sad advent

To hear Brandi read the essay instead, click here: https://youtu.be/Q5BEUsZkrJg

This year’s hard has felt like a continuation of last year’s awful, so I decided I needed Christmas music early. I listen to NPR pretty much anytime I drive or cook, but during Advent, from Thanksgiving to January, I replace the news with Christmas tunes. It is a lovely thing to spend a 12th of the year revisiting songs that hold keys to the memories of my life. This year, instead of waiting for Turkeys to make my annual switch, I started November 4th.

It occurs, to me, as I write that date, that early November holds significance to my family. The week of November 4th marks the day we gathered at a court house for a Judge to tell us we were officially and legally, now and forever, the family of Stella. We began adopting her before she was born, as her mom chose to become part of our family forever too. She talks about knowing we were the ones: That we would raise Stella with big brothers and a good dose of chaos, all rooted in long-gathering love. She sensed in us that we would stay that course as long as we had breath, and she wanted that kind of loud, fun, head shaking love for her little girl.

I think maybe the first week of November should always kick off Christmas for me.

Today Stel and I were driving to church and a bluesy jazz piano version of “Silent Night” began to play. The chords were often minor and sustained, and it gave the familiar carol a darker tone. Recognizing the song, she asked, “Why does this Christmas song sound sad? Christmas is supposed to be happy.” I explained to her that Christmas was happy, and—most of all—hopeful, but that the night this song remembers was probably also scary and sad. Dark and cold. Uncomfortable and lonely. But that’s how hope works. It doesn’t show up at the end of the sad, but coexists within it.

“Can I have a twizzler?”

As usual, she found my explanation compellingJ Her interest notwithstanding, I offer us a reminder as we enter Advent: Hope and Lament coexist in the community of God. Advent gives us the chance to feel how heavy the weight of waiting can be. It is sacred weight, grounding us in the divine intention of God to come near when we need rescue. Needing rescue does not mean faith has lost or that despair will win; it simply means we are humans honoring the limits of our everything.

The bluesy music Stella heard today carried this message with no words at all. There is a lesson here as well, and that is to remind us to look to those who have suffered long when we face our own dark nights. Blues music was developed, performed and perfected by African Americans. It is an artifact of their culture—an evolving, shared act of creation that acknowledges the legacy of song-as-balm as it pours forth lament. Blues music reflects the African diaspora, the belonging in home unvisited, the rootedness in a history full of holes. Blues music uses all the keys, black and white, and finds a melody in discordant notes. The blues, in that way, are the perfect vehicle for the songs of Advent.

If you have been taught that faith in Christ looks like joyful, sure hope at every turn, I hope you will allow the voices who hurt—for me often voices of color—to open your eyes to another part of the familiar Gospel story. God comes to our darkest places, sometimes to rescue and pull us out, but often to join us in our poverty. Kings brought Jesus gifts in those early days, but they did not rescue him from his poor, oppressed existence to live comfortably in a palace. God chose to heal humanity with the gift of presence, of shared suffering, of recognizing hope in the midst of despair.

The first week of the Advent season—now, for me, the first week in November—reminds me that knowing God means knowing we belong in a way that expands our capacity to carry the burdens of others. Stella’s belonging to us is the greatest gift of our lives, and we celebrate her with all the hope and grief those who love her must carry. I feel profoundly grateful to have been taught that a faithful life does not require us to only play the happy keys. We are troubled and joyful, forlorn and gathered close. Advent is an invitation to explore all of it, to end this year aware of God’s presence in the dark and in the light.

Before Sunday I will add readings below this essay if you like to practice a daily rhythm of pausing with our Maker. I hope you find time to pause, to wait, to reflect and to wonder with the One who chose poverty, the Light who knew the dark. Merry Christmas.

considering the gaps in our education

To hear Dr. Kellett read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/FZMeFdefPFA

I am the victim of an incomplete education. Most of us are. I attended fabulous schools (Go Spartans! Go Deacs! Go Canes!) and am grateful for the many ways I was invited into excellence, rigor and curiosity; however, like most Americans, I was exposed primarily to curricula written, sourced and designed by white Americans. The last two and a half decades have revealed the large gaps in my knowledge and the work I must do to find a complete education. Having now encountered the incredible diversity of thought that functionally shaped America, I realize the insularity—the poverty even—of our educational norms. We can do better! As curricula designers continue to grapple with laws banning conversations about how views of racial difference shape and shaped opportunity in America, I am more aware than ever that we are each responsible for who we read and listen to as we learn to be neighbors. We have an incredible wealth of cultural, literary, historical and artistic legacies from every race, and we are diminished as a people when these voices are not actively taught in our schools. 

Here is the problem: When we are primarily exposed to American history and literature through the work of white folks, we are taught to privilege white perspectives. We begin to believe important cultural trends and innovations come exclusively from one segment of society. This narrow exposure lays a foundation for cultural racism, suggesting that people of color are physical in nature, while white people, with their higher order thinking and artistic expressions, meaningfully impact our national narratives, our literary heritage, and the production of culture. 

American culture and history have been shaped by the voices, inventions and perspectives of a rich variety of people from all walks of life. The idea of American democracy suggests that every person has value and is capable of contributing to our whole in necessary ways. It is disingenuous for us to believe this while also pretending as if every important contribution to the common good came from one race of people. See the gap in our ideals and realities? Although this hypocrisy that affirms equality while codifying systems of inequity is one of our great national habits, America itself has nevertheless been deeply influenced by contributions from all types of people. Like our food, music, fashion, politics, storytelling, and theologies, American literature as we know it would not exist without African American literature. Black cultural production is American cultural production.

In the South we love to think about our culture as one of genuine hospitality, gorgeous grounds, fine food and excellent music. Because we have a legacy of erasing or diminishing the contributions of people of color, our educations failed to teach us that so many Southern traditions only exist because Black folks worked independently of or collaboratively with white folks to create norms of hospitality in settings we cherish. In many famed Southern kitchens, Black cooks created the recipes published by white chefs, now beloved as Southern heritage. Here in Tennessee, whiskey distilling was mastered by enslaved men. Indeed, Jack Daniel’s Distillery now explains that Jack himself learned to distill from a Black man named Nearest Green (Buy it! Uncle Nearest is our whiskey of choice). Best practices in agriculture, building, husbandry, sewing and carpentry were perfected by people of color. I offer these anecdotes to remind us any American historical narrative that does not include the contributions of African Americans is incomplete. 

Most of us understand that our musical heritage is not complete without the contributions of jazz and the blues, pioneered by Black musicians. Jazz and rock n roll were largely commodified by whites but created by Black Americans; indeed, Elvis became famous by publishing songs first performed by musicians of color.  We sacrifice creative pride and cultural dignity when we erase the role of Black cultural production in America’s story. What do we forfeit if we investigate our cultural understanding of ourselves to make room for all those who contributed? I’d say only a toxic mythology that hurts all of us! Our educational norms often fail to reflect our entire heritage, and states that ban any teaching that could be loosely attributed to Critical Race Theory or even racial difference are actively attempting to erase American history. We need not remain in ignorance. 

Some of our best early links between literature, sociology and ethnography were established by Black writers like Zora Neale Hurston. A gifted writer of fiction in her own right, Hurston travelled through Florida recording the stories of African Americans as they experienced the world. Hurston helped prove that anthropology is incomplete without ethnography and auto-ethnography. Many of us were taught to celebrate early writers who noticed such cultural differences through travel like Herman Melville or Mark Twain.  Black writers like James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin and Paule Marshall, far less read, continued and advanced this style of writing about the helpful collaborations and differences one discovers as s/he travels at home and abroad. Acknowledging the pull of diaspora while claiming our full history speaks powerfully into our current discussions about identity and the ways that we explore national loyalties. If such voices were celebrated in education, we might be better equipped now to face a world in which citizenship, migration and nationality seem to clash in violent ways. 

In school, many of us were exposed through literature to the tension women face as they struggle to position themselves as whole subjects with needs, wants and the agency to act on those needs and wants. We read Emily Dickinson or Kate Chopin or Sylvia Plath, celebrating the singularity of their voices. Most of us were not exposed to writers like Nella Larson or Maya Angelou, though, who wrote compellingly of the intersection of gender and race in a woman’s desire for agency. Larsen’s work is accessible, exploring the life choices of a disappointed upper class woman in a way that Chopin’s work cannot. Activists like Sojourner Truth revealed the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that the voices of black women were diminished, doubted and ignored. She was a forerunner to feminism, asserting that gender and racial binaries can be used to silence women who do not conform to cultural norms. 

So many voices shape American identity, and there is no need to diminish one voice in order to make room for another. Education is a place where a variety of voices can be elevated not in order to rewrite history, but instead so that we can embrace and elevate the conflicting voices who shaped our history. The need to learn from many voices is a core foundation of discourse, rhetoric and a liberal arts education! Our cultural norms, heritage, conceptions of self, and identities are, in fact, shaped by the many brown, black and white voices in America. Our educational norm is to celebrate and memorialize the white voices, rather than to openly teach a wide variety of perspectives, recognizing the myriad voices that shaped American culture, literature and history. We are not products of Black labor and white innovation; we are the culmination of many voices expressing their God-given giftedness to help us translate and understand experiences of life in America. Historical erasure ensures that we are victims of this incomplete education. As the school year continues, the hope of this moment is that voices of color have always existed, we only need to recognize our deficits and do the work to complete our education. Ask to see your child’s syllabus, and ask how many Black, Indigenous or Writers of Color are included. Contact me and ask for recommendations if you want to expand your education!

dogs and bias as we re-enter society

This essay is revised and updated from a few years ago. To hear Dr. Kellett read this essay, click here: https://youtu.be/OeBL9xorAM8

Our dog turns 4 this month, and she is worth talking about for a couple of reasons during this season of reengaging after 18 months of being disrupted or alone. First, she has been a constant reminder that I cannot, in fact, will things to be true that just aren’t. For instance, when we adopted her, I thought adding a puppy would not destroy our lives, give me old lady shingles, and trigger a depressive and exhausting year. I was wrong. Maybe she is not to blame for that year of hellishness, but she certainly did not help things. It is as if our family bus was teetering on the edge of a cliff, and I thought that our new dog would help stabilize said bus. Instead, she ran full throttle and pooped in the front half of the bus so many times that it plummeted to the depths below (I may or may not have some PTSD-like flashbacks of dog poop on my carpet, even 4 years later). My misjudgment stems from the truth that we are dog people, and after grieving the death of our beloved first dog-child, I thought we were ready. I was wrong. (Also helpful is the fact that my husband was adamantly opposed from the beginning. That is a precious little gift that keeps on giving, even now, years later). The point is that choosing to care for others is difficult and does not always go as planned. As kids hopefully go back to school for good, as we go back into our offices, let’s do it anyway, and perhaps expect the messiness that loving others might require.

The second reason to talk about our dog is that people care a whole lot about gender coding. One of our favorite mini-series (now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write AND one that exists with absolutely no context, given that I can’t name another mini-series) is Lonesome Dove. It is Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones in their prime, best friends, poignant, and funny as hell. Their names are Augustus McCray and Woodrow F. Call. Naturally, we wanted to name our next dog Augustus, but my sister beat us to it. And so we have a dog named Woodrow. A she-dog named Woodrow. This name leads me often to refer to her mistakenly with a masculine 3rd person pronoun, and apparently that is a big deal (“This is Woodrow, he enjoys chewing on my couch and is a girl.”). At first I thought the disapproval was a strange manifestation of trans-phobia, but having defended myself for 4 years, I think the angst at my mistaken gendered references comes from a loyalty to dogs. The outrage seems to surface at the intersection of dog fans and gender binary adherents. Their incredulity is credible, their passion sincere, and their assumption of righteousness solid: “Why did you give her a boy name? You have to stop calling her a he!!” My response is consistent: “She’s a dog.” 

Apparently our bias about the “right way” knows no bounds, and this should be considered as we reflect on the year + behind and prepare ourselves for the year ahead. Bias is a product of intersections among and between familial, socioeconomic, racial, gendered, ethnic, religious, geographical, cultural, linguistic and educational normativity. Each of us was raised in a specific set of circumstances, and grew to engage in a specific set of circumstances, both of which help shape our assumptions about the world. Sometimes these norms are codified in a clear way in a family or community setting. Often though, they simply shape our thoughts, expectations and opinions of ourselves and others.  The perspective from which I view the world is distinctly shaped by these biases and norms. We all have them and we all do it.  I am not arguing against bias, but pleading for us to examine and name our biases as we learn to engage each other again after a year or so spent mostly apart. 

Any glance to the right or left confirms that we are surrounded by people distinct from ourselves. This is obvious to all. And yet, we somehow take our own cultural norms, often utterly unexamined, and project them all over every person we encounter. The clear presence of diversity among humanity should temper adherence to our own cultural norms. Perhaps even that is too much to ask, though. Could we at least agree that we each have biases, that these instinctively shape the way we rank and value the actions of others, and that perhaps it is fundamentally unfair (and a vast overreach) for me to project my cultural norms onto you? 

Many of us are fabulous at navel gazing after quarantining, but we are shockingly ill-equipped to bring a metacognitive gaze to our sense of self possession. That is to say, we cannot hope to truly see or understand the perspective of another if we have not first stopped to think about the way we think. When we discover the origins of what we call “normal”, we become curious about what someone else might call normal. Our postures change from those of accusation and judgment to observation and curiosity. We begin to look for the origins of the norms that produce certain viewpoints or sets of actions, a crucial skill if we hope to appreciate others. 

This is not a call to abandon our norms as baseless and without merit. Adherence to cultural norms and traditions can be very important in helping one position oneself as a subject, in identity formation and in the acquisition of agency. I am simply arguing that a modicum of self reflection might reveal that my bias shapes the way I view you, just as your bias shapes the way you see me, and perhaps naming those areas of bias could lead to productive conversations in which we explore our differences as we literally begin rubbing elbows and working together again.

In Lonesome Dove, Woodrow and Augustus are set in their ways.  They are stubborn curmudgeons who refuse to align their actions with the values of anyone else. And yet, they both understand and respect the places from which the other comes. Augustus is never going to work on purpose, and Woodrow is never going to squander the day away. Their friendship works because they understand the perspective of the other, and this understanding becomes the foundation for establishing value and mutual respect in friendship. 

I took Woodrow on a hike last week, and as we were crossing the field to enter the trailhead, she squatted down to poop. Is there anything more humiliating? It is the worst.  I stood there, increasingly self-conscience, intentionally trying not to watch and feeling shame if I made eye contact with anyone. Good Lord! What must they think about this atrocious act of...humanity? dogmanity? And then I thought of bias, and was reminded that everybody has one, and nobody wants to admit it. Every dog has to poop. Every person carries assumptions around with her that hinder or expand her ability to care about someone else. And yet, instead of finding camaraderie in the shared experience of exploring and naming our bias, we all stand awkwardly in the park, avoiding connections with others while we pretend like we can’t smell what is right in front of us. If you resolve to notice and explore your bias, you might find that you become a more curious and compassionate friend, a more agile advocate for justice, a more humble and consistent ally.