Holier Than Thou

I’ve seen the worst of humanity this year. It is certainly not the worst humanity has ever been – 2020 doesn’t deserve that kind of credit – but, certainly the worst traits exacerbated.

I’ve seen politicians shrug in the face of unimaginable death and loss, even while holding some power to fix and change. And, I’ve seen people excuse this callousness, exposing their own.

I’ve seen the wealthiest people in the world grow unapologetically more wealthy while most of the world suffers. Folks who could simultaneously house, feed, and educate the entire world over, and still be really freaking rich, continue to take and exploit and take and exploit.

I’ve seen a police officer, after being indicted for only the walls he damaged, attempt to sue the man who watched him murder his girlfriend in her own home, and who he then arrested for firing his legally-owned gun at, what he thought were, home invaders. And I watched people blame the victims, if they allowed any of the tragedies of the Black lives taken this year flit across their radar at all.

I’ve worked in customer service and been on the receiving end of people saying some of the most awful things, things they’d never say with an audience, the sense of entitlement and complete lack of consideration in general, and certainly in light of a moment much larger than their damn books…and I really like books.

I’ve observed people who claim to worship the same Jesus I do, actually worship at the altar of something wholly unrecognizable compared to the Kingdom of God, and do so with impunity.

And, I have felt, as I’m sure comes through, that I’ve had a right to cast judgment on all the above.

I am wired in such a way that, try as I might, I am incapable of turning away. Incapable of letting things slide. Compelled to torture myself in the face of unwinnable battles.

And yet, how do I be that person, one who calls evil by its rightful name and not be the very thing that I’ve spent all of my adult years recovering from?

How do I not become holier than thou?

Trading swear word policing for the policing of casual racism

Purity culture for justice culture

Fundamentalist conservatism for my own dogmatic interpretations of Matthew 25 and Luke 4

However obviously righteous.

I don’t know.

How much energy am I supposed to spend figuring it out? For whom? To what end? When the entire history of humanity has been fighting the same battles, and we seem not much better off?

The bible doesn’t say I can’t have enemies. Quite to the contrary, it assumes them an inevitability. As a kid, I found those passages far-fetched, dramatic even. As an adult, well, it’s a different story. The bible doesn’t say I can’t have enemies. It does say I must love them.

How?

By shaming them into “right belief” as was certainly the tactic of my earliest teachers?

By “calling out and in”…

…the 74 million?

…those on Twitter who have condemned me to hell for the blasphemy of reading a poem highlighting the humanity of both Jesus and Mary in a season marked by embodiment in its most literal sense, and by making the point that those who have felt entitled to the story-telling are not even those to whom God entrusted those most sacred moments?

…those who pick fights in my DMs, justifying and explaining and asking questions they don’t really want the answers to, only to twist my words to further support the positions they already hold?

…those who claim to love me and my family, only to sell us out at the polls, with their wallets, in their private conversations, at the first hint of love’s true cost?

How to love?

Is there a way? To speak truth without inherently shaming? Is it arrogant to believe that what I’m speaking is truth at all? I don’t know. I would like to be a person who has more questions than answers. Who, like my precious, brilliant daughters, remains committed to wonder, to possibility. I want to be a person not unable to dream for better even while calling a spade a spade. A person who is able to believe in redemption without preaching some kumbaya nonsense that requires no accountability.

Is there a way? I’m not sure. But, if I’m sure of anything, it’s that there are few pursuits more worthy. I’m sure that this is worth working on and working out.

So, I’m committed to trying. I’m going to try. To continue to uncover what God has made Holy in me, and hopefully, in so doing, to uncover what God has made Holy in you. I’m sure that the alternative, as each day brings about more bad news and more perpetrators of bad news, feels like a desolation so deep as to make this life hardly worth living.