What would it mean to be truly known?
Jen and I have not watched the well known show Yellowstone. We have recently watched a few episodes of, what I understand to be, a prequel. It is called 1923 and it stars Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford.
We’re only a few episodes in, so please don’t give it away. Actually, I think we can already see what happens - people are terrible, they are violent and life is brutal, and we have to choose who is good and who is bad. That is, whose violence is justified, whose brutality do we cheer on?
1923 was, if you do the math, 100 years ago.
So, when were the good old days? Were they before 1923, or after? How long did they last? Judging by the show, there were no good old days in Montana 100 years ago If they existed, they were few and far between.
On the show there are warring factions and killer animals. Threats exist everywhere, all the time. The violence that is hardest to see, though, is of a particular sort. It has to do with erasing identity. The show depicts a residential school in which Catholic nuns and presiding priests seek to educate children who have been taken from their Indigenous families. One girl, in particular, is singled out for violent punishment. Eventually she responds with violence of her own and the cycle escalates. There are many historical examples, across faith traditions, of seeking to deny or destroy the identity of people.
This kind of tendency comes from a particular theological understanding that says people are basically terrible and helping them to become otherwise means getting them to accept, by thought and behaviour, religious and social conformity. People identified as leaders within these systems, then, often take up the task of shaping, even by means of violence, the identity of people, particularly children, into what the leaders and the dominant social order see as acceptable.
In the show, the girl who is abused so horrendously by the religious leaders is denied her own identity. When she objects to the coercion, she is beaten and told that she is evil, a demon, the devil. There is no attempt by those in leadership to listen to the girl, to consider her personhood and identity apart from the definition of the church.
This might be the way that damaging religious systems have operated, but they didn’t get it from Jesus. Over and over again in the gospels we see Jesus recognizing the humanity of people who had been judged harshly by the religious and social systems of the day. One of the reasons that people were drawn to Jesus was that he did not aim to force them to be someone other than who they were. One of the reasons that the status quo rejected Jesus was that he did not force people into conformity.
I came across a term that you may have heard, but was new to me. Parasocial relationships are a kind of pseudo-relationship, often mediated by social media platforms. This is not only the many “friends” of Facebook, but it is also the feeling that you have gotten to know someone who shares a lot on social media. In the article that I read, there were multiple examples of people who became almost enmeshed in the lives of others who they had never met and “knew” only through keeping tabs of constant information online.
The 139th Psalm is one of those passages of the Bible that has been instrumentalized for political interest. What it is actually about is being known. It is a prayer to God, voiced by David, about being known.
Imagine a girl in a residential school being able to pray, in defiance of the leaders there, that she is known by God.
Far too often, religious and social systems seek to deny the identity of people. The collective, the social whole, is actually better with less conformity but we fail to see this. Do you want people to be just like you?
Relationships that are moderated and mediated by social media can be part façade.
In faith, is it possible to see that we are known and loved? There are voices of coercion, like the nuns in the show, that would have you deny who you are. There are voices of, seemingly friendly, parasocial relationships that present highly filtered and managed interaction with the aim of gaining followers more than of knowing people.
Consider the possibility that, in faith, you are known and loved, as you are.
News suggests the latest shooting in a Nashville Christian School was done by a transgender, ‘assumed resentment’ said the article. ... I also recall 50 years ago when a 24 raised in our church and Christian school was excommunicated publicly from our church. He was gay. He later took his life. There are no words of consolation I can suggest with these sadnesses.