About six months ago PSR's Seminarians to End War group co-hosted with The Beatitudes Society a panel discussion on Sports, Religion & Social Justice. My friend Audrey DeCoursey organized the event which included recruiting speakers. She asked students within the GTU to represent: James Ryan Parker talked "sports & hermeneutics"; Mike Beckman spoke on "Green Bay Religion"; my friend Tai Amri spent his time discussing "sports and identity construction"; I concluded the panel by reflecting on "Women & Sports" (though it was less systematic than that). The speakers brought different styles of presentation and vastly different content. Tai Amri and I reflected from personal his/herstories, making connections between personal experience and systemic issues. James brought critical theory to his presentation and put forth a brilliant constructive proposal for reading sports through religion and reading religion through sports. Mike talked about local economic strategies in Green Bay that result in shared ownership of the Packers. Each presentation brought fascinating ideas and issues to the forefront. I will admit my presentation was the weakest by far; I came in ill-prepared and somewhat disinterested in the overall theme. I agreed to present because Audrey wanted a female voice on the panel and couldn't find anybody else. The evening proved worth my time though; I sure did learn a lot! Okay...so what?...you ask.
After the panel, I sat outside my apartment on Le Conte as one of my fellow panelists walked by with his girlfriend. I had changed clothes and put the hood of my sweatshirt over my head so he didn't recognize me. As he came walking down the hill he was mocking the use of narrative in the night's event. He said "maybe I should have just told stories about my experience playing T-ball when I was six." His girlfriend recognized me at the last minute and could tell I heard his belittling remarks. She leaned into his shoulder and whispered "wasn't that the girl from PSR that presented?" It was all so 7th grade but for some reason the experience stayed with me.
When people tell their stories, the safety-guards and niceties of "theory" fall away. Stories break-through bullshit abstractions. Stories reveal the potential for wickedness and grace lingering in each human heart. Stories challenge generalizations and foster ambivalence. Stories make plain the nuance and complex messiness of relationships and development. Stories challenge stereotypes. Stories illuminate, uniquely, the diversity of life, the differences between peoples, communities, continents, religions, etc. They also illuminate similarity and continuity. Stories keep it real. Stories shouldn't be the only way information gets exchanged. I too have, at times, gotten nauseated when narrative didn't come balanced with a healthy dose of book learning. And let me be clear: critical theory is of/from G-d. I do though find the resistance to personal narrative, especially by persons well-versed in academic theory, revealing when it comes to the role of education privilege in emotional distancing and silencing. Is it surprising that this white heterosexual male found the stories of an African American male and queer female below performance standards??
Many of you know I work in a hospital with Vets. I listen to stories all day, 5 days a week; stories about war, fear, death, injury, victory, camaraderie, patriotism. Some of these men open up and what comes out challenges every idea I've had about masculinity, mental-health, religion, combat, militarism, colonialism, faithfulness in marriage, strength, courage, ad infinitum. Their story telling invites me into a deeper awareness of reality. It challenges me to get beyond narrow understandings of war and peace, male and female, healing and wholeness, etc. Sometimes I think this country would drown in tears if our soldiers (current and past) told the truth about their lives. But we don't let them. We ask them to "man up," to "shape up or ship out". And it's not just vets who get silenced in this way. I think my GTU colleague's response that night exemplifies a general unease underlying the current power structure that if people outside the power center started talking, all things vulnerable might appear. He's right. We shame the revelation of truth through narrative. It's not tidy enough, not systematic enough, not controlled enough. It doesn't confirm the "naturalness" of white supremacy, the tyranny of masculinities; narrative aggravates logocentrism, deconstructs modernist "Truth", gives way to alternative world views and epistomologies. It's all so...liberating.
I come back to my GTU colleague in mind and heart quite often. I wonder what stories he listens to, what voices ring in his head: something tells me they rigorously echo the maxims of control so deeply rooted in white, masculinist, academic culture(s). If he has little space for the spoken struggles of others, it tells me he has little room for his own struggles. How sad. My prayer is that one day he makes room for stories about 6 year-old T-ball as enthusiastically as he theorizes strategies for cooperative economics.
No comments:
Post a Comment