Room with lines of patients on gurneys (attached to oxygen) waiting to be admitted into an already full-packed department. Like an In-N-Out employee, when the drive-thru line gets too long and busy, someone would always come out to begin admitting each patient and do a complete medical workup. 

This is one of the stories I usually tell people whenever they ask me about what it was like during the first surge of COVID-19. This is one of the milder stories I tell. However, I found myself not telling many stories about what I saw throughout the pandemic. Not because I didn’t have any stories to tell or I was too sad about what was happening, but because there was a sinking feeling in my gut that told me that no one really wanted to hear them. Moreover, I felt that no one could really understand or relate with me unless they were in healthcare themselves. I wasn’t the only one who had this thought. This language of us vs. them, healthcare vs. non-healthcare, or frontline workers vs. people working from home was ubiquitous on the healthcare threads of Reddit. Doctors, nurses, and emergency service workers complained how family, friends, and the public didn’t really fully understand what was going on. Not just what the pandemic has done to our healthcare system, but also how dangerous COVID-19 truly is. “They don’t see what we’ve been seeing! They don’t understand!” they would exclaim.

Living through COVID-19 and coming back into a community like Christ Kaleidoscope has been a jarring experience for two reasons. 1) People seem to easily get back into the rhythm of talking as if no time has passed for them. It was obviously easier for people who worked from home to relate to one another. In contrast, from the perspective of someone living in what seems to be a liminal space, it was-and still is-hard to be present. It was easier for me to relate with my coworkers and other healthcare workers. 2) Risk factors are understandably, but frustratingly different. Although I hold a pretty safe and conservative view towards COVID-19 safety, it is tough to hold strong safety views in a community full of non-healthcare workers. 

This has led to many thoughts and feelings of displacement for me in Christ Kaleidoscope. If I am to be completely honest, that sense of displacement when I am with people hasn’t fully gone away for me. Yes, I have since worked through it, but it will always linger in the back of my mind. As a result, this caused a sense of loss in my identity and belonging in a church community. In other words, I gave up on my identity as a member of a church community that was taken from me by COVID-19 and quarantine because, throughout this entire pandemic, I was always reminded that I had been living a very different life than most people in CK.  

Theology of Place and Displacement

We live in an era of displacement. Our country has undocumented people who are deported, sent back to a “home country” that many do not consider home. Others live in fear of deportation, trapped in the precarious space of the in-between. We can also use the Russia-Ukraine war as a prime example of displacement found in our world. Displacement raises existential questions (human personhood, meaning, suffering, and belonging) to which the church is called to think theologically and respond to displacement.

The concept of “place” invokes the language of “making room” or “making space”. Within the Christian context, “place” is often defined as socio-spatial communities of creaturely life and is a means of grace by which God reveals himself to us.

What we find in the Christian tradition is a great deal of understanding of “place”. That is, the Christian faith answers the question of how Christianity can be good news in a world of displacement and loss of “place”. Theologically, we answer this question by saying the means of inhabiting creation is God in Christ investing himself in creation and reveals God as thoroughly committed to its good, to make it a place again for the fullness of creaturely life in God’s presence. In other words, the incarnation, death, and resurrection are God’s acts of self-revelation and are demonstrating God’s devotion to be fully present by inhabiting a place of creation. As a result, the risen Christ makes the church his body and calls it to inhabit creation as himself: a bodily manifestation (or eikon) that makes space in creation for creaturely life to flourish.

There And Back Again?

I don’t know if there’s an answer to how we can reconcile the two realities. I think in giving a suggestion or an answer, it would come off as dismissive to how someone might think and feel. I have learned that I’m not a fan of receiving unsolicited advice, so I’m going to avoid giving one out. For that reason, I’m gonna end this post with a Lord of the Rings quote. I think this quote is the necessary language of encouragement and gentle wisdom for people who feel displaced and for people who can make space for others should hear:

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.“

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Loss vs Sacrifice

Video games, at their best, are artistically and narratively compelling blockbusters. Often allowing players to be transported into new kinds of realities, perspectives, and mythos that can speak to our human condition. Not many video games masterfully do this well, but there are gems and dialogues that can capture someone’s attention and imagination.

In the last decade or so, YouTube started seeing an increase of videos where people would upload all a video game’s cutscenes and a few gameplays to seamlessly create a movie-like experience. This is great for people like me who want to experience a compelling story without actually playing the game (and at 2 times the speed at that!).

Tomb Raider’s 2013 reboot of a young Lara Croft was one of those games for me. The story begins with Lara, our protagonist, going through an emotional growth arc throughout the game, beginning with a scared young woman washed ashore on a dangerous jungle island to a kick-ass heroine who is prepared to do what is necessary to survive at the end of the story. It is in this kind of media-the circumstance that the protagonist finds herself plays a big role too-that we sometimes get some food for thought on the human condition during an exchange of two characters:

“Sacrifice is a choice you make. Loss is a choice made for you.”

America and COVID-19

On March 1, 2022, during his State of the Union, President Biden announced the good news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a new masking guideline for all Americans- most Americans are now free to not wear masks. He then goes on in his speech to acknowledge what COVID-19 is and has done and what he hopes the future of America would look like.

“We have lost so much to COVID-19. Time with one another. And worst of all, so much loss of life. Let’s use this moment to reset. Let’s stop looking at COVID-19 as a partisan dividing line and see it for what it is: A God-awful disease. Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans. We can’t change how divided we’ve been. But we can change how we move forward—on COVID-19 and other issues we must face together. ”

Like Biden, many politicians in the past couple of months have spoken to this idea of moving past COVID-19 and looking forward to the future where we recognize COVID-19 as an “endemic”.

Lent

Lent is a forty-day season of reflection and preparation for the death of Jesus. It is a time of repentance and meditation, of considering Christ’s suffering and rethinking how we are called to take up our own crosses. Some of us give up things like chocolate or television during this season as a sort of fasting. As a result, we are left to rethink how we live and how we want to live. However, Lent is not necessarily a New Year’s resolution for Christians. Yes, we sacrifice and give up certain pleasures and bad habits, not because of self-improvement or righteous piety, but to reorient our lives towards the cross.

Additionally, Lent is not simply about mirroring Jesus’ fasting in the desert for forty-days and the temptations he had by Satan. Lent is a season where we hear, respond, and arrange our lives to Jesus’ call and the cross. It is a season of giving over our lives to Christ in union with his pending death. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it best, “when Christ calls a man, He bids him to come and die”.

Loss, Sacrifice, COVID-19, and Lent

Dr. Ajita Robinson, a licensed clinical counselor with expertise in grief and trauma defines loss as two categories: “physical loss” and “symbolic loss”. “Physical loss” are things that can be easily named that involve something tangible or something that can be seen. A physical loss can be a death of a loved one or a house due to fire or eviction. “Symbolic loss” on the other hand are things that we can’t see or are intrinsically intangible. A symbolic loss can be losing a sense of control or identity. However, Dr. Robinson states, “we don’t even see them as losses”. She further explains that “the challenging part of the symbolic loss is that we don’t have rituals or built-in support systems for them. So oftentimes they can accumulate when we don’t have the language to name them. This accumulation can trigger the same grief response as a physical loss”.

What does, loss, sacrifice, COVID-19, and Lent have to do with one another? True, the sacrifices that we do as Lenten practices aren’t the same as the kind of physical loss found through the pandemic. However, what this reflection series is getting at (and what I’m hoping that I’m correctly arguing for) is that we gave up on the symbolic losses that were dealt to us by the pandemic.

Whether it was for the sake of politics, mental well-being, technology, routine, etc., like a poker player, we made a calculated choice to sacrifice certain card(s) that the dealer handed to us.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers, nor do I know what we can do from here. It’s simply my reflections and my experience in looking at the past two years. However, maybe looking at COVID-19 as a Lenten experience can allow us to find the necessary language needed during this Lenten season and to live in this new “post-COVID” world.

As we “celebrate” Good Friday today, one of the more unsettling questions concerning the final hours of Jesus’ life is his refusal to respond to the false accusations made against him.

Mark 14:55-51

55 The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. 56 Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree.

57 Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: 58 “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands and in three days will build another, not made with hands.’” 59 Yet even then their testimony did not agree.

60 Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?” 61 But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer.

Why doesn’t Jesus say something?

It is this strange reluctance to give a response that is so confounding. On this, the darkest day of the Church Year, the day in which Jesus is brutally beaten and crucified, God remains silent. Is God a god too weak to speak? In this deafening silence we find ourselves caught up in the mystery of what Paul describes as the foolishness of the cross — the power of God demonstrated in and through weakness.

In what follows I’d like to reflect on the deeply emotive and masterfully melancholic song “Say Something” by A Great Big World . The song itself captures in it’s tone and melody an uneasy combination of anger, sadness and regret. The first lines of the chorus articulate so much of the undertone that perhaps we feel when it comes to a God who stays silent in the face of tragedy: 

“Say something, I’m giving up on you.”

Of course, the song on the surface is quite clearly a break-up song, but I’d like to read it through another kind of break-up: the one Judas instigates with a kiss, in which he turns from trusted disciple to jaded betrayer.

It is often assumed that Judas betrayed Jesus out of greed. That is what is heavily implied by John in his Gospel (John 12:4-6). But Matthew seems to paint a different picture. We are told Judas sells Jesus out for 30 silver coins, which is about a couple hundred dollars. In other words, it’s not all that much. What’s more, Matthew tells us that Judas was filled with so much remorse that he tried to give the money back and when the coins are thrown back in his face, he commits suicide. He is unable to live with what he did.

It is here we begin to see that Judas is much more complicated than we often give him credit for.

Some have suggested that perhaps what Judas was trying to do was force Jesus’ hand. Judas genuinely wanted God’s kingdom to come. That’s why he gave what he had and followed Jesus. He truly thought Jesus might be the one who could accomplish what so many before him had failed to do. But then Jesus kept going on about how he had to suffer many things and be rejected; how he had to be killed.

Judas, presumably thought just as Peter did. He wanted to set Jesus straight. Messiahs don’t suffer. They don’t get rejected. They don’t get killed. They inflict suffering. They do the rejecting. They go around and do the killing. So Judas, as the theory goes, made a strategic wager. He made the gamble to have Jesus arrested, to push Jesus into a corner, so that when push came to shove, Jesus would finally throw off his “lamb led to a slaughter” act and get to doing some real Messiah s#@t!

When that doesn’t happen, Judas’ is utterly broken. He bet the house and lost it all. Everything he had believed in and hoped for died on that hill.

Listen to this excerpt from writer and preacher Sarah Dylan Breuer that explores some of these themes. It takes the form of a journal entry written by Judas:

For months, I’d been traveling with him. I listened to him, comforted him, prayed with him, stood by him, shared my vision of how the world could be and how little and how much it would take to see things set right. I thought he understood, or was beginning to understand. “Do what you must,” I’d said to him, knowing that it would cost, but that either of us would give our life’s blood to see God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. This was the object of our prayers together each day, and of our silent prayers each night as we drifted to sleep beside the crackle of the fire and the steady sound of the other’s breathing, “Do what you must,” I’d said, and I thought that he was steeling himself to act.

As the time drew near, I told myself that I acted for the sake of a kingdom worth more than my life or his. I talked about resurrection as if that would cancel the cost. I talked about love, and told myself I acted in love for him and for the world we wanted to save from itself and from our enemies. And when, in the garden, he took my hand and turned the tables, I told myself that he finally understood what I had been trying to teach him. “Do what you must,” he said.

The kiss betrayed me.

In the moment I kissed him, my lies crumbled like the shell of a log burned to ash. He didn’t take up the sword, as I thought he would. He didn’t attack the soldiers and lead us to Jerusalem to destroy our enemies there. And suddenly it was all clear, stripped naked like the young man who had traveled with us and was now fleeing the soldiers. I had believed the lie that God’s rule could be purchased with violence. The lie that the big idea was bigger than our lives. The lie that I knew what love is, and the biggest lie of all—that it was my love of God that overrode my love for him. All dust.

With all this in mind, you can now hear the song as expressing the tortured memory of someone, of Judas, still coming to terms with the role he played in the death of his friend(ship).

Say something, I’m giving up on you

I’ll be the one, if you want me to

Anywhere, I would’ve followed you

Say something, I’m giving up on you

And I am feeling so small

It was over my head

I know nothing at all

And I will stumble and fall

I’m still learning to love

Just starting to crawl

Say something, I’m giving up on you

I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you

Anywhere, I would’ve followed you

Say something, I’m giving up on you

And I will swallow my pride

You’re the one that I love

And I’m saying goodbye

Say something, I’m giving up on you

And I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you

And anywhere, I would have followed you

Say something, I’m giving up on you

Say something, I’m giving up on you

Say something

This song, when heard this way, powerfully expresses the profound anguish that emerges as we hold in tension a God whose glory is somehow found in the pain and humiliation of a Roman cross. Surely God could have done it differently? And so we feel this anguish that holds within itself anger and lament, blame and humility, desperation and repentance. To enter into Good Friday is to recognize that deep within us is this poignant cry that is at once both a demand and a plea for forgiveness: “Say something, I’m giving up on you.”

As we have been through a year full of tragedy and trouble, Good Friday is a day we sit in the uncomfortable sound of God’s silence — all the meaningless pain and debilitating loss. We feel the anger that demands God to do more than to say nothing. And yet we also recognize on the cross God has said something. God has done something more than we can quite put into words.

by Ellen Huang

I’m of the opinion dark humor saves lives. There’s some catharsis in being able to joke about darker things in life, almost as if laughter helps us fear a little less. The Addams Family is bursting at the seams with dark humor— after all, it’s a family of gothic people who delight in everything witchy and spooky—and yet I find there’s something about them that is so…wholesome.

The running humor in the black-and-white TV series is the shock of people who encounter the Addams and enter their lovely home. The Addams live next to a cemetery, they house the most unusual pets, their children play with headless dolls and explosives, and they have connections with people all over the world that the neighbors would consider crazy and strange. Living among their family, the Addams also have a towering Frankenstein-monster-like butler named Lurch and a disembodied hand called Thing that helps them with the mail, both of which the Addams are very warm and appreciative to as if they no less than were regular people.

Creepiness aside, you’d also notice that their family dynamic actually looks really healthy. Gomez and Morticia are very passionate, affirming, and supportive of each other as equals. Their children Wednesday and Pugsley work together and stick up for one another often. They speak very fondly of their dead family members and are always very hospitable, be it to the fuzzy creature made of hair Cousin Itt or to any old mortal human that comes their way. The kooky family’s even comforting to watch, because they just seem to be overflowing with love.

Funnily enough, what is biblically said about love can almost all be applied to The Addams Family. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. (1 Corinthians 13: 4-5 NIV).

I think film reviewer Lindsay Ellis (aka Nostalgia Chick) hit the nail on the head when she said:

“The joke isn’t that they’re cruel or bad at parenting or have any particular disdain for the world at large. They aren’t unkind to their neighbors or to the animals, and they’re deeply devoted to their children and to each other. They joke is that they’re happy.

“The Addams Family is missing a lot of the typical sitcom tropes. There’s no mother-in-law jokes, no arguing over who is supposed to fill what gender role; both Morticia and Gomez spend roughly equal amounts of time parenting the children, and the most remarkable is the relationship between Morticia and Gomez [. . .] usually working together. Rarely will party A keep something from Party B but for the most part they form little schemes together as partners. Both are heads of the household and they almost never disrespect each other — in a genre where that’s usually the joke.

“But the reason the Addams are happy is really because they exist outside of society’s expectations. Gomez is a man child who plays with his trains and that’s fine. Morticia fences with her husband and plays with weapons often. And it doesn’t occur to them to care what people think.”

Something that stands out to me as really refreshing about The Addams Family is that they actually don’t dramatize their weirdness like many other edgy goth characters in media. They don’t compare themselves to others or get defensive about who they are. They normalize. Everything they offer their confused neighbors is genuinely out of kindness + hospitality into their home, and their lived realty is that what the world thinks of them doesn’t even exist.

No one in their house is a burden, none of their odd friends are monsters, and not even the normal humans who judge them are given anything but the benefit of the doubt.

They simply live, and they love unconditionally, and in doing so they show us another way.

I wonder if Christianity in particular is supposed to do that: show another way.

The earliest Christians, being a minority so moved by Jesus that they were even willing to die as believers, showed another way. In a world where family was defined by long genealogy lines, they found family outside of blood, following Christ’s example of emphasizing spiritual siblinghood (Matthew 12:48-50). They were to recognize the Other as part of the same Body and no longer let differences divide them (Galatians 3:28). In a world of hierarchy and oppression, they were motivated by hope and provided for each other, even to the point that “there was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold” (Acts 4:34 NRSV).

Christians were eyed suspiciously for their chosen community, their delight, for their dangerous hope, for believing anything was higher than their emperor. People judged them for their weird ritual of claiming to eat a body and drink blood (perhaps there is danger in literalism) and rumor would spread that Christians were a cult, cannibals, rebels, troublemakers. Was it some kind of joke, how they caused a scene in their nonviolent protests such as turning the other cheek when backhandedly slapped, or giving their cloak also when demanded for their coat, or running an extra mile when forced to go one mile? Why did they see humanity where they didn’t have to? In fact, in an 8th century description of Chinese Christianity, engraved as a Xi’an stele inscription, Christians were known for their unusual ways of not keeping slaves, but regarding all men, regardless of high or low status, as equals. (Source)

The early Christians, being an actual minority (much different than today), lived outside of societal expectations. They didn’t hunger for power but acted as if they didn’t need it. They were grounded in a culture of loving the neighbor and the stranger, a faith in the unseen, a delight despite darkness, and a repurposed symbol of resurrection out of what used to be an execution device. They laughed without fear of the future. They declared where, O Death, is your sting? They would become even more undignified than this. They were to be known for their peculiar ways of loving even their enemies, believing greatness is found in the one who is a servant to all, and fearing no death for their liberated way of thinking.

In the film The Addams Family Values, even when the Addams are all hooked up to electric chairs by the villainously entitled Debbie Jellinsky, who yells, “So long, everybody! Wish me luck!” the Addams are prepared to even wish her good luck (killing them). It’s ambiguous, but I’d like to think this is because they already knew that it wouldn’t kill them. (Other interpretations include that they sympathized with their enemy, loved their enemy the entire time. After all, they later bury her in the family graveyard).

Granted, we are mortal human beings, and it isn’t best advised to actually be oblivious to the rest of the world (especially during a pandemic!). Maybe in these days, we actually should hold a healthy fear and responsibility for affecting others’ lives. Maybe rejoicing about the afterlife isn’t the only faithful response to death. Maybe we can hold space for negative emotions about abusive enemies. Yet all this can be true while looking at things another way. All while living into an inclusive, redefined family dynamic such as that of the adoptive, hopeful, diverse kin—dom of God.

The joke is that they’re happy. They don’t need power, they don’t need to be in the majority, they don’t need a spirit of dominance nor conformity. They’re living as they’re created, and they’re happy.

I feel our progressive “introvert church” Christ Kaleidoscope can be that kind of light. Where love is patient, love is kind; it does not boast, nor envy, nor insist on its own way. It does not dishonor, keep record of wrongs, nor rejoice in wrongdoing. We honor everyone.

What if love couldn’t run out? What if there was room for anyone to be family? While justice and prophecy will win out, what if the powers that kill the body but not the soul were not to be feared? (But please wear a mask, the Addams would probably encourage that kind of mysterious look while saving lives still anyway). What if we were happy being the inclusive outsiders?

And perhaps in doing so, as Madeleine L’Engle would say, we’re “showing a light that is so lovely that [people] want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”

By Andrew Tai

During quarantine, two of the best movies I’ve seen have been two documentaries: The Last Dance, featuring Michael Jordan and the 1998 Chicago Bulls, and Free Solo, featuring Alex Honnold and his free solo climb (i.e. without rope) of El Capitan.  It’s fair to say that Jordan and Honnold are perhaps the two greatest athletes in their fields of all time.

Jordan and Honnold certainly have different personalities–Jordan is petty, ruthless, and unhealthily competitive; Honnold is intense and passionate too but seems to have a “whatever will be will be” attitude even during his riskiest climbs.  Yet a common theme I noticed in both of these documentaries is the impact of the words their parents spoke to them as children.

In The Last Dance, we learn that when Jordan was younger, his father favored Jordan’s older brother (who at the time was the better basketball player), and how his dad once disappointedly told him to “get back in the house with the women.”  Jordan’s sister writes, “It was my father’s early treatment of him and Daddy’s declaration of his worthlessness that became the driving force that motivated him.” 

In Free Solo, Honnold talks about how “in his entire life, no one in his family had ever used the L-word (love).”  Honnold’s dad frequently demeaned him when he was younger, and his mom’s favorite sayings were “Almost doesn’t count,” or “Good enough isn’t.”  Honnold, probably one of the most accomplished climbers in the world, talks about how he feels that “No matter how well I ever do at anything, it’s not that good.”

In reflecting on these two I’ve thought about how profoundly the voices we hear shape and influence us, and of course on what voices I’ve allowed to shape me.  I think about mixed messages I hear as a kid; on the one hand, my dad’s favorite refrain to me as a child–“As long as you try your best, you are the best”–often comes to me and brings comfort when my plans don’t go as I’d hoped or I encounter failure and disappointment.  On the other hand, I can still remember my mom’s disappointment after I got a 44% on a math test in 4th grade; I can remember the silent and tense car ride home and the immediate enrolling in Saturday morning tutoring classes.

Whether through my parents, school, or media, somewhere along the line I learned that I’d be a failure if I wasn’t successful professionally; that what matters most are my accomplishments; that people only care about me because of what I do for them.  I’ve spent years now trying to unlearn and unhear these voices, though frankly I’m not sure they’ll ever go away.  

As Christians, at the end of all our theology, our musings and reflections, our prayers and worship, lies the simple but bottomless truth that we are God’s chosen and beloved children.  God’s words to Jesus, “You are my Son, and with you I am well pleased,” are spoken not just to Christ but over all of us as well.  The Christian life can be difficult and challenging, and ultimately I think cannot be sustained apart from the continual reminder of this truth.

I pray that even during this crazy, quarantined time, you all would hear the words of God spoken over you and try your best to allow them to speak more loudly than the others in your life.  If we might let them, these words can serve as an antidote to all the voices around us that tell us we are not enough, and can move us to deeper relationship with our God and with each other.