Racism in hiding

Mennonite Church USA, like other Christian denominations, is committed to becoming an anti­racist church. One of the things that makes that difficult is that racism, like many systems and like the “powers” described in the New Testament, is pernicious and likes to remain hidden from our awareness. Part of becoming antiracist is keeping our awareness of racism alive.

The opposite of that awareness is denial, and such denial runs rampant in our society. We like to pretend we aren’t as racist as we may be. A recent article in The Atlantic (September) helps call us to task.

In “Fear of a Black President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at the magazine, writes that as our first black president, Barack Obama has avoided mention of race almost entirely. He goes on: “In having to be ‘twice as good’ and ‘half as black,’ Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.”

The fact that Americans elected a black president is often cited as evidence that we have moved beyond race as a factor in our politics. But that notion is shown to be false.

This does not mean that opposing policies of the Obama administration signifies racism. Racism is a much subtler system.

Coates points to an irony of the United States: “For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government.”

Coates shows this irony in the events around the death of Trayvon Martin last February. As soon as Obama addressed the parents and said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the case moved from a kind of national mourning to what Coates calls “racialized political fodder,” and he gives numerous examples.

Historically, Coates writes, African Americans have been limited to protest and agitation in addressing the disconnect between democracy and white supremacy. Now, when Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of what happened” in the Martin case, he was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. “The power was black,” Coates writes, “and, in certain quarters, was received as such.”

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred,” Coates writes. “It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” He notes several studies that have shown the role of race in voting patterns and in opposition to and support for health-care reform. After Obama’s election, the rhetoric of fear became much more prevalent. Signs at Tea Party rallies read, “Obama plans white slavery,” and one congressman complained that Obama “favors the black person.”

The double standard of having to be twice as good “haunts and constrains the Obama presidency, warning him away from candor about America’s sordid birthmark.” Coates points out that in the first two years as president, “Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961.”

The myth of “twice as good,” writes Coates, “holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors.”

Coates makes clear he does not agree with all of Obama’s views. He particularly abhors his embrace of a secretive drone policy. His point is about the pernicious presence of racism in our politics. “Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story,” he writes. “It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.”

The problem goes beyond politics and affects—infects—every area of society. Love, not fear, should guide us.

Prejudice and religious ignorance

Mennonites are used to being misunderstood, both in negative and positive ways. We often hear others ask about horse and buggies or plain black clothing when they hear we are Mennonites.

On the other hand, some people laud Mennonites for being committed to peace and justice, not realizing the great diversity in our ranks on those subjects.

We all carry prejudices. We prejudge others, make assumptions about them, often out of ignorance about those people and what they may believe.

Much of our media betrays great ignorance about religion—not just Mennonites but many religious groups. And if you spend much time on the blogosphere, you encounter great ignorance as people spout views that are at times hateful, certainly prejudiced and that show ignorance about the groups they are putting down in order to advance their own views.

One of the groups most commonly misunderstood are Muslims, whose numbers are growing rapidly in the United States. And worldwide Islam is the second largest religion.

Nevertheless, it is treated as monolithic and homogenous. As religion scholar Philip Jenkins writes, “Arguably, over the span of its development, Islam worldwide is quite as diverse as Christianity.”

One of the stereotypes about Islam is that it is Arab, yet, Jenkins writes, “Of the world’s eight largest Muslim countries, only one—Egypt—is Arab in language and culture, and it would not be too far off the mark to see Islam as a religion of South and Southeast Asia.”

A recent book, Woman, Man and God in Modern Islam by Theodore Friend (Eerdmans, 2012, $35), is an excellent source for getting to know modern Islam.

Friend, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an award-winning historian, traveled across Asia and the Middle East in order to understand firsthand the life situations of women in Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. The book relates hundreds of encounters and conversations with people he met along the way.

Friend writes that the reader will find “respect for Islam conjoined with faith in women and in their creative and productive potential.”

Meanwhile the media regularly report bombings by Islamicists but ignore peaceful overtures by Muslims, such as “A Commond Word” in 2007.

Ignorance of religion has enormous consequences, whether it’s a white supremacist killing Sikhs or U.S. soldiers burning copies of the Qur’an or the U.S. invasion of Iraq helping overturn half a century of women’s right to be treated as equal citizens in Iraq.

And with the recent rioting over the anti-Islam video reveals religious ignorance going many directions. 

Religious ignorance extends beyond Islam. Every day some media reinforce views of religious groups that are simplistic and fail to build understanding.

One media source that helps counter this practice is Religion News Service. For example, the weekly report dated Sept. 5 included an article on Mormons okaying Coke and Pepsi, one on Seventh-day Adventists arguing about female clergy, a Q&A with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the “Ground Zero mosque,” one on Jews in New Orleans, a Q&A with David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association, and one on the trial of Amish bishop Samuel Mullet Sr., whose followers forcibly cut the beards of Amish men.

There are many sources for learning about others and their beliefs before we make judgments about them. Jesus’ warning about judging others (Matthew 7:1) is pertinent. Let's take time to understand others' religious beliefs before we make judgments about them.

A troubled genius

Last Sunday, the Wichita Eagle published my review of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max (Viking, 2012, $27.95, 356 pages). I hesitate to place it here, but I do for a couple of reasons. First, some of you may be, as I say in the first paragraph of my review, "serious readers of contemporary American fiction." Second, as I mention in the last paragraph, Wallace struggled to find "some truth behind the banalities of daily life." While Wallace was particularly religious, though he did delve into Buddhism and Catholicism, his struggle is similar to a spirituality in the present tense, i.e., seeking to live in each moment with an awareness of God's presence. Wallace, at least, strove for awareness, which is a worthy struggle. Anyway, here's the review:

Serious readers of contemporary American fiction at least know about David Foster Wallace, a wunderkind whose massive novel “Infinite Jest” had a great effect on literature. Now, just four years after his death from suicide at age 46, we have the first biography of this remarkable writer.

D.T. Max, a New Yorker writer who worked with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends, distills a large amount of research, including access to Wallace’s notes and many of his letters. Max also displays his careful reading of the writer’s published works, including his three novels, three short story collections and many nonfiction essays.

Wallace grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., then went to Amherst, where he excelled in his studies, focusing on philosophy and literature, winning many academic awards. He also struggled with depression and had to leave school at times.

During one stay at the psychiatric unit of a hospital, “the doctors likely considered the possibility that he suffered from bipolar disorder, manic depression.” But they ended up putting him on Nardil, which instead treats atypical depression. He would stay on this drug until a year before he died.

A recognized genius (he received a MacArthur grant), Wallace incorporated huge amounts of information and created new approaches to storytelling. His head teemed with thoughts too numerous to communicate. For an epigraph to the book, Max uses a quote from Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon”: “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

We learn how much of Wallace’s own experience he used in his fiction. In a footnote, Max quotes Wallace’s sister, Amy: “We [the Wallace family] quietly agreed that his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for.”

Max traces Wallace’s writing from his first book, “The Broom of the System,” written as his senior thesis at Amherst and widely acclaimed, to his last, the posthumous “The Pale King,” which he left unfinished at his death. He shows how Wallace changed through the years, growing from “Broom,” a postmodern novel heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, through his first story collection, “The Girl with Curious Hair,” which critiques such metafictionists as John Barth, to “Infinite Jest,” which marked a major change from using irony to pointing toward a more positive outcome.

Partly through his own experience of addiction, Wallace had come to see America as “a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied.” However, rather than simply describe that addiction, Wallace said in an interview, the writer’s job was to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” Wallace noted that “American writers were still content to describe an ironic culture when they should be showing the way out.”

Max, who gives much attention to Wallace’s best-known work, writes, “In ‘Infinite Jest,’ Wallace was proposing to wash Pynchonian excess in the chilling waters of DeLillo’s prose and then heat it up again in Dostoevsky’s redemptive fire.” He goes on: “The book is at once a meditation on the pain of adolescence, the pleasures of intoxication, the perils of addiction, the price of isolation, and the precariousness of sanity.”

With the publication of that book in 1996, Wallace became a celebrity, and the attention was excruciating to one who so resisted crowds and prized his privacy. By then he had taken a job at Illinois State University that allowed him to teach part-time and write the rest of the time.

After nearly a decade there, he accepted an invitation from Pomona College in California, to write and teach one course per semester. There, following many failed relationships with women, he met Karen Green, an artist, whom he later married.

Meanwhile, he published two collections of short stories, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” and “Oblivion,” plus numerous nonfiction pieces, many collected in two books, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster.”

But he agonized to make progress on “The Pale King,” the novel he was writing about the IRS. Always a perfectionist, he felt stuck trying to figure out the right approach to the work.

At the same time, he was happy with Green and decided to go off Nardil in 2007. Doctors tried different combinations of antidepressants and even electroconvulsive therapy, but on Sept. 12, 2008, Wallace hung himself at home.

Max has charted not only the life of this extraordinary writer but his influence on literature. One of his more influential works actually came from a graduation address Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. In a speech against egoism and egotism, he encouraged students to practice awareness, to open themselves, even in line at the supermarket, “to a moment of the most supernal beauty—‘on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.’ ”

Someone taped the speech and wrote it out online. It went viral and later was published in a short book. The speech summed up, in a way, the arc of Wallace’s writing, seeking some truth behind the banalities of daily life. And his honest struggle seemed to resonate with many readers. It still does.

Humility and pretension

Every so often we see a film that just clicks with us. We may not know why, but it may be worth exploring. Let me explore.
Last week I saw Ruby Sparks, which is a good (not great) film and has received good reviews. But I came away thinking, I loved that film. Why?

First, let me tell you a bit about it. The story is about a young writer, Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano), an introvert whose first novel was a huge success but who now, 10 years later, suffers writer's block. He lives alone with his dog and sees a therapist, Dr. Rosenthal (Elliot Gould). Meanwhile, his brother Harry (Chris Messina) tells him he just needs to get laid. Calvin dreams about a girl. When he tells Dr. Rosenthal about it, he tells Calvin to write about that. "Write something bad," he says, addressing Calvin's perfectionism.
Calvin begins writing on his manual typewriter, which sits next to his iPod (go figure). He names the woman from his dreams Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan), and the words come with a new freedom. A day later, a young woman shows up in his apartment who fits his description of Ruby. It takes him some time to realize that she is real. He tells his brother but makes him swear to secrecy.
A succession of events follow, including a visit with Calvin's whacky mother (Annette Bening) and whackier stepfather (Antonio Banderas). The young couple experience differences, which Harry had warned Calvin about. Calvin can change Ruby by simply writing something about her on his typewriter, but unforeseen consequences follow.
The tone of this postmodern fable is funny but touching. It's directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who directed Little Miss Sunshine, and written by Kazan.
As in Little Miss Sunshine, the characters here are often over the top, which adds to the humor but strains the credulity. But by the end, as in the earlier film, I was won over. I predicted the ending, but I didn't care. I wanted it. And besides, it provided a good lesson that I enjoyed learning along the way. 
What's the lesson? In a nutshell, that love cannot be controlled but must be given and received freely. That may seem obvious or trite, but it's still a good lesson, and Ruby Sparks provides a fun way to have it presented.
Why did it connect with me? I tend to like movies that explore the inner lives of writers and other artists (I loved Capote), and this one captures the mixture of humility and pretension that infects many writers. Writing is a vulnerable, humbling activity that's usually marked much more by failure than success. But it can also be pretentious. For example, who am I to think other people might be interested in the thoughts I'm writing here. I could identify with that mixture of humility and pretension, and perhaps it has a broader relevance. Maybe those two adjectives describe much of human activity.
Another reason I liked the movie is that it's shamelessly romantic, and I have a strong romantic side. And Dano and Kazan (who are a couple in real life) are a charming duo who show us that life is messier than we'd like it to be. But out of that messiness, a beautiful connection can come.
 

Forgiveness in strange places

Good fiction often takes us into worlds completely foreign to us and makes them familiar. It even creates characters we may on first sight think we have nothing in common with and makes them feel human, sympathetic.

 

Hanna Pylväinen’s debut novel is one such work. The subject of We Sinners is a family, two parents and nine children. The Rovaniemis belong to a conservative church—a Lutheran revival movement called Laestadianism—in modern-day Michigan. The church forbids dancing, drinking, TV and other common practices in our culture. But its central belief, repeated several times in the novel, is that believers are forgiven in Jesus’ blood when they repent.

Pylväinen tells the story from the point of view of the various members of the family. We witness the struggle of each person with other family members and with their faith. Some hold onto the faith; others reject it; some fall somewhere in between.

Pylväinen uses telling details to show these struggles. For example, Warren, the father, reflects on the family’s constant struggle with poverty: “It was daily things, it was money, it was when he stopped at a gas station and the kids all chanted, ‘Get a treat, get a treat,’ and when he came out with chips they grabbed for them like starving people.”

Tiina, the second oldest child, is the first in the family to leave the faith, yet “she felt no thrills of liberation.” Her becoming an unbeliever is like a conversion, yet she can’t quite fill the emptiness. After she cheats on her boyfriend, she feels “she was no good in both the church’s world and in the world she had chosen.” For her, “it wasn’t about the sinning at all, it was what you did about the sinning, and she had no means of forgiveness about her.”

In spite of how oppressive the church feels to many of the children, it’s difficult to leave it behind. When Julia, the fourth youngest, who has left, returns for a visit, she sleeps in a bed with her younger sister and experiences “the old childhood security of many people asleep in one place, the uncomplicated comfort of someone in her bed who was not her lover.”

Not everyone leaves. Brita, the oldest, marries a man in the church and has numerous children (four and counting). Nels, the oldest boy, goes to college and takes up drinking and going to parties in pursuit of Bernie, a girl outside the faith. But no matter how often he breaks the rules, forgiveness is available at church, and eventually he marries a girl in the church and settles down.

Pylväinen uses irony in this interplay of belief and unbelief. Nels’ roommate, Clayton, is his conscience as Nels breaks the rules. But later, Clayton takes up drinking and ends up with Bernie.

Uppu, the youngest, befriends a new student, Jonas Chan, a shy Asian-American, at her high school. Jonas goes to her church out of courtesy and discovers a faith different from the one his parents had left. “Unlike his family’s old church, no one said they loved Jesus, no one was overemotional, and God was less a personal friend than someone spoken of quietly, as if in fear of disturbing Him.” As Jonas becomes more and more interested in the church and then becomes a believer, Uppu can’t stand it and leaves.

The final chapter goes back to 1847, to Finland, where we encounter Laestadius, the founder of the church. What became in many ways a group that imprisons people in its conservative, sometimes harsh ways began as a revival that liberated people from some harsh cultural practices that were particularly oppressive to women.

In We Sinners, Pylväinen deftly explores this dance between between oppression and liberation, between belief and unbelief, and shows the gray areas. These are not polarities but gradations of human experience. We all move in and out of various communities and belief systems, searching for love and acceptance. Often we search for forgiveness. This novel shows that sometimes it’s found in strange places.

When the powers drag their feet

In Kansas, where I live, we have experienced a second consecutive summer of extreme heat and drought. We are not alone. People I talk to keep hoping this is an anomaly, a simple weather pattern that will change and bring cooler, wetter weather next summer.

Would that it were true. But the overwhelming evidence from climate scientists around the world is that climate change is happening. And “an increasing body of science points to rising dangers from the ongoing buildup of human-related greenhouse gases—produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and forests,” according to a report in the New York Times.

Furthermore, “global emissions of carbon dioxide jumped by the largest amount on record in 2010” (5.9 percent). This trend, scientists fear, “will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.” 

Meanwhile, political powers have generally put the brakes on taking any kind of concerted action to address this problem. The United Nations can’t agree on a plan, and the U.S. Congress is influenced by money from fossil fuel companies and ideological foes to the idea that humans contribute to climate change.

A growing number of businesses recognize that short-term profits aren’t too helpful when long-term survival is in question, and there are some hopeful changes being made. But unless the majority of political powers get on board and make significant changes in the production of greenhouse gases, the heat and droughts and storms will likely continue.

I say likely because science deals in probabilities, not certainties. Many people seem to think that if something isn’t certain they don’t have to worry about it, especially if it means they’ll have to change how they live.

There has been an established scientific consensus about the role of climate change in causing weather extremes, but a recent paper by James D. Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, and two co-authors has gone further in tying specific weather events to climate change.

According to the paper, published online on Aug. 6, “scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year (see photo above), the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases,” writes Justin Gillis the New York Times.

The paper argues that “the percentage of the earth’s land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years.”

In an interview, Hansen says that “the change is too large to be natural,” and adds, “It’s just going to get worse.”

The response of his scientific colleagues, however, was split. Some experts agreed with the paper’s findings, while others were not persuaded that specific heat waves could be tied to global warming.

One climate scientist, Andrew J. Weaver, “compared the warming of recent years to a measles outbreak popping up in different places. As with a measles epidemic, he said, it makes sense to suspect a common cause,” writes Gillis.

While the powers drag their feet, what do we do? Ignore the evidence and hope for the best? Let the next generation take care of it?

Perhaps what we do individually seems small, insignificant. But Mennonites and others have claimed we are called to be faithful, not just effective. Let’s be faithful.

A refreshing change

Toward the end of a summer with its share of blockbuster movies geared toward teenaged boys comes Hope Springs (PG-13), a movie for and about adults. It is a refreshing change in several ways.

First, despite some over-the-top elements, it presents a realistic situation—a couple married for 31 years who has fallen into a dull routine and lost any sparkle in their relationship. We witness no superheroes, no car chases or fist fights, no political conspiracies or bombs, no F-words.

Second, the movie offers frank discussion of sexuality in the context of a long-lasting marriage without depicting domestic violence or infidelity. By frank, I mean frank, though it is used not to titillate but to communicate, often with humor.

Third, rather than take viewers away from their current reality to some other world or fantastic situation, Hope Springs holds up a mirror to couples and nudges them look at their own marriages. In this way, the movie goes beyond entertainment and becomes an opportunity to reflect on one’s life. I should add that it does this without being didactic; it simply tells a story of one couple.

Kay (Meryl Streep) and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) Soames sleep in separate rooms, share little physical contact and go through the same routines at breakfast before going to work and in the evenings at home, where Arnold falls asleep watching golf lessons on cable. But Kay is unhappy and signs them up for a week of intensive marriage counseling with Dr. Bernie Feld (Steve Carell) in a coastal town in Maine called Hope Springs.

Arnold refuses to go, but Kay tells him she’ll go without him, and besides, she has paid for it. He ends up going but is grumpy, complaining about the cost of everything and how worthless this endeavor is. But they meet with Dr. Feld, and in daily sessions he asks them increasingly frank questions about their relationship, including their sexual fantasies.

Though it improves in the second half, the film’s weakness is its screenplay, particularly its depiction of Arnold. His constant negativity and his aversion to touch seem extreme. And Kay’s obsequious behavior toward him at first also seems a bit much. But these two great actors overcome such flaws in the script and use their skills to make their characters believable. Carell, too, is good, playing against type as a calm, gentle counselor.

While the movie includes laugh-out-loud moments, it’s a serious drama that shows a couple going through the difficult exercise of reviewing their life together and having to decide if they want to do the hard thing and change or continue to drift apart.

Jeanne and I, who have been married 32 years, watched the movie with some recognition that certain ruts are easy to fall into. I laughed at moments and cringed at others. We came away talking about what changes we want to make in our relationship.

While Hope Springs can be seen as a cautionary tale or lesson, it’s basically a story of one couple’s relationship and can be enjoyed on that level. Even younger folks—and there were some in the audience—will enjoy this honest, heart-filled film.