Brave Delusions

Richard Rohr summarizes psychologist Carl Jung’s philosophy in these words:

“Humans produce in art the inner images the soul needs in order to see itself and to allow its own transformation.”

But what if our “art”, the image that leads us towards greater emotional health, is a delusion? Can something false help us see what is true in ourselves?

de·lu·sion

• an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument

No other work of art better portrays the way our self-created delusions help us live into reality than the 2007 movie Lars and the Real Girl. This slow, exquisite, tender and brilliant film follows Lars and his girlfriend, Bianca on the journey of their love story—except Biana is a blow up, life sized doll Lars buys off the internet. The movie masterfully explores how our delusions are a way to work out our fears, take risks we can’t take alone and test the waters of the world’s ability to accept us. They can even be a lifeline to hope.

Join me on December 22nd from 6:00-7:30 pm MST as I lead a small group discussion of the film and the ways “lies” have given us courage to tell the truth in our stories.

Willful Forgetting

In the 2017 podcast series Seeing White (season 2 of Scene on Radio), Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor at Rutgers University and frequent guest on the show, unpacks the phrase willful forgetting.

Concerning racial realities in America, the term refers to the phenomena of white America putting out of its consciousness our history of racial oppression and terror. The term struck a deep chord with me because I recognize willful forgetting in my work with clients as well as my own story.

On a Saturday afternoon, at age seven, I worked up my nerve to tell my mom about a form of abuse that was happening to me. I remember the knot in my stomach and the laundry basket of unfolded clothes I carried into the living room so I had something to focus on rather than look her in the eyes. For years I believed abuse stopped the next day. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I realized it was four months, a eternity for a first-grader, between our conversation and an event that delivered me.

That’s willful forgetting—when we remember reality in a way that creates the emotional distance we need from a truth we are incapable of holding.

What if the only way white America can end our willful forgetting of our country’s racial history is by confronting the natural, willful forgetting we’ve done with our own stories?

What if the very narratives we turn away from as a nation are the ones that could lead us back to our own?

Join me in exploring Harriet Jacob’s autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (available for free on Hoopla). Penned in the 1850’s and published in 1861, Jacobs was the first woman to author a fugitive slave narrative in the United States. At a time when state laws in the South made it a crime to teach the enslaved reading and writing, she used her words to reveal the awful truth of American slavery.

In her story you will see your story and that will enable you to more clearly see the stories of those around you.

Sign up for a 90-minute virtual group discussions (FREE for first time guests of my online membership community, Between Touches):

• Monday, September 28th 1:30pm-3:00pm MST

• Wednesday, September 30th 8:30am-10:00am MST

Benefit of Betrayal

In an April episode of the On Being podcast, Vietnamese poet Ocean Vuong eloquently describes the conundrum of being the child of an immigrant in America:

The great crisis of the first and second generation is the first generation made it here, and to live at all is such a privilege that they’re happy, and even encourage you to put your head down: work, fade away, get your meals, and live a quiet life. And I think the second generation, the great conundrum there, the great paradox, is that they want to be seen. They want to make something. And what a better way to make something and feel yourself with agency than to be an artist? So, so many of us immigrant children end up betraying our parents in order to subversively achieve our parents’ dreams.

There is growth and freedom for all of us in considering how our desire to be more seen in our stories meant leaving our parents and family culture. Vuong words offer us a way to reframe that betrayal as actually entering into our parents’ dreams for us, whether they see it that way or not.

Join my online group on Tuesday, July 28th, from 6:00-7:30 pm MST discussing two fabulous movies (The Big Sick & The Farewell) that explore the immigrant experience and what it has to offer all of us in understanding how we leave our family systems in order to enter into a truer life than our parents were able to give us.

Hurting Everyone

Last year, when I read this excerpt from Daniel Hill’s book White Awake, I didn’t disagree but I also didn’t understand.

White supremacy attacks the humanity of every living being. It attacks the personhood of people of color by promoting a hateful view that they are sub-human. It attacks the personhood of white people by promoting a hateful view that they are super-human. The enemy is not each other. It is the system of white supremacy and the evil one who leverages it for destructive purposes. We all need to have our humanity restored and re-calibrated to what and who God says we are. 

Last month, an experience in my “white” son’s life taught me, on a visceral level as a mother, how dangerous white supremacy is for all of us.

If you were to put our family of four on a racial spectrum it would look like this:

Previously not understanding the danger racism is for everyone, I naively worried more about my daughter, since she looks more Asian, than my son. She was the focus of my efforts to educate through documentaries, movies and news articles. But last month that changed.

In June, my kids tagged along with me to an apartment complex where I coordinated a church group moving a family into their new apartment. It was in an affordable housing complex in what is, for Denver, a diverse part of town.

After an hour of sticking around the big group, my son floated off with another boy he’d just met to the basketball courts. Twenty minutes later, he returned telling me about how an older, black teenager had flashed him the gun in his waistband as he stepped onto the court to play. My son was adamant that it was a warning for him alone because he looks white. Wisely, he was slow to exit the scene so as not to alarm the teenager or look like a snitch and after a few minutes made an excuse about being hungry and wanting to get something to eat. His new friend followed him back to our picnic.

You could tell my son’s story in a way that makes it about the danger of “rough” neighborhoods, the availability of guns in the “ghetto”, territorial gang behavior, or violent tendencies in black communities. But what if it’s really about America’s history of redlining communities of color, safety for black bodies when first responders aren’t allies, communal protection under oppression and how racism breeds fear of white bodies in black communities?

Though it took several hours after we were home for the adrenaline to leave my body, my version isn’t one of a black thug with a gun endangering my son’s life. That young man is also another woman’s son who in his efforts to feel safe, yields something that is more effective than a 911 call. I’m relieved for both my son and that young man, whose face I never saw, that nothing happened that day.

Being white in America today equates to privilege, power and wealth which means we experience only a fraction of the trauma communities of color face daily, but it does not make us safe from nor invincible against the dangers of racism.