What do you know to be true?  How does what you know square with the daily messaging you consume?

These questions are what come to mind for me when I think about this month’s theme, “the path of resistance.”  You see, I’ve gone through most of my life hearing that I wasn’t enough.  As a young person, my body wasn’t the “right” size, my grades “could be better,” and the “cool kids” of my school days said outright I didn’t belong.  I carried these messages into my young adulthood because they were reinforced by everything I saw and heard.  The people I saw on TV were thin or athletic, gorgeous, articulate, and they knew what they wanted and how to get there.  The people in my life who had things “right” were the ones who achieved “success”: college education followed by good (i.e. white collar) jobs, money, home ownership, lots of people around them, confidence…  And I struggled to feel like I was worthy of any of those things, because, by then, I believed the messages I had consumed my whole life.  What I knew to be true, from consuming that messaging, was that there was something wrong with me.  And that kept me from questioning the way things were.  From reading and listening to people who are even more impacted by that messaging than I am (read: BIPOC, queer, disabled, poor, and otherwise marginalized people), I now know that it’s the messaging that’s wrong.  The messaging comes from the intertwined cultures that were built to control who has the power in this society- the way things are.  As I’m learning to see this, I’m coming around to a different way of thinking about what is true.  Here’s what I think (and it’s not a surprise that none of this squares with the messaging I’ve been receiving).

Meritocracy wants us to believe that there are some people who deserve money and power because they’ve earned it somehow, because if we believe all humans deserve to thrive, we’ll support the sharing of resources that those in power work to hoard.  Consumer culture wants us to believe that we aren’t enough, because if we believe we’re enough, we’ll stop moving money and power toward the “top.”  The culture of hyperindividualism wants us to believe that we don’t need others, because if we believe we’re interdependent we might realize we’re enough.  The growing culture of polarization wants us to believe there is one right way and that we have to fight to defend or preserve it, because if we come together to support the things we all need, we’ll lose our individuality.  And underlying all of this is white supremacy culture, which doesn’t want us to feel, because if we feel the harm all of this does to us (all), we’ll stop believing its lies.

So in this month that we’re exploring the path of resistance, I invite you to reflect on your own analysis of what our culture tells us and what it does to us, and what you believe is worthy of resistance.  What does my inner voice tell me?  What does my faith tell me?  What have I heard from people who don’t benefit from the messages we’re meant to consume (such as people in communities that are historically and currently oppressed and marginalized)?  In what ways am I complicit with those messages?  And what might I do to change that?  I’ll be doing the same thing on Sunday mornings and with our Covenant Groups.

In faith and love,

Karen