Sometimes I hear God in the conversations I have with friends and family. It is like there is an overarching message, something God is trying to speak that challenges me. Because of this I tend to pay attention to the kinds of conversations I am part of and what might be the message that I need to hear. The last couple of days have been filled with conversations about what we can and cannot say to each other. In some ways it is Taylor’s soft-relativism that stilts our conversations, but I think there is more to it than just getting caught up in political correctness gone too far. (Political correctness is really about respecting each other and making space for the other, but when it goes too far it is about being afraid of offending each other – offence will come, but that is not an excuse for being a jerk.)
I was watching the very first episode of Kim’s Convenience with my nephew, I thought it was a great story where fun is poked at the misconceptions we straight people have about queer and gender-queer people. My favourite scene was the dad’s interaction with the drag queen named Therese which starts out super awkward but Therese hangs in there long enough to recognize that the question was an honest one. This led to a conversation about what kinds of questions are acceptable. I love it when a sit-com can spark a serious conversation.
We mainly talked about relationality as being an important approach to understanding each other. But the issue that I felt God was highlighting for me (and had come up in a few other contexts) was the effect of narratives in creating the norms we are subjected to. When we interact with others, we tell stories about them. I’m not talking about gossip, but the internal narratives that help us to reconcile their place in our lives and our worlds. Those stories are not always healthy. For example, racism internally makes sense to a person because it fits their story about what they feel is normal. So a racist person is more prone to confirmation bias regarding the stories they internally tell about the other. I think this is part of what happened with John Stackhouse’s recent uncareful words about settler-indigenous relations. I’m not saying John is racist, he’s definitely an important voice in evangelicalism today, but his comments on this particular issue required a lot more care than he gave them. (EDIT: Since I crafted this post a moderated conversation between Terry Leblanc and John Stackhouse has occurred, it is very helfpul.)
Unfortunately the worst offenders are those of us with privilege. This is a product of our narrative frameworks. We are taught as North Americans that the end justifies the means and that being successful is the most important thing. We are also told that we alone are responsible for our success. All of this is toxic to our social nature as humans. When we believe these things we become blind to the way our privilege underwrites our success. We miss the ways that our narratives are constructed to exclude the other, especially the other that dares to take pride in their exception to our norms. We want to guard our success so much that we have to de-normalize the other. And eventually we close off the spaces where we might have real conversations that could lead to real understanding.
So my answer, and I feel this is evolving, is that we need to strive to challenge our own narratives by becoming self-aware and by giving normative space to the other. Let me unpack these ideas.
Self-awareness is not easy. Our narratives are what holds our sense of self together. We tell these internal stories not for the other, but for ourselves. These stories are how we understand ourselves and how we navigate our experiences in life. So to deconstruct or even critically examine these narratives feels terribly risky. I once likened this self-deconstruction to pulling the core of my self out to dissect on a table. I’ve taken a few university courses that actually invited me to do such a thing. When our selves are laid bare like that, we can feel like we no longer know who we are in the world. That is a terrifying feeling. But when you’ve deconstructed and then reconstructed, something gets better within us. We somehow find an ability to hold those narratives a little less firmly and we allow our horizons to expand.
I’ve also watch many a friend refuse to deconstruct until life forces them to deconstruct painfully. I have a dear friend who has been in the throes of this kind of deconstruction for years now and it is painful to watch. He’s got bigger horizons in some ways, but he is far from the man I once knew. I think many of us are good at holding back that kind of turmoil, but I am not convinced it is any healthier than having the rock of reality fall on us, crushing us completely.
The second aspect is only really available if we are willing to continue the work of self-awareness. This work is creating normative space for the other. By this I mean that we become deferential to the other by allowing for their sense of what is normal. Notice I’m not saying accepting. My wife and I have taken this approach with many friends who suffer from depression, accepting their view of normal isn’t often helpful, but giving our friends space where they do not have to justify their experience is priceless. It is about being willing to lay down the defense of our own norms so that the other can have the breathing room to find their feet and take their own journey to self-awareness. But that journey isn’t something we can make another, it is simply something we can help them make space for. This is also really hard work and things like depression are not easy to overcome. But not having safe spaces makes that even harder.
What I’ve discovered is that I do not always agree with what others find to be normal, and I might have good reasons for that. But mostly my reasons have to do with me and not with the other. So trying fix the other is simply an exercise in alienation. What is a better course is to allow the other, and their stories, to challenge my own narratives and let me grow as a person. This changes the narrative from isolationist success at any cost to a humanizing creation of community where difference is not a barrier, but something that we see as an opportunity for all of us to grow as people.
The image is another Richard Dufault photo, I love the quizzical look on my face as I’m reading a boardgame manual. I think questions are good.
A funny thing happens when I’m asked what I teach at the university. I’ll say theology in general and often have to correct the assumption that I’m a Biblical scholar, I am not. But when I talk about the courses I teach and mention grad and undergrad courses on ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue that is when things often get interesting. If the person asking is an evangelical, which is my tribe, then you often get the sidelong glance or their attempt to inject that I must mean some sort of apologetic approach to other religions (by which they usually mean why our religion is the right one.) Leaving aside that I’m fairly critical of contemporary apologetic approaches, I thought it might be helpful to talk about why I believe inter-religious work is so important.
As a theology professor I end up marking a lot of papers. The process is not really that difficult – however, a poorly written/formatted paper can take me three or four times as long to evaluate as a paper that follows a few simple rules. Believe me, there is nothing to gain from making a professor work hard simply to determine if you understood the concepts enough to pass a paper. In addition, as I often teach first year courses, I do take it on myself to help students write well. So I thought I would capture some of the more common problems that I run into as a head start for students wishing to get great marks.
