This great essay almost makes one dream about a time when people will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That's kind of a catchy line. Someone should put it in a speech.
This individualism is what we hoped for when we seemed to be progressing toward color blindness, before that progress was derailed by identity politics. Multiracial marriage may get us back on track.
This is a wonderful post written by Nadia Bolz-Weber and it can be shared. Enjoy!
I am not an ice cream cone
some thoughts on identity, prayer and hope
NADIA BOLZ-WEBER
JUL 28
I was standing in my 5th grade classroom at US Grant elementary school in Colorado springs when I first remember having the thought, who am I?
We 10-year olds were meant to be making collages that could express who were are. At the top of each student’s board read the words “I Am…”. Our provisions for answering this existential question: glossy magazines, glue sticks and safety scissors, as if, armed with these things we could create a suitable image of our selfhood. The boy next to me was quickly filling his poster board with pictures of trucks and I thought, wait, he’s not a truck. He just likes trucks. At the time I had only a single picture on my own board… it was, unsurprisingly, from a Baskin Robbins ad. And then I thought, but am I ice cream? Am I a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone since that is what I like? (I puzzled about this for so long in fact, that I never finished my I AM board).
In some ways it feels like I’ve tried to fill in that collage every day since then, cutting out images from various subcultures and then confidently gluing them on my metaphorical I Am board only to look back on myself later and think how wrong I was, because now I am different. (I mean, not for nothing, but this dynamic is slightly more acute when you are someone who writes memoir. For instance, I was obsessed with Crossfit during a 3 ½ year period that happened to overlap with the time I was writing Accidental Saints, so even though I am now nearly 10 years older, 20 pounds heavier and 100 times happier than then, readers still assume I want to wake up each morning to burpees and snatches, which, trust me on this, I do not).
Other times in life it has felt like my identity is wrapped up in my political associations or professional position, or ideological leanings. Or I think of myself as a collection of my wounds or a collection of my accomplishments. Or I think of myself as whatever it is everyone else thinks of me as.
So, who are we really?
This is why I love meditating on this verse from 1st John:
Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.
1 John 3:2
Which is maybe just a more theologically eloquent form of that facile coffee mug saying: “be patient, God isn’t finished with me yet”.
We are, no matter what traps we’ve fallen into, no matter what addictions we have given our hearts and wallets over to, no matter how many times we have focused on accomplishing something big, done it and felt nearly as empty after as when we began, we are more than anything else: God’s own. AND no matter how old we are, what we will be is still to come, still unfolding, and still closer to the core.
This week my friend Tom, who grew up on the rez and follows the Lakota ways, said, when talking about prayer and spiritual practice, that, “prayer is the sloughing off of who we are not”. Isn’t that just invitingly simple? This, and not trying to manipulate God into getting what we want, is a form of prayer, or more accurately, a desired result of prayer that I can get behind.
Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.
I cling to this as a reliable form of hope.
I cling, not to some delusional idea that everything will be better, that life will get only easier and never harder, that bad things won’t happen – no, I cling to the hope that I am known in my true form by the God who knit me together in my mother’s womb, and next to that, every identity that I cut out pictures of and paste on my I Am board is ultimately meaningless.
I cling to the hope that the me whom God loves is the me that isn’t wearing makeup.
I cling to the hope that God’s work upon me leads to new thinking about others and the world and even about myself.
I cling to the hope that the me whom God loves is the me that isn’t wearing makeup.
Because this same hope is what allowed the hemorrhaging woman to reach for the hem of Jesus’ garment. She trusted that what she would be had not yet been revealed. She knew there was more for her. More than illness, more than impurity more than alienation.
Because this same hope is why Bartimaeus the blind man cried out when people told him to shut the hell up already. He knew that who he would be had not yet been revealed. He trusted that his voice was hearable to the one who created it.
Because this same hope is why the woman who was described as being a “sinner of the city” busted into a perfectly respectable dinner party and covered Jesus feet with scented oil and tears and then wiped his feet with her hair. Because she knew her designation was not her destiny.
Same with me. Same with you. We are more than our designations, more than our preferences, more that our ideologies, more than what our families say we are, more than what society says we are, and for sure we are more than the sum total of what we buy.
So as we all go through this week, may we remember to pray, (whatever that looks like) and know that, every layer of the onion that is sloughed off in the process, all the “what we are not” that is left behind, can be blessed for what it gave us and be left behind as that which is no longer needed.
Because obviously no board of compiled images can ever portray who we really are in our original beauty as God’s own. Not even, and this is hard to believe, but not even a picture of a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone.
If the past is any guide, Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Jews all became White People within my lifetime. So if preferential employment and admission practices atrophy, racial identity will go the same way.
"Jack and June are the result that social engineering — integration, inclusion and diversity — often fails to achieve." In my view it is the result that social engineering always fails to achieve -- because that is not the goal. The goal is, as the author states earlier in the piece (paraphrased), to identify race and then to use race to gain power over others.
When I was in college some 60 years ago, it seemed as if there were more mixed race marriages occurring across the country, and I thought at last we've reached the answer to the problem of racism and discrimination. However, 50 years later, following the election of a black president, I wonder what became of that trend. People are more than ever identified by their "tribe" and rewarded accordingly. For the sake of your children (and my great-grandchildren), I hope we can get back to it. I still believe it is the answer to the problem!
"The day will arrive when this multiracial racial generation reaches political consciousness and finds itself at odds with America’s divisive identity politics."
Excuse me. Are you aware that there was a Multiracial Movement during the 1990's? The goal was not only a Multiracial Census option (replaced by "Check all that apply.") but the legitimization of racially mixed ancestry in general. Do you think you are the first one to think about these issues?
Thank you for personalizing your essay, and thus making your readers think about the implications from your point of view. Your opening salvo that race identity is a fight for power has me thinking. You are absolutely correct. It reminded me of an experience I had with a Chinese (Taiwanese) student that was in my class in the late 90's. He had a Filipino last name because his parents had been born there. His moral dilemma, as he phrased it, was how to "identify" on his UC Berkeley application. If he checked the Filipino box, he, at that time, would have had a better chance for admission than had he checked Chinese.
Oh that we would have more of these types of individual.
When I was growing up in a mostly white suburb, asking "What are you?" was meant to prompt whatever we knew about where our ancestors came from. "I'm half Irish and half German," was a common response. My best friend was Jewish, and in high school, my best friend was Polish, and in my house, we were "Part Swedish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, English and Jewish."
I remember torturing myself prior to asking a man I was dating what he was. Finally I blurted the question. "Half Bolivian, half Swedish." Turns out that his father's side escaped Bolivia during the revolution. How INTERESTING!
You are absolutely correct that these days, the non-white identities are claimed as a means to power. It provides immunity from criticism (or otherwise, "racist!"), it provides a launching pad into the Vice Presidency, and -- at my workplace, suddenly a person I've known for 20 years is "brown," even though she looks white to me. At every opportunity, she tells people that she is "brown," while simultaneously weeping over racism that somehow passed her by.
By this generation, we are literally DIVERSE. Hence the gratuitousness of the "diversity is our strength" mantra. I'm in my early 60s and my experience as an American living in metropolitan areas is DIVERSE. It doesn't need to be forced or yapped about. It just IS.
Enough is enough. Kamala Harris is an American woman unqualified for POTUS.
This great essay almost makes one dream about a time when people will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That's kind of a catchy line. Someone should put it in a speech.
Good one!
Very powerful. Thank you Eli 🙏🏻
This individualism is what we hoped for when we seemed to be progressing toward color blindness, before that progress was derailed by identity politics. Multiracial marriage may get us back on track.
This is a wonderful post written by Nadia Bolz-Weber and it can be shared. Enjoy!
I am not an ice cream cone
some thoughts on identity, prayer and hope
NADIA BOLZ-WEBER
JUL 28
I was standing in my 5th grade classroom at US Grant elementary school in Colorado springs when I first remember having the thought, who am I?
We 10-year olds were meant to be making collages that could express who were are. At the top of each student’s board read the words “I Am…”. Our provisions for answering this existential question: glossy magazines, glue sticks and safety scissors, as if, armed with these things we could create a suitable image of our selfhood. The boy next to me was quickly filling his poster board with pictures of trucks and I thought, wait, he’s not a truck. He just likes trucks. At the time I had only a single picture on my own board… it was, unsurprisingly, from a Baskin Robbins ad. And then I thought, but am I ice cream? Am I a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone since that is what I like? (I puzzled about this for so long in fact, that I never finished my I AM board).
In some ways it feels like I’ve tried to fill in that collage every day since then, cutting out images from various subcultures and then confidently gluing them on my metaphorical I Am board only to look back on myself later and think how wrong I was, because now I am different. (I mean, not for nothing, but this dynamic is slightly more acute when you are someone who writes memoir. For instance, I was obsessed with Crossfit during a 3 ½ year period that happened to overlap with the time I was writing Accidental Saints, so even though I am now nearly 10 years older, 20 pounds heavier and 100 times happier than then, readers still assume I want to wake up each morning to burpees and snatches, which, trust me on this, I do not).
Other times in life it has felt like my identity is wrapped up in my political associations or professional position, or ideological leanings. Or I think of myself as a collection of my wounds or a collection of my accomplishments. Or I think of myself as whatever it is everyone else thinks of me as.
So, who are we really?
This is why I love meditating on this verse from 1st John:
Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.
1 John 3:2
Which is maybe just a more theologically eloquent form of that facile coffee mug saying: “be patient, God isn’t finished with me yet”.
We are, no matter what traps we’ve fallen into, no matter what addictions we have given our hearts and wallets over to, no matter how many times we have focused on accomplishing something big, done it and felt nearly as empty after as when we began, we are more than anything else: God’s own. AND no matter how old we are, what we will be is still to come, still unfolding, and still closer to the core.
This week my friend Tom, who grew up on the rez and follows the Lakota ways, said, when talking about prayer and spiritual practice, that, “prayer is the sloughing off of who we are not”. Isn’t that just invitingly simple? This, and not trying to manipulate God into getting what we want, is a form of prayer, or more accurately, a desired result of prayer that I can get behind.
Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.
I cling to this as a reliable form of hope.
I cling, not to some delusional idea that everything will be better, that life will get only easier and never harder, that bad things won’t happen – no, I cling to the hope that I am known in my true form by the God who knit me together in my mother’s womb, and next to that, every identity that I cut out pictures of and paste on my I Am board is ultimately meaningless.
I cling to the hope that the me whom God loves is the me that isn’t wearing makeup.
I cling to the hope that God’s work upon me leads to new thinking about others and the world and even about myself.
I cling to the hope that the me whom God loves is the me that isn’t wearing makeup.
Because this same hope is what allowed the hemorrhaging woman to reach for the hem of Jesus’ garment. She trusted that what she would be had not yet been revealed. She knew there was more for her. More than illness, more than impurity more than alienation.
Because this same hope is why Bartimaeus the blind man cried out when people told him to shut the hell up already. He knew that who he would be had not yet been revealed. He trusted that his voice was hearable to the one who created it.
Because this same hope is why the woman who was described as being a “sinner of the city” busted into a perfectly respectable dinner party and covered Jesus feet with scented oil and tears and then wiped his feet with her hair. Because she knew her designation was not her destiny.
Same with me. Same with you. We are more than our designations, more than our preferences, more that our ideologies, more than what our families say we are, more than what society says we are, and for sure we are more than the sum total of what we buy.
So as we all go through this week, may we remember to pray, (whatever that looks like) and know that, every layer of the onion that is sloughed off in the process, all the “what we are not” that is left behind, can be blessed for what it gave us and be left behind as that which is no longer needed.
Because obviously no board of compiled images can ever portray who we really are in our original beauty as God’s own. Not even, and this is hard to believe, but not even a picture of a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone.
In it with you.
Nadia
Eli, like Shelby, you are brilliant.
Hope so too. And always a welcome and understanding essay!!! Thank you!
Your story is beautiful!
And so are your children, you lucky man.
If the past is any guide, Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Jews all became White People within my lifetime. So if preferential employment and admission practices atrophy, racial identity will go the same way.
Beautiful piece.
"Jack and June are the result that social engineering — integration, inclusion and diversity — often fails to achieve." In my view it is the result that social engineering always fails to achieve -- because that is not the goal. The goal is, as the author states earlier in the piece (paraphrased), to identify race and then to use race to gain power over others.
Thank you.
When I was in college some 60 years ago, it seemed as if there were more mixed race marriages occurring across the country, and I thought at last we've reached the answer to the problem of racism and discrimination. However, 50 years later, following the election of a black president, I wonder what became of that trend. People are more than ever identified by their "tribe" and rewarded accordingly. For the sake of your children (and my great-grandchildren), I hope we can get back to it. I still believe it is the answer to the problem!
"The day will arrive when this multiracial racial generation reaches political consciousness and finds itself at odds with America’s divisive identity politics."
Excuse me. Are you aware that there was a Multiracial Movement during the 1990's? The goal was not only a Multiracial Census option (replaced by "Check all that apply.") but the legitimization of racially mixed ancestry in general. Do you think you are the first one to think about these issues?
Eli,
Thank you for personalizing your essay, and thus making your readers think about the implications from your point of view. Your opening salvo that race identity is a fight for power has me thinking. You are absolutely correct. It reminded me of an experience I had with a Chinese (Taiwanese) student that was in my class in the late 90's. He had a Filipino last name because his parents had been born there. His moral dilemma, as he phrased it, was how to "identify" on his UC Berkeley application. If he checked the Filipino box, he, at that time, would have had a better chance for admission than had he checked Chinese.
Oh that we would have more of these types of individual.
When I was growing up in a mostly white suburb, asking "What are you?" was meant to prompt whatever we knew about where our ancestors came from. "I'm half Irish and half German," was a common response. My best friend was Jewish, and in high school, my best friend was Polish, and in my house, we were "Part Swedish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, English and Jewish."
I remember torturing myself prior to asking a man I was dating what he was. Finally I blurted the question. "Half Bolivian, half Swedish." Turns out that his father's side escaped Bolivia during the revolution. How INTERESTING!
You are absolutely correct that these days, the non-white identities are claimed as a means to power. It provides immunity from criticism (or otherwise, "racist!"), it provides a launching pad into the Vice Presidency, and -- at my workplace, suddenly a person I've known for 20 years is "brown," even though she looks white to me. At every opportunity, she tells people that she is "brown," while simultaneously weeping over racism that somehow passed her by.
By this generation, we are literally DIVERSE. Hence the gratuitousness of the "diversity is our strength" mantra. I'm in my early 60s and my experience as an American living in metropolitan areas is DIVERSE. It doesn't need to be forced or yapped about. It just IS.
Enough is enough. Kamala Harris is an American woman unqualified for POTUS.