Matthew 11:28

"'Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.'"

For those who feel the weight of difficult decisions,
who are weary from battles fought and lost,
and for those who anxiously face an uncertain future...

For those who labor in vain,
who suffer the loss of loved ones,
and who long for comfort...

For those who suffer in body or in mind,
who are tormented by guilt,
and who have fallen into despair...

Lent 2012

It's probably due to my liturgy-deprived childhood that critical dates of the Church calendar tend to sneak up on me.  And, for that same reason, I get excited about these moments in the life of the Church.  As much as I am devoted to the faith, I find myself stumbling through the ecclesial calendar and the liturgical movements of the Church life which I encounter when I attend the local Episcopal church.  When I [recently] realized that Lent is approaching, I began to look forward to this time of reflection and journeying with Christ.

The Lenten season reminds us of the sufferings of Christ.  Unfortunately, the fascination with Jesus' sufferings have lead to masochistic tendencies, to passivity in the face of abuse and injustice, and, sometimes, toward self-destructive behavior.  Glorifying the abuse and death of a peasant by the hands of a strong power (in this case, the state), has become a commodity of piety that appeals mainly to those all too familiar with privilege.  That's to say, it's easy to romanticize and to sanctify suffering if it isn't part of one's daily existence.  I'd argue that this has left a stain of morbidity and life-denying piety on the Christian tradition.  And, for this reason, themes that regard Jesus' sufferings as "redemptive" have come under heavy criticism by feminist and liberation theologians (and rightly so!).  But lately, I've struggled to find renewed significance in the sufferings and the death of Christ and, thereby, also significance in Christ's body.  I wonder how we can understand the sufferings and the death Christ without romanticizing the pain and injustice felt by the most vulnerable of our world?  Can we truly find hope and life in the midst of despair?  Is there an affirmation of life in this story about injustice and violent death?  I find this moment in our Christian story profound and perplexing, rich and embarrassing, magnificent and offensive, yet I think my faith is forged in wrestling with it rather than passively accepting it.  During this Lenten season, I hope to spend time contemplating this twisted and strange moment at the heart of our faith--to find new life when "God-with-us" gave up his.

BSWM II

Having just completed chapter 3, I find that each chapter is richer than the preceding one.  So far, Fanon has drawn from the fictional work of popular Martinique authors to illustrate and analyze the relationships between colonized Martinicans and colonizing French people.  He speaks about the woman of color and the white man in chapter 2, who longs to enter the white world (thereby escaping her own race) through romance and marriage to a white man.  The black woman ("Mayotte Capecia") not only wants to save herself, but to save her race by whitening her race.  With this being the goal, Fanon writes that "we know a lot of girls from Martinique, students in France, who confess in lily-white innocence that they would never marry a black man," (30).  I was surprised to find that in this chapter a substantial portion addressed the negative effects that this woman-of-color/white-man dynamic had upon the black man (the appropriate correlate cannot be found in chapter 3--possibly a sign of the book's male-centered bias.)  In chapter 3, a similar behavior is found by the black man ("Jean Veneuse") who encounters a white woman.  Fanon describes Veneuse as introverted, anxious, and lacking self-esteem.  As a student in France, he struggles to believe that he is equal to his white peers or worthy of the love of a white woman.  And his peers, trying to guarantee him of his acceptance, happily proclaim that Veneuse is not a real Negro.  "[In France] there is a general refusal to consider [students of color] as authentic 'Negroes.' The 'Negro' is the savage, whereas the student is civilized," (50-1).  In both cases, the black and colonized Martinican desire white skin, society, and acceptance.  Blackness and Martinican culture are chains from which to seek deliverance and stains from which to be washed clean.  In positioning themselves in relation to the civilizing culture (see my previous post), Fanon is presenting blackness, in the colonized mind, as the repulsive deprivation of whiteness--lacking in beauty and civility.  Blackness is a region of non-being.  "It is commonplace in Martique to dream of whitening oneself magically as a way of salvation," (27).  However, these dreams bear devastating results since both black and white are trapped in their own particularity and hopelessly fighting to escape (the black man to whiteness and the white man to universal manhood).