into the shit

(a modified version of a talk i gave to the general faculty body yesterday)

Its Ash Wednesday. A day when much of the Christian world chooses to wear a sign of humiliation and weakness upon our foreheads.

My friend Dave resigned from his job this past fall without knowing where he’d go. He’s my age with a wife and family and a mortgage.

Ryan blogged about the discouraging dimensions of this stage in her life. She’s a bright, talented, driven writer who is struggling to find a sense of vocation in the jobs available to her.

“Somewhere along the way I have lost this strong sense of self/identity that has always been a very prominent part of me. I have become really weak, which is hard for me to admit, because I am such a dominant person, but this is something I have had to face also.”

Dez’s dad has even worse frustrations with a job he’s poured his heart and his career into.

One of my cousins has all kinds of shit happening to her right now. One of my brother’s jobs is full of it, too.

As I drove home from work the other day, I had a slow motion moment. Do you have those? Where something, for whatever reason, captures your attention and stands out? Slows down the time you’re experiencing?

A dad and a little girl stood hand in hand poised and ready to cross 25th street. The Malone Rush Hour Traffic kept pouring by, though. I’m sure to her three year old eyes the crossing of that road seemed as wide as the Red Sea, or maybe as daunting as forty years in the Siani Desert.

For Dave, for Ryan, for Dez, my cousin, my brother, for the three year old girl ~ waiting. Is hard. Being between is shitty.

I mentioned Lubrano’s book LIMBO before -- where he talks about the experience of growing up in a blue collar home and living in white collar middle class society. He calls himself a “STRADDLER” someone with one foot in his blue collar heritage and the other in the occupation and social network of a white collar world.

And I know the idea of liminality isn’t a new concept for you blog readers – I write about it a bit on my front burner site.

Anthropologist Victor Turner refers to this position of between-ness – as a LIMINAL state. Limin simply means threshold. When you’re in a threshold you’re neither in the hallway nor in the room. No longer that, but not quite this either. Turner was intrigued by the possibilities of liminality. Limin offers a unique opportunity to its inhabitants to transform themselves and it often allows the group who bestows the new status (job, promotion, graduation, membership, completion) the opportunity to clarify the standards of the community.

Are you already seeing how the college experience is one that’s full of liminal experiences? At Malone (my front burner employer), demographic data suggests that many of our students, as first generation college graduates, will emerge from college as “straddlers” – Lubrano writes ambivalently about this experience for him – “the academy renders you incomprehensible to the very people who formed you.”

But its not just students. For all honest people, there are dimensions of our work and our families and our identity which we experience as being profoundly between. Between that which we’ve come from, and that which we work toward.

On the other hand, one of the difficult parts of life is that for everyone who feels between – there are several people around her or him who are finding the world to be their oyster. Josiah and Nathan won a debate tournament this weekend. Dave decided on a job. My friend Garry wrapped a movie last week. Cliff finished a really great documentary film. I got tenure. Lynn’s big inservice at the downtown school district went really well. The world feels underwritten by a big generous disco beat and flashing glorious rotating light bulbs.

It is fun for us to emerge into status, isn’t it? To find a job, to find meaning in our job, when our friendships feel good and secure, to finally reach safely the other side of twenty fifth street. the finish line of a long race, a promotion, a graduating child, a completed campaign. Crossing the Jordan. Leaving behind the wilderness of temptation and wandering and fasting. It’s natural to enter into the celebration of completion and accomplishment.

But its less natural to want to enter into the shit.

But Lent is the season of the church year when we choose to go into the shit.

I hope you’re not hung up on the word. I hope the severity of its ugliness just draws you into thinking about the exquisite complexities off its reality.

Shit is stinky and vulgar and mushy. Until relatively recently in history it was pervasive (for many people and places, it still is). You couldn’t separate yourself so easily and completely from the ugliness your body produces with a quick flick of a silver lever. Some of the tribes Turner studied in employed shit to mark the liminal beings. It’s disgusting but true – they would smear themselves with it as costume, marker and protection (from the evil spirits). Which reminds me that we shouldn’t forget the liminal nature of shit – the fertilizing capacity of our own waste…

In lent, we choose to enter this middle ground. This difficult, ugly betweeness.

We choose to lay aside status, step away from stability, reduce our comfort. We enter the wilderness, we don sackcloth. We do not sate our appetites.

When we enter in to lent…we recognize the fullness of our own weakness and our dependence upon God’s mercy and grace.

In lent…we remember the depths of darkness that lie within our own histories and lives. The virtue of hopefulness & anticipation, become vital in that darkness.

In lent…we experience solidarity with the under-resourced, with the liminal, as a celebration of faith and reconciliation.

And maybe most of all – we participate in the Great Divine Gesture – we give up our riches to participate in the suffering of the world. We choose to become less.

Like Jesus, we go – into the shit.

I know that there’s a rich diversity of faith tradition in the readership. Whether you’re giving something up for lent or not – can I invite you to participate in the spirit of lent?

When you realize you are losing some control. When you feel overwhelmed by the flow of tasks. When you recognize that the light at the end of the tunnel is far away and getting dimmer. Or when you miss desperately that thing you’ve chosen to abstain from.

Now. Here. In weakness, in humiliation, in darkness. Join in the Great Divine Gesture.