Lee
This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
We've had a delightful first season, and so pleased that you've been with us. This is our final episode in this first season, but fret not! We shall be resuming late next month if the Lord is willing. Season one recap coming up in just a moment, in which I get to wander hither and yon through the seasons archives talking about some highlights. Welcome.
A few years ago, we did a show in Abilene, Texas. It featured poet Chris Wiman, now at Yale. Wiman's work has been hailed far and wide, and out of several profound life experiences, he had recently written a memoir in which he asked the question, “What is poetry's role when the world is burning?” This is not poetic, artistic, overly introspective hyperbole. This week, Lebanon was burned the same week that we remembered the atom bomb burning Hiroshima 75 years ago. We remain in the midst of a pandemic with a virus loose and wreaking havoc, and immense political hostility. And so indeed, what is poetry's role, or what is the role of song or story or interview when the world is burning?
Michael McRay here, on traveling to some of the world's most intense conflict zones.
Michael McRay
Michael Brown had just been killed in Ferguson. ISIS was in the news all the time. Israel was bombing Gaza. And the stories that we're hearing told publicly through the news seem to be beginning and ending with violence with no real imagination for “How is it that we can live in the midst of this, but find a way out?” And I had a strong belief that the stories that we tell directly affect our ability to imagine the world. So if we only tell one type of story, we will only see the world in one type of way.
Lee
So, perhaps we underrate imagination, as if it's a childish thing that has nothing to do with the real world. But perhaps imagination needs to be reclassified as an adult skill, and recognized as one in which we are immensely deficient. It may be that new imaginings may be the only way forward beyond the fire and hostility and the lordship of demeaning powers.
Marie Howe
We're under a constant spell of consumerism.
Lee
That's New York State Poet Laureate Marie Howe.
Marie Howe
You're having a feeling? Go out and buy something, right? You're having a feeling? Eat something, drink something. So poetry is a counterspell in that it says, “Be here exactly as you are. Be here in all your vulnerability. Be here in your bewilderment. You are not alone.”
Lee
She told about a playful counterspell she learned from her school aged daughter.
Marie Howe
She came home. There was some mean girl thing going on in school. I wish she were here because she could do it, but it's like, “Don't make me snap my fingers in a Z formation, exclamation. Talk to the hand. Talk to the wrist. Ooh, girl, you just got dissed. Oh, let her fall. I got it all. You don't. I do so poof with the attitude,” and it's this whole thing.
[Laughter]
It's like, poof with the attitude? It's like, poof. You have to do that. Anyway, it's a counterspell and I thought, that's what poetry is. Okay.
Lee
Or to pose the question to US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith on the nature of such work.
It does seem, in your current collection, that you have these poems that, on the one hand, are very disturbing that would stir up all sorts of kinds of sociopolitical questions, and yet, on the other hand, you seem to be looking for ways of reconciliation and common grounds. How do you hold both of those things together in your work?
Tracy K. Smith
Well, I think it just speaks to the capacity of art to allow us a vocabulary and even a sense of courage for facing the real and all of its troubling dimensions. And also it urges us to draw upon the kinds of resources that we have to confront that, you know, live with it in a way that's productive.
Lee
And as you know, my field is theology, and yet I think what Michael McRay, Marie Howe, and Tracy K. Smith say here is why I've been drawn to music, to story, to poetry: because religion too often stultifies, too often enslaves and burdens. And so do many forms of mass media. So does consumerism and a great deal of political rhetoric. Reading some Wendell Berry, listening to some Johnny Cash, watching the film Just Mercy, or perhaps I should add reading the poetry of the Hebrew prophets or the sermon on the Mount or the apocalypse of John: all these are steeped in the real world, and yet refuse to be constrained by a paltry imagination. They all insist that there are other possibilities. Should we want to sow seeds of peace in the world, we must first be able to imagine peaceableness, which is to say that one of the most important things we all might need to do is cultivate a fertile, fecund imagination.
Clearly some lack such imagination, as I do too often, myself. Part of the contemporary burning of the world is in its meanness. And that [Laughs] that just reminded me of something we'd say in seventh and eighth grade in Alabama. When someone said something smart-ass-y that landed a rhetorical sting on a classmate, onlookers would cry out “Oooo, burn!” And social media is, in so many ways, like being in junior high. “Oooo, burn!” Such is a comment posted on YouTube in response to Lauren White's crash course on Christian feminism episode. “Lesson one,” it said, quote, “feminism is a cancer. End of course.” End quote, clearly not having listened to the episode. It turns out that quite a few conversations this season revolved around meanness - even horrific violence - and affiliated emotions, especially emotions related to offense and forgiveness, such as anger and resentment, and that there are better and worse ways to navigate those. Particularly instructive was MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Jerry Mitchell.
Jerry Mitchell
Make it more personal: if we're angry at somebody, the idea is to go take care of that. You don't let that fester, because when it festers, that's when it kind of becomes bitterness. But I think for these kind of cases, in my opinion, what this is more like, to borrow a term, “righteous anger” or whatever you want to call it, “just anger.” And, I think it's okay to be angry in that way and, and to seek justice.
Lee
What Jerry did, of course, was not sit on Facebook and incessantly rant, and call that seeking justice. And if you missed that episode, the ways in which his work as a journalist contributed to the convictions of 24 cold murder cases from the civil rights era. It's one not to be missed. He actually let the anger fuel him for constructive work in the world.
Another instance of murder discussed in this season was singer-songwriter Ashley Cleveland sharing about a horrific episode near the end of her father's life. I've edited out some of the grizzly details, but as a reminder, Ashley's parents divorced when she was young. She'd learned later that her father was gay. They never discussed it. He had never opened up about the pain or difficulties he faced.
Ashley Cleveland
Towards the end of his life when he had macular degeneration in both eyes, he had moved into a really large condominium. There was a young man who was recommended to him. He let this kid move into the upstairs in exchange for driving him everywhere, because he couldn't drive anywhere.
Lee
So they forged a close friendship, almost like father and son. But one night suddenly and unexpectedly this young man was murdered.
Ashley Cleveland
And my father was just destroyed by it. Just shattered.
Lee
So Ashley decided to visit her dad. This was about eight months before he passed away.
Ashley Cleveland
We sat in a restaurant, and he just started talking, and talked about everything in his life, including being gay, what it was like. It was like a dam had burst, and I kept thinking, he's forgotten you're here, so don't say anything or he's going to stop talking. And he probably had. You know, he was probably in shock and very, you know, grief stricken, but it was a window into him that I had never had before. But he was almost 80 by then, and so I was pretty sure it would never happen again. So that was a gift to me. I held so much against my father because he was mean. He was so critical and so kind of high-handed with us. But when I think about how he was trying to navigate what he had been born into at the time he was born into it, I have great compassion for him. What an impossible thing.
Lee
Out of the numerous instructive elements of the story, one is surely this: to shut up and listen. And we'll come back to that in a bit. Another related element regarding meanness and affiliated emotions was dealing with criticism. This topic arose numerous times this season. Here's the conversation with author and activist Brian McLaren.
You've certainly come under lots of fire for certain things that you've said and taught and so forth. What have you found to be helpful to sustain you in saying what you think to be true?
Brian McLaren
Well you need a couple of friends who know you. If the people who know you are telling you you're terrible, that's one thing. But if it's the others, it's a little easier to bear. And then I think this is one of those places where criticism either makes us bitter or better. I think anyone who tries to step out and say and do things that received some criticism has to go deeper, and you at some level ask, “Am I doing what's right before God and my conscience?” And you just try to press on.
Lee
We covered similar territory with former Tennessee governor Bill Haslam.
What were ways that you have learned to process criticism, and/or not to let it get you to a point of despair?
Bill Haslam
I'll start with the full disclosure. I've gotten better, but not great. I mean, after a while, your skin gets tough just because you've been shot at enough times, it's like, okay, well that didn't hurt as much as I thought it would hurt. When you're in a campaign and the first time somebody runs a negative ad and you're sitting there watching the nightly news, and it's like... Crissy, literally one night we were getting ready to go to bed, and we were in Knoxville. So then the nightly news came on at 11:00 and I'm brushing my teeth. And she watches the ad and goes, “Well, I'm not so certain I want to sleep in the same house with you anymore.” Kidding. And then she runs, she promptly rolls over and goes right to sleep. And I'm staring at the ceiling for about three hours. Like, how can they say that? I think two or three things. Number one, I think, the pastor of our church in Knoxville used to... I asked him that question. He said, “I always remind myself that no matter what they think about me, they don't know the half of it, that I'm way worse than you think I am.”
And so...
Lee
Oh man. That's pretty great. That's a beautiful bit of wisdom.
Bill Haslam
That's part of it. I do remind myself, like you don't know the half of it. I think some of it also is the sense of... it's part of the calling when you're a public person. Again, I'd compare it to a pastor. A pastor, every week somebody walks out of the church and goes, “I can't believe he said that,” you know, “he's wrong.” And they go back to lunch, you know, criticizing whatever that was. So it's just part of the nature of having a public role. It's the same thing if you're the football coach for the Titans or whoever it is. I mean, it's just you, you do your job in public. So that's, that's part of what we - if you feel called to that - that's part of what comes with it. And then I think the third thing is, again, I'm not great at this, but I had to remind myself that this is part of the process of formation that God's decided to use for me. That, you know, we talk about it, until Christ is formed in you, and that criticism is part of how God has decided that that's what I need to do to form you into who I want you to be.
Lee
And on this criticism thing, I'm reminded of the book of Hebrews, in which some were being persecuted for their convictions. And the writer says something like, “Listen, I know it's tough. But just remember that you have not been persecuted like some of these other folks. Keep some perspective,” I hear that text saying. So it's good for me to remember this conversation with Martin Doblmeier on Dorothy Day, in which we were discussing one of my favorite photographs from American religious history.
Martin Doblmeier
The body posture that you see is somewhat defiant as she's being intimidated by police who've got their hands on their guns. It's really quite a photograph, but that happened in the 1970s when she was in California. So she made the trip all the way from New York in her seventies, all the way out to California, to be part of the demonstrations for Cesar Chavez in support of the Farm Workers Union. She would be arrested out there. And the famous background to the story is that she was actually telling the policemen at that time, “If you come back tomorrow at the same time, I'll be here tomorrow. If you don't arrest me, I'll be here tomorrow. And I'll recite for you the beatitudes, which is the reason why we're here. And maybe you would like to hear that, officers.”
Lee
No, I didn't know that part of the story. That's pretty great. So what, did they go on and arrest her then?
Martin Doblmeier
She was arrested while she was out there. And it was for the eighth and last time.
Lee
You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. This is our season one recap. While we take a one month or so break, we hope you would take a moment to refer us to a friend, send the link www.tokensshow.com/podcast to a fellow podcast listener. We would be so grateful if you would help us spread the word, and it will make a great deal of difference in the sustenance in the long term endeavor. We have some great, great stuff coming up in season two, and we'll look forward to being with you again soon. Part two in just a moment.
You are listening to Tokens, and our season one recap. Another thing we saw arise a number of times this season is what I once heard the famed homiletics professor from Emory, professor Fred Craddick, call “othering.” Brian McLaren got at this in a profound way.
Brian McLaren
A Catholic theologian named James Alison said, “If you give a person an enemy, you give them a crutch by which they know who they are.” So the shortcut to having an identity is giving me an enemy.
Lee
So in other words, I know who I am because I know I'm not you.
Brian McLaren
Exactly right. And it's a great way for leaders to circle the troops and increase loyalty and maybe even donations, if we give them the idea that we're protecting them from those bad other guys over there.
Lee
All sorts of othering seems to be going on around us: othering which is unnecessary, unless, that is, one needs to stoke the fires of othering, as McLaren put it, “to circle the troops” or facilitate donations. Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institute of Health and head of the Human Genome Project, put it this way.
Francis Collins
Unfortunately in this country especially - although it's true in other parts of the world, it's particularly true here - we've arrived at this strange point where it seems that the things that we have been allowed, through the intelligence that God has given us, to learn about ourselves and about the world and about the universe are somehow seen as a threat to God.
Lee
That's such a significant statement in this time in which too many are using their false piety to debunk science and expertise, and such a significant statement because it's coming from one of the world's leading scientists, that it's worth hearing it one more time.
Francis Collins
We've arrived at this strange point where it seems that the things that we have been allowed, through the intelligence that God has given us, to learn about ourselves and about the world and about the universe are somehow seen as a threat to God.
Lee
My former student Leslie Garcia moved me again with her spoken-word piece on othering.
Leslie Garcia
My mother came to this country in the back of a pickup truck.
Lee
And if you missed her moving performance, make sure to go back to episode five and listen. It's an exercise which enacts a sort of performative compassion, requiring us to put our place in the shoes of those who are too often othered in our contemporary sociopolitical context.
Leslie Garcia
That they all remember that old immigrant's saying, “I prefer to risk my life crossing the border than to lose it in my country with my hands on my lap.” We cross borders because the fear of home is greater than the fear of crossing death.
Lee
One of the great failures of othering is that we impoverish ourselves. Numerous economic studies actually tell us that this is true in economic terms. But to move beyond our othering can seem frightening experientially. It might require some courage. McLaren, a Christian pastor at the time.
Brian McLaren
On September 11th, 2001, I was doing what most people were doing: I was glued to my television. On September 12th, 2001, I was doing what most pastors were doing: I was leading a prayer meeting, and in that prayer meeting, I had this deep sense - it just kind of came out from within me - that my Muslim neighbors were in danger of reprisals. So the next morning I got up and I wrote a letter, and the letter said, “I'm sorry. I should have come to visit you before, but I never have, and I hope that there won't be any trouble, but if there is trouble, here's my cell number.” Well, I went to three of the mosques and the doors were closed. It was locked. I went to the fourth. And there was a television truck with a big satellite dish on top, just pulling out of the gate. It turns out a woman from that mosque had been pushed down in the street in Washington D.C., and the person who pushed her down said, “You're probably glad this happened.” And so the TV crew was there to interview the imam about how the woman was doing and so on. Well, the truck pulled out and there were automatic gates that were closing. Without even thinking, I stepped on my gas and just went through the gate really fast - scared the poor imam half to death. He ran out to me with his hands up, telling me to stop. I threw the car into park, stepped out, and I handed him my letter. And I'll never forget. He looked down at the letter. He was kind of a short guy, looked down at the letter, looked up at me, looked down at the letter, looked up at me. Tears came down his eyes, and he threw his arms around me. And I still remember the feeling of his head right here at my chest. He just held onto me. He said, “It's so good that you've come. It's so good that you've come, please come inside, come have some tea with me.” So I went inside, I went into his office. I'd never been in a mosque. I'd never been in an imam's office. It turned out it was just like my pastor's office except neater and all the books are in Arabic.
[Laughter]
But that day a friendship began between he and I, and I realized that I became a better Christian when I had a Muslim friend, and that began a process of rethinking this whole issue of identity.
Lee
Our friend Odessa Settles came at this from an altogether different angle early in her career.
Odessa Settles
I was a new nurse on the evening shift, and there was a white middle-aged woman who had come in for a surgical procedure, and I was introduced to her by the charge nurse, which was interesting, but this was a well-to-do woman, so I'm sure that's probably why she had to preface it. But when I went into the room and then once she introduced me, the patient said, “I don't want that [censored] to touch me.” And so the charge nurse was visibly upset, you know, more so than me because, you know, I grew up in the South. I'm used to seeing children right across the bus hollering out “[censored] girl” or whatever. So I asked the woman, “If you allow me to take care of you this evening, maybe there will be someone else tomorrow that you would be pleased with.”
Lee
And yet, the next day, the woman did not want someone else. She wanted Odessa to care for her. And again, the next day, and so on. And so Odessa went on being Odessa, and on the day of discharge, Odessa says...
Odessa Settles
I thanked her for allowing me to take care of her. She teared up, she cried, she gave me a hug, and she just kept saying, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
Lee
This directly relates, of course, to Amy-Jill Levine's telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan. You'll remember that Amy-Jill is a practicing Jew, and yet a professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt Divinity School. One of her formative childhood experiences was being othered.
Amy-Jill Levine
When I was seven years old, a girl on the school bus said to me, “You killed our Lord.” Because she had been told that the Jews - all Jews at all times and all places - were responsible for the death of Jesus. And I couldn't figure out how this absolutely magnificent tradition could say such hateful things about Jews. So I started asking questions.
Lee
And her questions led her to becoming a world-renowned New Testament scholar. And our topic here of othering...
Amy-Jill Levine
... brings us to the Good Samaritan. You know the story. A lawyer comes up to Jesus, they have a bit of a conversation, and the lawyer says to Jesus at one point, “So who is my neighbor?” And Jesus explains how a fellow was going down the Jerusalem-to-Jericho road, and he's waylaid by bandits. He's beaten, robbed, stripped, and left half dead in a ditch. And he's wondering, who's going to help me?
Lee
Yes. You do know, likely, the story: the priest and the Levite pass by on the other side, perhaps out of their own fear. And then, along comes a Samaritan.
Amy-Jill Levine
To go from priest to Levite to Samaritan is like going from Larry to Mo to Hitler, or Father to Son to Satan. It was unthinkable. Today we think of Samaritans as people who help you by the side of the road. We have Good Samaritan hospitals and Good Samaritan car services, but that's not who Samaritans were in antiquity. And they weren't the oppressed minority either. They were the enemy. One chapter before our parable, Jesus and the entourage are going to Jerusalem, and they stop off in a Samaritan village and ask for hospitality. And the Samaritans refuse them hospitality because they're Jews and their face is set towards Jerusalem. At this point, James and John, two of the apostles in their apostolic best, say to Jesus, “Lord, shall we call down fire from heaven and destroy this village?” And Jesus has to explain that dropping a bomb is not the appropriate response to lack of hospitality.
[Laughter]
So what do we do? Today, when we hear this parable, we think of ourselves as the Samaritan, but in antiquity, they actually referred to the parable as “The Parable of the Man Who Fell Among the Robbers.” We're the person in the ditch. We might think, with the Samaritan coming, I'd rather die than acknowledge one of that group helped me. And then it's even harder, because we have to realize the face of the enemy is also in the image and likeness of God. And the face of the person we think might kill us is the very person who might save our lives. Yes, there are bandits on the road and yes, it's dangerous. But what Jesus is saying here is, “Recognize that everyone is a human being. Recognize that the person who saves you might be the person you think is the enemy.”
Lee
And so when Odessa, who we heard earlier, was out on an ambulance call, she was the nurse in charge to care for a newborn infant, nigh unto death, desperately needing care in a rural area.
Odessa Settles
My team consisted of a white nurse, an African American driver, and me. We arrive, and I'm the one in charge. We are picking up a baby who is less than two pounds and also less than 26 weeks gestation. And so, the doctor there went straight to the white nurse to ask, you know, “What do we need to do?” And she'd said, “No, you need to ask Miss Settles. She's the one in charge.” So needless to say, there was an awkward moment. And the father, once he found out I was the one that was in charge, he said, “I don't want you to touch my baby.” So then I was stunned a little bit again, but I cannot react. I said a silent prayer, “Lord help me say the right thing and do the right thing.” I pulled him aside into a room where we could be alone. And I said, “I sense that you probably was influenced by the South and the culture here.” I said, “So was I, but today let's not make it be about you and me. Let's make it be about whether or not you want to try to give your son a chance. And if you tell me, no, I will have to walk away.” You know? So by the time we got done, he is crying at that time. And so he said, “Do what you can do.”
Lee
So Odessa did. The man in the ditch with his baby needed the help of his Samaritan, and the Samaritan saved his baby's life.
Odessa Settles
One day about two and a half to three months later, this man is walking into the clinic. He walks up to me, he's holding a baby that's on supplemental oxygen. He says, “Do you remember me?” Of course I smiled. And I said, “Yes I do, very well.” And so he hugs me and again, he says, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
Lee
All this awareness of othering, of course, requires what former governor Bill Haslam insisted had been one of the primary Christian values he had tried to take into public service.
Bill Haslam
Always remember the other fellow might be right.
Lee
Our lives, and our communities, and our families, and our friendships quite literally might depend upon such wisdom: to imagine new possibilities of peaceableness, to shut up and listen, to refuse to practice othering, to seek to practice humility. Common wisdom, yes, but it's common practice of that common wisdom that perhaps most desperately we need these days. So I close season one with a challenge to go out and practice these things today, this week, this month, and sow the seeds of a new sort of world.
[“Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” plays]
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. It's been a delight being with you for our first season. Again, we'll be back soon, and I'm pretty excited about some of the episodes we'll be bringing you. In the, meanwhile, let us hear from you. Email us text, or attach a voice memo and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com. Tell us what you liked. Tell us what you didn't like. Tell us what you might like to hear more of. And do please go over and give us a generous review on Apple Podcasts. Those reviews do matter a great deal in helping us get exposed to a broader audience.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that make this podcast possible. Our occasional cohost in season one, Dr. Lauren Smelser White. Executive producer and manage, Christie Bragg, Bragg Management. Co-producer, Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producer, Leslie Thompson of Rogue Creative Marketing and Media. Associate producer, Ashley Bayne. Our engineer, Cariad Harmon. Production assistant, Cara Fox. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
[“Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” plays]
That stellar vocal performance at one of our live Tokens events by the outstanding Jason Eskridge. Thanks for listening and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.