God in Disguise: a guest appearance on Fuel Radio


Last week, I had the privilege of being interviewed as a guest on a friend’s podcast, Fuel Radio. It was fun to reflect with Rod Janz on the process of writing my book, God in Disguise, the lessons I carry with me from having been immersed in urban poor communities in India, and the way my spiritual journey has continued to unfold since my book was released last year. In particular, I enjoyed having the chance to intentionally remember the ways that failure and pain have unexpectedly become catalysts for the deepest healing in my life over the past few years. You can listen to the whole half-hour podcast here.

If you’ve read God in Disguise, I’d love to hear from you about how to book resonates (or doesn’t) with your own spiritual journey. Whether you’ve read the book or not, have you ever experienced an unraveling of your faith or your worldview? What happened next? Have there been times that you have found God in unexpected places, or found healing through what felt at the time like a dark and hopeless situation?

Who’s paying for your vacation?

vacation

photo credit: womansday.com

Summer is prime time for vacations. School is out, and the warm weather is perfect for outdoor adventure, or just lounging at the beach or the pool. For many of us, vacations are a way to relax, recharge, and escape the stress of everyday life, but we often don’t realize the implications of our vacationing practices for the people and places we visit.

Back in June, I wrote an article  for a magazine called Christ and Pop Culture about how to vacation without checking our ethics at the door. The magazine offers their readers a digital subscription for tablets and iPads, so the article has been behind a pay wall until now–but today it’s being featured on the website for free. Here’s how it starts off:

          “From royals relaxing at summer palaces to wealthy Americans seeking out natural surroundings for the sake of health during the Victorian era, vacations have historically been a privilege of the social elite. It wasn’t everyone who could afford a second house by the sea or a trip out to the wilderness to escape the cramped conditions of cities. Yet both rest and connection with nature have always been basic human needs whatever your station in life.

          These days, the world’s cities, cultures, and natural landscapes are often marketed as prepackaged commodities available for consumption to anyone who can pay the ticket price (which still includes people with money, and excludes people who are poor). But this purely materialistic understanding of vacation is a destructive oversimplification of God’s creation. As consumers, we are encouraged by industry executives and advertisers to narrow our focus to the monetary cost of our trip. But as followers of Jesus, we are called to be concerned about the rest, health, and wholeness of the places and people we visit as well as our own…”

 

Click here to read the rest of the article, in which I examine the unsavory specifics of cruises, all-inclusive resorts, and air travel, and offer practical advice for vacationing in ways that are just and compassionate.

ethical vacations

Is Free Trade Fair?

migrant workers in California

Migrant farm workers in California. (photo from Google images)

Last Friday, Andy and I attended a panel discussion about how to create a sustainable food system. We learned about the ways that farm workers here in Canada have been shipped in as cheap labor through temporary foreign worker programs, but are denied the basic protections that most people enjoy at their jobs—like paid vacation time, or overtime pay. “Piece rates,” rather than minimum wage, determine their income, and these rates are so low that half the workforce can’t pick produce fast enough to even make minimum wage! Workers are also at the mercy of unscrupulous contractors who function as the middlemen between farms and laborers, retaliating with job termination if workers complain about their housing, working conditions, or pay.

A priest running a migrant worker shelter two borders south, in Tijuana, Mexico, described the even larger problems facing agricultural workers in the United States. The U.S. economy depends on foreign labor, but unlike Canada, has no program for temporary workers at all. The result, he says, is an immigration system in chaos. 600,000 workers were deported from the U.S. last year. Many of them end up at the priest’s shelter, bewildered by their sudden twist of fate, separated from spouses and children, and—in many cases—finding themselves in Mexico for the first time in their lives. The priest told us about a surprising new industry popping up in Tijuana: call centers to employ the growing number of new deportees who speak better English than Spanish.

Mexican farmers

A small-scale farmer in Mexico (photo from Google images)

Ironically, it was an American-led free trade agreement which created the surge of illegal immigration from Mexico in the first place. When the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA) went into effect back in 1994, farming markets were opened so that peasant farmers in Mexico were suddenly competing against large, government-subsidized corn growers in the American Midwest. These small farmers couldn’t compete with the cheap imports from large-scale commercial farms in the U.S., and many of them went bust. Failed farms forced people to migrate first to Mexico’s cities, and then north to the U.S. looking for work. In the last ten years, narcotics cartels have intensified the problem by pushing even more Mexican farmers off their land and causing even urban dwellers to flee the threat of violence.

peasant farmers

Corn had been the staple crop in Mexico for centuries. (photo from Google images)

Finally, the director of the Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA) in Seattle, Washington, discussed the connection between the plight of small farmers in the U.S. and migrant farm workers from Latin America. Both are losing out against large-scale agribusiness, she says, and their best hope protecting their livelihoods is to band together to defend their rights against corporate giants like Monsanto. The DFTA is hoping to create these kinds of mutually beneficial partnerships all along the supply chain, connecting workers, farmers, suppliers, retailers, and consumers to work for the common good rather than pursuing their own economic benefit at the expense of others.

I have long been aware of the importance of buying fair trade when it comes to products imported from the developing world, such as coffee or chocolate. But this panel discussion opened my eyes to the reality that the agricultural sector here at home is hardly different from the unethical systems that prevail in other parts of the world.

The U.S. and Canada are wealthy, developed nations, but we are still depending on an underpaid, overworked labor force for our cheap, abundant food. Our laws do little to protect farm workers from exposure to harmful chemicals, abuse at the hands of their employers, and nonpayment of wages, and our legal system similarly lags behind in protecting the rights of small farmers.

These are serious problems that should concern anyone who eats food. The United States has an aging farm population, and we have reached a point as a society where we have more people in prison than we do on farms (an absurdity on both counts). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the general population has a life expectancy of 73, but the average migrant farm worker can only expect to live to the age of 49. Furthermore, EPA safety standards for farm workers haven’t been updated in twenty years.

It’s obvious in our laws and in the way we have structured our economy that we don’t value the people who produce our food. We have come to see them as just another inanimate, economic input; something to be squeezed for as much productivity on as little pay as possible, to keep profit margins high and prices low for consumers like us.

There is currently no federal regulation for fair trade.

Think about that for a moment.

Farms—companies of all kinds—are under no obligation to prove that their products have been created without exploiting the people or the natural landscapes of the places where they were produced. There’s no way for us to know whether the food that we’re eating has poisoned a river, poisoned someone else’s body, or relied on slave labor to make it to our plate.

It’s high time fair trade came home to North America. We have a responsibility as North Americans and as Christians to care for the people who are sustaining our lives while barely being able to eek out a life of their own in the most prosperous nations on earth.

The video below features interviews from small farmers and migrant workers in the American South, and follows the story of a farm in Florida that is becoming part of the solution:

Am I Pretending to be Poor?

A few days ago I had the uncomfortable experience of traveling back and forth between what felt like two entirely different worlds. During the day, I found myself in the middle of an impromptu and chaotic voter ID registration blitz at a local school, helping to fill out forms for people who can’t read or write and who—in the absence of any birth certificate or school records—may be applying for a document which will legally prove their existence for the first time in their lives. It was noisy, crowded, and disorganized as people scrambled around to get their applications in order, struggling with an inane paper system that could have been easily streamlined with a basic computer, and receiving little information from the disdainful government officials responsible.Then in the evening, I headed over to the upscale shopping district of the city to meet for coffee with another expat. When I spend time with other expats, they often tell me about the places they’ve found to buy imported brands, peanut butter, organic products, and even bacon, of all things. I can’t even remember the last time I ate pork; we gave it up after we decided to move into a Muslim neighborhood (for the sake of relationship rather than for the sake of any kind of ritual purity). But it’s not like I don’t enjoy peanut butter or organic food! If I were still living in the West I would be highly interested in figuring out where to buy organic produce, or stylish shoes, for example. But here, the thought never even crosses my mind. When none of my neighbors can afford to buy anything besides the conventionally-grown vegetables at the local market, when those same fresh veggies are available just walking distance from my house, and when we cook every meal from scratch, how could I possibly afford to travel to another part of the city to buy my food at an expensive, indoor shop where it would cost ten times what it does on the side of the road? And where would I wear jeans or any other article of clothing besides my loose-fitting salwar kameez suits when I have joined a community in which women scarcely leave the house without their heads covered? In this context, jeans would read as a socio-political statement, or maybe worse, as a cry for inappropriate attention. Many foreigners are doing important and compassionate work here in India, and they aren’t living extravagantly; by the standards of their home country, all of these things they buy are extremely cheap and reasonable. Many of them work alongside highly educated, wealthy Indians to whom Western clothing and customs are entirely acceptable. But for me it’s different. That kind of lifestyle would be far out of reach for all of my friends, and it would separate me from them.

After coffee, my husband and I wandered around, enjoying the spacious sidewalks and temperate weather. We passed by huge, glass storefronts with mannequins behind them sporting either Western-style designer ensembles or luxurious saris worth hundreds of dollars, never mind rupees. We walked past the flashy mall which a neighbor had once described to us after a family window-shopping outing as a wonderful place “where it’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter,” and where they had been fascinated by the “moving staircases” but were too terrified to ride them from one floor to another.

The people who milled around us now were likely unimpressed by the escalators inside: they all wore Western clothing, carried smart phones, and drove cars and fancy motorbikes. Probably they were more drawn to the Western labels and fashions which have become status markers in Indian society, helping people to project a cosmopolitan and cultured image. From inside the mall, brightly-lit signs for KFC and Dominoes Pizza welcomed patrons into upscale restaurants which certainly would not be associated with those same signs in the small towns that I remember as pit-stops on the long American road trips of my youth.

In a way, all of this felt familiar—hadn’t I also worn Western clothes, carried an iphone, driven a car, and gone out with friends in my previous life? All of those things had been so normal in America, but here they were alien experiences. I have never shopped at a mall in India. I have lived in this city for a year and a half without ever seeing most of the coffee shops, stores, bars, and restaurants where wealthy, educated Indians in my city hang out. Instead I have been to village weddings and Muslim saints’ graves, outdoor markets and public hospitals, train stations and slums.

It’s ironic, because actually I would rather go out for gelato on a special occasion than spend hours making buffalo biryani at home to celebrate something important. And I don’t particularly enjoy Indian weddings or visiting saints’ graves as a leisure activity, but I accompany my friends to these kinds of places because it’s what they do for fun, on the fairly rare occasions that they go anywhere at all. I’m not Indian, I’m not a Muslim, I’m not from the village, and I come from a wealthy, educated background, so it’s strange when I run into another expat or an Indian coworker at an NGO. They’re wearing Western clothes and talking about the city’s nightlife and checking facebook. They’re puzzled by my bangles and Indian dress, and my apparent ignorance about the city’s restaurants and bars; it’s hard to answer the unspoken questions about why I don’t do all of the “normal” things that they already associate with my culture. Why am I emulating people who are lower-class and “backward”? No one aspires to move into a slum, any more than someone would aspire to move into the projects, or into a trailer park, if they had another option. Am I just putting on some kind of act, pretending to be poor?

It’s a question worth asking, in order to make sure I’m not losing or hiding myself in the midst of all this radical “adjustment” across culture, religion, and socioeconomic class. But I really believe the answer to that question is, No, I’m not pretending to be someone I’m not. I’ve just chosen to make a lot of choices in my life based on a desire to relate to people who are different from me and to meet them on their own turf. That means that the superficial aspects of my life—food, clothing, social habits, etc.–often reflect the culture to which I am adapting rather than my own preferences or sensibilities. It means that what was foreign becomes familiar and what was familiar becomes foreign. But my hope is that the essential core of who I am and what I’m about will remain unchanged; merely translated into a new language, or converted into a new medium.

I know that my choices are strange, but my old life just doesn’t seem normal either, anymore. In America, jeans and English and a high school education don’t make you privileged, but here they do. In India, Western habits and food and clothing are all luxury commodities in themselves; the English language is a status symbol. I feel uncomfortable in the wealthy areas of the city because when I go there, the poor—the people I have lived among for the past two years—are still part of the scene, but as rickshaw pullers, children selling balloons on the side of the road, beggars entreating passing shoppers for change. I have begun learning to see things from their perspective, so it feels strange and wrong when I go to these places and feel that I’m being grouped in again with the wealthy shoppers, unaware and uninvolved, instead of with the poor on the sidelines.

Perhaps the main reason these situations feel uncomfortable for me is that they actually force a sort of crisis of identity: where do I fit, after all? Me, the foreigner with access to nearly limitless resources and opportunity, who owns a laptop and an ipod and a facebook account, but who lives without AC, speaks Hindi, and spends more of her time with illiterate village migrants in a slum than with people of her own race, religion, nationality, or socioeconomic background?

An outsider on the inside, an insider on the outside.

New to India, and yet more acquainted with its harsh realities than most of the middle- and upper-class Indians who have spent their whole lives here.

Integrated into the slum, and yet a total stranger to the worldview that orders my neighbors’ universe.

Sharing in my neighbors’ experiences, and yet completely unversed in the tragedy, suffering, and desperation that has shaped so much of their lives.

I’m still trying to find my place in this society. So my life feels strange to myself, when I bump into my old life unexpectedly in an expat or a wealthy Indian. Yet again, I find that life here forces me to learn more about myself than about anyone or anything else.

Source: New feed

On Miracles and Justice through Community

          This week I heard a moving story about a family’s brush with death and their experience of God’s miraculous intervention to save the life of their newborn daughter. They described the six hundred people who were interceding for them all at the same time, the nearness of God throughout the whole ordeal, the state-of-the-art medical facilities and the world-class doctors they were able to get treatment from. I appreciated hearing an honest and personal account of a very difficult situation, and at the end of the story I felt happy and relieved to see a photo of their adorable little girl who continues to develop as a normal, healthy child. But this story of miraculous intervention and the avoidance of tragedy also brought up more complex emotions and questions for me. I couldn’t help but think of all the babies and children in my neighborhood in India who have died of preventable causes over the past few years– things much simpler than the condition this baby suffered from. I wondered whether those children are any less precious to God than this little girl who was saved. I wondered whether God is really petty enough to count the number of intercessors before deciding whether to get involved.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve begun trying to sort out the difference between God’s blessings and the privileges that we hold onto for ourselves. In this story, it was remarkable that the child survived a very serious health condition and a very rare complication after a high-risk surgery– her recovery is certainly a miracle that goes beyond the limits of medical treatment. But still, a part of her story is that she was operated on by, literally, the best surgeon in the world. A part of her story is that her family had access to some of the best medical centers in the world, that they could afford it, and that their families were wealthy enough to put them up in a hotel and provide for their every need while they waited for their daughter to be able to leave the hospital. All of these factors of geography, income, and family connections played a significant role in determining whether the child would live or die.

I’ve waited outside of crappy public hospitals in India with families who shuttle relatives back and forth from home to bring meager provisions for the patient and the people who are waiting at their bedside. I’ve seen the families who come in from the villages for treatment and who just sleep outside on the grass or curl into the fetal position on one corner of their patient’s hospital bed for nights on end because there’s nowhere else to stay and no money to pay for accommodation. I’ve seen situations in which so many odds are stacked against them that it would take a big miracle to save anyone, and I wonder– have we taken some of our privileges for granted and given God credit for things that global economics, or politics, or we personally have allotted to ourselves? How many Indian doctors and nurses are competing for high-paying positions in American hospitals instead of taking positions at hospitals and clinics in their home country where there are severe staff shortages because our country can afford to pay them more, and because treating wealthy patients in spacious, private offices is less stressful than treating poor patients in overcrowded clinics?

I’m not resentful that children in my home country get great medical care. On the contrary, I join this child’s parents in celebrating the gift of her life! But I am also disturbed that children in my adopted home country hardly get any medical care at all, and I also grieve with the parents of so many children whose lives have been lost– not for lack of divine intrvention, but for lack of basic medical care… and maybe for lack of God’s people intervening.

I’m struck by how much relationships can determine in our lives. I know many wealthy people who are extremely generous amongst their friends and relatives. They are often quick to respond to any need that is brought to their attention, but the problem is that few needs are likely to crop up in their network of relationships, because everyone they know is also likely to be fairly educated, wealthy, and well-placed in the world. Likewise, when entire families, neighborhoods, groups of peope, or nations are poor, chances are that the neediest people will only have other needy people in their networks of relationships when some crisis arises.

What if we could change that? What if we who are wealthy (if you’re literate and have access to a computer and an internet connection to read this, then you are in that category) could expand our circle of friends and family to include those who are poor? If a stranger needs housing, or cancer treatment, or a hot meal, we may or may not contribute through some indirect, sterile line of charitable donation. But if our sister or father or friend is the one who is ill or without a job or in need of a place to stay, there’s no way we would let them go without!

The redefinition of family and responsibility for our fellow human beings is at the very heart of the Kingdom Jesus preached. He scandalized his listeners by declaring that his mother and brother and sisters were not merely his biological kin, but included all those who did the will of God. He revolutionized our concept of the “neighbor” whom we are to love as we love ourselves to include not just those who are ethnically, religiously, or geographically close to us but even those who are our enemies. Many people were offended by these teachings because they believed that Jesus was devaluing the relationships between parents and children, or between people of the same nation or religion. Those people didn’t understand him. He was actually telling us that we owe that same level of committed care and compassion to whoever is in need of it, whether they’re biological family or not.

Expanding our sense of family and neighborhood goes beyond just moving money around. It means making our time, our energy, our resources, our connections, and our know-how available to those we have accepted as part of our surrogate family. Maybe that means moving into a neighborhood where poor people will live nextdoor to us. Maybe it means creating opportunities to build relationship with people in need by volunteering somewhere where we will cross paths with people we wouldn’t meet in the course of our usual routine. However we go about it, it’s bound to take some intentional effort and creativity because it will take us beyond our comfort zone. But I believe that if we can do that, then all of the advantages we’ve been given in life—whether direct gifts from God or the unjust gains of an unequal system—will become true blessings to those who give and to those who receive.

The Long Way Back

          3:30 am: we pull ourselves out from under the covers and into the cold of the room that propels us into wakefulness as we get dressed and boil eggs to take with us for breakfast, once it’s late enough in the morning for our stomachs to settle and eat. We make the final preparations on our room– bringing our “kitchen sink” and other buckets inside, taking books off the shelf underneath that leaky section of roof– and head out the door with our backpacks.

Walking along the side of the road is strange at this time of night. I’ve never seen it so utterly desolate and quiet. It feels as though the city has been emptied of its entire population. Fortunately, before we have to walk too far down the road, an auto pulls up and we climb in to ride the rest of the way to the train station. The station, by contrast, is as busy as we’ve ever seen it: a colorful swarm of sleeping bodies covered head to toe under thick quilts and blankets take up two-thirds of the platform, making it difficult to squeeze past. Around 5 am, our train arrives, and there’s confusion as we all crowd around, trying to board. All the doors are locked, so following the usual protocol, one or two passengers force open a window and climb through to liberate the train car from inside. Then we’re all pouring in, but there are no lights on so we struggle to find our assigned bench in the dark, while other passengers merely look for whichever seats aren’t occupied yet in order to claim them temporarily with their luggage. Even though we bought our tickets a month beforehand, the only thing available was this “bench” class: berths of hard, straightback pews facing each other, designed to fit three to a seat, but bound to be stretched beyond their official capacity because every person holding one of an unlimited number of “general” (read: “standing”) tickets being sold will also be accommodated in this train car. For awhile, there are just the two of us sitting on our bench, and we are naively hopeful. Perhaps our main challenge over the next 10 hours will just be existing on this uncomfortably hard seat and maybe managing to fall asleep for part of it!

Then comes the next station. And the next. People fill in the aisles, and then flow in between our benches, standing in the spaces between our knees and leaning over us to support themselves with their hands on the backs of our benches. Eventually the car is full, as far as we can tell. Even making it to the toilet at the end of the car is a pipe dream, unless you want to be crowd surfed to your destination. And yet somehow people continue to pile on– they find space for new people long after Westerners would have declared that an impossibility. Now we reach the stage where there’s a fight at the door every time we reach a new station. The least fortunate of the new arrivals merely hang out of the open door with their luggage on their backs as the train accelerates out of the station, and eventually, they are absorbed into the car. But finally, even this magic runs up against the laws of physics: a young man with a big backpack sticking out behind him is stuck outside the door as we pull away from the station. He’s just an inch or two away from running into the signal poles each time the train passes one of them, and five minutes after leaving the station, he is yet to move one inch into the interior of the train. As we look out the window, we can actually see the backpack of the person ahead of him also sticking out of the train door, in front of his face. We call out to him and A. reaches through the window to relieve him of his bag by tying it to the bars of the window from the inside. The bag and the man stay where they are for the next hour or more, until they reach their final stop.

Sitting next to A. during this whole ordeal is a grey-haired Indian man who seems wealthier than the usual bench-class passenger and seems to be taking it all in as an adventure. He’s generously inviting more people to come and stand in between our benches, or sit on the edge of our bench, or to pass their babies and small children into our compartment to sit on someone else’s lap while their parents stand wherever they find room. He’s obnoxiously friendly like that. Meanwhile, I’m becoming internally militant over defending my shrinking space as another grateful passenger squeezes onto the seat and my shoulder presses harder against the bars of the window. By this point, a couple of people have stowed their seven- or eight-year-old boys on the luggage rack overhead, and I envy their apparent comfort. Observing the general scene, the overly-enthusiastic passenger turns to A.: “It’s miserable, isn’t it?” he says happily. “Why did you come to India?” he wants to know. A. bursts out laughing. “It’s very discomfortable,” the man continues in English. “Everyone is discomfortable.”

“Discomfortable” indeed. But whereas most people in the train car were expecting the journey to be exactly like it was, we were comparing the experience to the thousands of other journeys recorded in our memory which were faster, easier and just more comfortable than this one. When a young woman in a sari sat down in the floor directly in front of my seat where my legs should have been, she was probably thinking, This is how it always is on the train. But as I resigned myself to the lost leg-space and curled into a vertical fetal position on my last square foot of bench, I was thinking, This is the worst trip of my life. Expectations are everything.

It was a small comfort to think that we were sharing in the experience of the Majority World by traveling the way most human beings in the world do—I was reminded of this every time I looked out the window to avoid mounting claustrophobia and saw motorbikes, buses, and jeeps that were just as packed full of people as our train was.

Still, we were eager to get off the train. We spent the night at a cheap, grimy hotel in Delhi, and the next morning the second leg of our journey began. Arriving at the airport, we already felt that we had crossed into another world. It could hardly be imagined that the air-conditioned spaciousness of the airport with its glossy surfaces and orderly lines and uniformed personnel was really India, separated by just a few yards of space from the messy, pulsing life continuing all around it. Stepping into that other world felt like a relief, but it was also very strange. This surreal feeling continued as we boarded the plane, settled into comfortable chairs reserved just for us, and watched movies for a few hours before touching down in Istanbul. Our minds couldn’t keep up with the distance our bodies were traveling at such an incomprehensible speed. The Turkish airport was like an upscale shopping mall. How could Turkish coffee and baklava and Western fast food chains really be just a few hours away from chai on the train with snatches of rural Indian life flying past the window outside: villagers plowing their fields with oxen and harvesting crops by hand; entire families working at brick kilns with the tall smokestacks in the background, just like you see in those documentaries about modern-day slavery. Then we board the next flight: plastic-wrapped blankets, plastic-wrapped headphones, plastic cups for water and juice and coffee. Complimentary socks and slippers and warm towels and entrees containing more meat than we’ve eaten in the past month.

Things get stranger still when the in-flight map shows that we are no longer flying over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, or France but over the American South—yet by now we have accepted this liminal space that defies comprehension. We land in my hometown, are greeted by family and a peppermint mocha from Starbucks, and minutes later we’re cruising down the open highway in an SUV, trying to get our bearings as we take in the big box stores, billboards, and miles of open space. Christmas lights. Suburbs. Indoor grocery stores full of flawless, giant fruit and food imported from around the world. It is just 48 hours since we set out from the slum.  The geographical distance we have just traveled doesn’t even begin to represent the full distance we have covered.

The Ugly Truth About The Beauty Myth

          A few months ago, I read Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth and it felt like a missing piece sliding into place, naming that vast and vague sense of unfairness that I have instinctively felt since childhood. It’s the reason that as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by private and public conversation that centers on the pitiless appraisal of women’s bodies. The reason I was able to so easily detach from my real appetite for several years in order to hinge my hunger instead on whether or not the reflection in the mirror deserved food or not. The reason why I have so often fallen into the catch-22 of aching to hear that I was beautiful, only to find that the judgment, having been passed, reaffirms my precarious position more than my personhood, and that I feel resentful towards the man who has power to pass such a judgment in the first place without needing mine in return.

If you’re a woman, you can probably relate to these kinds of experiences. If you’re not a woman, ask one who’s close to you about this and she can probably tell you how this same undercurrent has pulled at her throughout her life. ­But I have hope that if this thing has a name—if it is a man-made construction rather than simply “the way things are” or, worse, “the way God designed things to be”—well, then it’s a system we can climb out of to claim our freedom.

The book explains the myth that our society has constructed: that beauty is a universal, eternal, and unchanging quality, and that possessing it is the only way for women to obtain worth, love, or power in society. Any cross-cultural experience or historical research quickly reveals that standards of beauty are diverse and contradictory throughout time and across the globe. While I grew up always trying to get a tan in the summer, my Chinese friends were horrified at the idea of ruining pale skin with sunlight, and while women in the U.S. diet to stay slim, my Indian friends tell me I’m too skinny and encourage me to get “nice and fat.” Think of foot binding and corsets and all the other strange things women have done over the centuries in pursuit of “beauty”. Nonetheless, the current beauty myth has been retold with such an alloy of fervor and monotony in advertisements, literature, film, popular culture, and even scientific journals that it has convinced most women, either consciously or unconsciously, that their worth lies in their sex appeal.  With that in mind, women are essentially doomed to an endless treadmill of buying products and disciplining their bodies as they strive toward an ideal of “beauty” which, with the advent of photoshop, airbrushing, and mass media, is based less on the human form than on the humanoid creations of advertisers and pornographers.

The belief system inspired by the myth explains why, despite the fact that women are more educated, enjoy better health, and have more legal rights, professional opportunities, and influence in wider society than at any other time in history, we’re in a worse state than any previous generation of women “in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically.”  Writing in the early ‘90s (and all of these trends have surely intensified since then), Wolf points out that over the last few years, “eating disorders rose exponentially… cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty… pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.”

Wolf maintains that this unrealistic ideal and the unhealthy lengths women go to in order to achieve it have not come about accidentally. This situation has been invented—by advertisers, among others—in order to keep women more concerned with maintaining their appearance than with bringing the full power of their energy and intellect to bear on the world. Who knows what kind of upheaval might result in society from women collectively unleashing their full talents for the first time, after centuries of restrictive roles and separate spheres that have prevented them from participating fully in human history?

The beauty myth creates a caste system which offers social rewards sporadically and temporarily, but playing by its rules, even the most beautiful woman ultimately loses (it’s no coincidence that to be a model, an eating disorder is basically a prerequisite). Whatever fleeting admiration she gains through the system feels like love, but it blocks the real thing by never allowing a woman’s true self to be recognized and loved for who she is. And eventually she will grow older, the lines and marks of lived experience on her body disqualifying her for “beauty” and taking away all her power and worth in society. Wolf suggests that the way out of this mess is not to scramble towards the top of the heap, but to refuse to be locked inside of a caste system at all.

How have we bought into this lie and perpetuated its power in our own lives and the lives of others? What does it look like to break free and to help others do the same?

Source: New feed

Comfortable Crucifixion 

Picture

art by Banksy
          I’ve been contemplating this image a lot since I came across it a few weeks ago, thinking of how poignant it is for the nails in Jesus’ hands to be represented by shopping bags; for the sin nailing him to the cross to be the greed and excess of consumerism.  More specifically, of my consumption.

Living “simply” doesn’t mean I’ve conquered that internal drive to pursue comfort by acquiring more. I realized the other day that when I think of my home country, for example, what often come to mind are the products that I miss. Jamba Juice. Peppermint mochas from Starbucks. Scented body wash. Comfortable furniture. And I suppose that’s not bad in itself, but why are those the things that come to mind when I’m feeling tired and discouraged? The other day I thought about wandering around the supermarket in my hometown and just the idea of leisurely browsing aisle after aisle of specialty foods in air-conditioned comfort with endless options and variety and a massive supply that never runs out sounded so good to me. I found myself daydreaming about just walking around there, not even buying anything.  I mean, I like eating hummus and cheese and Fritos and all those things you just can’t get easily in Northern India, but even just shopping for them sounds comforting and familiar. The idea of the glossy lights and colors of the cosmetics section brings up similar feelings, even though I hardly own any makeup and am usually turned off by all of the advertising when I’m actually near it.

The Kingdom of God that Jesus is constantly talking about in the Gospels encompasses God’s vision for humanity to enjoy freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and inclusion in a community of love. In first century Palestine, the powers of evil which killed Jesus were embodied in the brute force of Rome and the religious authority of the Pharisees, whose legalistic, judgmental, and top-down religious system was set against everything his Kingdom stood for. In the same way, perhaps a big part of the Empire and religious establishment of our day is the soulless system of materialism, consumption, and ever-increasing wealth in which we are all enmeshed in some way or another, whether we realize it or not. Globally, this system values profits and products over people, exploits the poor and vulnerable with low wages and unsafe working conditions to create cheap, mass-produced commodities for the wealthy, and often involves the degradation of the natural world in order to create these disposable items that will one day become trash in a landfill.

And this impersonal system of commerce not only harms our neighbors—it eats away at our own souls as well.  We consume to feel beautiful, important, safe, impressive, comforted, or just distracted from the needs of the world and the inner turmoil of our souls.  Maybe we even pursue more and more external stimuli and experiences and possessions in order to be distracted from the gaping fear that if we ever stopped to look too deeply within ourselves we might find that we are not who we present ourselves to be, or—worse— that there is nothing of substance within us at all.  There are a lot of buoyant memories from my younger years of happily buying a new outfit or accessory or CD and feeling a sense of fulfillment with the new appearance or experience I was instantly gratified with, but I remember too that none of those times ever felt like the last time I would need another stick of eyeliner or some new music. There was always more out there that I didn’t have, and as trends changed I would inevitably want more or at least something different than what I already had. Seasonal fashion and planned obsolescence and insecurity  in who we are can fuel continuous consumption that makes us feel like we’re on the way to being a happier person by satiating ourselves or achieving a certain image, but we never seem to arrive. I still find this mistaken belief system at work in my heart.

As I consider this unorthodox but rather profound image of Jesus on the cross, the thought strikes me that this carefully-cultivated superficiality needs to be crucified before authentic life can grow in its place.

Confessions of a Violent Pacifist

“My experience tells me that the Kingdom of God is within us, and that we can realize it not by saying, “Lord, Lord” but by doing His will and His work. If therefore, we wait for the Kingdom to come as something coming from outside, we will be sadly mistaken.”—Mohandas Gandhi, Young India, 12 May 1920“He or she [the nonviolent person] must have a living faith in nonviolence. This is impossible without having a living faith in God. A nonviolent man can do nothing save by the power and grace of God. Without it he won’t have the courage to die without anger, without fear and without retaliation. Such courage comes from the belief that God sits in the hearts of all and that there should be no fear in the presence of God.”   –Gandhi, Harijan, 23 March 1940

“[A]s my contact with real Christians increased, I could see that the Sermon on the Mount was the whole Christianity for him who wanted to live the Christian life… it seems to me that Christianity has yet to be lived.” –Gandhi, as quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in Performing the Faith, 2004
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

I feel convicted by the words of Gandhi on the subject of the Sermon on the Mount and the pursuit of the Kingdom of God. It occurs to me that in many ways, the way of Jesus is “yet to be lived” in my own life. I haven’t yet attained the courage to free myself from anger, fear, and desire to retaliate in the face of mistreatment and violence.

I am walking down the side of the road alone. A motorcycle brushes past me from behind, much too close for comfort. Two men look back to stare at me, the foreign woman walking alone. My mind immediately begins to play through the hypothetical situations of what I would have done if they had actually touched me, what I will do if they stop to cause any trouble. My eyes fall to a brick lying in the dust ahead of me. I picture myself picking up the brick and throwing it at them with full force.

In the sea of people leaving the park, a man walks past me in the opposite direction and gropes me. I wheel around and hit him in the back with my water bottle. No physical harm done to him (unfortunately, I think to myself), but I know that it would have been my knuckles into his back if he had been any closer—my reaction was instinctive and automatic.

Crossing the street with my husband on the way to a friend’s house, a man cat-calls at me and proceeds to make animal noises. I’ve had enough of this kind of disrespect. We walk swiftly toward him (and the rest of the day laborers he’s sitting with) and confront him in Hindi: “Are you an animal? What are you making those noises for?” Before I know it, there’s a hand on my shoulder and a middle-class Indian friend who lives nearby is taking my place in front of the man scolding him about his harassment. But before she’s finished, another middle-class man—a total stranger—has noticed this gathering of important-looking people confronting some poor, low-caste riff-raff from the villages and steps forward to hit the man without even knowing what has happened (or caring to ask questions). At this point A. and I both move forward to stop the violence, but it’s too late. Policemen pull up on their motorbikes out of nowhere and similarly enter the fray, beating first and asking question later. We try to pull them back from the man, saying that there’s no need to beat him; nothing has really happened. What began as our confronting a man about his dehumanizing treatment of women has rapidly turned into the wealthy, powerful people ganging up on the poor—who, due to malnutrition and hard manual labor, are literally half their size. The man is suddenly clasping his hands and appealing to me for forgiveness—but of course, this is no heart transformation. Fear has driven out any chance of reason or reflection. He fears for his life under the police officer’s baton–the same batons that threatened women and children at the protest rally a few weeks ago. This was not a situation I had intended to create. I wasn’t happy about it. And I didn’t feel any vindication in my dehumanization being paid for with his. The same system of domination and violence was oppressing us both, and we had both become pawns in its game.

If I don’t commit violent acts but only fantasize about them in my head, then am I really free of violence? And if I don’t use physical force, but seek to demean, insult, and control others with hateful words, then can I really claim to be overcoming evil with good? Am I seeking the transformation of my own heart and the redemption of my enemy when I respond to their aggression in kind?

These stressful situations bring out parts of my inner self that might remain hidden forever in a different environment—say, my hometown. I am forced to face the limits of my faith, and the gap between my stated convictions and my actions and ingrained reflexes. It’s one thing to talk about the Sermon on the Mount. It’s quite another to find creative ways of loving my enemies, especially when they outnumber me or have superior social position and physical strength.  But surely Jesus was aware of these sorts of situations when he charged his hearers to repay evil with good and to love their enemies. I’m sure that Roman soldiers had similar tactics and maybe even similar weapons when they came down on Jewish peasants in occupied Palestine during Jesus’ days.  And even sexual violence is certainly nothing new. But creativity, and self-restraint, and even a willingness to suffer (NOT to be confused with passive acceptance of abuse) certainly take a lot of practice, and ultimately, as Gandhi says, they can be put into practice only “by the power and grace of God.”

I don’t know all of the answers, but in the active “satyagraha” (“the Force which is born of Truth or Love”) resistance that Gandhi taught and practiced—the same method of active-nonviolent resistance that inspired Martin Luther King’s “soul force” movement in our own country fifty years ago—I am challenged to pursue and experiment with Jesus’ teaching under the assumption that it is not only possible, but necessary as the only way to resist the cycles of violence in our world rather than reinforcing and becoming a part of them.

May it not be said of our lives that we have left the way of Jesus untried.

Toxicity

          Andy and I just returned from a two-week trip to Los Angeles to visit friends from Pepperdine, our “family” in Watts, and some biological family. We graduated from Pepperdine two years ago, so the people we knew as freshmen and sophomores when we left are now juniors and seniors about to graduate! It felt good to be able to return to a place that had been so meaningful to us in a formative time of life, and to still run across so many familiar faces. We were even able to meet up with some of our mentors, people who taught us about marriage and Following and have therefore shaped our lives forever. And it was good for our spirits to get to spend time with so many of the close friends that we graduated with, who are still living and working in the L.A. area. Thanks to them, we traveled all over L.A. county without once having to rent a car or even use public transit, and we always had a place to stay. Thank you Christine, Dave, Thomas, Becca, Lauren, D’Esta, Stuart, Grant, Paul, Jen, Bryan, Steph, Michael, Gary, Adam, Daniel, Genieve, Brittany, Shelby, Dusty, Cecily, Jon, Rose, and everyone else whose hospitality fed, sheltered, and transported us during our stay! There are even more people whose conversation fed our souls with good questions and insights and stories. Now add perfect Southern California weather to all of that and you can see just how good we had it.
Picture

an aerial view of Pepperdine’s campus
           At the same time, however, there was one aspect of the trip that was discouraging. For several years now, an injustice that has weighed heavily on my heart is the way that our culture objectifies people, particularly women. I would venture to say that this plague is nowhere more evident than in Los Angeles, where a lot of trends begin and a lot of destructive mass media is produced. Pepperdine’s campus is a microcosm of it, and you can tell by the way that a lot of female students dress (or don’t get dressed) that they have completely bought into our society’s lie: that women are primarily sexual objects who exist to meet others’ needs and whose value and worth depends on their sex appeal. Now some may think I’m being dramatic, until they see a lecture hall emptying out and find themselves wondering whether students forgot to change out of their clubbing outfits from the night before, or whether some of them might have lost their pants while walking to class.          But I can’t rag on them too much, because I know the positive reinforcement they get from the guys around them, and I know the unhealthy lengths that I and other women I know and love have gone to in order to meet those same unreasonable standards of beauty. It’s easier in the short-term to deprecate the women who annoy the rest of us by putting themselves on display, but when I recognize my own weaknesses and fears in them, I can empathize with them and feel the compassion that their situation ought to evoke in us. It makes sense to try emulating air-brushed, soft-porn advertising perfection, if you believe that your identity and the security of your relationships depend on it.

But the truth is that we women don’t have to get on that exhausting hamster wheel of comparison, jealousy, and insecurity, and that we don’t have to devalue as we age. The truth is that our dignity has nothing to do with our sex appeal and everything to do with the Image that we bear and the Love that created us. And the truth is that men don’t have to chase the phantom promises of lust and dehumanize themselves by cultivating selfish and distorted appetites.

In a culture as toxic as the one we live in, that kind of radical message needs some reinforcement– because the opposing lie will be reinforced with every billboard, commercial, and magazine we see. Its important for brothers and sisters  to look out for each other’s spiritual and emotional well-being, and to protect each other from the lust and the insecurity that have become so normal and accepted in our society. I really believe that viewing other people (and ourselves) as objects to be consumed is the root of so many other, more obvious evils: eating disorders, pornography and other sexual addictions, prostitution, human trafficking. All of these big things begin with a small, personal belief that is based on a lie, so the best way to start addressing any of them is to pull out that lie by the root. So men and women, knowing that our struggles fuel one another’s struggles, how can we stand out from the world by treating ourselves and one another differently? How are we reinforcing or challenging the sin in each other’s lives, and how can we draw each other toward wholeness?