not

 

The world is discouraging - - not life itself, "Life is Good" as my orange hat reads, nor "Life Itself: A Memoir" as film critic Roger Ebert summed up his own life story that I loved because it took me to so many places of the heart where I also had been in my own life. No, the world around me - - not Creation, Earth and the Universe, but the world of people. Genesis 6:5-7 and, as my seminary theology professor put it, "How does God stand us?"

Already for many years not a television viewer, now it's to scrolling past the online newsfeeds that come to my computer desktop, how much discouraging news does a person need, can a person take. Throw in the towel on life, or tune out; and life itself is too good to miss, so it's tune out. 

In the world of man, hatred and violence are so discouraging that it's Time to take refuge in a hermitage, not as The Hermitage of Andrew Jackson, but a hermitage: the remote, small, quiet dwelling place of a hermit, and let the world go by. Yet,

" ... and the second is this: you shall love your neighbor as yourself" commands our God, both Hashem, himself The Name, and again through The Name's One and Only. But "as yourself"? - - as I love myself? Who as a child grew up loving him/herself? It takes an extraordinary parent and environment for a child to grow up so self-confident as truly to love oneself, and realize humbly and modestly that it's so, and, more, to love others and the world of man as unconditionally as Grace and ἀγάπη would have it. 

Myself as a parent raising my children to love themselves and others, I cannot judge; but myself as a son I know that loving myself was not part of growing up. And Fr Richard's meditation this morning (scroll down) helps me, finally at this age, know that I am in the general population. Nobody else does either. Or, few. The meditation is worth a read and a think.

RSF&PTL

T       

Week Forty-Two: Love and Justice

A Theology of Somebodiness

On the CAC podcast Love Period., Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis interviews Civil Rights leader and longtime activist Ruby Sales. Here Sales considers how embracing our God-given identity provides healing amid society’s injustices and empowers us to love others.  

Ruby Sales: One of the things that I discovered is that when we think about love, we think about how is it that we love other people? But the first question is how is it that we love ourselves so that we extend [to] other people the love that we feel for ourselves? . . .

It’s hard to love yourself when you follow people who degrade your humanity and teach you to hate other people. It’s hard to love yourself when you’re being used by powerful people to carry out an agenda that buttresses their power but disempowers you. And so I think that the critical question that white people must deal with, and all of us must deal with in the 21st century, is how is it that [we] can love ourselves so that we might extend that love to others? Because I think that we have been taught to hate and despise ourselves. . . .

I think that in many ways, the society that I grew up in, in the South . . . if we had learned to hate ourselves the way the official requirements required us to do, then we would’ve never survived, and so I think that out of the Black community in the South, you have a kind of agape [the Greek word for unconditional love] growing up. I loved everybody, and in order to love . . . we had to counter the narrative that we were nobody with the sense that we were somebody, and that meant self-love. And I think many communities who stood on the outside of the gates of power have had to come up with a way of finding themselves worthy and beloved.

Jacqui Lewis: I love hearing the stories of your childhood community, Ruby. How did your folks, your elders, your village, how did they raise Ruby Nell Sales and your contemporaries to love yourselves? . . .

Ruby Sales: The theology and pedagogy of somebodiness—that I might be enslaved, I might be small within the state, but I’m somebody, not only with God, but with each other, and about myself. And so the pedagogy and theology of somebodiness. I’m a child of God, and being a child of God, I’m essential, and no one has the right to limit, or the power to limit, my ability to be somebody. So I grew up in a society where that theology was so powerful. . . . The white view of Black children as being inferior never penetrated my being because I was surrounded with the possibility that I could live into my highest capacity and to love myself.

 

Adapted from Jacqui Lewis, “Ruby Sales,” February 15, 2022, in Love Period., season 2 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2022), podcast, MP3 audio. 

Image credit: Nathan Garcia, Untitled (detail), 2019, photograph, Albuquerque. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.