By Reverend Donna Schaper
Secular change organizations often seem tepid to us. We wonder where the passion is, where the urgency is, where the MUST joins the maybe. We don’t like living in the flats. Again our virtue tips into our vice: We can be so right that we can oppress you with our conceit. We can try to convince you to be like us, a dead ringer for bigotry of the spirit. The best I can say about my perch is that we are aware of our arrogance, the way our misguided convictions hammer others. A hammer is a hammer, whether its origin is the left or right. We are trying to mature spiritually. Censorship is our enemy. We even like some right wingers—and use the terms “open” and “closed” more than we use “right” and “left”. The reason is that we know the totalizing effect of the left and the right, including and especially the religious left, of which we are card-carrying and flagship-bearing members.
We also sometimes look down on the religions of our births, particularly those of us from Southern or Midwestern fundamentalism. Reactivity joins arrogance from time to time to make Judson a less than Christ-like place. “I am not like them!!!!” We find that self-definition more than a little juvenile. Our growing Sunday School parents say they don’t want to know any more about what other co-religionists think. They want to know what we think, what we stand for, who we are. Not who we aren’t. If we have a chance to meet, that’s what I want to know from you too. What do you love so much that you can’t let it go? Is it fairness? Or teamwork? Or justice? Do you find these words a little dusty, as I do? How do we dust them off or change them or repurpose them?
At Judson, we go exceptional when the Jesus way would tether us to the muddled middle and make us look less attractive in our boots and tights; that is the way we join New York in imagining it as the “greatest”. Our maturity would connect us to those we had to leave rather than spend our dotag e proving to ourselves that we are not them.
Why do I want to meet you? I want to know how you can help me get my ads on a tone-deaf media, which is so afraid of religion that it knocks us off the air for dumb reasons, in the same way that NPR (!) refers to all Christians as right-wing Christians, as though I didn’t exist. Bothersome as spiritual alienation and neuroses are, they are not equal to being thrown under one bus after another. Invisibility finally gets to a person. Ask Ralph Ellison.
