My Peace I Give to You

Echoing Mary's musings about who reads this blog and why, I've wanted to share a recent experience of mine, but hadn't found the proper moment till now. I, too, appreciate the comments in response to whatever I blog about more than I can say. I appreciate everything from "Lady, you're crazy" to "Yes, and it makes me think of this...", whichever applies from the readers perspective. We receive over 10,000 hits per month on this site, although I have no idea how many of those are blog readers; I hope that however many it is find it to be helpful and thought provoking. Many (although clearly not all) of those who respond with comments seem to be clergy and/or formal students of one sort or another; I want to share a different sort of response today.

Anna first showed up in my office after exchanging a few stilted phone messages asking for a time to meet with me. According to the messages, I had done her mothers funeral four years ago, and she had an unusual request of a similar nature that she wanted to discuss with me if I was willing to meet with her.  Not a member of my congregation, she said she knew she had no claim on my time, but would appreciate whatever I might be willing to spare her. I didn't remember her mothers funeral particularly, nor Anna herself; I do a lot of services for non-churched people who find themselves scrambling for something meaningful in response to the crisis of death.  It's the form of outreach I like best, although I'm guessing Rick Warren et al won't be writing about it any time soon.  I called Anna and set up a meeting, assuring her that she didn't have to be a member of the church to ask for help.  She arrived for our first meeting with an enormous smile, a firm handshake, bounce in her step, and the statement that she was dying and wanted to talk about planning her funeral.  While I had no reason not to believe this woman, I had a hard time making sense of her words; she was vibrant, energetic, and full of life.  My response was something along the lines of an incredulous, "Really? From what? You look incredibly alive right now!"  Anna laughed-something she did often- and explained that she had cancer. She was about 18 months into a diagnosis of of CUP (Cancer of Unknown Primary site), a rare (2,000 cases annually in the US) disorder in which fewer than 5% of patients live longer than two years.  She had done the math, and although she was pleased to be falling into the top 5%, she also knew that her time was distinctly limited. She wanted to plan her funeral out now so that her husband and father would not be burdened with it later. Most of all, she said she was here in my office because she was very concerned about her children (ages 6,10,12). She remembered that when I had discussed arrangements for her mothers funeral with her, I had asked if there would be children present, and if so, did she want me to do a brief Children's Address for them?  My concern for her children at that primarily adult event had impressed her; her childhood experience of church did not lead her to expect that. In fact, it had led her to abandon all things church at the earliest opportunity.  The other reason that she was in my office instead of one of the ministers in her own neighboring town, was that she had Googled my name and found the Preaching Peace website and this blog. She wasn't sure she correctly understood the theology; she also wasn't sure she really wanted to. What she was sure of was that the blog entries that reflected on life from whatever this mimetic stuff was all about made sense to her. She appreciated the effort to avoid blaming and scapegoating, the concern for victims, and the assurance that God was all about love, mercy, and peace. It was her expressed opinion that there wasn't enough of that in the world, and if there were church people who really believed that instead of focusing on judgment, exclusion, and the wrath of God, then there was hope for the world yet. She didn't expect to live to see it herself, but she desperately wanted it for her children.

Anna and I continued to meet together. I met with her and her husband, and I visited them and the children at their home. Often, Anna would smile and say to me, "I"m still reading that peace blog of yours, you know."  While she didn't want to discuss it in detail- there were more urgent matters for us to deal with as time went on- she made sure I knew that she was keeping tabs on what we were saying about living like Jesus. It was important to her that she be able to see some sort of evidence that we're practicing what we preach here, and especially that I, the person who would help her children cope with her death, was doing that.  While blogging during that time, I was keenly aware of her as part of my readership; knowing that this dying woman found hope here gave me a greater sensitivity and awareness as I wrote.

Anna died peacefully at home, surrounded by her family and her friends. Her funeral was a major event; her vitality and gift for developing community had touched many people.  As much as people can be, her family- husband, father, and all three children- appear to be grieving peacefully. That phrase sounds like an oxymoron, given our cultural association between death and violence, grief and pain, but I don't think it is.  Grief is hard work; Anna knew this and taught it to her family. She also taught them that it is work worth doing. It is work that can increase the peace in one's own life and in the world if done genuinely and sensitively.

There are many dimensions worth exploring to Anna's story, but for the purposes of this blog I want to focus on the fact that ordinary human beings with no acquaintance with mimetic anything stumble across this blog and find a new dimension of meaning in their lives because of it. While the lectionary support and theological articles on the site are invaluable to those of us who need such things, the blog is the place where, as Anna once put it, "the rubber hits the road." It is the evidence that we can practice what we preach- or not. It's the place where we work out the kinks in our own practice and refine our thinking based on real living. Perhaps it's just the difference between theory and application, but for Anna it was clear that our thought process about real life events modeled here on the blog modeled a Jesus she was willing to meet.

My relationship with Anna's family is continuing. I don't ever expect to see them in my Baptist church; although stranger things have happened, this family's mixed Roman Catholic and Jewish heritage gone atheist/agnostic doesn't bode well for organized religion. But then, as mimetic theory teaches us, we know that the role of organized religion is to contain violence, which is not the same thing as bringing the peace that Jesus gives to us. That peace came across to Anna, and by extension it is at work in her family, through this blog. To all of you who contributed, both blog entries and comments during the past six months, I say thank you. Thank you for ministering, albeit unknowingly and anonymously, to Anna as she died. Your efforts made the peace of Jesus a hopeful reality for her.

Please continue to comment people! It is unbelievably helpful in more ways than you know. If you do so on your own blog, it would be great if you'd just post the link in the comment section. The greater the dialog from this perspective, the greater the work of peace in the world....the real peace of Jesus, "not as the world gives"..... (Jn 14:27)

nancy hitt.

Comments

[M Wms]

Nancy,

Thank you for this reflection.

I ask this question sincerely, not in the least snidely (tone is hard to decipher online!): You say: "as mimetic theory teaches us, we know that the role of organized religion is to contain violence, which is not the same thing as bringing the peace that Jesus gives to us" and yet you mention that you are part of a Baptist faith community.

How do you reconcile these things?

I can't seem to go to worship any longer or be anything but a fringe participant in my semi-former faith community because of exactly what you say here, that institutional religion is designed to contain violence; and, I'd add, from my observation and experience, it often (maybe always?) does so by mandating and maintaining circles of exclusion and inclusion. I don't want to scapegoat 'church' and yet I don't see how I can be part of it, either, because of the way it operates and its intention in so operating.

I'd love your thoughts, and others', too.

[PamBG]

Thank you for that story which has shaken me out of my current 'cold, rainy afternoon of the soul'. :-)

If you are getting 10,000 hits a month, you are certainly ministering to people.

[nancy]

Dear MWms: I'm thinking seriously about your question; it's a very important one. I know that I have answered it for myself by staying in the church, but I'm not prescribing that for everyone. Please humor me while I take the time to sort this out; although I have thought a lot about it over the years, it's been a while since I've needed to articulate it. I will get back to you asap with more genuine content, but I wanted you to know that I'd seen your response and am not ignoring you. Thank you!

[PamBG]

I don't feel I have any 'easy answers' that will necessarily convince anyone else, but I wonder if the question about 'Why church' could be a separate blog entry, so we could discuss it?

[Teresa]

Nancy, I comment here occasionally, read here almost every week. I tend toward the theoretical, which is why I try to keep my responses here short! But this time, I’ll add a little more and hope you’ll forgive me if I seem to go on.

I stumbled across Girard in the 1990’s, when I was working on a feminist philosophy journal. The French feminists, like Kristeva, were dismissing him as reactionary. I was reintroduced to Girard by my spiritual director a few years ago. His is the best exegesis of the Bible I know. But now, I find I’m at an impasse. His theory is locked in patriarchal essentialism: he believes the scapegoating mechanism is not a result of culture but creates culture. But this seems to me like saying that innately, women are not as academically smart as men, while ignoring the fact that our culture doesn’t encourage and reward girls and even penalizes them socially for achieving.

I’m not satisfied that humans are naturally geared toward escalating rivalry. To believe this process is innate and not culturally derived is to ignore a culture in which difference, hierarchy, domination, and violence are its very foundation. It’s like giving a pass to patriarchy, saying we’re naturally geared to creating this “rule of the fathers,” a masculine society in which binary gender roles are the primary marker for determining options and success. Women are the first victims of patriarchy (shown in myths of sky god over earth goddess and in history as gendered laws), so how is it that women have participated in creating this culture from the first victim? And whose desire is being mimicked? Or is Girard saying – like the antiquated anthropological theory goes – that men created culture while women were raising babies?

This culture doesn’t simply encourage competition and hierarchy; it can’t exist without it. So educating us to our scapegoating violence doesn’t solve the problem but just shifts our victims.

Before Jesus we weren’t aware that our murdered victims were being scapegoated, and it seems to me that most of the scapegoating history has been facilitated with physical violence. In modern times, we use economic violence just as effectively. We don’t see our violence because we cloak the scapegoat as deserving of economic failure (“murder”) for how lazy he is, how weak, how dumb -- despite unequal laws, treaties, resources, training, etc. Wasn’t the murdered scapegoat made “deserving” of his victimhood in the same way? So, we scapegoat the murderers and don’t see that we participate in a system that starves and sickens the world.

The very interesting thing to me is that, despite our modern obsession with nonviolence, wasn’t Jesus’s emphasis really about the abuse of the poor? In any case, Girard and this blog have made Jesus a little more real for me. I appreciate the thoughts.

Your post about Anna was disturbing. Losing a mother is about the worst thing I can imagine. Her forethought was a gift. I admire pastors like you and the others here who find themselves at the most critical moments of people’s lives. It must be both a reward and the worst part of the work.

If you’re interested in how I reached my impasse with Girard, you can read the last few posts I made about his theory on my blog, Flesh & Spirit:
"Things Hidden Since the Foundation of Patriarchy" and "Violence Gone Underground" at http://teresawymore.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/things-hidden-since-the-foundation-of-patriarchy/
http://teresawymore.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/violence-gone-underground/

[Brefduddend]

Nice site keep it up!

http://www.dasofte.com

[qznwbdv sqbielkw]

epvgsc hpxvbz puaib agewc zdcahqewb mioqrnypc owpvxas

[Rolando]

I thought eyonvere knew about quinine. It's a natural antibiotic like tea tree oil and was used as a therapy for malaria back in the day. It also has muscle relaxant properties which are perhaps helpful for relaxing little eye sockety muscles. But more importantly it makes gin and tonics taste just right..d