Splitting

On the sunny morning when my son was born, my husband raced our Civic through town while I hunched in the passenger seat, my hands weirdly frozen in claws. I watched people walk nonchalantly to work and thought, how is the world going on while my body is tearing in half?

Fifteen years later, on another sunny day, I was finishing coffee with a friend when our phones dinged with text alerts: there was an active shooter at a Catholic academy down the street from my son’s school.

It was a hoax, a cruelly believable hoax. But we didn’t know that yet.

While emergency vehicles swarmed the school; while my ninth grader was locked in his English classroom with the lights off and shades drawn, hearing nothing but sirens and helicopters; while Twitter and text messages kept me updated, I thought: what’s best practice while you’re waiting to find out whether someone actually killed kids again, or just pretended to kill kids? I wanted to run outside into the street, bellowing. Tear off my clothes, set them on fire in rage, in shame that I hadn’t tried harder to prevent this. Instead, I numbly turned up my phone’s ringer, said goodbye to my friend, drove home, parked in front of my house, and carried grocery bags to the kitchen.

This time, I was both the person blithely going about my business and the person tearing in half.

In this country, in 2023, I’m constantly splitting in this way. I hear another story about police violence or climate catastrophe, and I have to choose: engage meaningfully with the grief, or tamp it down and…keep on keeping on?

I don’t want to live in this cognitive dissonance, protecting my daily routine from my rage, my desperate desire for change, my sense that we live in very serious times that call for very serious engagement. I don’t want to careen wildly among hope, fear, and numbness. I’d like more wholeness, more coherence in my mind and body and schedule. More of a best practice for being a whole human in serious times that neither ignores the fire nor lets me be consumed by it.

The table

What keeps me tied to Christianity is its notion of the “kingdom of God,” which sounds horribly cultish but which I find totally compelling. As I understand it, the “kingdom” is a state of being—paradoxically both currently accessible and not yet complete (understatement)—where God is in charge, there’s no human hierarchy, and everyone has inexhaustible, joyful abundance. In the kingdom of God, children are safe and free. The land is whole and healthy. Life is deeply, exuberantly good, for everyone.

Now. The image of a perfectly benevolent “kingdom” is just too foreign to be a meaningful tool for me. Luckily, Christianity isn’t a one-metaphor affair. In describing the kingdom, the Jesus of the Gospels constantly reaches for another image: a banquet, a feast, a table where all are welcome and all hierarchies are overturned. “People will come from east and west and north and south,” Jesus says, “and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God. Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.”

That table, y’all. ! !! !!!

That table is everything I want in the world: justice, wholeness, abundance, joy, communality, fearlessness, peace.

It’s an invitation to work—now, on this planet, not in an afterlife—to smash hierarchies and share abundance, even while praying for divine intervention to finish the effing job.

It’s believing that the arc of the moral universe does, as the prophet said, bend toward justice.

It’s a metaphor I can imagine exploring for the rest of my life. A frame for the serious but joyful work I want and need to be doing.

It’s best practice for being a whole human in serious times.

And 99.9% of the time, I forget it.

Instead of living confidently and working steadily into the table’s wholeness, I spend most of my life in one of three, um, other states of being:

  • Overwhelmed despair, forgetting that the world is bountifully good, because HAVE YOU SEEN IT LATELY OMG;
  • Myopic complacency, because my own personal table in my own personal house is really quite nice, and my own personal kids are, so far, merely terrorized from afar;
  • Frenetic political activity (Phone calls! Petitions!! Marching!!! Sending money!!!!) that quickly loses momentum and spirals back into despair.

I don’t want to be Mostly Despairing Or Complacent, With Brief Periods of Panic Action. I want the cadence of my everyday life to respond meaningfully both to the table’s abundance and to the reality that—despite God’s frequent commands to the contrary—not everyone has a seat there, and that self-appointed bouncers prowl its borders with ARs. Liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez says that the kingdom “manifests itself as a gift, a grace, but also as a task, a responsibility.” I cannot imagine a better place to live out my days than between those two truths. But right now, I spend a vanishingly small amount of my energy enacting the table’s grace and responsibility—despite wanting them, despite believing they’re what I was made for, what we were made for.

Getting to work

I have some ideas about why I keep splitting instead of finding wholeness. I even have some ideas about what to do about it. But this isn’t a table for one. Since a lot of us are desperate for that wholeness and action; since there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if we can work together; and since this question is apparently not going to leave me alone…I’m going to write about it here. Weekly essays, for at least six months. There will be earnestness (see: this entire introduction!); there will also be GIFs. On Fridays there will be additional, experimental little digests of things to read and look at.

Some of the questions I want to tackle:

  • What’s keeping me/us from aligning our gut-deep desires for justice with our daily choices?
  • Who’s doing it well; whom can we learn from?
  • What daily habits/practices can help change my routines?
  • What about mental health?
  • What about money?
  • What about joy and fun?
  • In justice work, is patchouli required? (Please God no)

In the spirit of “a task, a responsibility,” this table on this website isn’t (just) a party. It’s a place to strategize, tell stories, and get sustenance for the fight. I’ll set the table and bring the discussion questions; I’ll bring the Trapper Keeper and take notes. Y’all come!

Let's get this party started in the comments. Does the idea of the table get you jazzed (and why/not)? Which of the questions above is/are most compelling for you?

Yay, here we go!