Solidarity, charity, and guilt

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Vince shares one of his biggest personal lessons in solidarity, and brings our theme “from charity to solidarity” to a close by talking about a very important challenge to making that mindset shift: guilt.

SPEAKER NOTES

Solidarity, Charity, and Guilt

Story

• Pride month reminds me of one of my biggest lessons about solidarity.
• We’ve been talking about economic inequity, and how we want to address that from a solidarity mindset, and what does that mean, and how is that different from a charity mindset.
• And we’ll do that some more today.
• But I want to start today talking about a time I learned about the power of solidarity in the specific world of church inequity. Then I’ll bring us back to our wider reality of economic inequity.
• In church settings, major inequity is experienced by people who are queer in their sexual or gender identity. Many of you know this from personal experience; many of you don’t need to be told this. It’s obvious to you. Most church settings have a ceiling as to participation in community if you are queer including being excluded from leadership, a refusal to perform same sex weddings, and in the worst cases teachings that your sexual or gender identity is a distortion to be corrected.
• From the beginning of our church, we have never endorsed such teachings or enforced such ceilings on participation for our queer friends and community members, but we were for our first many years of life a part of a larger movement of churches that did include such marginalization in the practices of other churches.
• For a long time I would feel guilty about this, as a pastor. There were good reasons we were a part of this larger group of churches; this group was by no means rotten to the core, and I’m so grateful for it, and so many of the people I knew and learned from through it. And for some time it felt as though our church could be a voice for queer inclusion within this larger group.
• But increasingly it became clear that wasn’t going to happen.
• And so my guilt would grow.
• Guilt is an interesting thing. It’s useful to a degree — to help us realize “not this way; go a different direction” — but there is a point at which it ceases to be helpful, and it starts to fester.
• And it begins to control us because that festering wound demands treatment immediately when its symptoms flare up. So we do the thing that provides the quickest and easiest relief from our guilt.
• In my case this would be to remind our church in my messages on Sundays of our love of the queer community. This would assuage my guilt for a time. Until the wound would flare up again.
• Eventually, our church board identified we could no longer exist in the dissonance, and it was clear we needed to leave our affiliation with this group of churches so we could more publicly and fully live out being a church open and affirming to queer individuals.
• And so what was laid before me and Kyle, my co-founding pastor, was leading the church through this, because for many in our community our affiliation to this larger group was a really important thing. (And I understood that! Again, it was important to me!)
• As I prayed about how do we lead the church through this, I felt like God was saying: get coffee with every stakeholder in the church you can.
• That felt overwhelming. That meant like planning 3 dozen meet ups and having the same conversation over and over. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to just talk about this in a message on Sunday again? Or send an email or two?
• But my sense was God was in this intuition I had — get coffee with everyone you can.
• And so I did. I had dozens of coffee dates over the course of two months — with many of you (and Kyle did too).
• And something incredible happened. There was this swell of passion because of this challenge before the church, of purpose, a charge, an unlocking of energy, as everyone coalesced around this idea that, yes, this is who we are as a community.
• The church voted on whether to leave our affiliation to more fully pursue our values on lgbtq inclusion and the vote was unanimous.
• I felt utterly invigorated by this whole experience. This was so different than my little personal efforts to assuage my guilt in Sunday messages.
• What was this power?
• I think the power I discovered was the power of solidarity — a relational, bottom up power of a community of people, with a one-ness of purpose: queer inclusion.
• Racked by guilt, I just wanted to do the quickest and easiest thing I could: I’m a preacher for this community, so let me just preach about it — hoping the dissonance would then just disappear. But it never did.
• This was different. It involved much more relationship (and therefore risk, because we can’t control others we’re in relationship with), it took much more prioritization and time to go and meet with people than just writing a sermon on my laptop — it wasn’t a quick fix to my guilt.
• But staying with that destabilizing feeling of not quickly fixing my guilt and putting in the hard work of relationship building unlocked the power of solidarity.
• We’ve become as a result not just a community that “talks” about being lgbtq inclusive, and then every once in a while talks about it again, because we have to perform it so we can reassure ourselves it’s still important by the recognition of others.
• No, we’ve become a community that actually feels inclusive to queer individuals. Because a degree of solidarity has been built.
• We’re by no means perfect in this regard. But our efforts of inclusion have not been a surface effort.
• I want to bring in the terms of our theme that we’ve been working all spring “shifting from a charity mindset to a solidarity mindset” —
• My personal efforts previously using our platform of Sunday sermons were absolutely charitable to the queer individuals connected to our church, and that’s great! But the relational effort of building solidarity (kicked off by that sense from God “get coffee with everyone in the church”) meant a whole new level of impact.

Context

• So this was a major lesson about the power of solidarity for me in the specific world of church inequity.
• Now, our focus this spring has been more broadly on economic inequity.
• On how today’s version of unchecked, deregulated capitalism in America and across the globe, sometimes called Neoliberal capitalism (which has been our economic regime since the 1980s) works great for the few on top but exploits the poor and working class, and exhausts the middle class to keep things running.
• There are better, more just versions of capitalism, that don’t worship the idols of growth and profit alone, but we don’t have those right now unfortunately.
• In America, the gap between the richest 1% and the rest of the population has grown and grown under these 40 years of this version of capitalism. The wealthiest 1% today control 40% of all wealth —
• This really can only be described as immoral, because the resources exist to provide housing, healthcare, and a living wage to every person in America, but that imbalanced distribution means millions of Americans don’t have secure housing, healthcare, or wages.
• From the Christian perspective that animates us here at BLC, in order for God to love all, God takes sides — God does not love all by being neutral in matters of inequity, but by taking sides, like Jesus, with those on crosses, not those building crosses — because the way you love someone who is suffering is by coming alongside them, but the way you love someone who is harming others is calling them to repent — this is the way of Jesus.
• To follow that way is to likewise take sides, with the working class and poor — those must suffering under our current economic regime.
• The mindset we’re wanting to foster as we do this is a solidarity mindset, rather than a charity mindset.
• As I’ve learned, charity is not bad, if we want to address economic inequity, BUT because charity is something an individual does, it tends to miss a major opportunity: the relational opportunity —
  • the three or four co-workers meeting together to make a plan for how to talk to their boss about something that needs to change,
  • the person who feels passionate about something organizing people over dozens of coffee dates telling and telling again and telling again the same stories and calls to action (instead of just sending a mass email),
  • the choice to sit with and listen for the perspective of a different department in the employee cafeteria, perhaps across a language or cultural barrier.
• These are efforts of building solidarity.
• They take more risks and relational energy than individual acts of charity; they can’t be accomplished on a phone or laptop in the margins of life. But they are more impactful, because relationship and human connection are what life actually run on!
• This especially presents those of us who are middle class with a choice: to pursue relationship with the rest of the 99%, rather than with the elite 1%. To remind themselves their situation is more similar to the working class and poor than to the rich.
• Experientially, this is true! — Middle class bank accounts are different from the poor and working class by thousands, but different from the rich by millions or billions. And all people who work for a living — from grocery store employees and service industry folx to professionals in healthcare or universities or IT companies or schools — all experience the same pressures and conflicts of having to work for a living, right? Interpersonal communication and time management and making choices under stress.
• And with rising student debt, people today who grew up middle class feel just as unsure about their retirements and their kids’ futures as working class and poor folx always have.
• But there are cultural forces that keep us from seeing this commonality — that keep the middle class comparing themselves to the rich, wanting to have what they have, go where they go, do what they do.
• Oh the potential! — if all of the 99% of people who have to work for a living saw themselves together on the same team, saw each others problems as their problems — as St Paul suggested in his image of the body in 1 Corinthians in the Bible, that “an injury to one part is an injury to the whole body”. THAT is the potential of solidarity.

Guilt

• But I want to bring this back to the psychic challenge I highlighted in my own story: For anyone of good will, inspired or convicted to pursue economic justice (or, as in my story, queer inclusion), the psychic experience of this can be an avalanche of guilt: couldn’t I be doing more?
• Some guilt is appropriate — that’s a natural part of a process of changing our minds, or, to use the religious word, repenting —
• BUT beyond a certain threshold, guilt no longer serves a purpose. It becomes debilitating.
• We often point out the excellent turn of phrase from therapy settings: “shoulding” all over yourself. Many of us relate to this. We are people who should all ourselves.
• BUT my new favorite philosopher I’ve been reading lately — the Korean-German philosopher Byung Chul Han — suggests, perhaps more often in our age we are “coulding” all over ourselves.
• The guilty torment we know in our minds is more often based not in shoulds coming from outside us, but in coulds coming from within us, because of the endless freedoms and choices always available to us in the Modern World.
• The predominant guilt of ages past was based in shoulds — we felt guilty before a Holy God or the Law (which of course have their own versions of getting blown out of proportion beyond appropriate guilt), but the predominant guilt of today's age is feeling guilty before our own selves, for not doing all the things we know we could be doing.
• We are simultaneously the guilt-ed and guilt-er! It’s arguably even crueler than a guilt-tripping God or Law, because there’s no escape. The call is coming from inside the house!
• Our neoliberal version of capitalism, which prizes acceleration, limitless freedom, and constant newness supplies endless “coulds” for us to feel guilty about. Sometimes quite intentionally with algorithms and emotional manipulation, which is the immoral part.
• This is why so much in modern self-help content is about learning how to forgive ourselves.
• Assuaging this consistent, background “could” guilt — before our selves — is behind so many of our impulses.
• And — like my early, less-effective efforts in trying to lead this church in queer inclusion — that means there is a pull toward what feels like the quickest and easiest ways back to psychic peace.
• This explains part of why we default to individual efforts of charity. Because I can do charity on my own, probably on my phone, without too much interruption — in fact so much of today's discussion in the world of charity is literally how to make charity as quick and easy and least interrupting as possible.
• And our guilty psyches say to us, “Thank goodness!” Something quick and easy to do to assuage some of my “could, could, could” guilt.
• And that’s not to say good doesn’t come from this! (Again, BLC is a charity! Please give to us. It IS quick and easy!)
• The problem here is that the psychic pull for quick and easy individualistic guilt-relief can distract us from choosing the more impactful, slower-burn option of relational solidarity building.
• The call before us is to build capacity to resist quick and easy fixes to our guilt feelings within our “could, could, could” culture, and trust that there might be a deeper psychic relief.
• How?
• This will be my final comment in our “from charity to solidarity” theme this spring — on how spirituality offers such distinct help in this regard.

Final words

• Even if we don’t struggle with guilt that is before a Holy God, guilt before our selves is still guilt, and it is still calmed by the same antidote: Forgiveness.
• If you find it difficult to forgive yourself, for not doing or being all you could, it can be so helpful to look to God — one who is beyond you and yet at the same time within you — for the forgiveness that you are struggling to grant yourself.
• I do this so regularly; it is among the most constant prayers in my prayer life.
• Some of you know, I’m an “every morning, with a cup of coffee, before anyone else in the house is up” kind of pray-er, and the way I look to God in this way is really so simple:
  • As I take deep breaths, I speak over myself, in my mind, or sometimes out loud under my breath:
  • “You are okay. I am okay. You are okay. I am okay.”
  • And I’m imagining in my mind’s eye this as a back and forth: God speaking to me. Me repeating back to God.
  • Whatever “could” is tormenting me from within, I am forgiven.
  • One way I’ve heard this talked about and I will often share with people when we’re talking about prayers is: to accept yourself can sometimes feel really hard. But what if instead you try to accept that you are accepted — by one beyond you, and yet also within you, by God. That feels more do-able to me, and many have that same experience.
• Praying this way one time might be helpful for you or might not, I’m not sure, BUT as a regular diet... week in, week out... this is what has helped me not so compulsively jump to individual acts of charity to get the guilt monkey off my back.
• This is what has helped me slow down, and embrace the risky-ness and uncontrollable-ness of relationship building in pursuit of the values that have seized me, rather than just individualistic choices in pursuit of those.
• Because the prayer that you may find yourself praying after feeling genuinely a calm that “you are okay” — that you’re forgiven, that you’re accepted — is
  • What do you have for me today, God?
• This was my prayer when I felt like God said: get coffee with everyone in the church, that sent this church down the road of more solidarity with the queer community.
• That hit me with a weight because it meant a lot of getting beyond just myself and what I could do, BUT it wasn’t the weight of guilt; it was the weight of realizing I was on to something — something significant.
• And here’s the other benefit of getting to a calm enough place to pray “what do you have for me today, God?”
  • Sometimes you hear: “You are not responsible for not doing what I have not called you to.”
  • I first learned this from a pastor friend of mine named Pete, and Pete was fond of reminding people this phrase.
  • “You are not responsible for not doing what God has not called you to.”
  • You are responsible to what God is calling you to. So this is not about letting anyone’s fragile privileged ego off the hook!
  • But calls from God are never heard in the context of a "could, could, could" guilt-spiral. They are heard in the context of calm and acceptance.
  • And, presumably, if something is important, the God of Love is calling others to the work that God is not calling you to!
• I personally am skeptical of any “you could be doing more!” messaging or social media call-out that diagnoses our societal problems in too individualistic a way, because that takes the focus off systemic problems.
  • The classic example is the carbon foot-print calculator — a tool for individuals to try to limit their carbon footprint is great. But do you know who developed the first carbon footprint calculator? Who came up with that idea? BP — British Petroleum — the oil company! To divert attention away from the enormous responsibility massive corporations have for CO2 emissions, by focusing on the minuscule change individuals can make as consumers. Totally preying on all our “could, could, could” guilt! (The Guardian reports that 71% of global CO2 emissions are produced by the economic interests of just 100 corporations. 71%! Individual consumer practices are not the problem!)
  • Even when “you could be doing more” messaging is well-intentioned, I think it’s often a distraction, because it activates that “find quick and easy relief for my guilt” energy.
  • The Biblical language we go back to all the time here, again from St. Paul, is: our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities — systemic forces, not individual villains!
• When we are calmly receiving acceptance and guidance from God, rather than looking for the quickest, easiest ways to assuage our guilt ourselves, we so much more readily see the greater impact that the slow-burn of relationship building, solidarity building accomplishes, over even the most principled individual acts.
• So, we’re bringing this theme of messages to a close for now, but this is not the last you’ll hear about our church shifting from a charity mindset to a solidarity mindset. Over the last two months, a very quality group of people in our community has formed around this mission, and the goal of that group is to lead our whole church in whatever our next step is in contributing to a solidarity economy that works for all, not just a few on top. Stay tuned!
• Let’s pray…