Category Archives: social work

Sep 03 2020
4 Comments
bible, learning to live, on, social work, the calendar, to my students, what they are teaching me

In Memory of TuTu, the Firecracker

Donald and TuTu at ComeUnity cafe

September 3, 2020
TuTu’s Funeral
Eulogy

While it was expected, the news of TuTu’s death was loud and sudden. The hours after however felt oddly silent. Like the audible nothingness following a tornado or an explosion. It sounded as though had I dropped something, it would echo infinitely when it hit the ground. I found myself walking circles around my house, then driving aimlessly around town, as if I couldn’t figure out where I was or how to get home.

TuTu was the last of my living grandparents to go into the life to come. To have lived most of my life, adult life even, with all of my grandparents is a rare gift not lost on me. On my mom’s side, my grandfather and namesake Donald (or Dabo) was a polymath and my grandmother Mama 2 a fashionista. On Dad’s side, my grandfather TaTa was the quintessential American working man. And then there was TuTu.

I have been trying to think of the best phrase or word to describe her, Ohna Jo Jordan—known though to most children and adults as TuTu for at least the last forty years—since she went home on hospice several weeks ago. I’ve noticed over the last few days that the word I landed on in the knowledge that this very moment was coming is being used regularly by many others to describe her.

TuTu, my last grandparent, was a firecracker. She was a short, red, singing, smiling, blonde firecracker.

She was a firecracker at church, the only person I’ve ever known to be a full-time, go-to Sunday School substitute teacher after she “retired” from actually leading Sunday School programs and all kinds of other groups. When she was caring for my granddad in his last days, she would faithfully drive up to First Baptist with her tithe check in hand every single Monday, marching in and dropping it off, talking to her multiple friends in the office, then studying the prayer board while taking notes before she left.

And know this: if she added you to her prayer list, it wasn’t an act of southern kindness or religious best practice. It was in fact a very real and personal call to arms for her. In a passing chat, I would tell her about a friend going through hard times or waiting on significant news, asking her to pray for them if she thought about it. A year later she would call me specifically for the purpose of getting an update on how that person or family was, and how she needed to pray for them moving forward.

She told a story of being around 5 or 6 with some kind of degenerative eye issue that was rendering her blind and had resulted in doctors telling her she would live her life without sight. One evening in the 1930s she decided that a certain prayer at a certain place on that certain night would bring her sight back even though the Great Depression offered little expendable income to get the gas needed for her scraping-by family to drive her out of town for that to happen. Sure enough, someone had a car and was willing to drive her and my great-grandmother a few hours to the church she insisted on going to for prayer that very night. She explained why she was there and was prayed for.

Her sight returned in that moment as she tells the story. She would go on to describe staring at the brilliance of the car’s dome light as my cousin Paul remembers after insisting it stay on the whole way home, and eye doctors continued to tell her throughout her adult life they couldn’t believe she could see with all the scarring in her eyes. They didn’t know she was a firecracker, though. She was determined and no doubt had an impact on the people who took up her challenge to pray for that certain thing at that certain church that certain evening.

It seems apparent that this experience, one among many, shaped her view of what was possible in prayer as well as what determination and speaking up for what you wanted could bring to your own life and the life of others. It and her telling of it seemed to make both God and imaginative possibility remarkably real.

In flipping through her contact book a few days ago, I noticed she’s added several of these friends I’d once asked her to pray for with their phone numbers and email addresses to its pages. No doubt she followed up with them in case my update answer wasn’t generous enough with the information she needed for her war. She often shared a whole friendship for years with these friends of mine, adopting them as her own grandchildren and keeping pictures of all of us framed on her walls or desk. Their Christmas cards lined her tv cabinet year-round.

Just like those of her grandkids.

Soon after she was married at age 16, my grandfather told her she should drop out of high school and take on her new role as a housewife. In 1947, the firecracker was not having it. Absolutely not. Likely with a red face yet gentle tone, she let him know that would not be the case. She finished high school and went on to take college courses all the way into her final decade of this life.

I suspect that decades of the marriage filled with love they shared following this early incident also shaped what my grandfather TaTa knew she could do when she decided she was worth it and determined, whatever she was told by others. Firecracker. Perhaps this is why, in his final days, my uncle Tony says my granddad asked that she, not a preacher or deacon, himself, or anyone else, pray for him. He was wise to her ways and her firepower.

She loved Lifeline Blood Center, where she worked many years as a secretary for two different Executive Directors, and she would often let me come to work with her. Having set up an enormous desk for me (I’ve learned just today tfrom my cousin Amy who is clearly more intelligent and shared this same experience on her own, that this was merely the conference room and conference table) with Lifeline posters of blood cell cartoon characters and markers, making me feel like I was saving the world by spending hours coloring these posters in this office of hers (that I believed she ran… and in some ways she likely did) where she always made clear magic was happening every day.

In this way, she clearly shaped how I began imagining the meaning of a “job” at an early age. And those with whom she worked there continued to check in on and share life with her for the rest of her life… long after her retirement and everyone’s moving on to other things. She had adopted them as her own children and grandchildren, so they were sure that they were the most talented and important people in the world.

She helped open the doors at the very beginning of ComeUnity Café in downtown Jackson several years ago, then in her 80s. She would greet each visitor at the front door and explain the novel concept of a real restaurant offering healthy, fresh, delicious meals to all regardless of one’s ability to pay, and where labor counted as dignified and respectable cash in exchange for delicious and gourmet food.

She did this in between volunteering nearly full-time for several years at Area Relief Ministries answering phones and doing data entry in Excel spreadsheets to ensure Room in the Inn, a program that facilitates hospitality and generosity between local churches and those who are homeless in the community over a hot meal and warm bed, could continue. The staff at both of these incredible organizations adopted TuTu and she adopted them. “My girls” she would often say about Andrea, Nichole, Nicolé, Lisa, Brandi, and Annie. She talked to my friends in León, Nicaragua and Cape Town, South Africa without my knowledge or presence on multiple occasions. All were adopted as grandchildren, so they were from then on treated as such.

Volunteering at ComeUnity Café and ARM was likely ‘retirement’ number five or six for her. Before this iteration, and after she happily worked fulltime as de facto home health for her husband in his last days during her late sixties and her seventies, she had already audited college courses on the New Testament with undergraduates, complaining only that she couldn’t take the test (after reading the textbook the first time before class ever started). She ultimately adopted all the students in those classes with her—and often the professors—as her own grandchildren. She participated in other Geriatric Social Work classes as a requested participant to share her thoughts on the course material. (“It doesn’t feel as sad or lonely as they say it should,” she once confided to me about the stages of development covered in the course). These students—and their professors—were also adopted as grandchildren. So she saw them all as the most important people around doing the most important work imaginable.

When I was teaching university classes, she managed somehow to adopt nearly every student I’ve ever had in class, following them on Facebook and sharing—I’ve only learned in this last month––regular and private words of encouragement, prayer, wisdom, and support for them as their lives developed. Later on as her health started to deteriorate, at her request, I would hold blown up, life-size pictures of her face next to mine at graduations for students to see as they walked by since she couldn’t be there.

She would record inspiring videos for them for me to share before finals week (where she also sent multiple, huge boxes of chocolate for them), but I did not know of her ongoing communication with them until just the last month or so.

In reality, this has ultimately resulted in a decade of students moving into careers of human service and social justice adopted as grandchildren to whom she was secretly generous and faithful and present for critical years. And I’ve only just found this out.

These newly added grandchildren of hers have been sending messages of grief and stories of hope and impact from the work she did in their lives over the span of years. I’m learning why she would refer to Facebook as “work” when saying she “had to get back to work” these last several years before standing at her laptop on the kitchen counter to talk to her Facebook friends.

It’s true that whatever roles she played over her 89 years, the largest and primary role I ever knew was that of grandmother. She would sign Valentine’s Day, Birthday, Christmas, St. Patrick’s, Easter, Boxing Day—any holiday she knew of—Hallmark cards mailed like clockwork with a crisp five-dollar bill in each signed, “I Love you, TuTu. Your GRANDmother!” with all the letters of ‘grand’ capitalized and often underlined. I keep them in an easy-access drawer in the kitchen.

She made sure I had no question of her love and support for me, that I was her GRANDson as she would also write, and she my GRANDmother. I’m learning only now that she made sure a host of other people knew this to be true also. I’m learning her impact on me was true of most of her grandchildren, born to her or adopted by her.

      

      

There’s not enough time for the stories I’d like to tell. Like so many good Southern Baptists, she would go along with the pretense that alcohol was evil when she was in public. So when I would sneak over to her house while she was at her weekly beauty parlor appointment, hide a frozen Daiquiri or Piña Colada in her freezer, then call later telling her to check the freezer and pray… She. Loved. It. While I don’t think she ever actually drank any of them, she loved that they were sneaky and funny and she loved being in on the joke. “Somebody has been bad in my freezer,” she would say randomly, months later, making a sneaky grin followed by an innocent, ignorant, questioning face. Then that burst of red-faced laughter.

Another time we drove up north to see my youngest cousin Casey play the phantom on stage, and later that evening at a hilarious (as usual) family dinner with my family and my uncle and his family, TuTu ordered a glass of white wine, drank two sips over the multiple hours we were there, and then sincerely asked the server for a to-go cup so she could take it back to her hotel room.

I could go on and on and on about her laughter, her singing, her insistence on growing in knowledge, moving aggressively toward thoughtful racial and social justice, comments on the meanness at the heart of the current president’s policies, actions, and comments, making fun of until she finally cleaned my dirty garage, threatening another of her grandsons if he was mean to her great-granddaughter…but there’s no time as we would never be able to leave here today.

So know this: TuTu was a firecracker.

And know this too: truth be told, today is very hard for me. I grew up sitting on our “family pew” at First Baptist Church in between these four grandparents every single week for over a decade. One by one they have moved on and up into the next life, leaving a sharp absence and deep shadow in their assigned seats on that pew. First, the American working man moved on, then the polymath, then the fashionista, and now this week, my TuTu. The firecracker.

In those silent moments after I received the news of her death from my dad earlier this week—the moments after the tornado, the explosion—the imposing and thick silence felt particularly lonely. It felt as though I was now sitting starkly alone on this once-full pew as the last of my incredible grandparents had gone to whatever is next, all leaving incredible legacies, rich histories, and unfillable shoes. It felt like I was alone on this obviously empty pew, and that if I were to drop something it would echo infinitely when it hit the ground.

But in the hours and days that have followed that loud silence, it wasn’t quiet for long and hasn’t been at all since then. As I’ve been forced in my aimless wandering to look around and listen, read emails and texts, receive flowers and letters and cards and chicken salad and coke zeros, the pew I felt so suddenly alone on has become quite overwhelmingly crowded. The whole section is now full and it continues to spill over.

There’s been a growing swell of loud chatter on and around this pew I’ve come to realize is actually filled with all of her children and grandchildren, those few dozen born to her and those hundreds adopted by her. She is still very much here, still very much inspiring, igniting, booming, and encouraging as the firecracker she has always been in the lives of people her own age all the way down to her year-old great-grandbabies and the loved GRANDchildren raising them. Her presence is so deeply missed, but it is also incredibly, deeply felt.

The firecracker is still here and among us.

Because of her life and the way she lived it with great prayer, gratitude, musicality, laughter, spark, and determination, in her honor and memory, may her children, her grandchildren, and her great-great-great-grandchildren live in peace and hope into the beloved community of the kingdom of heaven.

Cheers to you, TuTu.

djordan
11:00am
Ridgecrest Semetary

Donald and TuTu at ComeUnity cafe

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Aug 21 2018
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learning to live, on, social work, to my students, what students are teaching me, what they are teaching me Image

I cracked two paintbrushes tonight.

two paintbrushes against a tan tile floor, background includes wall with painters tape outline a freshly painted triam and molding.

I used to iron clothes.

In a profession that requires patience, expectancy, and hopefulness, many things are waited on for long amounts of time. We wait for things beyond our abilities to wait for them.

So the ability to iron clothes, vacuum floors, mow yards, install light fixtures––they become therapeutic.

At least they do for me.

To start and finish a task that allows me to back up from, look at, and see physical characteristics of its completeness… its finished-ness… it’s healing in a way. In a vocation that requires a long waiting for things unseen, and bearing a faith that pushes hoping for the ridiculous even farther, hope and wait, hoping and waiting, are the honored things.

But they are the things cursed under, and often not under at all, our breath.

+++

I cracked two paint brushes in half tonight.

In an effort to both gain satisfaction from crossing off a to-do list item from my list as well as to prevent my mind from ruminating on certain frustrating circumstances, I smothered my ears with these new headphones, cranked up Ludovico Einaudi, and got to work. Having repainted the walls of my kitchen a few months ago, I started carefully repainting the trim.

Crisp antique white.

Against the “water swirl” bluish-white of the kitchen, a Lowe’s knock-off from an $8 sample of a fancy shade from London’s Farrow & Ball, there’s not much contrast, but high gloss against flat paint should be quite striking.

Clean lines. Smart joints.

Between coats two and three, however, I cracked two plastic brushes in half. I chuckled at the first but slowed at the second breaking.

In an effort to calm my spirit and ease my mind, my anger and frustration and fear and anxiety managed to make their ways to my right hand and wrist where they released themselves in the crack of cheap paintbrush I was using to assuage my own anxieties.

And then in a second cheap paintbrush.

Finding clean lines and smart joints and perfect outcomes and positive news is a daunting task. The profession of social work leads one to find those things in places and things other people, students, or clients.

windowsill with blue painters tape separating light blue wall from antique white trim and moulding.

The search pushes itself into ironed shirts, swept floors, and painted molding.

The stress pushes itself into the cracked handles of two cheap paintbrushes and the profane-ridden mumbles of my midnight comments to two dogs and a poorly-informed and poorly-responding Alexa dot.

But the reality remains… when I’m ready for it as well as when I’m not. The world goes not well, but the kingdom comes. We do the things we know to do––successful or not––because we can’t not do them. We iron our shirts, paint our molding, break our brushes, and curse our innocent dogs.

But ultimately, we wait in hope.

The world goes not well, but the kingdom comes.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Jan 13 2018
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bible, learning to live, Series: Signs of the Kingdom, social work, to my students, what they are teaching me

not most hopeful

It’s been difficult to write.

I’ve not been hopeful.

And having experienced anything other than hopefulness, like wrestling with emotions and under the realities of frustration, anger, depression, sadness, isolation, grief, loss, and silence, there have been few honest words that could be defined as hopeful.

And to project a facade of hope is as offensive as the realities that attack hope itself.

So there has been and in many ways remains quite a season of silence. A season of either hopelessness or silent hopefulness.

Either way, a season of silence. On my end at least.

I’ve heard a great deal from the people in my world: from my history and my past and my world. They’ve been everything between furious and dismissive to piously, self-righteously, “prayerfully,” “worried” about me and my “soul.”

And yes, worried about my “eternity.”

When asked about the refugee, the immigrant, the oppressed, the poor, the person of color: they have no concern.

They’ve not been worried about the present-day life of the neighbor who doesn’t look like me (us), talk like me (us), explain religion like me (us), or… ultimately… the neighbor who is not white like me (us).

But I am a source of concern for these “brothers” and “sisters.”

It’s been difficult to write hopefully.

I wish I could wag a finger and wield a glare at myself for pushing beyond the truth to prove a point, but that luxury isn’t afforded anymore. When a president was elected to the highest office who began his campaign with racist, untrue, and hate-filled remarks about Mexicans, I was told to “chill out” about the response to this un-American position on diversity, human dignity, and individual initiative… I was told this only by those who identify as evangelicals.

When I spilled out concerns about a man who stated: “I hate the thought of black people counting my money” as well as “when you’re famous, you can do whatever you want; you can grab ’em by the pussy,” I was told to think about unborn babies. Told to think only about unborn babies. When I talked about babies born into poverty or what policies and practices actually reduce the occurrences of abortions, I was told it was “fake news” and the conversation had to move back to shopping or gossip.

When I struggled as Dr. Ben Carson was video/audio-taped saying that sometimes you have to put your faith and your Christian principles aside for the sake of politics, I was told I was being irreligious or simply lying.

When I said I could not stand or support or accept a man who celebrated sexual assault, proudly proclaimed his racism toward any human being created in the image of God whose skin wasn’t pasty white or bronze-tanned, or bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” I was told I could not possibly be a Christian.

To write hopefully, much less most hopefully, has felt impossible over the last many months.

And now in the last forty-eight hours, the President of the United States has suggested that we should only allow immigrants from predominantly-white, European countries to grace us with their presence in this country.

The President of these United States is suggesting that those who save us in emergency rooms, those who fight for us in the US military, those who rush into burning buildings and die rescuing our families, those who teach our children third grade math or senior-year Oncology and graduate school public health, and those who operate on our grandparents are from “huts” and “shithole countries.” And we don’t want any more of them here.

And then the decision to dig in to and spin these comments rather than confess the hateful, lymbic, ignorant shadows of them and beg for forgiveness. No need to beg for forgiveness; those who claim to follow the human being of table-turning and death-defying faith work hard at defending or excusing these realities. The more common response is a cloudy blend of eye-rolling, huffing, “waiting-for-proof” for the hundredth time, and pretending that obvious fact is a shadowy conspiracy.

The most common response is, “Well I don’t know about all that, I haven’t paid any attention, but I support him.”

These “shithole countries” are the same places I’ve been asked by Sunday School teachers and youth ministers to visit on ‘mission trips’ and to donate to for “missionary campaigns.” I grew up with photos of these––in the words of the President of the United States––I grew up with photos of these folks from “shithole countries” taped to my wall and fastened to my neighborhood lemonade stands as both an attempt at advocacy but more an attempt at guilt-driven capitalism (in the name of Jesus, of course).

The last I’ve heard from old Sunday School teachers and youth ministers was that the promoter of this hatefulness was the person their Jesus wanted and insisted that I vote for. Local and national evangelical, particularly southern baptist, Christian university professors and “theological” or “ethical” polymaths worked hard to find ways to excuse, explain, or defend standing with something and someone who more explicitly than almost ever before acted, spoke, and believed against most of the sermon-on-the-mount ways of Christ…sadly, or opportunistically…in the name of that very same Christ.

So yes, it’s been difficult to write hopefully, to write anything about hopefulness, much less to write with a sense of hopefulness above and beyond anything else. I cannot lie.

And of all the things I feel, I’m not most hopeful.

So what does it require to remain most hopeful when the loudest, self-proclaimed Christians blindly or apparently-blindly defend a sexual assaulter and racist xenophobe who says he is “Christian” and promises economic growth for the richest among us? What is there to do to hold out hope when old friends claim over late night beers around a fire that “blacks” should get out of the country or “everybody should get over it” when the highest office in the land spews racist and Christ-antithetical hatefulness toward anyone who can consider being “other” before heading back to an emotional worship service the next day?

Presidents of “Christian” universities waste no time in the courts, in the papers, or on social media outlining who is not accepted by the king of the heavenly kingdom for their loves or their politics, but have a hard, pressured, or “I don’t recall” time saying anything definitive about much less against the KKK, white supremacists, racism and classism, or those who teach, live into, and most dangerously love and therefore fear the blasphemy of a celebration of wealth, power, and accumulation rather than the hope of a doxology, generosity, and shared abundance.

I’ve wanted to, and have worked to find the ability to do it, but it’s continued to be difficult to write hopefully, much less hopefully more than heartbroken or harrowed.

Youth ministers have posted, spoken, and confirmed support for sexual assaulters and racist pedophiles.

Friends have let me know, via distance and disembodiment, that I can’t be a Christian.

Old family friends have pushed (privately and publicly) piously-decorated support for a human being who is, in all ways of both word and action, antithetical to the king and his coming kingdom. But my own religious ancestors-in-present of evangelicalism are the pale group who put him there, work to defend him, and spiritualize his hatefulness toward the least of these.

And they have all continued to push, or “prayerfully encourage” me to fall in line.
Or at least be calmer or quieter if I’m not in Orwellian-step with the rhetoric and propaganda.

Hopefulness has been a distant courtier; but hopefulness has been a persistent courtier.

And so to honor the best of my youth ministers, my Sunday School teachers, my old friends, I’m obligated to keep seeking Christ and his kingdom––the kingdom of the least of these and the last in line––I’m pushed, in honoring a memory of those relationships that are apparently no longer based on the same values, to believe what I was taught by those very folks at their best about a new way of living and being in the world.

The world does not go well, but the kingdom comes.

So for me, it’s for Christ and his kingdom. Hopeful or not, this is what I, at my best, am called to follow and working to lean into. Difficult or not, we bend the arc toward the beloved community.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

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Aug 20 2017
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art and photography, from the archives, learning to live, on, Quotes, social work, what they are teaching me

until we know ourselves

A young boy in KKK robes sees his reflection in a riot shield held by an African-American state trooper. Taken in Gainesville, Ga., in 1992, this photo by Todd Robertson has resurfaced through social media. via Poynter.org Quote by Krista Tippett in Becoming Wise (2016), "...the human condition, in all its mess and glory, remains the ground on which all of our ambitions flourish or crash. The adage that "he who does not know history is doomed to repeat it" doesn't go far enough. History always repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves.A young boy in KKK robes sees his reflection in a riot shield held by an African-American state trooper. Taken in Gainesville, Ga., in 1992, this photo by Todd Robertson via Poynter.org

“…the human condition, in all its mess and glory, remains the ground on which all of our ambitions flourish or crash. The adage that ‘he who does not know history is doomed to repeat it’ doesn’t go far enough. History always repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves.“

Krista Tippett, from Becoming Wise (2016). New York, NY: Penguin.

 

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Nov 16 2016
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bible, on, poems, Prayers, Quotes, Series: Signs of the Kingdom, social work, to my students

forget not the afflicted: on Psalm 10

psalm-10-forget-not-the-afflicted

psalm-10

on Psalm 10
New Revised Standard Version

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Jun 12 2016
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grief and trauma, learning to live, on, social work, to my students, what students are teaching me, what they are teaching me

an open letter to my students

i-also-remember-this

An Open Letter to My Students on the Eve of the Orlando Shooting.

June 12, 2016

Dear Students,

You likely woke up today as I did: late. You may or may not have turned on the news as is my morning wake-up custom, coffee in hand and multiple snoozes later. Within moments it became clear that there was yet another mass shooting while we were sleeping. This morning’s shooting at a gay night club in Orlando. Over 100 dead and injured.

I remember thinking ‘My soon-to-be godson is to be baptized today. My responsibilities seem yet-again larger now.’

I’m late to the service by a few minutes this morning; I know you’re not surprised. I stood too long at the television in my bedroom, clenching the wooden ledge on top of the dresser left in the room by my great, great-aunts who were the unusual of their era; they were highly educated, remarkably fashionable, and unusually independent women from a time where that was not allowed. No doubt they were recipients of both celebration and judgment. The dresser left in the bedroom of this house they used which I now sleep in has new fingernail marks as of this morning, left accidentally as I should have been dressing for a baptismal service but was instead being washed again in the blood of others.

“I also remember this, and wish I did not,” as Didion once said. I remember that I was not surprised.

Yet another killing, this time the largest mass shooting in our states’ history and the largest terrorist attack on US soil since my freshmen year of college when I sat in a lecture hall of Blanchard at Wheaton and watched the towers fall before my eyes.

I remember this morning thinking that I was surprised that morning as an 18-year-old hopeful, but that I am not surprised now as a 32-year-old hopeful. And it is the hopefulness of my better wiring which has been wanting to talk to all of you all day long today, even though you’ve managed to sneak away from me for the summer. I’ve managed to talk to you in one of our random, side conversations all day long in my head regardless. Then I decided that I hope you might hear it.

Many of you value your faith deeply; I do as well. Because of this, those who believe differently from you are owed your love and honor. The faith you claim has told you so; the faith leaders you are bothered by have challenged this. Follow your faith.

Many of you think
public policy,
issues of social policy and social welfare,
wealth and poverty,
emails to your governors and senators and representatives
(unanswered as most of them go…which you will remember),
childhood development and influence,
family structure and complexity,
group norms and roles,
mob mentalities and social capacities,
and research formulas and findings
aren’t connected in any real way
to your deep desire to help those who are in need.

The crimes of today should remind you that these things are all connected.

The language and now law signed in by Governor Bill Haslam in Tennessee that allow therapists to legally hate and discriminate by refusing counseling to those of the LGBTQ community affected by today’s mass shooting is an issue of policy, welfare, wealth and poverty, legislators who listen and those who ignore (and are paid to do so, which you will remember), legislation and its [silent] funders, biological development and its influences, structure, complexity, norms, roles, mob mentalities and social capacities, research and its findings…

This language and this legislation and these legislators and these voices are the authors of the men and women who will come into your offices and onto your caseloads wounded, orphans of those killed by this morning’s violence, orphans of those who had parents who lived lives of silence or submission to a norm, or stood silently in the back of your sanctuaries on mornings like these as you went to church and thought it was a regular Sunday morning.

I felt the need all day long today, now pushing the clock to make it honest, to let you know that I expect the world of you.

I am pretty sure I have told you this. You will be the best.

I expect a whole other kind of world from you. I expect you to wake up on days like today with the news of the moment and the heart of a saint that is both willing to break the rules and willing to break the norms to dig your fingernails into the wooden ledge on top of the dresser and be late for something planned and appropriate because you decided you had to stand up and speak out for something possibly inappropriate because it puts all of our humanity at risk.

So in class, when I hound you and harass you and rap at you and sing at you and yell at you and take points from you and even when I feed you in an effort to buy you, please know this: I do all these things so that some day, some Sunday morning when someone is waking up and committing to go to church and pledge gratefully to be a godfather for a young man or young woman who has not yet learned to distrust the world…

I do all these things so that you will remember that it will never be okay for us to not be surprised at this kind of hateful news that greeted us this morning.

I’m counting on you.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

 

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Mar 19 2016
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learning to live, social work, what students are teaching me, what they are teaching me

students and clients

mosthopeful.student-photo.3.19.16

Several times the last few weeks I’ve been struck with a kind of running-out-of-time panic while standing in front of students with pens in hands, phones in hands, laptops on desks, mostly paying attention and a few paying attention to look like they are paying attention.

I’m not sure what the sudden shock-dropping imperative is connected to my eye-welling realization that I have them for such a short time, and they will spend such a long time working beside people who have been told and treated like they are worthless more times than I can generously imagine. mosthopeful.quote.otis-moss.3.19.16

There are other similar but less such moments of sudden shock when I’m trying to catch up with emails and trying to catch up with emails and trying to figure out what it means to operate between clients and communities and friends and students who expect me to tell them how to do it. I don’t really know how to do it, to be fair.

But I also know that my friends hear me either talk like I know what I’m doing or like I know I must figure out what I’m doing. I know the people I work with day to day believe that I am anticipating something worthwhile and valuable to come from the work, or at least I know I don’t have any other options even if what I’m doing doesn’t matter.

It’s those moments, though, where I’m on the floor or in my chair with a client as I remember (between my fears of taxes and the email I forgot to answer) that there are human beings waiting for someone to acknowledge that they are strong as hell. It’s those same moments where I see my students, pens and phones and laptops in hand (part attention, part facebook, part studying, part snapchatting), with their whole lives in the field in front of them.

And on Saturday nights when I should be doing something ridiculous and irresponsible and hilarious, I find myself happily grading their papers and praying that somehow, between my ridiculousness and their distractedness, that they hear me say the human beings in front of them in the world need someone. They need someone to look at them, to see them,to see the story behind their eyes that says they are bigger and badder and bolder than everything about them would suggest. To look at them and say they are waiting for the one person who might tell them truth about what they are made of instead of the lie of what they think they are supposed to be.

And I want my students to know that the person their clients are waiting on are the people in my classroom behind their awkward desks, pen, phone, laptop and all. And I want my students to remind me as I stand in front of them and get punched in the emotional jugular with the out-of-nowhere reminder that no matter what I am thinking about or dealing with, when I show up for work I am looking at a group students who have the power to change the hateful, xenophobic, racist, sexist, imperialistic and hateful world I wake up in and operate within every morning.

They deserve it: client and student.

donald.png
djordan
Pine Tree

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Feb 21 2016
5 Comments
grief and trauma, learning to live, on, social work, what they are teaching me

we all will

ann-livingstone-funeral

I watched my own mother file in, first in line of the four women. The two directly behind her I know well and have a heavy respect for as game-changers, rule-writers, integrity-definers, and culture-forgers. The fourth I’ve never met in person and somehow now in this moment feel embarrassed because I know her name and legacy well. These four women together are the honorary pallbearers for Ann Livingstone today, a funeral that is unwelcome and too early for her lifetime and her influence in our own. They are each dressed in black, of course, as they filed in St. Luke’s historic building, but with a sharp and intentional splash of red as Ann had instructed.

I picked up flowers later that afternoon for the tables and counters and surfaces at Mom and Dad’s house later that night. I was looking for all white blooms, and then remembered the instruction for a punch of red. So all white was chosen, and a punch of red per Ann’s request. A southern dinner for family and friends, and in Ann’s case…students, was held at Mom and Dad’s house the evening of the funeral.

The door I came home late through nearly two decades ago as a teenager I was now opening to one-time students who had become Ann’s students either officially in a classroom or practically in the world because she instilled in them this deep longing to work excellently and brilliantly and faithfully and daringly in their respective fields, whether political science or peacemaking or religion or community development or justice or healthcare or human rights. They were arriving on our from porch from California and Canada to who knows where paying respects and mourning the reality that Ann was now, whether she wanted to or not, offering the ultimate assignment: taking on the work that had now been stolen from her far too soon.

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A few days ago, a good friend of mine posted online an image of our high school English Lit teacher Lisa Kee. She was too crazy to categorize, and too sincere to discount. She was diagnosed with cancer before our eyes as we watched from the desks in her classroom. She proceeded to teach us new ways of being honest with our own humanity, our own fears, our own faith, and our own responsibilities to read and write. She instilled in us the responsibility that by doing so we were shaping the world around us. She told us about the horror of waking up to baldness because of chemo, the value of fresh air and moon beams when you’re trapped in a sterile hospital room, and the fear of knowing that death is closer than it had been invited.

For me, and for many, she was the first person who ever made it clear that my voice was worth using and worth being heard, and therefore worth being trained and challenged because our shared humanity was at stake.

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When Mrs. Kee died, her funeral was the biggest of any class reunion I’ve ever been to. To invoke her name shapes the conversation that follows, and raises the bar of what we expect among each of us. Ann was never my professor, but I’m the recipient of those she taught, both officially as students who are now my friends and colleagues, and unofficially as friends, like my parents, who have been shaped and challenged and pushed to live wholeheartedly because of what she has taught them.

Death is bullshit.
Unwelcome.
Unnatural.
Untimely.
Unreasonable.
Unacceptable.

But shots of red, unexpected and insistent fugues, the filing in of these four pallbearers, and images of the past wrestle hard against it, fighting honorably against grief in making way to the surface insisting the work must continue. To live with honesty, teach with integrity and urgency, and die with dignity are a sharp lesson and challenge.

Justice waits for us to fight for it. Peace waits for us to make it. Goodness waits for us live into it.

And in the loss of our larger-than-life teachers who have now been stolen by the fight, we find ourselves pushing a little harder to pass on the imperative of living in ways that are worthy of the human spirit.

To Lisa Kee and to Ann Livingstone, I will do my best. And I will push my students with all I have to do their bests.

We all will.

djordan
Pine Tree

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Feb 18 2016
3 Comments
learning to live, Quotes, Series: Signs of the Kingdom, social work, what they are teaching me

human beings

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I would most definitely be lying if I said it happens every time. It most definitely does not happen every time. But when it’s not a season of dryness, it happens a lot. Today was one of those days. Tuesday was one of those days. Last Wednesday was one of those days.

There comes a split second in the middle of whatever I’m doing where I realize, somehow, that space

and time
and passion
and gut
and possibility
and awareness
and weight
and responsibility
and value
and importance crash in on one another in the middle of what would otherwise be a regular day or a regular moment at work, in work, while working.

Tuesday I stood in front of a group of students who I’ve slowly been getting to know, pointed partly to the screen behind me, projector light across half my face revealing an obvious typo in my otherwise regular presentation. My hands are in the air, my mind is on a person who once sat in my counseling office, and my words are coming out as an imperative I once made fun of a past professor for saying all the time.

“But you will be different. You will be better than everyone else. You will be the one person they come in contact with who looks at them and treats them like the actual human beings they are. These are human beings. You are working with humans. And you will be the best. You will be better than all of your coworkers. You will be excellent. They deserve it.”

Students are half-confused, half still waking up, half-engaged, and some hopefully teeming with the thought they could actually change the course of history in doing excellent work with human beings.

A few hours later, after grading quickly and pouring in caffeine, I’m standing in the same spot with a different group. I find myself reading through a poem about the people who have come before us and challenged everything we think we know about who deserves to be treated like a human being. And I almost lost my composure for a moment.

And then last Wednesday, looking people in the face and listening to them tell me about their perseverance and their hopefulness when everything tells them there’s no reason to keep fighting, I realize I’m in some kind of sacred space where humanity crashes into reality and brings clarity for a split second before exploding back into chaos and confusion once again.

And then today.

Listening to a man the same age and race and history as my grandfathers, were they still speaking wisdom over me in the flesh, saying with tears in his eyes and a knot in his throat,

“Brotherhood & sisterhood
among people of all kinds
is not so wild and crazy a dream
as the people who
profit from postponing it
would have you believe.” – B. Zellner

He was once in the KKK, as was his pastor father. But he joined the freedom riders and was pulled bleeding across the street with his black brothers and sisters, many of whom were killed.

And listening to him tell his story and say these words in front of me as I watch my students sit beside and around me, with lives of social work and beloved-community bringing and rule-breaking completely ahead of them

And then tonight

Driving home from sitting with a friend at another board meeting where numbers and spreadsheets and arguments and committee reports are ultimately about people getting the care and support and dignity they deserve because they are human beings.

It’s then that something clicks and says it’s worth being so tired and so ready for bed if it means that people are treated like the human beings they actually are. It must be. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s so elusive.

And it doesn’t happen every day, every time, every meeting.

But it happens just enough to remind me that there are no other actual options but to wade into these kinds of waters and fight these kinds of fights

And hope that the students and the clients and the colleagues and the men who marched all those years ago will keep doing the same…

on days when it happens

but mostly on days when it doesn’t

djordan
Pine Tree

 

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Oct 03 2015
3 Comments
grief and trauma, learning to live, on, social work

you will go to church tomorrow

you-will-go-to-church-tomorrow
About five years ago, I sat next to her the morning she was trying church again. I understand why she had quit trying altogether up until now…the threats and the punches from her husband, the need to stay in the marriage from her old church and pastor, the reality of how in hell to care for her children and protect herself at the same time. I couldn’t believe she showed up to begin with. And on that Sunday morning, the sermon itself was ultimately about how wives should keep doing the right thing even when their husbands’ don’t in hopes that their husbands will come around. God bless.

For people dealing with socks in the floor or toilet seats left up, perhaps this is not a problematic statement. But the reality that more than two thirds of christian women in violent relationships feel like it’s their duty to tolerate the violence1 makes it a problem. The difficulty with knowing that nine out of ten church-going, christian women interviewed felt that their husbands used their religion and doctrine to support their abuse2 makes it even messier.

I worked at the church at that time, so I found myself on Monday morning wringing my hands while deciding whether or not to mention this difficulty to the preacher. When walking in that morning, one of the staff who worked there at the time asked if I had been at church the day before and what I thought about it. After playing dumb and answering with questions, it became clear that she was a survivor of domestic violence and left the sermon the day before feeling guilty for leaving the marriage. Another conversation with yet another church staffer made it clear that there were at least two women in the building who had been in “christian” marriages in the past where domestic violence was present. They had both pushed courageously through their church’s tradition that you have to stay, wait it out, and keep doing the right thing in hopes that your male “head of the christian marriage” will come around. The two of them before 9:30 in the morning made it clear that I had to mention this issue to the preacher in hopes that in the future he would be willing to make the caveat to avoid these silent sufferers leaving church thinking God is mad at them for their bravery in avoiding assault.

His response when I scheduled a meeting with him about the issue?

“You can caveat a sermon to death.”

A few days later, an additional response.

“It’s not your place to talk to me like you’re my teacher.”

I managed to leave my employment at that church too many months later after these interactions. I’ve learned in the meantime, now serving my second year as chair for an incredible nonprofit working to empower women and men in abusive relationships to get the hell out, the reality that many churches are afraid to address head on the issues of domestic violence out of fear that people are looking for excuses for divorce.

Please catch your breath with me.

Many churches and their male pastors, in this area at least, are afraid to address head on the issues of domestic violence and sexual assault out of fear that women are looking for excuses for divorce. Or, for the incredibly important reason that we can “caveat a sermon to death.”

To my friend that Sunday morning sitting next to me, leg and arm muscles tightening as you received word from the pastor that you should stick it out, I’m so sorry. I wan you I left. I moved on. And I wish I had never invited you. To church staff who pushed through the same issues, I’m so sorry. I left. I want you to know I moved on. And so did you. To the women who are still in church and still in marriages and still wondering whether or not God honors marriage more than your own safety and dignity, I have good news. He is for you.

This past Sunday, I watched as the Executive Director of WRAP, the nonprofit working to empower survivors of sexual and domestic violence, climbed the steps to the microphone at my church during the middle of the service. I felt my watery eyes turn on as she spoke gently and directly about the number of women who show up for services at WRAP and say that they were afraid to tell their churches because they were afraid they wouldn’t be believed. I watched the priest walk over to this woman as she was trying to make her way off the platform as he said, “please don’t go yet. If I can, I’d like to pray for you and the people your organization works with.” I watched him put his arms around her and say, “Thank you God for women like Daryl, and for places like WRAP, and for the work they do as a part of your church to let people know your heart if for marriages and families of mutual respect. You are a God who wants peace in families, and safety for all in the family. We know, God, that you are never for the abuse of your children. So we say today that we stand with you against domestic violence for all reasons.  Empower your servants to work with great power to free those in danger, and know that you are with them.”

You will go to church tomorrow. Is your church willing to honor peace over abusive marriage? Ask. Find out. Make it an issue, and make sure that your church will speak up. The people affected by these issues won’t cause problems in your congregations; they will go home and take another fist to the face. The burden is ours. The insistence is His.

djordan
Pine Tree

If you or someone you know is experiencing or has experienced domestic or sexual violence, contact WRAP by visiting www.wraptn.org. 

1 Nash, S. T., Faulkner, C., & Abell, R. R. (2013). Abused conservative Christian wives: Treatment considerations for practitioners. Counseling and Values (58). October, pp. 205-220.
2. Nickmeyer, N., Levitt, H. & Horne, S. G. (2010). Putting on Sunday best: The silencing of battered women within Christian faith communities. Feminism and Psychology. (20)2. February, pp. 94-113.

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