How Wide and Long and High and Deep

This summer I’ve been tracking the Pennsylvania budget impasse, and doing what I can to advocate for restoration of deep funding cuts to our state’s education. I’ve been writing emails to representatives and key legislative leaders, encouraging others to do the same. We have the most inequitable public education in the nation. I know some of those children in schools without libraries, library books, librarians. And I know some of those young adults who had hoped to college and found any help to get there had vanished.

I’ve been asked why I care. Most people I know don't. Not much. Unless their own kids are in one of those schools most affected.

Why care?

I’ve been finding that caring is a calling, and I can point to the start of mine.

It was a quarter century ago, an evening after a too-long, too-hard day. We had three small nieces spending the week with us, to give their parents a break, and I’d made the mistake of letting the whole crew camp together in our basement playroom. We had a baby, asleep in her room upstairs, and five excited children arranged between a pull-out couch and some comforters on the floor. Upstairs it was quiet. Downstairs, it was mayhem.

I was tired, impatient, ready to be done with the day. We’d done too many trips to the bathroom, too many last drinks of water, too many “just one more” stories. Lights, and night lights, had been on and off too many times to count. I sat on the hard wood of the basement steps, head in hands, and prayed.

I’m sure it wasn’t an eloquent prayer. More along the lines of “I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know why I put myself in this place, and God, I don’t love these kids. And I don’t feel like you love me. Show me. Show me that love that surpasses knowledge, and help me love these kids.”

No bright lights. No sudden voice. No angel song. But on those hard wood stairs, in that dark stairwell, I felt suddenly surrounded by a warmth and care that pressed in close and filled my empty heart. And I had a vision of God’s love. Not a visible vision, but a strange sense of being loved with a love that was firm, and patient, that would take as long as needed, that would hold me steady no matter what wind or waves swept past me. That wasn’t comparing me to anyone else, wasn’t grading me by some impossible standard. A warm, present, listening love, that melted my hard sad heart and still brings me to tears when I think of it.

Trying to describe it, I realize words fall short.  God was giving me a glimpse of a passage from Ephesians I had prayed without knowing what I was praying, words I had memorized and taped inside my kitchen cupboard door:

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (Ephesians 3:14 to 21) 

I had understood God’s love – in concept. And I had tried to live it- as a job description, a too-hard task I’d been given along with all the other too-hard tasks. But did I grasp it? Was I rooted in it? Was I filled with it? Was I strengthened by it?

My own parents disappeared a month before I turned two. They were married too young, had four kids too fast, and struggled with undiagnosed depressions and disorders in a time when no one knew how to help. My siblings and I grew up in our grandparents’ home, until my grandfather sold it and announced he was done with parenthood and with us. From there, it was a rocky road through high school, with uncertain attention from our grandmother and other adults who appeared and disappeared as they were blown along by the changing circumstances of their lives.

I had no doubt that I had been loved along the way, but a limited vision of what strong, steady parental love would look like, and not enough experience of it to pass along.

I’d seen, from a distance, some imposters. I’d seen the selfish parental love that treated the child as extension of the parents’ ego. I’d seen the needy love that would give anything to earn the child’s approval. I’d seen dictatorial parents who treated their children like robots, or little wind-up toys. I’d seen neglectful, episodic love, swooping in to say “Isn’t she cute!” then turning away to other interests. I was thankful to have been spared those facsimiles of love, but not sure the task-oriented form of care I’d been given, and knew how to give, was enough.

And yes, I’d been told that the very definition of love was Christ’s death on the cross. I’d memorized John 15: “Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

And yes, I was familiar with that famous chapter about love, 1 Corinthians 13. I’d memorized it in high school, and memorized it again as a parent: “Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

I worked hard on all of those things: patience was almost impossible. Kindness? Sometimes. Anger? That depended on the day. Record of wrongs? Still working on it.

 

The fact is - it was work. And that was the heart of the problem: it was all work. Rocking a baby late at night. Diapers. Laundry. Long, bored afternoons. The challenge of making dinner while kids whined underfoot. Work.

But there was an inner deficit, a hollowness inside that sang its sad song to me in those late night sessions while I rocked and sang a fussy baby back to sleep. I could do the work of a parent, but the heart of a parent seemed to be missing. I had started from a place of depletion - and the more I gave, the emptier I grew.

Sitting on the basement steps, I found something in me changing. It wasn’t a “conversion” – I was already following Christ as faithfully as I knew how. It was what Paul described in Ephesians: I began to grasp the boundless love of Christ, and began to be filled, in a new way, with the boundless fullness of God. Calling out for help, I found that help holding me, surrounding me. Singing a new song to my tired, hungry heart.

So what was different? The best I can say is I began to understand, somewhere beyond my head, what that phrase, “God’s love,” really meant. I was no longer trying to earn something that I knew I could never earn. I knew, in some deep, unexplainable way, that I was loved, and that God’s love, even when I couldn’t feel it, was present, at work, surrounding me.

From that evening on, I knew my role as parent was to do my best to offer a reflection of that love: Unchangeable. Wanting their best. Not dependent on their good behavior, their compliance, their good will. I could love them when they slammed the door, and could remind them, patiently, that they were free to be angry, but not free to be rude. I could love them when they made me look bad, interfered with my plans, challenged my priorities.

It started there, but bubbled far past that. If God loved me beyond understanding, beyond width and length and height and depth, then there was no edge to that love flowing past me, into places of need I had never seen before.

POWER: Philadelphians Organized to Witness Empower & Rebuild

I’ve watched with amazement as that love reaches through me to embrace others I’ve met along the way: silent children with hungry eyes, angry teens itching for a fight. Awkward adults caught in their own unyielding dramas.

And it bubbles up in waves of longing for equity and justice for those I know God loves: overworked teachers in crowded classrooms, desperate parents wanting a decent chance for their kids. All those beautiful, needy little ones, part of God’s family, children of his heart, waiting for the same care given other children.

That love flows out in ways I often can’t predict, can’t explain, sometimes can’t control. 

New every morning. 

Stronger every day.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

[This is a revision of a post from 2011, Love Is.  I'll be reworking some earlier posts this summer, as travel and time outside limit my time for blogging.]

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

#Nomore Less Than

There’s a moment in the film Selma when Martin Luther King says “It is unacceptable that they use their power to keep us voiceless. Those that have gone before us say, 'No more.'”

That “no more” became a ongoing cry: no more Birminghams, no more lynchings, no more unprovoked violence, no more sitting on the sidelines while people of color are treated as less than equal, less than human.

 

That cry continues, but a new one has joined it, a force behind an ad that will be aired during the

Superbowl this evening, part of the Joyful Heart Foundation's #Nomore Campaign against Domestic Violence.

I’ve been posting the last few weeks about inclusion and exclusion, justice and injustice, and King’s insistence that “Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

He also repeated in various places: “There can be no justice without peace, and there can be no peace without justice.”

This is true in our communities, and true in our homes as well.

When relationships are about power and privilege, with one group assuming its right to control, injustice and violence are not far behind.

Read through the arguments for segregation, and they all circle back to a sense of entitlement. 

But what happens when entitlement is part of our closest relationships?

What happens when the assumption of power and privilege plays out in the most mundane matters of daily life?

Racial violence doesn’t start with a plan to harm. It starts with assumptions, unacknowledged privilege, culturally endorsed ideas about who matters most, growing anger when assumptions are challenge.. Whose streets are the police trying to keep safe, and for whom? Whose communities are we hoping to see thrive, and how? Whose country is this, and how far will we go to see that belief preserved?

On the issue of domestic violence, the statistics are staggering, conflicting, inconclusive. According to the Center for Disease Control:

• At least one of every three women will be a victim of domestic violence.
• One in five women has been raped. 
• One in six women has been the victim of stalking.
• Almost half or all women have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner.  
• 1 in 4 women have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner. More than ten million children have witnessed domestic abuse.
• More than three women a day are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends.
• Less than 1 in four incidents of partner violence or abuse is reported – so the real number, on most of these, is far higher than anyone can prove. 

The NFL has been receiving much attention on this issue, prompting an ad by a group called UltraViolet that shows a football player preparing for a tackle, then charging across the field full force toward a woman standing alone.  A voiceover says “Let’s take domestic violence out of football,” while on-screen text reads “55 NFL abuse cases unanswered.” It ends with the hashtag, #Goodellmustgo.

The #Nomore ad is in a way the NFL's response. Reportedly based on an actual 911 call, air time and production cost were paid for by the League. 

A New York Times article describes the dynamic of NFL culture that can make wives feel trapped and unprotected.But that sense of entrapment and lack of protection is hardly unique to wives in the NFL. A more troubling article in The Atlanticdescribes a culture of abuse among police officers, too often unchecked.

And while much has been written lately about rape cultures on college campuses, the reality is that less privileged young women are far more likely to experience rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, often in their homes rather than in college frat houses.

A program successful with domestic violence in New York City offers this analysis:  

We have come to understand that the problem of violence against women is not a problem of individual men who are abusing individual women. The problem is a systemic one, an outgrowth of centuries of patriarchal privilege, which has defined man's relationship to woman in terms of domination, entitlement and ownership. Although the manifestations of male entitlement vary in different cultures throughout the world, it is a rare culture in which this paradigm simply does not exist. . . .Men utilize a wide array of tactics to control and dominate the women they are partnered with, not because they suffer from individual psychopathologies, but because they are socialized in cultures that encourage, support, or condone, a man's right to do so. 

A simple chart from the Dultuh Model, pioneers in community intervention, summarizes the research connecting the need to control and the likelihood of violence:

Reading the chart, I find myself grieving.

I know stories for every one of those slices. Stories told in tears on front porches, over coffees and eggs, in late night conversations when the lights are low. About marriages in trouble, explosive home situations, lingering baggage from long-ago trauma.

I read the chart and wish I had been more helpful.

Intervention is hard, support scarce, options few.

And the results of abuse are destructive and enduring.

Victims of domestic abuse can demonstrate the same symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as soldiers returning from violent war zones.

Unrecognized and untreated, these symptoms can add to more anger, more abuse. Even freed from the abusive situation, survivors can find themselves trapped in feelings of failure, isolation, and despair.  

No simple ad campaign will solve this.

And agreeing that domestic violence is wrong, or speaking out against campus rape, will do little to change a culture of abuse.

I’m reading in the gospel of Matthew this month, with Scripture Union’s Encounter with God.

The reading from January 21, Matthew 9:18-26, considered Jesus’ interactions with two women: the dead daughter of a man of influence, the marginalized woman who reached out to touch his robe.

The commentary, written by Fran Beckett said this: 

Tragically, misogynist attitudes can still be found today, reflected in dehumanizing practices such as the international trafficking of women and girls, female genital mutilation, abortion of girl babies, girls denied access to education, or women's portrayal as sex objects on the internet and in magazines. It exists in less overt although still damaging forms each time a woman's view isn't taken seriously because she's a woman, or despite her ability is denied workplace promotion because of a glass ceiling. Both women and men experienced profound injustice in Jesus' day and still do, and it was his positive engagement with women that marked him out as particularly controversial. Is there anything in our own attitudes to either women or men generally, or to particular individuals, that needs to change to be more like that of Jesus? 

In my experience (and according to a recent survey), our churches are no more likely to be safe havens for women than the other places where we travel. Women are interrupted, dismissed, shut down, and, behind closed doors, abused at statistically the same levels.   

Wives who seek help are questioned, encouraged to be “good wives,” left wondering where to turn.

The boys in our churchs, too often, are taught that they are “more than.” Their gifts are to be used, their ideas to be heard. While girls are “less than.” Abilities called into question, voices silenced, cry for help ignored.

Not in all churches, but still too many. 

Certainly not by all men. I’m grateful beyond words for the men in my life who listen to, affirm, encourage their sisters, mothers, daughters, friends.

Even so, the good news that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female,”  is still too often withheld from those who  most need to hear it. 

According to the New York Model for Batterer Programs: 

The most promising developments in the effort to stop the abuse of women have not been
in the therapeutic arena. Sociopolitical responses, befitting a systemic problem, have, in fact, begun to a make a difference. A systemic response is a comprehensive coordinated community effort: every institution in a community does its part in holding perpetrators accountable for their acts, and also provides extensive supports, including shelter, for women who are the victim/survivors. When a whole community treats violence against women as criminal behavior, instead of a private, predictable and acceptable family problem, things begin to change. When a whole community treats violence against women as shameful, looks down on those who perpetrate it, and make no more jokes about it, things will change. 

Almost eighty years ago, writer Dorothy Sayer called attention to Jesus’ example: 

Perhaps it is no wonder that women were first at the cradle and last at the cross. They had never known a man like this man. There never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made sick jokes about women; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took women’s questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out a certain sphere for women; who never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took women as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its point or pungency from female perversity. Nobody could get from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything funny or inferior about women. (Are Women Human, 1938) 

When our leaders, pastors, teachers, fathers decide to follow that example, when they refuse to treat women and girls as less than, and hold others accountable who do, we will be well on our way to ending domestic violence.

I’m waiting, and praying, and longing for that day. 

What's Required? Girl Rising

I had set aside this weekend to host a young friend and her two small children. We were going to visit thrift shops, picnic at a nearby lake, splash in the pool at the Y down the street.

But she called to say she had a new, much needed job. 

So she spent the weekend cleaning hotel rooms, her kids spent the weekend in a relative’s concrete back yard, and I’ve headed off in my kayak.

It hardly seems fair.

But then, much about life is far from fair.

When I was a kid, my grandmother often said, as she sent me off to school: “To whom much is given, much will be required.”

I had no clue what she meant.

We lived in a wealthy suburb of New York, where most of my friends had maids or nannies, two cars in the driveway, vacation homes. By seventh grade, or ninth at the latest, most of them would be in private school, at all the best academies.

And I wore hand-me-downs, helped my grandmother drag the shopping cart to Gristedes, a mile away, and tried not to let too many friends know that she watched other people’s kids and did ironing for neighbors to make ends meet.

Given?

Really?

Yet, the more I see of life, the more I understand what she was saying. I went to great schools. Lived in towns with wonderful libraries. Grew up in a state that made higher education possible for anyone willing to study. Never doubted that I could go to college, even grad school, if I wanted.

I thought of all that as I went with friends this week to watch Girl Rising, a powerful, troubling documentary about nine girls in nine different countries. Each story was written by a writer from the girl’s country, in conversation with the girls themselves, and each was filmed in a way that caught the hopes and struggles of the individual girl . 

Beautiful Suma of Nepal, bonded into labor at six, taught to read by a social worker after long days of work, survived by writing lovely, haunting songs of sorrow. 

Sokha, Cambodian orphan living and working in a city dump, searched for bits of metal to sell, a throw-away child in a throw-away place, until rescued and given home, school, future.

Buoyant Wadley of Haiti: she was seven when the earthquake destroyed her school, and defiant when told only children with money would be able to continue to learn.

Yasmin, of Egypt, tells a police officer the story of a violent attack. She knows where the attacker lives, and could lead the officer to him. Her mother cries for justice, and the officer, though sympathetic, shakes his head sadly: “In this world? No.” That cry for justice, and it's denial, echo in my mind.

Azmira of Ethiopia. Village elders told her widowed mother to marry her off at thirteen, but her older brother intervened, insisting she have the chance to continue in school. Every girl needs a brother like that.

Ruksana lives with her parents and two sisters in a makeshift home on a city street, dreaming of beauty, wondering why some people live in worlds like those she glimpses on tv, while police smash their simple dwelling and leave them homeless in the monsoon rains.

Mariama of Sierre Leone has two mothers, a father, and her own radio show. Joyful, confident, determined Mariama.

The two girls who linger with me are Amina of Afghanistan, and Senna of Peru.

Amina, “a girl masked and muted,” tells a story of servitude and repression. From the age of three she was carrying water to wash men’s hands, scrubbing, serving, working in silence. Sold as bride to her twenty year old cousin when she was just eleven in exchange for money her family spent on a used car for her brother.  Her first son was born nine months later.

Amina was one of two girls whose names were changed, and for safety reasons weren’t able to show their faces, yet her great sorrow, fierce anger and deep determination came through strongly, as did her accusation of all who live in freedom and fail to speak on behalf of those who suffer in silence.

Don’t assume, she says with feeling, that this is a religious issue. Women of her country, of her faith, lived in freedom before, and enjoy freedom in other countries now.

Child marriage and bride prices were banned in Afghanistan in 1921. For decades women were free to go to school, to hold jobs, to move about in freedom. Since 1996, Afghan women have been pawns of patriarchal power, facing violent enforcement of repressive restrictions.

I know almost nothing about the political realities that shape Amina’s life, that hold her in bondage. Does that excuse me?  "Your silence," Amina says, "has already spoken for you."

I find myself trying to see my world through her eyes: small children free to play, teen girls not yet burdened with pregnancy, women able to move and speak in freedom.

And I find myself wondering about that convoluted sentence my grandmother used to say: “To whom much is given, much will be required.”

I didn’t know at the time that she was quoting Jesus, speaking in Luke 12:48. She would have known King James version: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required."

What have I been given?

Education, opportunity, freedom, resources. 

Time, money, information.

What’s required? How?

The other story that haunts me is that of Senna, young teen from Peru.

Girl Rising: Life in the World's Harshest Town

Her story is set in La Rinconada, a gold-mining town high in the Andes, reportedly the highest city in the world, a thousand feet higher than the highest peaks of the Alps.

Her town, according to her, has more prostitutes than children. No running water, no sewage.

Her father named her for Xena, Warrior Princess, although he couldn’t spell the name. He never went to school, but wanted her to learn all she could. After he was injured in a mining accident, her mother and sister went to work cracking mining waste, looking for small remnants of ore, while Senna convinced the owner of the public outhouse to pay her for coming early every morning to clean the stinking holes, so she could work, avoid the lure of prostitution, and still remain in school.

As she lost her father to depression, then death, Senna discovered poetry and began to write her own.

Watching her, her determination, her struggle, I found myself wondering, as I wonder often: Why was I born here, in a beautiful place, with good health care nearby, excellent schools, clean bathrooms, green lawns?

I sit in my air-conditioned house, watch the hummingbirds visit my honeysuckle vine, wonder why I have the right to vote, to work, to drive, to read. To wear what I want, go where I want. 

I have the world at my fingertips – literally. FIOS internet connection. Functional HP laptop.

I find myself wondering, as I review the  movie, rethink the girls' stories: what are you asking?

10x10act.org, the organization that created the film in partnership with CNN and Intel, has started a fund for girls’ education. Donations to the fund are distributed between seven other partner organizations, including CARE USA, World Vision, Partners in Health, Room to Read.

It costs sixty dollars a year for school fees and uniforms in many places.

A year of teacher's college can cost less than a thousand dollars. 

So yes, money is required.

But more than that.

The 10x10 website suggests book groups, advocacy, hosting a screening, taking time to learn more.

Carrying those nine girls’ voices with me, I find myself humbled, thankful, hopeful, sad.

I want justice for each of them. In this world. Soon.

And I want choices, and beauty, and safety, and love.

Schools. Teachers. Books. Pens.

How much would we need to give to make that possible?

This is the last in a series on women and girls: 

• Talitha Koun. Girl Rising, July 15, 2013 

• Freedom is Indivisible, July 7, 2013 

• What Do Teenage Girls Need? June 30, 2013 

• Sweet Taste of Freedom, June 23, 2013 

• Courage, Hope Generosity, June 9 

• With All Your Mind? June 2