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Posts by Michael

I am a husband, father, minister, and writer.
by Michael

That Comment at Dinner about Manhood

The other day at dinner, we were all at the table, and you said something about “Trump.” I corrected you, told you to insert a “Mr.” and you did. Then, you went on with your story.

Since then, I’ve had a couple moments reflecting upon that parental intervention. I’ve questioned my response like I often do with you. Was it right? Where was I coming from? Was my approach authentic to the best parts of my upbringing, the parts that I want to pass on to you and to your brother?

And I’m thinking over the goods and bads of that insertion. That Mr. comes with problems. I didn’t go into the problems then, though they were on the borders of my thinking. I’m your father and a part of my role is to regularly be as close to my best thoughts as I can be because you and your brother come up with all kinds of things I want to affirm, correct, question, laugh at, or otherwise capture. It takes energy to be present. It takes energy to be a good father. I want to be both with you and number two. So the Mister.

In some ways, we’ve already discussed portions of the problematic insertion. In some ways, explaining myself at the time would have gotten us off the important point you were making and pulled us away from the more pressing matter of what you wanted to say. But this is why I blog, to post up little indications of increasingly critical and vulnerable discourse so that you and your brother will have trails of thinking where I’ve said my piece, made my peace.

There are issues with my suggestion about the current person sitting in the Oval, the broad white structure made by a lot of beautiful black hands and recently inhabited by a beautiful black family, the family there when we traveled to DC as a family so we could trek through the Museum while our president was Barack Obama.

First, everyone is worthy of being treated like a person. In my quick move to tell you how to put a handle on a last name, I was foundationally trying to say that you should treat “Trump” the way you’d treat anyone who was an adult and that isn’t by saying there name.

Second, this is an admittedly cultural application. You know people, some of them are your friends, who call people by names without handles, but that’s not the family you are being raised in, is it? Black people have conventionally raised each other to be honorable and that honor is expressed by an enduring respect for elders. That respect is easily translatable to others who aren’t old but who are older than you.

Third, you cannot restrict yourself to the limited experiences of people who use language irresponsibly. For better and worse, I am your father. You and your brother have inherited the godparental influence of Auntie Pat who on too many long rides corrected me and Uncle Mark and who wouldn’t let us get away with poor speech. I am passing that on. Of course, she has told you some of these stories herself. Both me and your dear mother are communicators in our own ways. There are certain phrases you must use, certain ones I’d strongly encourage you not to use.

Fourth, adults are adults. When you become an adult–and I plan to tell you precisely when that occurs!–those who are older are elders. As I said, adults and elders generally must be treated as, among other things, containers of deep wisdom. This comes out of your African heritage. It isn’t constricted only to blackness but it is certainly in your blackness. Your lineage includes honor for the elders.

I was coming out of these points of view. However, and now we turn toward the paradoxical and toward the ways I’m encouraging you to second-guess me and toward ways I’ve second-guessed myself on this comment at the table, some people are not worth your Mr. Some people–and I’d include this person in the Oval–are not worth your respect.

There are males who are only men by virtue of their maleness, who do everything to diminish your view of them because of how they conduct themselves in the world, and those males are not worthy of your respect. They may well be worth your acknowledgement of them as human beings, but they are unworthy of your respect. The men in your life, me among them, are aiming to teach you in how to discern which qualities make a man respectable. For now–and at the table–I was intervening, showing you this current example of a man who is unworthy.

You know because of how you are being raised by your dear mother, by me, and by our extended family (the plural collective that I’m collapsing in the singular term) that your respect is hard-won. Your respect is an indication of what it took for you to develop an idea of personhood broadly and manhood in (this) particular.

You have seen and loved and been by and loved by good men. For quick instance, your uncles are good men. All of them. For another instance, I am a good man. We are teaching you to respect yourself and how that respect is immediately and intricately related to respect for others. Since it’s hard-won, you ought not give away easily.

Giving your honor to a person means that you are extending to him or her some part of you that they ought to be able to accept, take in, and appreciate. People ought to be able to receive you, receive the pearls that come from you to use a biblical allusion. The man is the Oval, the current president of the country, is not one of those people. Again, this is complicated so I need to tell you more about why I’m offering a well-situated exception to the rule.

The current president, as you have told me, has been unkind to many people. This was a part of your heartbreak when he was elected. You remember how excited you and your peers were to vote in school, how surprised and perplexed you were when the man who said “those bad things about Mexicans and women” won. He has called for the harm of individuals and families. He has repeatedly told lies. He has admitted to participating in sexual assaults against women. He has deceived. He has consistently misapplied sacred texts, a devious consequence when a person is not a part of a sacred community. He has made decisions based upon people he knows and not taken the wide grace of counsel beyond his own comforts. He has encouraged violence and engendered, insofar as is possible for his talent, a national culture of division. He has been a successful businessmen in the United States of America without any real historically visible integration of spirituality which says more of the same. These may be true about other political misters but it has been documented by others in this president’s case and it has been experienced by you in your own life.

The current president will not always be the president. We will have others. So govern yourself accordingly. You can respect his personhood without extending to him what he would not extend to you. You can respect his personhood without accepting the type of masculinity that he models.

I wish I could tell you to use me as a guide. In some ways, you necessarily use me as a guide and measure of manhood. That is a delightful, bruising, high burden for me. But I’m imperfect as I often tell you. What I’m happy to do is point to the very contours from which you will judge me and judge others. Use these mentionings to hold me to the accountability of your best notions of respect. And use them to judge others too. They’re good enough for that, these cultivated ramblings.

by Michael

Park Swings

I heard Nina Li Coomes, a poet from Japan and Chicago, and her poem–which I got to by her essay in my inbox through the On Being newsletter–made me think of you. It made me think of your brother, too, but the thought of you came first.

Her poem was written to her unborn daughter and for a moment the title of the poem, spoken at a Chicago slam which Nina won, felt implausible to me, felt foreign to me because of my deep experience with you boys, felt distant to me because your mother used to say all the time how she thought I’d soften if I ever had a daughter and how she wanted to see that softening.

Presumably I’ve spent a lot of time hardening. Well, I should be honest that it’s not a presumption. I have hardened. I could insert the things I’ve said in a dozen ways before to explain that calcifying of my heart, that drying of my spirit, and provide departure points that begin with you, extend with your brother, and deepen in the country of loss that I live in while being a father whose own father exists in memories, in pictures, in videos, in the mouths of loved ones, in the twinkle of my mother’s eyes.

But I have softened and I thought of that softening today. I thought of it last night as I melted over the pain joy blanketing me in the quietness of a wonderful day to be a father. I softened all over again as I thought about why going to McDonald’s is so hard for me, why white and brown vans send my heart into its own swirls, why passing by parks and playing in parks with you and your brother the way we did yesterday is a trip full of complicated pleasures. These softenings remind me of the days when I held my father’s steep, chiseled hands, when he took me and my brother to eat, to play, to run, to be free. Thinking of them let me think of the hardening.

Nina’s words brought back my scholar and peer’s words while we were swinging on the swings, your brother commanding me to push and him watching you and you doing the same, smiling just the way you did when you were your brother’s age when we played in our park across from the Obama home, and me pushing you both by using the back stretch that ends of a sanchin kata that you haven’t learned yet, one you’ll do better than me. I was being a good dad and it was a way to spend the day with you and with my good dad on his birthday.

Nina’s poem had a line. You know lines because you possess many of them, keep your own like a poet awaiting his debut, inching up to the stage at Busboys, breathing lines at Louder, testing phrases at the Hyde Park Blvd bus stop, whispering them while you review a kata just before a promotion. Her line made me think of your line, which made me remember a moment that you discussed with me and your mother late one evening, after bedtime came and went.

You were distressed and that distress etched something in me that made me want to shield you. We talked it through. You and your mother had talked it through before. I heard some of it and stayed out of it. I waited until I was brought in so that you could do your thing with mommy. Then, we three discussed it. And we kept at it. I hardened in the moment because I’m used to hardening. I’m not bad at hardening. I would soften later. We would keep speaking over themes like the one you raised that night. We would edge toward the swing, lift ourselves in it, and eventually press ourselves into the blue.

Second grade would be a long grade for you (and me), longer than the others so far. It would be the grade where I heard difficulties emerge for you that were never difficulties before. It would be the grade that would show me the poverty and richness of my fathering skills. It would be the grade when me and your mother worked through how to become even better at something we do well.

It would be the grade that would deepen my longing for my own father, when I would write for him and offer my words to the sky for him to read the way I pushed my sons on swings during the holiday when their father felt free with them and, surrounded by friends over poorly coordinated leisure that worked out fine, despite his little fears that felt less strong.

You and your brother will keep swinging. The smiles in your faces tell me that. I’ll be one of the ones behind you, pushing, pausing, pressing you to extend yourselves, kick your legs, and dig into the movements of freedom. And we’ll all be engaging in that extending and kicking and digging. We’ll all be freer for it. One swing at a time. One smile at a time.

You and your brother can fight about who will write the poem. I have my thoughts about who will win.

by Michael

Reading Lynched: The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror

It’s as important to record reflections about my reading of Lynched as it is my own context for having read the book. I’ll start with my context because it sets the stage for my critical appreciation and my eventual scholarly appropriation of Dr. Sims’s work.

First, I’ve spent the last ten weeks reading and writing in the areas of Black and Womanist Theologies and African American Political Theology, and while those terms can be expansive in what they cover academically, it’s important to state those two courses as broad but immediate readying agents in my thinking about what happens in this book about Black people living in and in response to a culture of lynching. The book could easily be on the syllabi for either course. A Womanist scholar, Sims adds to the collective a historical reading of a time that’s not seen enough in the United States of American history.

Lynched is worth reading if for nothing other than its relevance to issues that many Black people are still facing around policing, community engagement, race, and political discourse. It’s relevant because as people we continue to be subjected to explicit legalized and legally authorized brutality in the form of newly designed lynching strategies, including police who still participate in the heartless, legally indefensible murder of Black bodies, while being shielded by and in some cases lauded by the governing bodies in place to protect citizens. I intend that as a theological comment even if it can be read from a particularly psychological, sociological, or ethical point of view. Lynching and living in response to it is a theological matter. As so is the support of persons who do the lynching of Black persons.

Second, aside from my current reading list, like every Black person in this country, I’ve spent the last several years participating to varying degrees in the anguish, contentment, alarm, prayerfulness, silence, and soul-bruising nature of this environment leading to our deaths. I say “our” in order to point to the corporate nature of how the long list of boys, girls, women, and men who have died as absolutely unwilling participants in the culture of lynching that pervades this country. I, like every other Black person, am recipient of the chronic, even if unseen, pain that comes from being Black and being alive, being Black and loving, being Black and wondering, being Black and hoping, being Black and quitting, being Black and fighting, being Black and parenting, being Black and serving, being Black and leading, being Black and going to the barbershop, being Black and grocery shopping for my family, being Black and driving through the suburbs, being Black and watching women clutch their purses at the sight of me, being Black and opening my empty hands when I see the police so that they see there’s nothing in them, being Black and holding my beautiful boys as much as I can while being Black.

Coming to this reading while Black was like coming to the notes of an aunt who wrote important things down, things that she said over and over while I was small but that she knew I’d listen to differently when the milk was no longer behind my ears. I’ve told you about the book already, though from a decidedly current and autobiographical sketch. That’s part of the power and beauty of a book like Lynched. It anchors you, if you’re Black, in a part of your story that you know intimately and may not be able to explicate.

That said, Dr. Sims pursued a project to conduct an oral history of experiences of lynching, inviting and meeting 50 persons from Virginia, South Carolina, New Jersey, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. Participants in her project were at least 70 years old, and she was interested in learning why people did or didn’t discuss lynching; how a culture of lynching influenced their understanding of justice or faith; and what those participants wanted future generations to know.

As she sets out onto this psychologically taxing and uplifting quest, Sims makes early notes about the ways participants first responded. People were cool to respond to church announcements promoting her study. She wondered about this and said that silence served purposes for Black elders. For some, silence was an expression of fear. For others, silence served to preserve life. The fear was not always acknowledged; it was subconscious and underneath the quiet of Black people. Fear motivated the silence as did life preservation.

In terms of preservation, when lynching wasn’t discussed and silence kept, Dr. Sims approached people directly in churches for instance, knowing that they were old enough and that their church was involved with justice long enough, so that there would be some story to tell. Those folks wouldn’t approach her always, she said, and that was to engage in any number of “countercultural techniques” like mentoring students, teaching literacy to adults, providing scholarships, and promoting arts rather than to deal directly with the bruising subject of lynching. There are those “public and private responses to moral issues” that Sims puts forward from her interviews (8).

Her stake is about the immense value of language, and stories in particular as a form of language, and its use “to minimize the gravity of lynching and the countless lives forever disrupted as a result of this practice” (16). What a comment! There is gravity. There is the impact upon countless lives. There is the longstanding word forever that names the existential disruption. There is the sad reference of the fitting word practice that captures it all. My sense from Sims is that it is uncommon to talk about lynchings, how they were publicized, how lynchings were cultural events paraded as spectacles which were government-sanctioned in order to produce terror in Black people and in Black communities and to assuage white communities by virtue of those communities’ uses of this perverted, brutal mechanism even while those white (people in) communities were community leaders like police, pastors, and politicians. The book gives insight into how hard it is to discuss this culture and why Black folks do and don’t jump into the conversation. And why whites don’t either.

For Sims, “These oral histories can serve as entry points to provide the human community another frame of reference from which to examine diverse ways in which notions of civility frame narratives that offer insights about these individuals’ human capacity to make a conscious decision to go into their interior archives and determine for themselves, if, or how, they will give voice to a truth that reflects their lived reality” (33). These are contexualized analyses and constructed “alternative responses” by the people who experienced these remembered atrocities turned “cultural symbols and their embedded meanings” (66).

Throughout my reading I came to basic questions about inspecting images offered in media and education and mining the relationship between images and symbols which are those deep, abiding, hardly changeable understandings of Black people. The symbols emerge after the use and spread of images over centuries. It’s hard to see lynching as both legally wrong and morally unacceptable when centuries teach you that Black people are worthy of death, even public, gruesome government-supported death. These are character questions and cultural questions. They are critical issues that make you, whoever you are, turn and ask what you really believe about people.

This is a book about remembering rightly. It faces the direction of remembering parts of history that are not seen or not regarded and about courage that isn’t either. One main attribute that Sims lifts is “an ethic of resilient resistance” and her oral histories enact “an ability to name and respond to evil in a manner that challenges practices that are neither just nor fair” (124). In summarizing the histories as an ethic, she promotes a truer reading of what happened and what happens during lynchings. Sims offers an alternative to naming silence or speech as resilient acts of resistance against the culture of lynching.

She also includes material about how Black folk are a people just as engaged in an “ethic of forgiveness,” an ethic that can’t be held without the aforementioned resistance. After all, how can Black folk forgive without also resisting the brutal murders bringing up the need for such forgiveness? Who would suggest the need to forgive without a prior acknowledgment of the God-made flesh and humanity of the murdered? It’s important that both are in the book and that forgiveness is after the former. Also, Sims makes all the interviews public. Look into her notes to find the wide trail to them.

In terms of my critique, I don’t think Sims goes far enough with her employment of the liturgical review of baptism. It’s clear that she’s leaning toward the historical and that she wants to respect her interviewees while not forcing a theological reading upon their work. I think she wants their words to shine rather than her interpretation of them. Still, I think she could have added a chapter to work out her own theological renderings of the interviews. She hints at this, of course, saying “the act of remembering is symbolized as a ritual of baptism—not a literal baptism by water, but a symbolic immersion that plunged and invited me to journey with participants into repressed, suppressed, reconfigured, and ritualized memories as they remembered lynching and a culture of lynching…” (5). Sims’s work is a social-cultural-religious approach to these primary narratives as sources of discovery and meaning. These narratives are gifts that Sims gives us, grants us access to, and it’s important that others come along to work with these narratives as they’re presented. I don’t fault Sims for her not dealing for pointedly with theological matters. I respect what she’s set out to do. She’s left more to be done, rather for her next works or for those of us picking up this book and living with it in our memories.

If you read this book and find it interesting to your soul; if you read it and you want to step into similar reads, I’d commend James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom, Kelly Brown Douglas’s Stand Your Ground and Terrance Johnson’s Tragic Soul-Life. These are not fun reads. Like Lynched, they are important, sobering theological works that help ground us further in the basic reality of Blackness that is faced with both uncertainty and deep certainty.

Those books, like Lynched, will remind you of what Howard Thurman called the “place for the singing of angels.” He was writing into our memories the way Thurman does about the truths recognized over and over. In Deep is the Hunger, Thurman described what is underneath these kinds of works. “Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels” (p. 92). That’s the kind of spirit underneath the oral histories of Sims’s project. Her interviews possess the spoken words, the hard-won melodies, and the unshakeable echoes of Black people who in the face of their own harsh discords decided to speak and to sing. May the Listener of our prayers encourage us to keep speaking, to keep singing, and to keep listening to our beautiful selves. And may in that collective chorus, we move toward transformation.

by Michael

You Wonder

A couple months ago, I took to the hermitage Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches and Joyce Rupp’s My Soul Feels Lean, two collections of poetry. I commend both to you.

With Ewing’s collection, I found myself relating to a new-to-me voice whose poetry revisited the streets and experiences of Chicago, along with the lovely images and scenes of blackness that she wisely integrated. A sociologist of education, Ewing may be my Chicago poet, after Professor Gwendolyn Brooks.

I’ve read Rupp’s book a few times, especially at transitional moments where loss, grief, love, and potential are at the tips of my fingers. If you want to read either of them, you should!

Of the many things I could pass onto you, here’s the one from Joyce Rupp that may open you to your own inquiry:

You Wonder

You wonder

why you take those daily

steps, pushing

to get your work done,

to conform to a schedule

beyond accomplishment.

You wonder

when you end each day

with the discomfort

of not making the mark,

leaving much undone, unsaid,

unloved, unresolved.

You wonder

how you could miss

those moments of friendship,

those invitations to compassion,

those connections to a world

not of your making.

You wonder

if you could live differently,

more in tune with your true self,

more in step with your deepest desires,

more in love with cosmic beauty,

more in sync with the world’s desolate.

You wonder,

but then you continue forward

on the same old trek of dull

repetition, karmic garbage,

and sludgy unawareness.

by Michael

hooks on “addressing universal concerns”

My experience as a southern working-class black female from a religious family has shaped the way I see the world. Yet the specificity of that experience does not keep me from addressing universal concerns. It is not an either/or issue and never has been. Both in our past and present the tyranny of race, gender, and social biases has meant that disenfranchised writers have had to struggle for voice and recognition in ways that highlight identity. That struggle has not ended, as we must now resist the form recognition takes when these categories are then deployed to confine and restrict our voices. If long-standing structures of hierarchy and domination were not still in place and daily reinscribed, calling attention to a writer’s race, gender, class, or sexual practice would illuminate work, expand awareness and understanding.

bell hooks (in “Writing Without Labels”) discussing life as a writer working around, with, and without labels, articulating a core piece of identity on display through the universalizing work of words.

by Michael

What You Should Not Say

Do not tell me

there will be a blessing

in the breaking,

that it will ever

be a grace

to wake into this life

so altered,

this world

so without.

Do not tell me

of the blessing

that will come

in the absence.

Do not tell me

that what does not

kill me

will make me strong

or that God will not

send me more than I

can bear.

Do not tell me

this will make me

more compassionate,

more loving,

more holy.

Do not tell me

this will make me

more grateful for what

I had.

Do not tell me

I was lucky.

Do not even tell me

there will be a blessing.

Give me instead

the blessing

of breathing with me.

Give me instead

the blessing

of sitting with me

when you cannot think

of what to say.

Give me instead

the blessing

of asking about him–

how we met

or what I loved most

about the life

we have shared;

ask for a story

or tell me one

because a story is, finally,

the only place on earth

he lives now.

If you could know

what grace lives

in such a blessing,

you would never cease

to offer it.

If you could glimpse

the solace and sweetness

that abide there,

you would never wonder

if there was a blessing

you could give

that would be better

than this–

the blessing of

your own heart

opened

and beating

with mine.

This is from Jan Richardson’s latest book, The Cure for Sorrow, a collection of blessings she wrote after the unexpected death of her husband. I’m thinking through an upcoming summer unit with new chaplain interns, thinking through a writing prompt friends gave me, and considering the integration of loss, of words, of self and of care. I commend the book to you if you consider such things yourself.

by Michael

New Names

I was listening to someone speak about a passage in the Hebrew Bible, in the earlier part of Genesis that describes how God changed Jacob’s name. The speaker did not say this but it came to me–and I’ve likely heard this before in someone’s sermon–that God was offering Jacob a wonderful gift in that passage.

When the angel of God inquired about the man’s name, the answer was “My name is Jacob.” Of course that’s what he said. The angel or God, whichever you choose, then, told Jacob that his name wasn’t Jacob but Israel.

In a sense, God changed Jacob’s name. It was the only name Jacob knew to that point. In another way, God gave Jacob his real name, the name he always had, the name Jacob wasn’t aware of, the name Jacob hadn’t been used to using.

And I ask, Was it God or Jacob who needed to know the new name? It wasn’t God, right? Hadn’t God already had a name for Jacob who was known by some other title?

God gave Jacob the name he always had but had not been called. Rather than call him a con, God called the man royal. The naming was a true naming and a truer knowing of who Jacob was (i.e., Israel).

Perhaps it’s worth holding onto the truth that God knows who you are and calls you who you are. It may not be in fashion and it may not be common speech, your name, and it can still be true. In other words, even if others call you something else, you can take your real name as truth.

Maybe you did earn the other, more common label. Maybe that name, Jacob say, fits. And still, the Divine comes to say something about you that fits better. God names you Israel. Try that on.

by Michael

Telling Others What You Hear

I started graduate school last fall in a program that prepares scholars to teach in pastoral care, pastoral counseling, and pastoral psychotherapy. I’m not in the clinical track, though it’s set up in order to deepen students’ clinical skills. I knew when I started school that I was also continuing in my work as a supervisor in ACPE. I knew I was meeting committee (in November of 2017) and again (in November of 2018). I knew of some of the feedback throughout my supervisory education process and that it’d be with me still when I started school. I knew because of these specific “events” that I’d re-enter individual therapy.

My committee in November gave me 2 recommendations that I wanted to take into therapy. I was also in the midst of an important departure from ending 16 years of congregational ministry, which meant a significant role loss; that was something I wanted to use therapy to reflect upon. I would add individual therapy to my list of venues of growth.

I started in January, and it felt familiar to me, and good. Don’t worry. I will not expose my experiences in therapy on this blog! But I will say one specific thing. Consider sharing what you get from your venues of growth with people who will help you grow, heal, deepen, and live.

If you keep what you learn to yourself or if you keep it within that venue, it won’t go far. It won’t spread. And it will be limited in how it reemerges in your ears. You won’t see it or hear it in the words and faces of others. In other words, you’ll forget about it. You’ll lose touch with it. You’ll restrict your possibilities to use what you get.

I’m using therapy as a venue of growth, but I’m adding it to supervisory education, spiritual direction, collegial conversation, and so on. Your venue may not be therapy for your venue to be therapeutic.

I used to tell people during pastoral care conversations at church that they should consider what to share with small group members or relatives. Those were the people who would come alongside my conversation partners, who would help them live toward what they discovered in worship, in prayer, and in spiritual conversations.

If you could do it all yourself, then the counsel would fall flat. But you can’t do it all by yourself. You never could. So when your pastor tells you something meaningful, share that with your cousin who texts you a million times a week. She can bring it up, ask you how it’s going using what your pastor said. You get the idea?

I started. I occasionally tell very close people what happens in my therapy. It’s a way of sharing my experience. It’s a way for me to keep using, speaking about, and practicing self-discovery on the way toward living. If it wasn’t helpful, I wouldn’t be in therapy. And if it is helpful, I need to keep it going. Sharing what I hear with others, helps me keep it going. What will help you keep your growth going?

by Michael

Reading Broken Yet Beloved

I had an idea that I’d occasionally review some of the books I’ve read while in this course of study at Garrett-Evangelical. It hasn’t worked out the way I wanted. Revision is the issue.

I’ve probably read a book or two a week since September for my courses (that’s on the low side), but the writings for that educational venue don’t feel like my exact tone for this blog. Revising book reviews that I’ve worked on while in classes is a project I haven’t had luxury to add to the task list.

Nonetheless, I’m going to attempt a middle-of-my-roads review, one that isn’t strictly academic but that will still allow me to look over some of the materials of my book learnin. And I probably won’t review books from my classes necessarily but books I’m reading on the fringes since those allow me to dabble outside the strict disciplinary discussions of hermeneutics, pedagogy, and theology. I’m still experiencing the readings as more complicated to translate into this medium. So I’ll pick and choose. That said, here’s the first of what I’ll attempt to do every month or so.

Sharon Thornton wrote Broken Yet Beloved: A Pastoral Theology of the Cross as a way to offer a pastoral theological work that goes against the grain of a focused theology of glory. She wanted to offer another view, another window into how the Christian tradition could be understood and how one of its primary symbols (i.e., the cross) could be appropriated for healing of the individual and the social. Perching against a theology of glory, her book delves into a view of the cross and its corresponding expression not of glory but of suffering. As she begins the book, Thornton summarizes the many theological spheres in which this kind of theological review has been done. She lifts up the spectrum of theological artistry in the African American, Asian American, Feminist, Liberation and Womanist Theologies.

I’m grateful that she does this in her effort to expand on how, presumably, other theological fields can incorporate what these other diverse communities have incorporated, learned from and lived in relation to the cross. It’s not hard to feel Thornton. Indeed, I found myself stalled by the strong ways she worked around what for me are the edges of pastoral theology. Thinking of my own experience, I felt her but also found myself grateful that our worlds were so different. I was already with her around how important and immediately-and-inherently-implanted into the work of pastoral theologians these diverse expressions are in my own worldview. Since the publication of her book, the field has reflected the commitment that Thornton voiced. Again, I’m grateful for her record of how the field has traveled across the roads of theological exclusion and inching openness versus the hospitality that I’ve come up with as a pastor and, now, an emerging scholar.

Among the threads to her focus on suffering—and the natural descriptors that relate to suffering like poor and marginalized and people of color and children—is a basic theme of how an individualistic root sits at the core of United States of American theology in churches and pastoral care. She pulls Ahlstrom’s term, root systems to discuss the “rampant anarchic economic individualism and racism as this country’s root systems (28). One tie she makes to the individualistic thread is how the world around us communicates value before God based upon the individual’s progress in society and production in an economy. Another is the influence of this focus on individualized forms of pastoral counseling and how it doesn’t traditionally include in its healing work the social analysis that Thornton is working to put forward as part of quality spiritual care. She lifts up several effects of an individualized focus and discusses critically myths at the core of an individual psychotherapeutic worldview. Among them are the myth of individual autonomy, the myth of diagnosis, the myth of insight, the myth of self-realization, the myth of science, and the myth of functionalism.

Thornton draws upon feminist, womanist, and systematic theologians from the last several decades to illuminate the movement within pastoral theology and to become more relational, more forthright about the interaction between the individual and the society, and how mutuality exists as a key motif for human communities. She describes these as a “welcome corrective that is beginning to impact pastoral theology and new vision of community.” (33). Thornton goes on in the book to describe this new vision, and she places suffering at the center of what she sees. Persons are simply unable to realize themselves or to grow without being in relation to what Thornton calls a public renewal. Without such renewal, each of these myths lead to “a disposition that fosters a kind of shortsightedness that does little to encourage us to look for hope and inspiration beyond our own private worlds.” (36).

Her comment points in the direction of Thornton’s findings about the myths. They either discredit faith at an essential level or force an artificial split between individuals and social context. In her criticism, Thornton reaches for dialogue between multiple disciplines. She says, “Pastoral theology must remain close to its source and engaged in addressing the face-to-face needs of the people.” (42) and in remaining close, she argues for shaping, interpreting, and practicing care that generates from the “perspective of those seeking relief” rather than from the caregiver’s perspective. In her largely historical review of what thoughtful practitioners developed in terms of pastoral theology, Thornton doesn’t jettison previous conceptualizations of theology and practice. Rather, she situates them as persons in dialogue, in their own way, and “trying to salvage a world that had been unprecedentedly damaged…” (43) Their world was damaged beyond repair, fragmented, and witness to the untamable aspects of life. (43) With this fragmentation came a corresponding deep fracturing of the relationship between theology and psychology.

In placing suffering in the center of a new vision, Thornton says we have access to true holiness that “can renew our lives and restore meaning to our days.” (46). She discusses how pastoral theology has been opening to suffering by acknowledging loss and the despair of the human heart and not only focusing on individual growth and insight. Drawing upon Hall’s conception of cynicism, she shows the difference between cynicism and optimism and how those two eclipse the holy “as God becomes seen as ineffective and untrustworthy, or simply absent” eventually for the cynic (48) and “separate and apart from all opposing and harsh realities” for the optimist (49). Thornton suggests a corresponding eclipse of self and longing within humanity that is being expressed through pastoral theological work. She points to the reclamation of pastoral theology (when an initial claim has first been made). “Too often the past has been arbitrarily chosen and not “critically retrieved” as a resource for current pastoral practices.

We cannot simply appropriate traditions or knowledge from one context and transfer them to another without examining their inherited worldviews and cultural biases.” (56). This critical observation about the pastoral theological task opens the way for Thornton to address her political theology of the cross, her critique of atonement theories (particularly Anselm’s substitutionary redemption and Abelard’s moral influence theory) and the “thin tradition,” her withdrawal upon Hall’s term to discuss hope and despair. In this presentation she asserts a historical and cultural survey of the cross and her summary is helpful for the person distant from how crucifixion was understood by Jews and Romans and Christians. Throughout her work is a theme around the communal understanding, use, and appropriation of suffering (and the cross) as opposed to interpretations for the individual soul.

In terms of appreciative critique, I found that Thornton acknowledged the work of Womanist Theology and Feminist Theology but she did not ground her project in these theological streams. I wondered why because her work sat well in both those streams. Thornton chose a few primary theological interlocutors, a choice every scholar makes, and her selection was wise and understandable even if it was directed away from the important contributions of Womanist theologians in favor of Feminist theologians (primarily Soelle). Thornton articulated a desire for pastoral theology to “attend to race, class, and economic factors in every aspect of our discipline” (29) but said so without accepting how she was working in her own discipline the way many others have fruitfully done in those two particular theological communities.

I think that Thornton has conversation partners in those places that she did not use. I was finished with her book before I started Sisters in the Wilderness (by Delores Williams), and Williams would have been working through her projects around the same times as Thornton. They seem to be sister-friends in thought, and I wonder if Thornton lost an opportunity there.