Keynote Presentation by Lelanda
Lee
Province V ECW Annual
Conference, April 28-30, 2017, Lansing, MI
Good
evening. Let us begin with a simple prayer this evening: “Here’s
to Good Women. May we raise them. May we know them. May we be them. Amen.”
I
am delighted to be with all of you this weekend to share conversations that explore
the meaning of being my sister’s keeper, through prayer, storytelling,
reflection, and conversational exercises. Sharing and conversations
mean that we all will be participating throughout the conference, even
though I have the privilege and the responsibility of providing some ideas and
direction in how we approach our conversations.
Courage and Siblings
I’ve
chosen to focus on the role of courage in being my sister’s keeper, because my own
reflections over the past couple of years have led me to a keener understanding
of courage and its deeper meanings. Over a year ago, as 2015 ended and 2016
began, I decided, after a great deal of thought and emotion, to step off the
merry-go-round of all the wonderful volunteer activities that I had been
blessed to undertake for a year of sabbatical. I didn’t know how then, and I still don’t know how now, to do anything in
half-measures. I did recognize the “need to be present in actuality and not
just in theory.” I did recognize the “need to practice presence versus merely
to embrace the ethos of presence.”
I
am the eldest child and sister of two brothers. I do not have any biological
sisters. Yet, I believe in sisterhood, and I believe that sisterhood is
powerful. In my life, girls and women have been present to befriend me, to
teach me, to nurture me, to support me, to comfort me, to strengthen me, and to
love me. I cannot imagine being successful, and I cannot imagine being happy,
without sisterhood. I believe that sisterhood is lifesaving for women, that it
is important that women have other women in their lives.
In
my life, I am still connected with women I met through women’s liberation
groups. My longest-term friendships with women date back to 1970 in
Plattsburgh, New York, as a young newlywed mother; to 1971 in Berkeley, after
driving cross-country with a girlfriend and my toddler son and her two young
children; and to 1975 in Honolulu, where I started over after a divorce. Those
women are still the women I turn to for important conversations and mutual
support through our many sisters’ marriages, children, divorces, and new loves,
and through the achievement of graduate degrees, job promotions, and business
start-ups and shut-downs. In Hawaii, I learned a valuable term that describes
the non-blood relatives that we meet and choose as part of our families of
choice. These women are my hanai sisters,
the sisters that I met and chose along the way, who have joined my ever-growing
and ever mutually supportive hanai family.
In
the Bible, our earliest story of siblings is of brotherhood, of Cain and Abel.
In Genesis 4, we learn that Cain had slain his brother Abel, and the Lord said
to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" and Cain replied, "I do
not know; am I my brother's keeper?" Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s
keeper?” is a defiant answer to the Lord’s straightforward question. It is a
self-justifying and selfish answer. “Me?
Why are you asking me? How do I know where he is?”
In
Luke’s Gospel, chapter 10, we meet the Bible’s most famous sisters, Martha and
Mary. Mary has chosen to sit at Jesus’ feet to listen to him teach, while
Martha demands to know from Jesus why he doesn’t admonish Mary to get up and
help with the hospitality chores. “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all
the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” Martha is frustrated. Her words to Jesus are whiny and
accusatory towards both Mary and Jesus and reflect self-centeredness and
self-pity. “Why me, Lord? What about her?”
Both
these stories of brothers and sisters speak to the difficulties in our
relationships with our brothers and sisters. Our sibling relationships are
filled with issues of equity—fairness in the division of work and its rewards,
fairness in inheritance and the measure of filial duty. Our sibling
relationships reflect how our human characteristic of self-centeredness
pervades our perception of events and how we speak about those events. We want
it both ways – “Why me?” and “Why not me?”
Our
relationship with Jesus also has the dimension of siblinghood, although we tend
to think of our relationship with Jesus most frequently along the lines of the
words recited in our creeds: Jesus as “Lord, Son of God, Savior, and Judge” and
humankind as “subject, follower, and sinner.” Yet, if we are the Children of God
and Jesus is the Son of God, then surely, we are also sisters and
brothers to Jesus and Jesus is also our brother.
Identity
Let
us focus in on the idea of “Identity.” Sisterhood necessarily requires us to
look at and to answer questions about our identities.
Who
am I? I am not what I did as my career. I have relationships that make me a
wife and a mother; yet, I am not my role as mother or wife. I believe that all
people have inherent dignity and equal rights to life and liberty, but I am not
my beliefs, although my beliefs describe parts of me and how I choose to live
my life.
The
fact is that we all have multiple identities, depending on the contexts in
which we describe them and think about them. Each time we say, “I am . . . ,”
and complete that thought, we are naming an aspect of who we are, based on the
context in which we make that statement. Over time and with additional
experience and introspection, how we complete the thought, “I am . . . ,”
changes, because we change.
Intersectionality
is a concept used to discuss critical theories of race, sex, and class, and
institutionalized systems that center oppressively on minority groups of people
based on race, sex, and class. The idea behind intersectionality is that it’s
really not possible to talk about, for example, sexism, without also talking
about how classism and racism
interact with sexism. You can’t isolate the effects of different kinds of
oppression. For example: a foreign-born, single mother with a good resume can’t
get a full-time job in a major city. Is it because she is foreign born and
maybe speaks with an accent, or because she is a woman? Or is it because she is
dressed in thrift-shop clothing, or all of the above, that she can’t get an
interview?
Identity
politics is a term we hear widely these days, primarily as a critical comment
in the current political environment of our country. Identity politics refers
to how some people have the appearance of coming from a particular place that
is centered on their identification with a certain group of people representing
a race, or gender, or class, or, in other words, a particular “identity.” Even
people who claim that they aren’t part of identity politics actually are
part of identity politics. It’s just that we attribute the term, “identity
politics,” as a pejorative only to those whose identities fall into the
minority or marginalized groups, while those whose identities fall into the
majority or dominant groups are considered the norm and therefore, not part of
“identity politics.”
The
point I want to make is that we must look critically at how we think about who
our sisters are, and how we came to our particular way of thinking about
sisterhood. Chances are, as Christians, you have spent time thinking about who
your neighbor is, and you probably have a familiar and straightforward way to
state that to anyone who asks, “Who is your neighbor?” You’ve probably been
taught to associate the parable of “The Good Samaritan” with your notions of
being a good neighbor. Good neighbors help their neighbors, even if their
neighbors are strangers and different from how they identify themselves.
I
like the insight of 30-year old Alynda Lee Segarra, the frontwoman of the
modern folk band, Hurray for Riff Raff, who says, “We are all living in the
middle of a lot of identities.” It is important that we also look critically at
how we think about our own identities, and how we came to name them and own
them. I’d like at this time to share a story of finding my then new identity at
age 60, almost ten years ago, and then I would like to invite you to consider
your own stories of recognizing and claiming new understandings of identity for
yourselves, as we proceed through this weekend together, in this community of
ECW sisters.
Bishop Nedi Rivera said to me in 2008 as we traveled on a bus to Sunday
Mass in the high country of Taiwan, “Lelanda, you’re an elder.” Those words
have stuck with me, and I’ve pondered them often. Those words resonate with the
transition I had been experiencing for the previous nine years that my mother
had lived with us and since my first grandchild was born.
In
the prior decade I had transitioned to being the matriarch of my generation,
the one who is acknowledged as the keeper of the family’s metaphorical gates.
The defining moment occurred a decade earlier when I learned that my mother and
the women of her generation were categorizing my widowed sister-in-law as not
an equal member of the Lee family. Her husband, my youngest brother, had died
some years earlier.
The
triggering event was a traditional Chinese one-year birthday party that my
husband and I hosted in California for the entire family to meet and celebrate
our grandson. While the live-in paramours of my cousins were welcomed by my
mother’s generation, the same courtesy was not extended to my sister-in-law,
because she was a daughter-in-law and not a daughter. In a traditional Chinese
family, those distinctions matter in word and in deed. There are words to name
each of the in-law relationships including distinguishing “on the mother’s side
or the father’s side” and “married to the child of such-and-such birth order.”
That
was the first time I spoke with the authority of a newly minted matriarch,
standing up for justice and equal treatment for the mother of my mother’s
youngest grandson and of my only nephew, for my sister-in-law who was and is
also my sister in the sisterhood of all women. There was push-back from the
grandmothers, who objected vociferously with rationales that didn’t make any
sense to me or to my remaining brother, Jon, to whom I turned for advice and
support. I finally said to the grandmothers that I would be very sad if they
chose not to attend the one-year birthday party, because my sister-in-law and
her partner would be attending.
The
confirmation of my new matriarch role came when everyone in the family showed
up for the party. The passing of the baton from one generation to the next
happens not with trumpets blaring and tympanis clashing, but with the quiet
acquiescence of old ladies who murmur approval upon tasting the family’s
favorite dish cooked by a daughter from her own new recipe. I had both grown
into and asserted my claim to the new identity of generational matriarch.
[ Insert exercise: Please
reflect quietly for a couple of minutes on an awareness of a new identity that
you recognized and claimed for yourself. Then group yourself with two other
people, and describe your reflection to your partners. ]
Imago Dei
In
our Christian tradition, we talk about Imago
Dei, of how we as humans are created in our Maker’s image, in God’s image.
Sometimes we express that as there being a divine spark within us. Namaste from the Hindu tradition is a
greeting that means “the divine spark within me greets the divine spark within
you.”
I
would like to suggest that we all need to go beyond Namaste, beyond merely an initial recognition of the divine spark
within each other, beyond merely greeting each other in a friendly manner. Empathy is a form of connection in
which we try to understand and share what another person is feeling. The roots
of the word “empathy” are in the Greek en, which means “in,” and the Greek pathos,
which means “suffering.” When we practice empathy, we essentially allow
ourselves to fall into the suffering of another person. That doesn’t sound very
safe, does it? To voluntarily allow our selves to fall into the suffering of
someone else?
Yet,
most of us would voluntarily fall into the suffering of our own family
members, and even of our hanai family
members. We would pray with, and sit with, and bring meals to, and visit a
family member who is hospitalized or who is declining physically and mentally
from a disease like cancer or kidney failure or Alzheimer’s or dementia. We
would probably also voluntarily fall into the suffering of folks we know
or even don’t know well from our workplaces and from our churches, because we
acknowledge our identification with those communities. Our workplaces and our
churches form part of our larger identities of who we are and how we want
others to see us.
Now,
let me ask, how would we behave differently if we practiced connection with our
sisters who are not so well known to us personally and who are not part of the
communities with which we share an identity—if we practiced connection by
showing the kind of empathy that means sharing in our not-so-close sisters’
suffering? How would the world be different if the focus for being
interconnected were based on the empathy of sharing in each other’s suffering,
as compared to sharing in each other’s resources—in each other’s material goods
and in each other’s connections to other people?
I
suspect that we all regularly participate in charitable giving of money and
material things and that we all also give our time in service to helping
others. That is, indeed, a sharing of resources. I once heard a story of a
seminarian who said that he and his family were motivated to change the way
that they eat in order to free up more of his family’s income to give to a
stewardship campaign. That is sacrificial giving. That goes beyond giving from
that which we can “afford” to give—that which we can spare to give.
I
am wondering: could it be that the sharing of resources would naturally follow
as a consequence of sharing in each other’s suffering, of showing a profound
level of empathy to our sisters? Perhaps it is our fallenness—our sinfulness—that
interferes with the sharing of resources as the natural consequence of our
empathetical sharing of our sister’s and our neighbor’s suffering.
Perhaps
we are too passive, taking too much for granted and waiting for invitations and
waiting to be solicited to participate in another’s suffering. Think about the
way that we talk about the cross—a central image to our Christian identity. We
tend to talk about sitting at the foot of the cross, looking up at Christ upon
the cross and weeping for our brother’s suffering and also weeping tears of
thanksgiving for his bearing of our sins. Speaking for myself, I prefer a more
active theology of the cross that calls for us to be pulled into the center,
that causes us to fall into the intersection of the cross, that brings us into
contact with Jesus’ suffering and with the suffering of our sisters and
brothers everywhere.
Part
of the divine spark, the Imago Dei,
within us is a generous spirit, which is a reflection of God’s Grace and the
fruit of Jesus’ suffering on the cross. That generous spirit gets triggered in
two ways: (1) when we feel grateful—when we respond to the joys given to us in
our lives, and (2) when we feel empathy—when we feel the suffering of others.
We
are practiced at noticing the gifts in our lives. We call it counting our
blessings. Admittedly, we often have to be reminded to count our blessings, and
we sometimes have to be shown how to see the gifts in the midst of
disappointment and loss. But we are less accomplished at noticing the suffering
of others, other than as a fleeting superficial or intellectual awareness—like
when we pass by a homeless person or when we read a news story about war or
natural disaster or when we look at the faces of today’s Syrian refugees. That
makes sense, because we don’t like to feel badly. It doesn’t feel good. It
hurts. We don’t like pain. And in some cases, we suffer from compassion
fatigue, feeling overwhelmed by all the suffering in the world, in our world.
My contention—my central thesis for the weekend—is that
courage—personal courage—is required to engage in the practice of
empathy that shares in the suffering of others. Empathy triggers the generous
spirit, the Imago Dei, that leans in
the direction of a generous sharing of all kinds of resources. That is the
essence of being my sister’s keeper. Courage
is the actualization of Love, and it follows then, as is often said,
“Justice is the public face of Love.” We will explore this in our
workshops tomorrow.
Fear is the mindkiller
A
major barrier to our capacity to actualize our Love is fear. We can be frozen
by fear that takes many forms, from the fear of not having enough leftover for
ourselves that makes us hold back on our giving, to the fear of being
physically harmed if we intervened in helping someone being assaulted, to the
fear of loss of our reputations if we helped someone that others view as
unworthy of being helped.
“Fear
is the mindkiller,” is the
phrase from the 1965 science fiction book Dune
by Frank Herbert. In that story, freedom-fighting desert dwellers use the
phrase “Fear is the mindkiller” to remind themselves to reach for their
personal courage in the face of huge odds against their oppressors from the
federation of planets. “Fear is the mindkiller” are the
words that my millennial daughter has tattooed across her belly to remind her
that she has personal courage as a young woman who identifies as biracial and
bisexual and that she has personal courage when fear is the enemy within that
she must overcome to engage the world to achieve her goals.
The
noun “courage” derives from the French word “coeur,” which means heart. A way to think about courage is that
courage requires confidence to overcome fear in order to act, and that
encouragement strengthens a person’s courage. Courage is different from being
brave. “Brave” is an adjective, derived from the Italian “bravo,” and is about the split second decision that makes a person
do something wild or bold in the face of real danger. Bravery does not happen
in safe places. Courage is a deeper, more sustained attitude or posture, that
emanates from a person’s heart, from the divine spark within, that is connected
to our Maker and that seeks to connect to the divine spark within others. Encouragement
is the gift that we as sisters can give to our sisters, when they need extra
confidence to overcome fear in order to act. Encouragement is one of the ways
in which we participate in our sisters’ courage.
[ Insert exercise: “Adding to the silence when you speak.” Take a minute or two to reflect on how you
have experienced encouragement as either a giver of encouragement or a
recipient of encouragement. Please group yourself again with a couple of
others, and share that experience with them and what that felt like to you and
what you learned from it. ]
Let
me repeat: Encouragement is the gift that we as sisters give to our sisters,
when they need extra confidence to overcome fear in order to act. Encouragement
is one of the ways in which we participate in our sisters’ courage.
Another
way to look at, or to talk about, personal courage is to talk about God’s Grace
and Grace’s presence in our relationships and in our lives. I’ve already
pointed out that I think of the generous spirit component of Imago Dei as a reflection of God’s
Grace. I would also argue that personal courage could be described as an
expression of our awareness—of our being in touch with—God’s Grace present in
our lives. Personal courage is an expression of how we are strengthened by
God’s Grace present in our lives and how we are compelled by our baptismal call
to share that Grace with others, to share it forward.
In
my poem titled “Courage is,” I end with “Courage is the secret self reaching
for its family.” Brené Brown wrote in her book Daring
Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love,
Parent, and Lead: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage,
empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and
authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more
meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
My
perspective is that courage is an orientation of the spirit that points towards
hope, that points towards a possible future for humanity, for community, for
family, for sisterhood. “Courageous Connection,” that is, courage in connection
with community, with sisterhood, is the courage to name a thing, to dispute a
thing, and to speak truth not just to power, but truth to well-meaning people
who don’t see the world through the lenses of the “other”—of our sisters.
Courageous Connection is the secret self living into its authenticity to speak
from an open, vulnerable place and risk being rejected.
“Courage is”
In
the 1950s, when I was a child younger than five years old, speaking only
Cantonese in a Chinatown tenement in Detroit, I asked my mother about what
happened when the Communists took over in mainland China. My mother married at
age 19 to my father, who had been raised in Chinatown New York and taken to
China with his older brother by my grandmother to find brides. After my parents
married and came to New York and then Detroit, the Communists took over in
China and confiscated my mother’s family's property and sources of livelihood,
the farms and shops that supported a family clan the size of a small village.
The Communists forced the men to flee the country first, beat her no. 2 sister to
death, and imprisoned her mother with an infant son in arms. My mother's
comment to me was, "At least now,
everyone is eating." In the face of an enemy’s takeover of her native
country and the refugee status forced on her family, my mother had responded, “At least now, everyone is eating.” That
is my emotional motto and touchstone. That is my earliest acquaintance with
personal courage—the secret self, that spark of divinity within each of us, reaching for
its family—even as the swirling human family of my mother’s parents and
siblings and her uncles and aunts and cousins were angry and hurt, suffering
and broken, from their forced refugee status.
My
mother is a very courageous woman. She lived through decades when a letter from
her family back in Hong Kong would cause her to weep and when no letters
arriving would cause her to weep. Brené Brown says in her book, “What we know matters but who we are matters more.” My mother has
always known that she is the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter and the
mother of an eldest daughter and that she is connected in ways that hearken to
a soul-deep sisterhood as a beloved daughter of a Creator who is the definition
of Love and of Courageous Connection.
My
dear siblings, we are called to dig deep to find our store of personal courage,
to let our secret selves that hold the divine spark within us be brave and
reach out to our human family, for Jesus taught, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who
are members of my family, you did it to me.’
I’d
like to close with the poem I wrote earlier this year, titled “Courage is.” It
is available as a handout at the close of this evening.
Courage is
Courage is an invisible
thread
that twists through
my hidden soul
my secret self
Mostly
courage lies buried
in daily life’s debris
where acquiescence
smoothes the way
The daily decisions
choosing
this bread
or that apple
in the end
make no difference
in my life
to my dreams
Yet
Earth’s destiny
asserts
its disagreement
uninvited
unacknowledged
Who am I
to argue with Nature
I am a member
of a tribe
too large to contain
too diverse to control
too selfish to share
I pray hope
when
all else fails
Courage is a bitter brew
more frightening
than addictive
I am a member
of a tribe
that judges the price
too large
when I am the one
chosen to pay
This tribe
has devised
veils
creating heroes
everywhere
everyday
to mask
the flight of courage
from the everyday
everywhere
If it’s posted
printed
published
If it’s spoken
sung
and shared
Surely that is
proof
positive
and true
that courage
still lives on
Courage is
communion
most sacred
When open
to all
naked of
rubrics
most powerful
Courage is
the communion
that lifts
the hidden thread
in the body politic
to be warp
and woof
of a people
of a community
of a nation
of the world
Courage is
the secret self
reaching for
its family
