The Political Implications of Loving My Wife

Carol Elaine Trott, standing, heads up a gang of assorted Trott kids in a painting project.

It has been way too long since my last post. Slowly, I'm trying to pull myself back into blogging, so those of you with belief in prayer's efficacy may liberally bathe me in prayers for the discipline to get back to business here.

'Nuff said.

Carol Elaine Durkin Trott, my beloved, is today being routinely scanned for any recurrences of her thyroid cancer back in 2000. Her thyroid was removed then, but every so often she has to be checked to insure no thyroid tissue remains to spread cancer in her body. This is done by injecting Carol with radioactive iodine, as happened a few days ago. Iodine "sticks to" thyroid tissue, and the radioactivity of the iodine will hopefully kill off the thyroid tissue it finds. So in short the test is also a treatment, one of the reasons thyroid cancer has such a high cure rate compared with some other cancers.

The scan's results will come back in a week or so.

Over the past few days, Carol wasn't allowed to be closer than three feet from me. She had to clean up after herself wherever she went, which was limited to within our small apartment. I was put in the position of being her servant for anything she needed. (Ah, say my female readers, a male put into a role he probably doesn't inhabit all that much normally... and those readers would be more correct than I am at all comfortable admitting!) Carol disliked this situation more than I did, I suspect; she's active, a go-getter. Being stuck sitting on a couch wasn't much to her liking.

But as always happens when the spectre of Carol's past cancers -- no matter how ephemeral -- comes to the fore, I find myself feeling a breath of fear on my neck. Fear, but also gratefulness. Carol has survived not only thyroid cancer but also breast cancer, which I discovered while we were being close one evening. My own grandmother died of breast cancer, and it affects many women on my side of our family, some of whom have died as a result. So I fear it. Many others we've both known also died via cancer. Yet others we know struggle at present with cancer, including one of our JPUSA sisters and a Facebook friend of mine, Patsy Moore.

So... I love my wife. I am glad she's alive and tremble just a little even in these routine moments which remind me of our journey through cancer together. Because I am thinking of Carol, then, I offer the following.

* * *

How do I love my wife?

This is a question with at least two very different meanings. The first meaning one might find in the question has to do with my efficiency, my ability, my talent for loving her. Am I good at loving my wife the same way a basketball player is good (or not) at scoring? The question becomes one with pragmatic rather than philosophical / theological implications.

The second meaning touches on the first, but is more a question I ask myself. How do I do this love thing? What is loving someone about? Or, to be specific, what language of love can I speak to best meet Carol's own love-hunger rather than my own hunger disguised as how I *want* her to hunger? Tricky.

These aren't the questions I'll answer here, by the way. Instead, I want to examine how these questions are political questions.

Carol is a person as I am a person, yet she is not me. In my gut, I often believe that her needs aren't quite all that my needs are. In my dark places I think I deserve to have my needs met before hers are met. I also, too often, think that my thoughts are more intelligent, coherent, and (gulp!) true than her thoughts. In short, there is a little fascist in me.

My faith assaults that inner Nazi. "Do to others what you would have them do to you." "Love your enemies." (Oh, yes... sometimes Carol becomes my enemy because she will not be friends on my terms!) " Or, as Philippians 2:3,4 put it, "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others."

How does this sort of love radically redistribute my internal values regarding Carol? My material goods? My goals and purposes for what I do, how I do it, when I do it? Carol -- the Other -- looks at me for her own orientation in this world, and as she does this so do I look to her (we are mutuality/egalitarian folks, not hierarchalist/complementarian).

As I try to love her as described by Jesus and Jesus' Apostles, I find my own needs, wants, thoughts, and feelings intermingled with hers progressively. That is, the further we go on together the more difficult it becomes to tell where my own hungers / needs end and hers begin. I consider this the Grace of God.

I also consider it the basis for my politics. If God's Son, He Who Perfectly embodied Love in full humanity as well as full Godhood, demoted himself to become Servant of all... what does that say about a political framework majoring on the gathering of power, the usage of progressively more and more military might, the intentional ignoring of scientists' warnings to continue abusing our planet, and finally the "othering" of those we deem "evil" (a strange term to exclude ourselves from!)?

I love my wife. But I don't love her well at all times. I don't love my neighbor well at all times, either. But both personally and politically, I don't have permission not to try.

Politics and Living Communally: The "Consensus Thing"

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This was a response to friend and fellow JPUSA community member Chris Rice's blogging on "Consensus." Very slight edits, and it almost stands alone... so here it is.

I agree with you on your point re JPUSA’s refusal to issue “policy statements” on Iraq and many related issues. Yet we have "officially" spoken out on some issues. There has been consensus on homelessness and issues such as low-income housing connected to it, race (here and in South Africa during the 70s and 80s) and so many issues connected to it, abortion and "pro-life" issues (though in a larger sense than that term is often used). In the future, issues we haven't yet found a unified voice in I think we may one day find. Which illustrates some of the nuances of life, I suppose…

So. I do not wholly share your disdain for consensus, even while admitting you make very good points re its dangers. Let me go a bit more personal than communal here.

In our evangelical subculture, at least, I am so often faced with — forgive the term — clueless members of the political right that I in fact need a little “shelter time” with people who disagree with that bastardized version of Christianity. The Right has Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. I have Keith Olberman, whom I tape religiously and watch each night as an act of self-soothing.

But more importantly that choosing one’s consensus partners from the media, I also find it very comforting to find one’s consensus partners within my and your local body of believers here at JPUSA. (I would do likewise if in another fellowship.)

Let me explain. When I am talking with someone about a presidential race, and they bring up the middle name of Barack Obama as a reason to vote against him (no, this didn’t happen at JPUSA, thank God — just an example), that conversation is over. There is such an intellectual and spiritual disconnect that happens I no longer can have meaningful conversations with that person. Should I force the issue, pushing them on their illogic and even xenophobia? Sure I should. Maybe, in some cases, I would. Sometimes, I have! But at some point, after a few strange encounters where it is obvious they are feeling toward me the same state of disconnect I am feeling toward them, I almost without fail realize it is not a good idea to continue the conversation.

This leads to further problems, in that while I can stand with them in some things, I am unable to share the tremendous angst I feel over what the Christian Right has done to this country. I cannot share with them the fact — a plain fact it is to me — that George W. Bush won both his terms in office *only* because of the Christian Right. Once he was there, and especially once 9/11 legitimated his immoral, illogical, and utterly without foundation in reality assault on Iraq, along with the “Patriot Act” and other erosions of freedom here and abroad, it became apparent that evangelicalism and even Christianity itself would never be freed of the blood stains his arrogant, poisonous policies caused.

I need consensus in order that I don’t go mad. I need friends whom I can rant with, discuss with while being one at heart and mind, and finally even to weep and pray with. I cannot do that with people who don’t “get it.” Why cause both myself and them pain -- the pain of dissonance caused by two immovable beliefs coming into contact? Isn't loving my neighbor at that point also being quiet? So I am. I have that circle of friends who see as I see, who think similarly (though not identically) to me. And to them, my heart of hurt, anger, and even grave doubts and confusion can be opened.

And yet, I do also recognize the need not to become insular — which is just what the Christian Right seems to have done. I do need to hear from the other side… *sometimes*. But again, I also need to feel the comfort and shelter of those who do indeed think more as I do and see the world through lenses less colored by the Right’s tired rhetoric of “Family Values” or “Moral Agendas.” I have a family. I have morals. And I will always and forever repudiate what to me is the doing of dirt to families, morals, and most of all Jesus Christ by those involved in the Christian Right.

Sorry this is long… but one more thought. I grew up in a very relativist church theologically. And there I learned the danger of so-called “liberal” theology, which I as a non-believer mocked as vacuuous. When I met Christ, the real, historical Christ, I for a time blamed “liberalism” for this bad theology I’d grown up under. But today, I think liberalism gets a bad rap. It is the Right which exercises relativism in its most sinister forms… whether in dealing with the Middle East or in dealing with just what “pro-life” means. My investigative journalist days looking into Satanic Panic, Mike Warnke, Lauren Stratford and that whole gawdawful mess of lies which was upheld by Christians and led to many innocent people being jailed for crimes they did not commit... I was left little ability to keep my mouth shut when confronted with Christians doing the devil's work for him -- which is spreading lies and causing division and dissension, of course.

What point am I making in all this? God knows. (Siiiiiiggggghh.) I guess in the end what I would say is that — as an extreme for instance — President Bush may have met the same Jesus I met. But as for whether I could comfortably fellowship with President Bush, or feel that we had any deep resonance together, I don’t think we would or could.

Sometimes it comes down to positionally being in the same family (whether our biological family or the Family of God) vs. relationally being in the same family. Even that is too stark; there’s not an either/or exactly there. But I do think that true community in some very deep ways requires resonance on the deep things. We would say “Jesus” or “love” or “doctrine” might be these deep things… and we could convince ourselves that we agree on so much there. But then comes the existential reality, the fact that in a concrete world, faith is what faith does. In that light, I often feel closer to “leftie” non-christian acquaintances than I do to my Christian Right fellow believers.

I could say way more, but have said too much already.

tag: faith and politics, politics and the bible, community life, communal life, JPUSA, JPUSA politics, Christian Right, consensus

Seeking consensus: a painful meeting place for faith and politics

For those interested in the intentional community where I live, JPUSA (Jesus People USA), you may find Chris Rice's thoughts on "consensus" illuminating. In fact even if you are not interested in JPUSA, you may find them illuminating. I left a long comment of my own there, and as usual my thoughts relate only somewhat to the post Chris offered (I went a bit more existentialist than he did... just like real life). Did I mention Chris is one of my best friends, whom I see daily and work with?

tag: JPUSA, Jesus People politics, Jesus People USA, community life, Christian Right, politics and the bible, faith and politics