In summary…

Our last blog.

For our final blog entry, a few from our group wrote about their personal experiences, what they have learned, and what questions remain. I have noticed that when I allow myself to be open and curious about what I don’t understand, I usually leave with more questions then when I started. This has certainly been the case in this group, as well. It has been a challenging and fulfilling time, becoming more aware of the pain in life, as well as the beauty, that I never saw before.

~One of the biggest thematic threads that ran through our Womanist/ Post-Colonial reading pod was that of memory and remembrance. In reading the theology of Womanist theologians and the African American cultural trauma theories from sociologists, it became clear that silence and forgetting were categories of violence and trauma. Many of the texts that we read were steeped in the story of real people’s lives. In this way, the past was very much present and collective memory was the place of both trauma, but also communal identity formation. The authors took biography, history and memoir as sacred texts from which to begin to shape their theology. What became clear is that if theology isn’t connected to the particularity of a community’s pain and can’t speak to their collective memory or their current reality, then it doesn’t bear any meaning. To begin with lived experience and the particularity of its embodiment, memory, trauma, and resilience gives theology a new language from which to talk about what life and redemption look like in the places where we actually live. Theology from the Womanist lens also takes seriously the community. To belong to a people is to be responsible to its freedom from oppression, its liberation from injustice, its healing from trauma, and its telling of story after long periods of silencing. In this way, participation in the community resembles the work of the Spirit as the one who wagers their fate with the beloved community and remains present unto the wholeness of all peoples.

~I had initially decided to study trauma in the Womanist, Mujerista, Post-Colonial Feminist group because it is in post-colonial feminism that I have found the most resonance. I did most of my growing up in Asia, in a Muslim country, and I would identify as a third-culture kid/adult, defined as someone who neither identifies with the culture of their passport, their parents, nor the culture that they were raised in. Conversations around race, privilege, gender, and religion, especially the intersection of all of them, has in the past led to the kind of lost language and disorientation that Bessel Van Der Kolk writes about in “The Body Keeps the Score” (2015). I have not known how to explain what trauma may lie in my experiences — I still don’t — but what I have found in this group, and in the Womanist, Mujerista, and Post-Colonial Feminist theologians and scholars we have been blessed to engage has been an openness, eager to hear my story. I have learned from Womanists like Karen Baker-Fletcher that pain is personal and relative, and that each story is important for constructing a comprehensive (though still incomplete) web of human experiences. From Mujerista theologians, including Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, I have learned that it is alright to ask for more than hierarchy, and to take comfort in my not-yet-knowing. The Princess Bride seemed to put it well when Inigo Montoya, fencing extraordinaire, said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Rather than falling into the false belief that I need to know — that my whiteness or my privilege requires that I understand things and people who I have not spent time with, and that this “knowing” is honoring — these women, including Native American writer Andrea Smith, have released me from that burden, and educated my ignorance of its impact. Finally, Kwok Pui-Lan and her writing on the experience of white Christian femininity in Asian mission field gave me the chance to voice my own experience, agreeing and disagreeing with her assessment, remembering that all depictions of trauma are both incomplete and complete. They are complete in the sense that they come from a whole person, but they can never show the whole picture. From these women, I have learned that I do not need to hold the whole picture. I simply need to remain true to my experience, and my piece of understanding.

~I grew up on a cul-de-sac in a Midwestern suburb once touted as a top ten place to raise a family in America. Unsurprisingly, none of the categories that comprised the reasons for making a top ten included a diverse population. I think this is representative of the attitude many have in America, where people of color are in the least implicitly ignored. The authors we have read are attempting to flip this attitude around — to put the marginalized and oppressed at the center of consideration. Everything else stems from this. Theology is often a place of intellectual assent for the privileged who then cast blame and judgment on the marginalized. To centralize the voice of women of color is to turn this way of theologizing on its head. It challenges an epistemology that has a tendency to divide with an epistemology that is inclusive and reciprocal. Our readings on trauma parallel this. In opening an ear to experiences of trauma, we ground theology to the body. Church, God, eschatology, and Spirit become words used in describing the hopes of the here and now. A felt sense of pain can then be attached to a body of work that holds the tension between life and death. I have been opened to curiosity and imagination in these readings and I hope to walk forward more humbly with an open ear to those who experience life differently than me.