It’s hard to fight racism, in yourself as well as in others, when you are surrounded by people who think it’s good, right, and justified. When you are immersed in a racist culture, which, of course, we are. It’s not just a white thing. And even though we, as a society, like to think we’ve made positive steps towards eliminating racism, very often it seems that it’s really just gone into hiding until society deems it acceptable again. And the scary thing is that sometimes it seems that it is already becoming acceptable again.

These days, I personally tend to approach racial issues from an almost naive perspective (at least that’s what I think people perceive it as). Questioning the reasonings behind them is a knee-jerk reaction now. And I still piss people off. Probably more than ever. But…

…I’m still not fully recovered.

I can’t remember having a consciously racist thought in at least a couple of years. But I still have quick, subconscious aversions sometimes. Almost like squicks, but not as intense. And they don’t have any conscious thought elements in them. They’re generally over in split-seconds, but the fact that they happen anyway concerns me, even though I know that this is due to my early-life conditioning. Will I ever be free of them? I don’t know. But I fight them every time they happen.

Self-awareness and conviction are amazing weapons.

I hope that someday we can piss on racism’s grave.

And I believe that we, as individuals, can do this.

It just takes time.

Namaste.

~J~

“To build separate spaces to do this is to commodify spirituality, and objectify it.”

I could not agree less. Having a refuge to remember who I am outside advertising, oppression, and the hateful voices loudest in this culture has been and continues to be pretty damn critical to me having any connection to God.

For some of us, it’s rather difficult to admit that we don’t have a perfect connection to God… that we can forget what we’re struggling for, and forget what that inner silence feels like. Refuge is a real need, especially with human culture’s capacity for harshness, cruelty and distortion of love. Training is a real need, when we are immersed every day in messages that attempt to do us harm. The kingdom is countercultural, and struggling against mainstream culture is exhausting. The temple space I see Gabe writing about is the very acts that nurture our understanding of God… the prayer time, the formation time, the repetition of messages of love that breaks through the repetition of messages of greed and hate. It’s also the dedicated spaces where that inner quiet can be relocated, when we can’t find it anywhere else.

I have not always been able to find temple space in my life. I have not always been able to find what nurtures me, where I can hear God and ask for help in understanding what I am to do. The pain of those times is amplified when the message is reinforced yet again that I *should* be able to hear God anywhere. I appreciate you warning us about the dangers of building churchmall structures, but the other extreme is still too popular: insisting that all of us should be able to find *enough* clarity, strength and nourishment in any given space to keep us going on the right path. If you can do so, great. Not all of us can.

I see nothing about flight from the world in the post here. I see an admittance that we ourselves are not God, and need strength outside our own; we need to draw from a well larger than ourselves when we work to expand beauty, grace, and peace in the world. And that’s exactly what a temple can be. It doesn’t have to be the expensive building you decry in your post. It can be the seed that spreads grace out into the surrounding soil. It can be a place to remember what quiet sounds like and what God sounds like when we’ve forgotten.

I totally agree…and that’s why I think you shouldn’t build temples, but seek out the transformation of the spaces tarnished by commodification, and make them useless, see their beauty and sacredness. To build separate spaces to do this is to commodify spirituality, and objectify it.

As Meister Eckhart advises, ‘Spirituality is not to be learned in flight from the world, by fleeing from things to a place of solitude; rather we must learn to maintain an inner solitude regardless of where we are or who we are with. We must learn to penetrate things, and find God there.’

I am having a blast reading through each one.

”
So much of the substance of memoir is not *what exactly happened?* but rather, what is the expressive truth of the past, the truth of feeling that answers to the effect of events and relationships on a life? … The memoirist writes from a subjective provocation, following an imperative to express the true dynamics of some part of the past. The distilled experience then exists as a specifically contoured shape, the stored sensation of ‘how it was.’ This is what the memoirist seeks to reproduce. As the poet Stephane Mallarme insisted, ‘Paint, not the thing, but the effect which it produces.’ Exactly right. And in capturing the effect the need for accuracy is absolute. The writer must represent as faithfully as possible what memory has shaped inside–memory and feeling.
”

It seems especially challenging for contemporary people to reconcile themselves with gradations of factuality, as evidenced by controversy surrounding certain “fake” memoirs and also by an overabundance of those which are simplistic and boring specifically for their reliance on fact. Probably the collective thinking process giving rise to these issues is the same that fuels some people’s indignance toward those who accept non-factual truths in a religious context. I would lay blame with our ingrained binary thinking, though I’m not even sure the biblical writers were much free from that when they crafted their particular mythologies.

The quote you cited is definitely going in my book.

Thanks for linking to your blog, by the way. I’ve really been enjoying it.

Quaker Universalists: http://www.universalistfriends.org/index.html

Friends Journal: https://www.friendsjournal.org/

Quaker Info: http://www.quakerinfo.com/forum/

If you do a search for “Religious Society of Friends” you’ll find quite a bit more.

Cheers!

Peace!