Anticolonialism

I grew up in an evangelistic tradition where I was taught that the state of every person’s soul depended on having the right belief system. I remember one year at our youth retreat, the leaders played the scene from Titanic when rescue boats begin floating through the debris in the ocean, looking for survivors to rescue. They discover body after body, for whom their rescuers came too late. Our leader emphasized to the how devastating it was to have their saviors come too late, and asked the room full of teenagers, “How many of you know non-Christians who will spend eternity separated from God if they die tomorrow not believing in Jesus? Don’t let it be too late for them! Stand up now if you are willing to share the gospel with them!” I stood weeping for my friends at school who hadn’t been raised to love Jesus like I had. I made a commitment through my tears to do everything I could to bring them to eternal life with God—a commitment that would render me uninvited from all of the upcoming bar and bat mitzvahs of my friends as we all turned 13 that year.

Regrettably this is not a new sentiment in the Christian tradition. My evangelistic fervor certainly took a toll on my 7th-grade social life, but far greater prices have been paid throughout human history for the sake of conversion. Western Christianity carries with it a legacy of war, genocide, domination, and colonization justified in the name of Jesus, wiping out indigenous traditions and decimating the God-breathed diversity of human experience, all in the name of being right.

Violence was conveniently left out of the history I learned as a kid in the Bible Belt—the Exodus and Noah’s Ark were happy tales of God’s faithfulness, and Thanksgiving was a convivial family banquet of neighborly love between European pilgrims and American Indians. Not one Sunday School teacher mentioned the biblical backdrop of patriarchy and religious violence; they only taught our eager young minds that we had the right answers, and those answers happened to be exactly what everyone else in the whole world needed the most.

Early in my years of ministry, I led teams of college students on overseas missions to convert the Eastern Orthodox in Serbia or the Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal, which would be the beginning of my descent into my first Dark Night of the Soul. I comprehended for the first time that my version of the good news required those hearing it to abandon their authentic traditions and heritage in order that they would think and act more like me. The scales fell from my eyes as I learned about systemic racism and my own complicity in power structures that lent me financial and cultural advantages I was only beginning to comprehend. I wanted to fix it. I wanted to get it right. I wanted to be a part of the next wave of justice. I was just hopeful enough to tug the loose thread of racism in my faith, and before long my entire belief system unraveled into an unruly mess and slipped through my fingers. When I tried to remove the injustice from my worldview, there was nothing left to hold onto.

Have you ever needed desperately to lament some heartbreak or vent some frustration in your life only to have your confidant attempt to find a solution? You just needed a space to complain and be broken for a moment, but your conversation partner jumped straight to some remedy or silver lining? Maybe you’ve been this person—I know I have. “I’m just trying to help,” you might say, despondent that your attempts to relieve the pain seem to only be making it worse. Why do remedy attempts seem to exacerbate the issue? Because immediate efforts to resolve a difficult circumstance overlook the very real hurt in response to pain. The truth is that when we immediately search for a way out of someone else’s suffering, it’s because we’re uncomfortable with their pain. We think it’s a problem that needs to be solved—we want the tears or anger or wailing to stop and so we find a fix. But when we ignore pain, it doesn’t go away—in fact it usually gets louder.

There comes a time for all of us when we learn that we simply cannot fix the broken world. We cannot undo the centuries of trauma. We cannot ease the pain of an unjust society. Before we skip to solutions, we must first honor the grief before us. We cannot ignore the voice crying out for justice, even if we don’t understand its pain. Our first task is to listen.

It isn’t easy—for those of us with Anglo-European heritage, our inherited culture means we have been subtly programmed to silence and stifle uncomfortable emotions for the sake of our public face and social decorum. Cultural standards of “professionalism” demand that we leave our emotions out of our interactions. In compliance we learn to medicate with substances and consumerism and entertainment to try to forget. So long as we resist our own pain, we cannot be open to the pain of others.

Before I could begin really listening to others, I had to begin listening to myself.

My well-meaning impulses toward reconciliation initially meant asking questions of my Black friends that highlighted my ignorance. I thought if I could just learn the rules and not offend anyone, my work would be done. Rest assured: you will not be the one to get it right in a system so broken. The pressure of resolution and perfectionism loom heavy like dark clouds in conversations about justice, and they are immense—they will swallow you in their storm should you try to take them on. The truth is that the work is never done, and if there are solutions to problems of injustice, they are not likely to originate with those of us who have benefited from it.

So before we try to save the world, let me lead us again and again to the role which we can play: learn to be uncomfortable. Practice the patience of sitting with the unknown, and start within yourself. Hold your own grief with the compassion you would have for a weeping child. Remember your God who loves you and has promised to never leave you. Seek the presence of your Divine Parent, and let her comfort be your courage. Learn as readily from your pain and tears as you do your joy and laughter. Let them guide you to where your fear has kept you split off from yourself—where you have rendered yourself unlovable and refused the presence of God.

In my growth and ongoing commitment to anti-colonialism, I’ve learned that it has to start within myself. Take my story as an example that we have all been colonized—even those of us who are descendants of colonizers. Like a chain of abusers, a people who conquers and dominates others is only repeating the wounds inflicted upon itself. The wounds of our own inherited cultural weaknesses have been inflicted on indigenous, black, and brown bodies for centuries because of our unwillingness to sit with the pain for long enough to heal. May we be the generation who heals our ancestral trauma so that we are no longer ruled by fear and scarcity, but who instead dare to dream of a world of trust and abundance. May we step forward in faith and courage to end the cycle of abuse.

Before we can participate in creating anything new in the world, we must examine our dominant culture that has been privileged to go unexamined for as long as “whiteness” has been propped up in power over others. May we journey into healing together. May we share our faith with one another in community as we dare to believe that we can heal from the colonization that has kept us apart for long enough, and may God give us the strength and courage to continue on the path toward justice.