ABC Post 14--You Talk I Listen--Gothard, Privilege, and Shame

I sensed it a lot as a child.

“It” was a dark, slimy something, sensed on a spiritual level but so real it was almost physically felt and seen and smelled, that swirled around me and through me and settled down into the deepest part of who I was.

I felt it when I was seven and saw a crying toddler out by the swings after church, and I had seen his parents go into the classroom off the kitchen, so—happy that I had what it took to help someone—I led him to the classroom, opened the door, and shooed him inside to his parents.  And then I shut the door and turned to see the church ladies in the kitchen all turn to me with angry and annoyed faces.  What was I DOING?? That couple was having a PRIVATE MEETING with the visiting minister!!

I got the message.  I had done something terrible, and I was just so bad.  I went out and sat in the buggy, overwhelmed with my own horribleness over which I had no control and about which I could do nothing.

When my brothers told me I was fat and ugly and a crybaby and full of parasitic worms, I felt the darkness too.  I knew I was disgusting beyond bearing, a burden and embarrassment to my family. That was who I was.  There was nothing I could do but go through life like Cain, head bowed with the heaviness of taking up room on earth that I didn’t deserve.

When I forgot my Bible at church one Sunday and then found it on the entry table at church a few days later, hoping no one had looked through it and seen the notes that Mary and Regina and I had written to each other in church, I was crushed to find among the notes a long anonymous letter castigating me for my wickedness. “…these carnal girlish notes,” it said, among many other things. I knew I was just so very irredeemably bad, and some nameless holy person at church had discovered how bad I was. Now they KNEW.  There was no atoning for this.

The swirling, smelly darkness always had the same messages.  “You are just so bad.” “Unbelievable. “ “What a freak.” “Everything is your fault.” “There is nothing you can do about it.” 

There was never a specific solution, a path forward, a way to forgiveness and redemption.

I got to be really good at sniffing out the presence of this slimy evil.  In the middle of a sermon I would suddenly sense it, reaching out like an octopus from the pulpit.  Maybe in a conversation with a concerned older woman or in a magazine article, there it was, around and within me, exposing my very awfulness. 

Long years later, I learned that the dark presence had a name.  It was Shame.

And I learned that Shame had lied to me all my life.

One day, as an adult and long after I should have known better, I conducted a children’s meeting at church and told them the story of the notes in my Bible and being found out, as a cautionary tale. You should be good in church!

My friend Judy Roth said afterwards, “Dorcas! You were not the bad person! Whoever wrote that anonymous letter to you had no right to snoop in your Bible.  That was wrong of them!”

The universe tilted about ten degrees. It had never crossed my mind that someone besides me could be the bad person, or could have wronged me and it wasn’t my fault.

That is how badly Shame messes with your mind.

Bill Gothard was a well-known teacher in those days who filled whole stadiums with devotees for a week of intense teaching.  If you were anyone in Christian circles, you went to his Basic Youth Seminar. If you were really serious, you went to the Advanced Seminar.

The most conservative Mennonite churches didn’t endorse Bill Gothard.  We of slightly more enlightened Mennonite persuasions looked at them with amusement.  Didn’t they know you could get solid Christian teaching from someone who wasn’t Mennonite?  I had many Mennonite friends who had filled their red books with copious notes and used all the special phrases—character qualities and rhemas and a Godly seed and spending time in the Word.

I went to a Basic Youth seminar for the first time after we were married.  With thousands of other Christians we walked expectantly into Portland’s Rose Garden, found our seats, and listened to hours and hours of earnest lectures delivered with gentle and persuasive words.

As the days progressed I became more and more aware of something “off.” Over and over, Bill would share a Bible verse, or part of one, and then he would quickly go on to the application of this verse, complete with 8 or 10 bullet points about the root cause of anger or the results of listening to certain music, and while everyone around me wrote it all down, I was still stuck on that verse.  How did he make the leap from the verse to the conclusion? It didn’t make sense.

There is no way Bill Gothard would have had the success he had if nothing he said was true. He had plenty to say that people found helpful and that encouraged Christians to take the Bible seriously. But I think it was Thursday or Friday when I recognized it—the same evil-smelling cloud of shame, swirling around, without and within, condemning me down to the core of my soul, sucking me into a spiral of trying to be good and never ever being good enough.

That time, for once, I pushed back.

It is a strange thing to be in a crowd of 10,000 people and feel like you are the only person who sees and feels this huge and obvious dark something all around you.  So I sat there and stubbornly prayed that his sin would be revealed.

I had no idea what it was, but I knew it was there.

30 years later my prayer was answered, at last, and his creepy controlling behavior toward the young women in his employment was finally brought to light.

Along the years, I slowly began to recognize the voice of Grace, which is the opposite of Shame. You could also call it conviction vs. condemnation.  Or the voice of the Holy Spirit vs. Satan’s voice.

We are loved beyond all explanation, the Bible says. If we accept God’s forgiveness through the death and resurrection of Jesus, then we become a new creation. Our heart of stone is replaced with a heart of flesh. We are free from condemnation and passed from death to life.

But sometimes it takes a long time to learn the reality of all that, and to recognize and renounce the lies that come at us.

Shame says You are just so bad.
Grace says, You are redeemed and forgiven and loved.

Shame is always vague. Its message is that you are just so bad to the core.
Grace is specific. If you’ve done something wrong, the Holy Spirit zeros in and shows it to you. And you know exactly what you did that you shouldn’t have.

Shame is urgent and frantic.
Grace is gentle and patient.

Shame says there’s no atoning for this, no clear path, only a heavy burden to carry through life, a red A, the mark of Cain as you wander throughout the earth.
Grace gives you a clear path forward, a definite way to make things right, and permission to put it behind you and move on.

If I’m hypersensitive on this subject, it’s because I believed too many lies for too long, and it’s a horrible way to live.  Recently I found a picture of myself as a small child, and I wanted to cry.  I was beautiful and adorable. I had been lied to, and I believed the lie, and acted as though it were true.

So, we come at last to the actual topic of the day.

I’ve always had an interest in racial issues, history, and justice.  I’ve studied history and kept up on the news and read biographies. But I’ve been very far removed from the American Black population. When we adopted a son who was black, I expected the prevailing racial tropes and narratives to fit his life, and they never did.

It made me question anything I’d learned that came from a white interpretation, especially an academic one, and it made me impatient with anything but specific information, preferably from the black community.  I wrote a blog post about some of this.

And, as mentioned a few days ago, I was inundated with articles to read and books to buy and information to process.

Some of it was helpful, full of stories and personal experiences and eye-opening comparisons and specific ways to promote justice and issues that would never have occurred to me.

But a lot of the material was full of earnest educated analysis, blanket statements about whole swaths of people, and words like “privilege,” and the more I read it, the more I sensed that something was "off" and there was a slimy black octopus reaching out from the words, and an evil smell lingering within and without.

They were all about Shame, I realized. It rose in black vapors from the pages.  The articles were full of vague accusations, encompassing all white people not with “these people did this specific bad thing” but “you are just so unbelievably defiled as a whole group.”

There was never a clear path forward to repent, rectify, make atonement, move on, and do better, as individuals or as a group, only a sense that the entire white American race was branded with the mark of Cain, wandering the earth. “Awareness” was the best we could hope for, and maybe “dialogue.”  But there was no way that any individual, even a farm wife in the middle of North Dakota, could ever remove the terrible mantle of privilege.

Just to make sure you understand: Do I believe inequality exists and white people often experience life differently, especially in certain parts of the country? Definitely yes. For instance, I asked my son Matt to verify what I’d heard about how young black men in Washington, DC, get sucked into the prison system.  He said it works like this:
1. You get arrested, wrongfully or not.
2. You get stuck in a private prison, which has every incentive to keep you in place as long as possible (more state money)
3. Being in jail that long, you lose your job
4. You get charged for your room and board in jail, innocent or not
5. Not being able to pay, you lose your driver's license and with it, whatever ability you have to get another job
Downward spiral from there.

I’m sure that happens in many places besides DC, and to low-income people of all races. But I can also see how it disproportionately affects the black population. No matter who it happens to, it's wrong.

My point is, it’s specific information that I can get my teeth into. It's not a vague adjective labeling a whole group.

The worst problem with much of the privilege agenda is that it’s only a short step to narrowing down the shame, from white privilege to white male privilege and even to white male Mennonite privilege. 

Like this article.

It soon gets really weird and creepy.

Here are two recent examples of where the prevailing privilege ideas lead when people take them seriously:
1. The young white male student who told my daughter, in all seriousness, that the world would be a better place if there were only 25% of the men, because men cause all the wars and stuff.
2. The professor at Portland State who told his class, “White males in leadership are the root of all evil.” [A student in the class told his mom who told me.]

That’s Shame talking.  It lies and it condemns.

I am all about all of us, as individuals and communities, loving our neighbors, pursuing justice, humility, listening hard, sacrificing, and speaking up for those who have no voice.  I believe in repenting of our sins and taking responsibility for choices and finding a better way.

But I have no patience with Shame.  It might take thirty years for the truth to be exposed, but when it does, I want to say I saw it for what it was.