Episode 55 - Advocacy

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so the podcast is great and all but one of our favorite things to do is get together with the liturgists that's you the people who take part in this community and there's something really special about getting together in the same space we've done it before and it's always been an amazing experience and so we're really excited today to tell you that tickets are on sale for the next two events of the liturgist gathering it's an amazing time we'll do a live podcast as part of our time together we'll engage in spiritual practices together we'll meditate we'll sing together and gather around the table for the eucharist and you'll be a part of really mind-blowing conversations of the kind and caliber you're used to hearing on the liturgist podcast with a key difference you participate along with us and maybe most importantly you'll find a community of people like you people who've been judged so much they don't have the energy or interest to judge anyone else so we'd love to see you at an upcoming liturgist gathering the first two cities we have to announce are boston which is going to be on october 6th and 7th and then seattle on october 27th and 28th so that's two cities coming up with the liturgist gathering on opposite sides of the country and if you're in los angeles don't worry we know we've said we're coming to la and our plan is to do so in september with more information to come soon but right now today tickets are on sale for boston and seattle don't wait don't miss it these events usually sell out the website is the liturgistsgathering.com hope to see you there [Music] i teach most of my classes on wednesdays at duke divinity school and so wednesday morning after the election i had an 8 30 a.m class and it was a difficult class to lead but it was probably our most beautiful transformative classes all semester i think that the pain that all of my students were experiencing unanimously in that class gave way to a life and invigorated their ministries in a way that i think will be forever lasting this is christina cleveland she's a social psychologist public theologian author and professor at duke university's divinity school whose work stands at the intersection of social psychology spirituality and justice we spoke with christina back in december before the inauguration obviously so some of this tone may seem a little dated these days it seems week to week can be dated but this was when it was president-elect trump and obviously at the time a lot of people were really freaked out about what the future held and this particular conversation that mike and i had with christina was it was full of hope and grace and we wanted to share it with you today can you describe the class a little bit more like sure yeah well yeah the class is actually on conflict resolution and congregations and i had prepared yeah i had prepared what i thought was a masterful lecture for that day um but obviously you know i woke up and saw the news and knew i couldn't just go and lecture and so we actually took the entire two and a half hour period um to go through spiritual and contemplative practices that would ready us to be the kind of leaders that we want to be moving forward and so we we started with lament we actually spent about an hour just um openly lamenting and that was just really beautiful and then we spent time naming the attributes of god and reminding ourselves of who god is and that went on for about 20-25 minutes then we spent time uh praying for president-elect trump and we actually modeled our prayer after the resentment prayer in the the aaa big book which is basically praying yeah praying everything that you want for yourself for that person um and so um we did that for president-elect trump his whole family you know we kind of made a list of all the things we want for ourselves you know like um health and good relationships and a peace and you know all these things and then i said all right now we're going to pray this for we're going to force ourselves as a spiritual discipline to pray this oh man and then and we also pray that for all of all of the people who voted for president-elect trump um and then um and then after that we spent time um praying just broadly you know for the church for you know the world um and then we took time to identify our own natural tendencies like what type of leaders we tend to be when we're under distress um and everyone kind of came up with their individual profile and then we identified the type of leader we we want to live into a leader who lives out of out of love and not fear who is non-violent in heart and in practice and then we identified each person identified three spiritual practices that they could implement in their lives that day that would support the type of leader that they want to be so we kind of went full circle in the sense that we started out kind of a hot mess of a class but ended um you know with some tangible practices that we could each do given our our particular weaknesses and strengths as leaders and i think this is what being a leader is all about you know and i told my students you know we can be real we can be honest we can be raw we can you know there's no judgment i mean i don't think there's a necessarily a perfect way to respond but i think we need to to notice that the patterns that we begin um can go on forever if we're not careful and if we're not careful about what those patterns are and so i was like you know we should really think carefully about how we want to respond to this because there's a lot of work ahead of us now and we can easily fall into bad coping but we could also choose better coping and we could choose better ways forward so it's good practice it's beautiful yeah i don't remember a time on the liturgist podcast where i could use this phrasing and have it be real but i feel convicted in the old school evangelical sense because like my response to that election has been grief and obsessive study despite actually having a contemplative centered christian practice i haven't spent any time doing uh that kind of spiritual discipline and the reason i mentioned that is is in the audience that listens to this program so many people have said you know what do we do we have a lot of people that are waking up to justice issues for the first time in this audience or people who are who have become aware of justice issues but don't know how to start taking steps to being an advocate to being part of the solution uh standing up for the rights of everyone and i hope those of you who've stopped us at events or emailed us or tweeted us saying what do i do just listened to that dynamic that happened in that room that began with being very intentional with being reflective with being thoughtful with laying out uh vision all those components are essential it's not just like finding books to read or people to follow or growing or going straight to some sort of action all those things are important but centering and grounding your response to issues in the world what i was i don't mean to that was just such a healthy response to such an unhealthy political development thank you grown up on the show i don't know about that i don't know about that but i will say any any ounce of inclination towards that comes from personal you know personal failure and just realizing that my um strident sense of justice alone which is really like probably about 85 percent self-righteousness um isn't gonna it's not sustainable you know and it's not effective and so i think my goal now is to be the healthiest person speaking out for justice i can possibly be i think it's brilliant you didn't bypass the lament you didn't bypass the grief you let it you go right into the heart of it so you're being truthful and it brings you to this raw place and then that you focused on god i think is fascinating rather than just rather than just right to the justice from there you you focused on goodness you focused on love you focused on that which binds us all together you focused on that thing that holds us together that's holding you together is the same thing that is holding president-elect trump together and by focusing on something other than just the issue at hand it put you in a place where you're able to like naturally move into justice from a healthier thing i just think that's really beautiful and wise thank you well we face this like in this difficult tension between a need to call out systems and people who are involved in creating injustice in the first place and that that's an essential act that has to happen but we also have a situation where i'm really into neuroscience and sometimes when you talk about systemic injustice and the role people play in that it becomes impossible to parse out from what they perceive as an attack on their identity which then they can't engage in the conversation because we have to protect our sense of identity that's just how we function as human beings and the way which frankly i have not been doing that's why i said i felt convicted i've gone straight to the justice component from grief and taking that time to center on the source but also i can't say that i've prayed for trump supporters since the election one time i've only thought about how to like convince them and i don't mean to just this is a bigger issue than than just this election the the election just makes a convenient shorthand right now for larger movements in society but this this that insight of creating an empathy which frankly should be easier for me as someone at the intersection of white and male to have an empathy uh for people who voted for trump than anyone else but then to create into that letting that spiritual practice give you that in very difficult patient open posture to discuss very difficult things because the only difference maybe between me and a family member who voted for donald trump is i'm more aware of the part i play in systemic injustice it doesn't mean that i'm actually like my actions are are better in the world than theirs are i you know i still live in a a white zip code with property taxes that support affluent schools i'm still involved systemically i'm just more aware and creating that posture through spiritual practice to an able discussion i mean this is what everyone's saying what do we do now how do we move forward and it seems seems so obvious but our faith really does play a role in our capacity to be peacemakers and change agents in the world and when i say peacemaker i don't mean a peace and an absence of conflict i mean a peace and a presence of justice hey guys so i live in jerusalem and there's definitely a huge need here for social advocacy and there's also a vast array of external systemic obstacles but the obstacles i actually find most challenging are the internal ones the need to protect myself and my family by not rocking the boat too much or even just procrastination and laziness those are the things i find hardest to overcome i work at a fairly liberal christian university in canada where values of peace and justice just lie at the heart of all that we do because of this context that i find myself in being an ally of the social justice movement is super easy you want to talk just food systems fair trade feminism human rights for indigenous peoples black lives matter i'm right there with you being an ally is easy because it's just a social norm but moving from being an ally to becoming an accomplice in what is what is hardest for me it's super tough to move my words to my feet to show up at marches and walks to change how and what i buy tougher yet is changing my circle of friends to include those who are part of the marginalized groups i say i stand up for i can talk the talk but walk the walk [Music] hi my name is director preston i live in texas and advocate for economic justice one of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of advocating for social and economic justice is that i along with many other advocates are rarely deemed credible because there are many millions of dollars spent by lobbyists to convince people in power that social justice form somehow hurts the economy instead of actually strengthening it by creating more equitable systems that are more sustainable for all so as someone whose understanding of the spirit is so linked to justice and the work towards liberation how do you sustain your spirituality in the face of what can seem like not only persistent but almost increasing injustice today you know i have i have regular spiritual practices i have a contemplative practice um i have a spiritual director i have communities of people who really stimulate my faith and and you know i hope vice vice versa um but i have found that particularly in this fight and you're right it does seem like the world is getting darker and darker and i i don't know if that's actually true or we just have a lot more access to information but i actually just returned from a trip to cape town where i spent most of my time there basically listening and learning from young activists pastors lived theologians maybe not academically trained but certainly on the ground trained theologians working in the townships living in the townships and i take a trip like that at least once a year last year i was in southeast asia mostly in india the year before i was in palestine and you know it goes back many many years and i've found that it's those trips that really sustain my hope i think that so much of hopelessness that maligns it comes from privilege it's like it's like an option to be hopeless as a per as a privileged person and so um it's really it's really helpful for me to spend time with people who are you know 27 years old maybe have five years of formal bad formal education um living in a township and decided to plant a church last year because there was a need and they are leading this church and working two other jobs and what does hope look like to them what is what does a theology of pain look like to them although they might not use those terms specifically that really sustains me and helps me in the journey that's fascinating that you would mention hopelessness as a consequence of privilege uh i don't think i've thought that way before but even as a just a momentary thinking device it actually seems to explain a lot about the political climate in the west today yeah i would you know i would argue that um i've i've just seen you know so many communities in the global south that you know have communicated to me you know we pray for you all because you have so many other options to place your trust in and those options end up failing us and so we're left with hopelessness because we haven't cultivated real hope and so i've just i've sort of reached that conclusion um through my activism work and my my personal relationships um i wrote a blog post about it maybe a couple years ago called the privilege of hopelessness i kind of dive deep into that possibility that's fascinating there's this story that i heard from this guy that i'm probably starting to mention too much named ramdas but he was a recently dismissed harvard professor back in the 60s and he went to india and he had all his travelers checks in his pocket and he he was there kind of trying to learn and study but he was in calcutta in these places with this tremendous poverty and this tremendous suffering and presence of death and sickness and illness and he was walking around kind of feeling like pity for all of us you know and he would walk around and just feel bad for these people and he said the longer he was there he started recognizing that a lot of people would look at him with that same pity like they'd look back at him with pity yeah because he felt so distanced fr like with his upbringing in the west it's some of that same stuff you're talking about as far as like you don't see that death is just part of a part of it you don't see that uh we're here and alive and loving each other and we're fine i mean sure there's pain and all that but you're the one that's having a hard time seeing reality here and you're the one that is kind of lost in this situation you know where you come from the west and all these things that you have that you're attached to and think that will save your soul or whatever and they kind of looked at him with that same pity and he said that was a big wake-up call for him yeah that resonates with me so much because you know in my contemplative practice one of the things that i've learned is that you know life and death are just so inextricably intertwined and it's it's interesting because so much of my contemplative practices is influenced by um by eastern religions um just because for the the christian contemplative tradition at least the west's relationship to it is very anemic um and so it's being strengthened but it's so interesting how much that idea that you know life and death are intertwined is also consistent with like you know most theologies of the cross and resurrection and it's it's really in that death it's really in uh being curious about that death and and to a certain extent you know embracing it that we even see we even find life and there's so much in the west that we are trying to escape you know that's painful or that would be associated with death and i think we um we miss out on on the life that is connected to it that is found in [Music] death [Music] hey liturgists we get a lot of requests for the music on this show and we are excited to announce that the day of the release of this podcast we are also releasing a collection of some of our favorite music that's been on this podcast that was specifically composed for this podcast by a guy named tyler chester and myself and we're releasing it under the band name on earth but it comes out on itunes and apple music and spotify and everywhere else that you listen to your music online today and we encourage you to check it out this song that you're hearing underneath as well as a lot of the music on this podcast and many of the podcasts that you've been enjoying as of late it is all on this record this first volume that we're releasing is some of the music that is really more intended to be a little bit more chill and it's great music for like mindfulness and meditation and prayer and a nice walk a nice peaceful walk this is a nice record to put on so do check it out we're excited to finally get this music to you in a way that you can just listen to it without talking over the top of it uh we're also giving this record away for free to our patrons so if you're a patron that subscribes you can check out your app or your email and you'll find the record in your inbox today so once again the artist name that you'll find it in itunes is on earth and the featured artists are michael gunger and tyler chester hope you enjoy it just wanted to let you know thanks now that i'm at duke divinity um my my students are they sort of self-select into my classes so they tend to be pretty earnest and open and ready to ready to hit the ground running from day one but i've taught enough in evangelical universities where students were maybe required to take a class that i was teaching where i just faced a lot of defiance and closed closed-offness ignorance but but when that ignorance was uncovered the response was consistently violent um and so i i had to figure out how to um teach students that i hated um and um and i realized that the the best the solution was to learn not to hate them and so um i began this practice um in my class where there you know there were always at least you know eight eight to ten white male young students who would be very intentional about being defiant and so they would often raise their hands um and and and i would know okay they're going to launch something at me right now and so before i would even call on them i would silently say to myself you know the image of god in me greets the image of god in you and i found that that that practice alone just softened my stance and over the course of the semester it would actually change my heart towards those students and i found that the semesters where i was able to do that consistently and able to kind of identify a commonality um identify see their humanity um see see the god in them despite what what their actions or our emotions towards me were um i was actually more effective with those students the needle moved further with those students and so you know i think when when we do love people or try to love people we're more effective at communicating with them too and i think that's just a really neat byproduct of it i mean for me it's really about keeping resentment out of my heart keeping my pipes unclogged but there's also this really beautiful effect where you see hearts being transformed because i think eventually they realize i have an armor of love and they're not going to be able to get through that and then they just sort of relent too for me what's beautiful is when i can truly see the humanity when i can truly see the deity in people i'm even more interested in speaking truth to them because i see i see what can be i see how they are enslaved i see the possibilities and i just you know the isaiah 61 in me just rises up and i really um gosh it's like it's like i hear even more um about about connecting this truth to them it's it's a win-win i think good for my heart and hopefully good for their prognosis as a formerly oppressor or liberated oppressors i love that so much because you're that those two ideas of kind of the contemplative you know mystical spiritual sort of formational practices tend to focus inward and sometimes in people there's a dichotomy between that and outward social action and they don't know how to bring those things together to me what i'm hearing you and it's what i believe is is when you do either of them properly they become one thing um it's all just the movement of love moving into your heart is moving into their heart in a way and it's the better and more clearly you can see them and love them the better justice fruit that can come about it because you're right so i can i can get into those places personally where i feel so passionate about an issue and all of a sudden i'm realizing i'm not dealing with any human to human heart things there's no real soul or spirit that's happening i'm just passionate about the issue and self-righteousness can get into that so quickly and easily without even noticing it but i love hearing how your practice actually informs your your work and your justice work and how it's like an almost an over spilling of it in a way is that is that fair to say thank you yeah it's certainly a big part and really what sustains it probably it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over one million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists so it would it would it be okay with you if i read like a paragraph from one of your blog posts just to unpack it a little bit sure uh so you in november you wrote this blog eight tips for talking to your family about trump this is the first point you made be encouraged that you're probably the best person to talk to your family about the election and then you said let's face it if your siblings are racist they're unlikely to listen to anything that i a black woman would have to say if and you went on and named other like specific examples of that and then you said research shows that our prejudice towards groups significantly decreases when we learn that someone we know has a positive relationship with someone in the other group kind of by the way i would encourage everyone listening to go read that whole blog post eight tips for talking to your family about trump on christinacleveland.com but i realized post-election the degree to which i had allowed the oppressor to become faceless which did a couple of things one it allowed me to distance myself from the role i've played as an oppressor historically and at present and uh two it was part of a reaction to my own identity part of my intersection would be a southern american and if you want to talk about someone yeah i have a lot of family members who are islamophobic or homophobic or racist and i'd allowed myself to lose any empathy for the fact that a lot of my family has never been on an airplane that a lot of my family has never crossed more than one state line this of my family has never met a muslim person um has never had the opportunity the privilege frankly the economic and educational privilege i've had to enmesh my life and enrich my life with the stories and experiences of people who live at many different intersections and i i'd let that oppressor become faceless and then somehow decided it was someone else's job to have those conversations because it was too difficult for me post-election i realized me times a couple million in terms of people is how you have an election that plays out that way so like for for you as the intersection of being black and being a woman some conversations are difficult or you would like standing with some people for me to go into some of those conversations is to wrestle with issues of my own past heritage and identity and it's easier to just say i'm not going to do that i've moved on but in doing that makes me complicit in the ongoing act of systemic oppression and inequality yeah and i think we are so we're so interested in quick fixes and at the end of the day we don't really want to pay a price for social transformation and so you know it's easier for me to tweet something or you know maybe even you know go something that's a little bit more costly like go to a rally but it's with all my friends who are like-minded and um and it's unclear what the effect is whereas having that you know having these sustained repeated conversations with family members and actually i wrote that post not about trump but it was very personal for me because i have a very close family member who the last time uh hillary clinton ran for president this person told me that it would be a sin to vote for her because she's a woman and that was this person's stance um and i um spent probably the the the next five years having these repeated conversations um knowing you know this person trusts me this person is close to me um it really who else is there i mean with the type of theology that this person is being exposed to at this point like i'm the only person who would who would challenge that in any way and even other family members would jokingly say to me i don't even know why you're like beating this dead horse out but i just like would not give up also i would not give up loving this person and being in a relationship with this person and it was interesting because the second time around this this fall um when she ran so when she i guess before it was when she was running in the primaries this person said you know they would not vote for her but this person called me up after they voted and said i voted for hillary clinton and it was an act i saw it as a spiritual act because of how much i've been transformed um in my theology the way that i view women my sexism all that sort of stuff um and it was beautiful to see that but i i know firsthand the pain and the difficulty of having those sorts of conversations we are social beings we share identity with people and so so often when we think about identity it's usually like us versus them but we very rarely um tap into the positive things about us-ness we usually just focus on this sort of dichotomy between us and them but us is a really powerful bond if we actually dig deep into that i mean of course they're risks and you know people get excommunicated from families or called heretics or worse so of course there's a risk but i think that the the possibilities far outweigh the risks if we're for willing to go there but it's it's not easy that's for sure so if we imagine like what can i do i'm becoming aware of issues of justice absolutely you should read more books absolutely you should engage in the kind of activism that makes congressional phones ring you should engage in protests all those things are essential but the more your intersectional identity is associated with privilege the more maybe the most important work you can do is multi-year conversations with your friends and family as being like the the most important justice work you can do is talk to mom and dad and your cousins and that guy at the office and those people and it does have a social cost and it is uncomfortable but that's the only way this progress will happen it's the only way that the advocacy work just as advocates are doing on the ground lines on audience is if uh those of us who are starting to see the world a little differently share that with those we love and those who are in our lives even if that that's difficult or painful or uncomfortable [Music] [Applause] so would you with either of you have because both of you are articulate peace oriented people that can have a sensibility about how to talk to somebody that differs with you uh a lot of people don't talk about it because at the first you know paragraph it's like well i guess we're never talking again and there's profanities flying everywhere [Laughter] yeah yeah so some people are just barely trying to like stay in a in a relationship that's good enough to get together once or twice a year yeah yeah i hear that so any advice yeah if people are really interested in this i would i would encourage people to go check out that particular blog post because um i lay out just lots of steps that might be helpful another thing that i think is um the one of the things i mentioned in that post that i'll mention now is it's it's really important to do spiritual strength what i call spiritual strength training because um i mean oftentimes these are hostile spaces um and we we can go in there fearful or we can go in there with an armor of love um i think another um another thing that's really important is to identify you know maybe don't start with like the white supremacist uncle or something start with someone um start with someone who maybe might believe different things but would be willing to hear your story either because you have a relationship with them and they value that or they're just the type of person that's like willing to entertain different ideas um but i've i've found that almost in any group you know you can identify the people who are going to be most able to have a conversation um and just start with that one person and then my thing is just tell tell your story you know like you don't have to get into the statistics you don't have to get into the you know political perspectives and spin you can just say you know here's how i grew up i i can relate to what your experience i can relate to you because i grew up in a similar town or a similar church or went to a similar school and these are this is the way that i was formed in that in that social space and these were the things that i cared about and these were the things that i was afraid of and i'm not sure why i was afraid of them but those were really real fears for me um and then and then share whatever what might have been a turning point for you or a catalyst you know and then i went to college and i met muhammad my roommate and i was initially afraid because i had been formed by this community that taught me to fear people like muhammad and i was ashamed of that and i didn't know what to do with it and i i was stifled and and but then i met someone who helped me walk through that you know and just kind of sharing here's how i got from one from point a to point b um really being careful to find points where you can identify with what that person might be experiencing um and just say you know i i've been i've been amazed at how how wonderfully that just starts a conversation without blame without um shaming people but just saying you know i can really relate to a lot of what you are experiencing [Music] it's it's helpful to stick to kind of just just do just kind of do you like tell your story with that without trying to tell other people's stories or make assumptions about who you're talking to or you know we don't have to plan out the rest of our debates from here till eternity but we can just see what what would be the next step maybe we read a book maybe we listen to a podcast maybe we go to an event together one thing that i do is i will after i share a story and after i include a positive experience with someone from the intersectional identity in question i will also treat the other person like an expert i would ask them like well what would you do about this how would you make this better yeah and then as they answer that i invite them to imagine you know if we're talking about ableism and differently abled people okay so if that's your solution how would this group of people feel about your solution and why do you think they would feel that way and by first making the person an expert they don't feel attacked and and second by asking them to imagine the implications for the people that the action or policy they're discussing would directly impact you're provoking empathy you're causing uh parts of their brain to become active that are associated with considering the perspectives of others you know studies have shown that something as simple as reminding people that ten commandments exist before a game where cheating is possible decreases the instance of cheating and possibility for 25 minutes even if someone doesn't believe in the 10 commandments so if you remind people the simple act of reminding people another perspective exists is enough studies have shown to produce minutes of additional empathy and or capacity for empathy in a given person so that storytelling is way more important than debate sharing positive experiences with people and then if you make them the expert they never feel attacked and you can almost lead them through their own process of discovery towards justice yeah science mic manipulation tactics [Music] that's good though i also um i think that um you know whether it's um kind of like the evangelical type like you know intercessory prayer whether it's something a little different that's more like loving kindness meditation you're sending people loving kindness i think that there's a power and prayer around this too and just creating space for people's hearts to be transformed and so um you know oftentimes i'll spend more time you know praying um before a lecture or a talk than i than i do even preparing for it because so much of this is about identity and about fear and about um historical patterns or strongholds or you know you can use all sorts of different language for it i mean i think white white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity and all of these things are are forces of evil in the world however we might describe evil and so or define evil um so i think too it's really it's powerful to cover everything with a blanket of you know loving kindness or some sort of prayer even as we're engaging in these conversations i'd say the most difficult thing for me is engaging in dialogue with people that i respect whether that be family or friends people from church or co-workers and being shut down believing that my opinion is either a lack of education and that my desire for justice is unfounded it's hard to have a conversation with somebody who doesn't think the conversation is valid i think my biggest barrier to standing up for social justice is a belief that i hold that i don't have what it takes right now and that sooner or later i'll have enough power or influence or financial means to really make an impact by far the majority of my friends and family members are white evangelical christians i think that find it very sad that i could wear a shirt with a rebel flag and some second amendment quote and no one would blink an eye in fact i'd probably get compliments yet if i stand with women who have been oppressed or my black brothers and sisters who have been treated unjustly or immigrants who need my help i am an out of the tribe liberal if we can't stand with those who need us and how can we follow say we follow christ for many years i was a birth doula and so i supported families that were bringing new life into the world with informational emotional physical spiritual support before during and after the birth and now i've shifted that work primarily into justice work this is mickey scott bay jones mickey describes herself as a mama activist contemplative healer public intellectual who believes in throwing parties as a key revolutionary strategy she was recently named one of the black christian leaders changing the world and huffington post mickey what does it cost you to advocate for justice for me it has been a deep personal cost in that you know as you guys talk about a lot people go through a faith journey and change many of us do and so when you start to change and for me it was this change from kind of what i would call a pretty typical like conservative evangelical framework to like this this understanding that like jesus has something to do with justice and that like when jesus like announced that he'd come to set the captives free and like take care of the poor that he meant like actual people in actual jail and actual poor people who actually needed food and shelter like that was actually a real big shift for me and started to cause some problems i used to say i grew up in like like the cosby show house like i i'm a like a poster child for like the black suburban kid like i didn't grow up with any sense of solidarity with poor folks barely grew up with a sense of solidarity with black folks and so so for me to say i want to live in solidarity with the poor now i didn't know what that meant it just became something that became important to me and i was willing to work that out but at the time i was married and that was difficult for my spouse we had before that we had been very committed to this idea of the quote-unquote american dream and like upward mobility and bigger house and more stuff and give our kids everything we didn't have and so aligning myself with this need to live in my own life in accordance with some set of kind of just to see principles and then like call others to that sure it cost me on a professional level but it has cost me on a deeply personal level in ways that i didn't i didn't anticipate and probably wouldn't have signed up for had i known right yeah so if if the cost is high like and it is and it costs you personally and it costs you professionally why do you choose to continue uh and do you ever think it would be easier just kind of go back to life as it was before yeah i mean i've i i fantasize about clocking in and clocking out of a job but i can't it's like when i felt that call or that's what i was supposed to do with my life there's no other answer like there's no other thing i can do it's it's it is so deeply personal i have three kids for me when i heard about trayvon martin being murdered i have two sons and a daughter and you know the day after uh i had to send them to school and zip up their hoodies just like i had done the day before um and hadn't thought about either one of them getting shot in my lovely little suburban neighborhood and and not that i didn't know as a black woman of course i knew um that that type of thing was a possibility but so for me this is about creating a better world for my for my kids and for all kids and like there's nothing i can do about like i can't put that to bed i can't walk away from that [Music] there's this pretty deeply held belief among some southern white people that america doesn't have a race problem that it has a class problem i've been in a pretty consistent ongoing dialogue with one of my relatives about race issues that i'm glad that they're open to even having and this person was telling me that they didn't understand why suddenly it seemed like some of their black friends were so much angrier than they used to be and i tried to explain that trayvon martin really cast in a very clear light racism in america versus classism america does have a class problem but you can't say that it does not have a race problem because for i think for a lot of people who were black and affluent an illusion of relative security evaporated that day one of the things i want people to understand about advocacy is we don't all pay equal prices to participate and some of us have the option to walk away and others of us really don't um because of what justice really means in america and across the world today yeah there's uh a really good book called the trouble i've seen by drew hart he does a little history telling which is always really helpful and talks about how you know white folks in the 50s and 60s didn't understand what black folks were like all upset about like they thought people were happy you know you go back even farther you know one of the reasons that slavers wanted enslaved folks to sing was because they thought that a singing slave was a happy slave so even though they would literally force them to sing they thought that that then proved uh that they were happy and so i think even now um to be able to live with this great disparity people have to believe that in general black folks are pretty happy like there can't be that big of a problem like they're they're not burning everything down every day so it must be you know fine you know but drew talks about this uh like explains that history and then basically calls white folks to be in in this area like discipled by people of color like as far as understanding the problem right like because they're the ones who see it most clearly so you know someone who lives in poverty i can't see that problem the way they can see it i need to submit to to their understanding of it because they're in it so as a person of color as a black person like you know i'm seeing it and like it's it's like that um i don't know if you saw that snl skit that was like right after the election right where the black folks like the white people were freaking out that the election was happening the way it was the black folks were like uh-huh and like we knew we knew that was about to go down i had so many like progressive white christian friends who would be like i don't know anybody who's voting for 45 i don't understand this this like it can't be it's not gonna happen it's gonna be fine and in the back of my mind because i l i live with those very southern people you're talking about that is my community black people been living it we that anger has been there it's we can't display it all the time we you just can't live like that [Music] david foster wallace has this amazing little story he tells where two young fish were swimming one day and an old fish swims by them and says hey boys how's the water and one of the young fish looks at the other fish and says what in the hell is water yeah right and the idea is like they're fish they water is just what they know to the point they don't know it and it takes an outside perspective to help illustrate it and i think you could tell you know the same joke uh with like white people in racism and say you know hey boys how's the racism and a young white person say what the hell is racism like that doesn't exist anymore because the position of privilege that they live at makes it impossible to see the privileged perspective they view the world from so that idea of like submission is a i think pretty biblical if i could use a term like that that i don't very often and and on the other hand uh essential because i don't have the ability to see beyond my own perspective that requires you know someone else offering me that vantage point that i can't reach on my own and i think that's hard for people to do sometimes but i don't think we can really advocate for universal justice without doing so yeah i feel a little dirty you of saying biblical [Laughter] it is though that literally that idea of submission is a very biblical idea and you know one of the more interesting hermeneutics for me that makes the bible valuable is reading it through a liberation lens and at that point it's very scandalous to talk about mutual submission between roman citizens and jews right they weren't on equal footing and that was a that was an incredibly subversive concept because romans weren't supposed to submit to anybody they were romans and so you know as i imagine like you know people in the audience reacting to a word like submit i honestly think in in good biblical scholarship the way mickey just used the word submit is the most biblical way to use it in a very reasonable read of the scripture sorry i've been bible nerding lately old habits are hard to break but i think that it can be really valuable when it in this context i use well and i use it for two reasons one because it is a term that christians use and two because it's disruptive right like so many of us that are progressive are like no submission no no no like we have completely rejected it and then people who are more conservative are like yeah submission you know but in very specific terms you know um so i like to use it to be disruptive is there a word like chronicle what like do they like the quran like they're like that's very cool i don't know we need to ask a muslim segment like this is biblical such a strange word um because what everything is biblical right pick a pick of verbs right it's in the bible uh the word dog is in the bible it's biblical well that's what i mean that's what this is such a weird concept like that the bible is this thing that can have a single attribute that represents it more right another just a fascinating thing so i'm getting off topic though no i mean i almost chose um i used to tell my children that uh you know before i really fully committed to non-violence i would say um so i'm clear that the the bible does not give me license to hit you as a small child but it is biblical that i can beat the sh out of you when you are a teenager so just understand i am saving it up but now i'm all non-violence and stuff and can't hit them use a cane or anything [Laughter] speaking of beating our children nice segue that was that was a real rough one but yeah how do you balance the necessity of remaking the world and taking care of yourself so that you can continue to do so in order to get to justice we shouldn't have to burn up on the altar of justice and sometimes that means like specific times of healing and rest and remembering and celebrating and sometimes that means just that daily are you taking care of yourself have you paid your bills have you eaten today are you hydrated have you called your friend all of those things it's strange how like taking care of yourself is an act of rebellion in our society and that's true i you know a core american value that is uh definitely highly associated with whiteness is this idea of ceaseless toil being not only necessary for success but a basic civic duty americans tend to have just such overwhelming guilt about times of rest or disengagement we you know we're with pride that we take less vacation than other countries and get less basic benefits for the work that we do because of that really strange puritanical obsession you know with ceaseless effort being a measure of virtue and when we carry that that's one thing if you work in an office where it's kind of soul bleaching but when you do essential work that is for the liberation of other people that has like a corresponding sole cost if you allow that pressure to keep you from taking care of yourself i've just seen so many brilliant capable passionate people completely wipe themselves out and destroy themselves in their mission to help the world and and so much of that is institutional because people that write checks to organizations don't necessarily like want to see facebook pictures of someone in the organization going on vacation you know what i mean like there's this weird like i support you if you're going to work ceaselessly and tirelessly but if you don't then i want like a more efficient widget of justice i don't know how to explain it right you want like a justice robot or a justice machine um and it's a really destructive yeah and it it's not gonna serve us to just keep pushing and burning and and not resting and not taking care of our whole selves and and we are just recreating the empire because basically jesus walked around wasting time many of the stories of jesus he's like hanging out walking around it's not like jesus was on his way i mean sometimes some are like he was going to the temple but like sometimes jesus is like he doesn't really have something he's doing for the day and then like something happens someone interacts with him and that's the story we get is this interaction and so like what happens when we just put ourselves in life and then the miraculous interactions have a chance to happen i am an enneagram one hardcore like i want to do what's right and i want to do it now like like let us save the world and let's do it now it's hard for me to rest it's hard for me make sure everybody's caught up but i have to like i've i've had my own personal bout with burnout i'm seeing it affect myself and my children all kinds and my work and i'm not willing to do that anymore and so i have to i have to believe this stuff and and work on this stuff and be with other people who will call me back in because it's essential i mean it's just it's just a part of how justice has to happen or it's not actually justice i would love to hear how your work is changing as the world is going crazy [Laughter] what does what is advocacy shaping up to be in a trumpian era what how is it going to look and how is it how is it going to shift how how does advocacy yeah evolve well i think what we are dealing with now um is this air of suspicion of one another that that is different from what we had um i think everybody is kind of looking at each other especially in christian circles right because we have the 81 35 the 81 of white evangelicals and 35 percent of poc evangelicals who voted for trump everybody is side eyeing each other like is this your fault is is this your fault is are you are you it like um i think there's a lot of distrust even among people that that people thought they could trust before so that makes organizing and healing work and all of that more difficult so that's one thing and then i think a focus on healing and pausing is no longer an option more and more people want to talk about healing justice about spiritual fortification and movement spaces and i'm talking interfaith i mean i'm talking to people every day who come from every faith tradition from you know don't claim a faith tradition who are realizing that we have got to be spiritual spiritually fortified to make it through the next four plus years of whatever this is gonna be you know i think we're still trying to figure it out and and the assault is continuous right like every day it's something else and so you just you just gotta keep looking at it and keep going it's it's pacing yourself um that's super important and i think that that is something that people are at least more talking about more i don't know if we're doing it more but people are at least talking about it more but you know but here's the thing like um we we have been here before like the the beautiful thing is uh here's a uh another biblical reference for you is that we have this great cloud of witnesses right like we have ancestor ancestral spirits we have folks who have done this before um whether it is within the biblical story whether it is people we can look at from movements from all of known history people whose lives we can look at and say they got through you know you can look at a fannie lou hamer you can look at ella baker um you you know white folks have people that they need to look at look as examples of what it's like to be an ally there's this amazing book by drake boyd called white allies in the struggle for racial justice that is basically just profile after profile of white folks who stood up for racial justice because i think sometimes there's this idea of like i don't know what to do nobody's ever done this before it's like actually there are plenty uh just look it up so but it we need we i mean it's true they're out there um but we need those ancestr ancestor stories the the stories of people who are just like us regular people who have stood up to empire before we're not doing it alone and we're not doing it for the first time so you know like we gotta buck up and and like take our lessons we gotta like do the sankofa thing which is go back and fetch it let's go back and fetch these lessons and that bravery and bring it forward and that's how we're gonna get there in these desperate times love will hold us here love will join our hands teach us to have no fear so we lay our way down to wash their feet when we see our brothers [Music] let the light keep let it break [Music] the hardest part of advocating for social justice is knowing how to talk to those that hold a different view and how to listen to those that hold a different view for me and my family we are committing ourselves to helping ally first nations people in canada and talking about it with our family and our friends has been difficult because how do you go about talking about colonization when you are the colonizers it's been really challenging but really good and it's been helping it's helped me to listen more than talk talk talk one of the most difficult aspects of advocating social justice in my immediate world is probably the distance you can put between me and other people in relationships i'm performing with them for instance if we're out to dinner and i'm eating a vegetarian meal and someone will inevitably ask uh conrad why are you a vegetarian and i hesitate to give the reasons why like the environmental reasons a bit of a standoffish kind of a little bit here's another grainy don't judge me mate kind of attitude and and from then it becomes a little bit harder for me to kind of build that relationship and and let them know hey you do what you want kind of yes probably relationships [Music] i am from central nebraska if i had to choose one thing that is the most difficult about advocating for social justice in the world living in this environment i would say it's convincing the people around me that there is actually social injustice happening some people just don't understand that it is still a thing [Music] my whole life people have told me that if they would have been alive in the civil rights movement that they would have been marching with martin luther king my whole life my friends my family my co-workers strangers it's been a refrain and one way i find hope is that doesn't have to be a hypothetical in 2017. now's your chance if you're white you have an opportunity right now to participate in a movement for justice for black lives for the rights of native peoples to land and clean water uh there are plenty of opportunities right now like today like this while you're listening to this podcast there is work you could be doing that hopefully in the future like this season is remembered as a furtherance of the pursuit of justice that it's not remembered as a sliding into the dark and the difference between 50 years from now people saying 2016 was a continuation of progress that started earlier or a slide into the darkness is how many people participate right now yeah and if one thing that's paralyzing and i get it what do i do how do i start there's a really helpful tool for planning justice movements called dismay that i i found in dismantling the new jim crow that that at that builds a four role model for social justice movements that you have you know rebels and advocates and organizers and helpers and that there's really four different tasks and there's pros and cons to each role but the point is if you think for a second like am i the kind of person who likes to make sandwiches and hand out bottled water and you know file papers and support people that's a very helper kind of thing are you the kind of person that's good in a courtroom or legal setting or good at writing and creating content that gets consumed by a lot of people that can change minds you might be an advocate are you good at bringing people together that are involved in individual work and creating a larger system that can create more change you're probably an organizer do you just want to burn the whole thing to the ground you might be a rebel and the thing about justice movements especially on the white side there's so much appreciation for helpers and advocates and organizers but a distancing from rebels and what i love about this four puzzle piece model you can't do it without all four types because without rebels nothing gets done or the other three will acquiesce to the system if they get any progress whatsoever and so that's that helps me understand a d all different personality types can play a role in justice and b depending on your wiring certain roles may seem unsavory to you but it's important that we acknowledge and understand the vital role that every approach brings to the creation of justice yeah and even beyond um personality type or um what you feel naturally suited for is also um kind of your station in life like what's going on in your life right now i mean again i'm a mom of three kids um i'm kind of in between generationally right like i'm not old enough to be an elder and i'm not a 20 year old who can drop everything to go to a protest today so i i look at it as like a big sister role and which naturally folds into this justice doula role you know i do a lot of support work you know we also need jail support and we also need bottled water and we also need people coordinating things and helping to think through things strategically we need people funding things we all have to struggle with where our roles are and they can change over the years you may move through those four different you know pieces and you may more you may move through those four in between different actions right like for one action you may be more the organizer another you may be more of the rebel like so being being kind of flexible in this is also a good thing to keep in mind right like you're not stuck in one thing [Music] i think there's um one of those a potential category that that i could see missing from the the four lit the list of four is an artist and there's something about people that can dream and imagine and i know that that can play at the either the at you know an advocate or i'm sure it has elements of those other things as well but you know even take something like that saturday night live sketch that you referenced and it's done with humor and with lightness and with play but it says something real and everyone kind of laughs but then at the end of the laugh you got to go like yeah you know which has a different effect i mean some of the comedians and films and music and people that can weave a vision of the world into creative work or humor or whatever storytellers all this i don't know if you take if you take that stuff out of advocacy it just becomes this kind of like that's to me when it starts getting heavy and weary some and dead it's just it's this just work to be done rather than an adventure of making the world new and artists can help people remember and see that and and enjoy learning and enjoy seeing i think that's one of the gifts that a great art artist or entertainer or um creator can can bring to it all yeah maybe artists are in that rebel camp you know because they can bring the lightness and the love and all that and bring the disruption yeah you know sometimes they put images in front of our face that just shock us or make us reconsider or make us cry or you know like like reverend barber doesn't go anywhere without yar allen because she brings the music king didn't go anywhere without mahalia well he went places but he you know mahalia jackson was there for him as bringing music right so there's always been this kind of musical element to movement spaces or or many times you know and and there's the big signs and the artwork and um puppets and all of these amazing things that capture our imagination in ways that words can't uh and i and that's i think that rebel spirit that says no you guys want to sit down and talk about this or you you know you think we're just gonna somehow negotiate empire falling no we're gonna show it to you in song and dance and pictures and we're gonna imagine the world as it doesn't yet exist that's one thing artists do is they say oh we can this is the world we can live in together this is the beautiful world that we can imagine but it is that very imagination that allows us that gives us the ability to keep going and that is uh to me a rebel spirit and that you say no no this reality that you say exists right now that's not the only reality i'm gonna i'm gonna live in that i'm gonna imagine like i don't i don't know how much more rebellious you can get than that but and there's also the element of just some art just holds a mirror up though and and lets you actually like i feel like that's what that sketch did it held a mirror up in a way you can actually see it yeah yeah so true [Music] my discipline and justice movement is constantly trying to deal with my own white guilt and not have it like paralyze me and i realize if any of the lunatics in the alt-right are listening right now that would just drive them blind with fury but when i look at like the role specifically my fathers and my father's fathers played in the way the world is now it's not flattering and i get a grief that we can't all fix no matter how hard we work this couldn't be fixed tomorrow and i i you know there's this constant awareness of oppression that my eyes keep getting open to more and more i don't talk about this a lot because i don't want to center white people in this conversation but i understand what your friend's saying there are days where i don't want to get out of bed because i am so disgusted with the world that we lived we live in that i helped build and so what keeps me going is almost like not just empathy but at the least i can do is undo the things i've actually built in my lifetime that i can't even talk about you know my ancestors but me that's not something homo sapiens as a species were psychologically uh built or equipped to do there's some very well understood psychological mechanisms at play in white guilt and white fragility and the kind of fatigue that we have and we i now mean humans not white people we have when engaging an important work of justice because empathy can wear you down and weaken you and that's why in this conversation i want to talk so much about how you take a step back and how you renew yourself and how you're refilled because that's as much part of the work as anything and there's a real opportunity i think for white people to get together and talk about like grief and complicity yes amongst ourselves yes and not waste the the time and attention and energy of people of color who have involved in justice work yeah we can handle that on our own we can talk about our feelings and what we've been through and what we're going through so that when we show up to do the work we're not bringing our suitcases with us [Music] yeah and that's why i think it it's it's always touchy bringing it back to relationship right because that can become you know this thing that we hide behind of like you just need more black friends or more gay friends or whatever like it's not about just being friends with marginalized people if you're a personal privilege but i do think two things the contemplative which you can do in relationship or alone right so this continual kind of connection with god and others through the contemplative which is all that fancy word means and then being in community or having relationship to folks like you said with other folks of privilege in some way where you can talk about this stuff there are in-house conversations and then there are larger commun larger conversations where we're all talking it out and i do think it's really powerful when white folks can have some of those in in-house conversations where men can have some conversations about women or other marginalized people like these things have to happen so that you can keep going um you have to have those conversations because again it does wear out you know a marginalized person to have to like walk you through it all the time and then you have to have those conversations and and commitments and relationship with people who are not like you because that helps us keep the commitment to each other right because it connects us to each other bonds us to each other we fall in love with each other more just because we have a relationship with each other if every time we're talking it's because we're doing business or doing justice work we don't we're not loving each other and it's that connection and love that is going to help us continue the work when it's hard like i don't want to go to jail with folks i don't love right so if we're going to both risk arrest together i'd rather risk a arrest with somebody i know and love so we better have spent some time together connecting before that there are those folks who i can kind of you know when they have like a moment where they feel like they need to check in with a person of color i'm their person but i think that's also why you have to have different like different people for different things right like i do have i'm i'm straight and i have friends who are lgbtq who i can who i can check in with and others that i wouldn't ask certain questions of because like we're not close like that it's not right for me to ask them that but i that's when i talk about like relationship being key that's the kind of thing that i'm talking about because we have to build resilience and part of building resilience is relationship and i'll just end with this my one of my favorite kind of i don't know scriptural verses actually comes from ethics of the fathers you know it's a jewish text and it says um it's ethics of the fathers 2 16 it said it is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world but you are not free to desist from it either wow that's good yeah like we're not gonna get it done in this generation i understand that it's like man we had the civil rights movement like aren't we done with this no we're not like we're not gonna finish it necessarily all i know is that i i can't quit either i just i have to keep going and i have to also believe that it's somehow part of the eventual coming of you know of the kingdom on earth as it is in [Music] heaven we hope you've enjoyed this discussion about advocacy on the liturgist podcast if you'd like to leave a comment or discuss this episode with other listeners or get additional resources related to advocacy visit our website at theliturgist.compodcast to view show notes and engage in the comments section we can be found on social media at the liturgists on twitter or at facebook.com the liturgists we'd like to thank our guests christina cleveland and mickey scott bae jones to connect with them via their websites or social media simply visit the liturgist.com podcast where you can find links to their work and other resources we'd like to thank the team behind the liturgist podcast madison chandler corey pig greg nordin and of course our patrons on patreon who make this show financially possible michael gunger and i science mike have been your hosts peace thanks for listening everybody [Music] you