TW: Swearing, Christianity, Progressive Politics
After reading the Medium piece by Jessica Vazquez Torres on today’s #FuckThisShit/#RendTheHeavens, I was torn. I had two competing, though complementary, responses to the daily prompt. One was simply a response directly to the prompt. That’s what’s in this post. The other was a response to the prompt in light of what JVT’s piece brought up for me. Because I couldn’t decide which to write, but knew they were separate enough to not belong in one essay, I’m writing two essays to one day’s prompt. Given that I’m not writing daily, I’m okay with that. Today’s daily prompt was “(DIS)COMFORT: 2 Peter 3: 11-13:
Since everything is to be dissolved in this way, what sort of person ought [you] to be, conducting yourselves in holiness and devotion, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved in flames and the elements melted by fire. But according to his promise we await new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
Instead of using Google to pull up the passage, I felt pulled to get up from the couch and grab my old New American Bible I received 17 years ago (August 27, 1999 to be percise). I received it in my freshman year theology class at my Catholic high school. I forget the official name of the fall semester class, but I remember the teacher telling my class that we should question our faith and question what we believe, because unquestioned faith was untested faith, and testing would make our faith stronger. She actively encouraged our questions, and discouraged feeling any guilt about questioning our faith. That encouragement has stayed with me, even if I no longer can tell you details about the lives of all the prophets we discussed in that class.
I’ve changed a lot in those 17 years. A lot of that is because of times when I’ve pushed myself to embrace discomfort. Two of my favorite people in college were (and still are) nothing like me on the surface. I remember one, Casey, commenting my senior (her junior) year that she was sometimes amazed that we were friends. She and I had different personal views on dating, religion, sex, post-college goals, political activism, and reproductive justice. She wore dark eye makeup under a huge hat with long hair and often gestured with a cigarette. She didn’t gesture with the cigarette if we were indoors, I had a cold, or there wasn’t a stiff breeze taking the smoke away from me. See, I was an asthmatic who hated cigarettes. My general style was somewhat preppy with the occaisonal peasant top or loose skirt while her style was dark bohemian. We were not at all the sort of people you’d think either of us would be comfortable around, but we made each other better people. Or at least, I know she made me a better person precisely because of what about her could be discomforting to my 21 year old self.
More recently, there’s a theatre that my husband and I love, Forum Theatre. They’ve won awards and they have intense, amazing shows. I rarely watch sad television or depressing documentaries. I don’t like books that are devoid of hope. I don’t enjoy absurdist or abstract films. I get that all sounds anti-intellectual, but it’s who I am.
The shows at Forum looked like they would discomfort me and challenge me. I was intrigued but it took effort for me to embrace the likelihood of discomfort and challenge, and realize that I needed that in order to grow and be a better person. Again, I’m so glad that I embraced that discomfort.
Forum shows do always discomfort me, at least a bit. They challenge me and make me ask questions and look at societal issues in a different way. Some of them I saw multiple times because I want to catch new nuances and see what new ideas they bring up. They’ve pushed me out of my comfort zone and into the experiences of other people, people who initially can seem so different from me and whose actions can otherwise seem so inexplicable. Thinking about Pluto, which deals with a shooting at a community college, still makes me uncomfortable because it showed me how to identify with someone I’d more comfortably consider a monster.
So what does all that have to do with 2 Peter 3: 11-13? Because it’s part of the sort of person I want to be, the sort of person I think I’m called to be. I don’t think that any of us are called to be totally comfortable all the time. I think that we grow by pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone. Whether it’s friendships or theatre, or something else, we cannot live in comfortable, homogenous bubbles if we want to really know the world that God created and that I believe, as a Christian, I have a responsibility to help change into an “earth in which righeousness dwells.”
Discomfort is not always easy. I have anxiety for which I take medication. It would probably be easier to only do things that are comfortable, but that’s not what I’m called to do. Sometimes it takes deep breathing or medication, but I’m not going to let fear of discomfort keep me from being the sort of person I think I’m meant to be. I’m going to do my best to embrace discomfort so that I can become the Christian I think I’m supposed to be.