Something Old, Nothing New, Something Borrowed...

For my New Year's Resolution this year I have resolved to buying nothing new.  I tried this a few years ago when I was in Guatemala and my volunteer group was reading Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity.  In the book, author Ronald Sider said something like "I bet no one reading this book needs to buy new clothes for a year" and I thought "wow. yeah. I guess I don't."  I resolved then (it was November 2009) not to buy any new clothes for the rest of that year and 2010.  I did not do this 100%.  I still bought a few used clothes while in Guatemala, especially a few more sweaters and some clothing that was unique to Guatemala.  I also bought a few new things when I moved to Nashville and started an office job--black dress pants and a few other clothes for work.  But I largely stuck to it, and when I didn't I thought really long about what to buy.

This year, I am resolving to buy nothing new, excluding basic toiletries (I'm defining basic as I go along...haven't quite decided yet if makeup is "basic").  I am also allowing myself to buy new books that I need for school if I can't find them used.  The point, really, besides being on a graduate school budget in New York City, is to be more conscious of what I buy and how I spend and think about money and posessions.  I know I also want to eat out less, drink less, etc. but one thing at a time. Not buying anything new for a year seems like a do-able but big enough undertaking for now.

So here are my "rules" (recognizing that for me, not being a perfectionist and not being bound by rules is a spiritual practice, so maybe I should call them "guidelines"):

• Don't buy anything new except for basic toiletries and medicine
• If you really need something find it used or, better yet, borrow it
• Be reasonable
• When buying gifts for other people, try to buy something made locally and by an individual or small-scale company

I realize that setting this goal for myself is a reflection of the immense wealth and privilege that I have.  I hope that this New Year's resolution will help me to be grateful for that wealth and privilege and also help me learn that it is not of ultimate importance, that this will help me relax my death grip on my wealth and privilege so that I may try to live from a place of generosity and gratitude and in a way that in some small way claims that the consumeristic, materialistic, capitalist way of life is not essential or ultimate.  The danger in these endeavors is always self-satisfaction and self-righteousness without real change.  I know that my small protest of a New Year's Resolution will change nothing large-scale and that it cannot be all I do.  But it is one thing I can do this year (among others) that I hope will help me adopt a posture that will better enable me to participate in larger protests and challenges to an unjust and unsustainable way of life.

Invisible Knapsacks

Some key words for conversations at Union (and I would guess many progressive seminaries and other similar circles):

• unpack ("Let's unpack that idea a little more")
• deconstruct ("we need to deconstruct the false binary of gender")
• Godself/God's (gender-neutral language please!)
• context ("What's your context?")
• privilege (white, male, hetero, US, etc)

My classmates and I sometimes laugh at ourselves and the way we throw around these terms, but language is important, and it often expresses ways of thinking and being that we often assume are universal.  We spent a lot of the first semester "deconstructing" some of those ways of thinking--recognizing the ways in which people of privilege (whether by race, gender, economic status, education level, sexual orientation, citizenship, etc.) assume that their experience or way of thinking is universal or "normal."  

One of the clearest analyses of this kind of examination of privilege (and the powers that accompany it) is an essay call the White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.  The author, Peggy McIntosh, is a white woman who uses her understanding and experience of sexism to begin to "unpack" her own white privilege.  Much of my first semester of seminary has been exposing me to different invisible knapsacks, which ones I wear, and the experiences of those knapsacks by people who do not wear them.  

I came into seminary with a decent understanding of the way sexism functions in our society and my own life.  I also, as a result of my years as a Young Adult Volunteer in Guatemala and Nashville, had some experience in understanding myself as a person of privilege by my US citizenship and how that plays some part in all of my relationships with people who are from different countries.  I even understood that non-US citizen women faced different challenges than non-US citizen men and than US-citizen women.  What I didn't understand was specifically how others may experience oppression and that their goals and ideas of what is liberative are often different than mine, even when the ultimate goal is to challenge oppression in various forms.  

I've listed below (in no particular order) some of the books I read this semester that best helped me understand others' experiences and perspectives and, thus, opened me to new ways of seeing God and of creating my own theology.  

• Sisters in the Wilderness by Delores Williams 
• A student of James Cone and former professor at Union, Williams talks about womanist theology, and her examination of Hagar changed the way I understand the Abraham story as well as giving me a glimpse into the experiences of African American women who are concerned not with liberation but with survival according to Williams.  She also gives a convincing critique of atonement theory, saying that anything that is forced suffering cannot be liberative or redemptive. (Womanism is a black women's movement that looks at power within the intersection of gender and race--it is often a direct response to feminism, which many women of color rightly accuse of being largely a white middle-class women's movement)
• Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology by Patrick Cheng  
• This is a very introductory-level book about queer theology but was possibly the book that most challenged my notions of God and Jesus.  It's a good starting point for queer theology.
• Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
• Continuing on the queer theology vein, this book is a collection of essays by black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde that examines lots of the -isms in our society and how they are inter-related
• The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone
• This is my theology professor's most recent book that is an easy-to-read (but not easy-to-stomach) that examines the ways in which the lynching tree where so many black (and a few white) Americans were killed is a modern-day cross.  Dr. Cone is the founder of black liberation theology in the US and describes his theology as being influenced by both Dr. King and Malcom X

If any of you do read some of these books I'd love to hear your thoughts about these books and/or what you might add to this list.  Happy Reading!