Remembering Mom

Mom, celebrating 90 years in October, 2017

The little Presbyterian congregation that I serve in metro DC has spent this summer studying the 25^th chapter of Matthew, and asking ourselves what it would mean to be a church shaped primarily by that foundational gospel text.

I probably should have just told them about my mom. She spent her entire life living out the deepest meaning of that chapter from the New Testament.

When I was sitting with her a few days before her death, I picked up her Bible and read those verses from Matthew 25. Mom marked up a lot of passages in her Bible, but she didn’t actually mark any of the verses I just read. I don’t think she needed to be reminded of them because her life testified to the importance of those words for the way she chose to live her days.

When mom encountered people who were hungry, she figured out how to feed them even though she hated cooking and wasn’t really all that much into food herself. She helped countless poor families throughout Chattanooga figure out how to navigate systems so that they could get breakfast and lunch for their children.

At the same time, she fed us day by day, and though she didn’t find a great deal of joy in the kitchen, she did find joy and share it at the dining room table. We ate dinner together as a family almost every evening of my growing up, and I know that practice passed along to the next generation. There is, of course, something profound and sacramental about breaking bread together, and we are shaped through such simple practices. At the table that my mother set, we were shaped for the kinds of service that our parents provided in their professional lives.

When mom encountered people who were naked she clothed them. She was part of the Neighborhood House system in North Chattanooga from its earlies days, both donating and delivering all kinds of gently used items of clothes that made their way to families in need. She stood in solidarity with poor families in their most trying times, and served them in ways as simple and profound as finding shoes and winter coats for their children, and in ways as complex and difficult as going to family court with them.

One of my strongest memories of mom is of going with her, after the Christmas Eve candlelight service here, into Chattanooga’s public housing projects to deliver Christmas to families whose trees would be far less richly adorned than the one I’d wake up to the next morning on Avalon Circle.

When mom encountered lonely people, she visited. In retirement she volunteered in all manner of ways, answering calls for Chattanooga’s crisis line often on holidays, serving as a hospice volunteer, and, in work that brought her deep joy, volunteering for years at the little house in the Children’s Museum where she often reconnected momentarily lost little ones with their parents.

Although she would likely have rolled her eyes at the divinity school vocabulary, what I’m trying to say is that my mother understood incarnational theology. That is to say, she deeply believed that whatever she did with and for the least of these – the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the lonely, the children of Chattanooga – she was doing with and for Jesus.

You always have a choice when you look at others. If you look for the worst in others you’ll find it. If you look for the Christ in them, you’ll find that, too. You’ll also find yourself a whole lot happier.

I learned from my mother that complicated abstract responses to unanswerable questions do not add up to a life of faith. Entering the kindom prepared for you from the foundations of the earth is not about your answer to the abstract question about the divinity or humanity of Jesus; it’s about seeing the divine spark in every human being and treating them the way you imagine you’d treat Jesus: with kindness and humility.

Thirtysome years ago I gave mom a wall-hanging for Christmas with the words from Micah 6:8 – do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God. Mom served the least of these through that lens. She was a fierce advocate of basic fairness, and a system rigged by and for the rich and powerful deeply offended her. She walked through every day with a loving kindness that touched everyone she encountered. And she always shined the light on others, being an incredibly supportive partner to our dad, a proud parent who always showed up for each of us, and a loving, doting grandma who, as Kaycee noted, taught her grandkids that there are some things an Ensign doesn’t do.

I was never clear on what those things are, and I’m pretty sure that her kids and grandkids stretched her imagination on just what things were acceptable. I will leave those things to your imaginations. In that way, as well, mom grasped something profoundly important: if you begin with love you can build and hold on to relationships through most any challenge.

In recent years it was challenging to get out of places with mom. Some of that was because her body started giving out long before her indomitable spirt waned, but most of it was because most everywhere we went with her she would run into folks she knew and they would want to stop and talk with her. Mom spent her lifetime building and holding on to relationships that began with her loving spirit.

She extended that curiosity to people in every walk of life. She knew the family stories of every principal in all of the schools that she served, and she also knew the family stories of every custodian.

My mom never turned down a chance to talk with an old friend, or a new friend, or a potential friend. She had a curiosity about life that drove her to want to learn about you, and a fundamental kindness that compelled countless folks to want to share their stories with her.

Throughout scripture salvation means wholeness, it means well-being, it means communion with God and with neighbor. All of that begins and ends with love. Mom lived and loved into such salvation day by day, and she rests in it now and forevermore. Hallelujah. Amen.

Panic at Pride

swag that we didn't get to toss to the crowd
because we were running away.

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Well that wasn’t on my bucket list, but I have now had that quintessential American experience: running with a panicked crowd fleeing in fear of a mass shooting.

Fortunately for the hundreds of thousands of folks at today’s Capital Pride parade the altercation that sparked the panic was not a gunman bent on mass murder, but when you see a wave of people running at you with terror in their eyes you don’t stop to inquire into the details. You run.

I was with a group of More Light Presbyterians waiting to walk in the parade. I've walked it with MLP most years since 2003, and many of those years with our kids. I was glad I didn't have young children with me tonight as we ran away from an unknown fear.
We ran several blocks down 22^nd Street away from DuPont Circle until we were safely behind a garbage truck that was blocking off traffic to the parade area. A DC cop was at that check point, and she calmly told us that there was a suspect in custody and no active shooter, and would we please not run because someone might get injured.

At that point, people started checking in with friends elsewhere along the route or just hugging the folks around them grateful to be safe.

This is America in the age of easy access to high powered rapid fire weaponry. It’s a time when people gathered on a beautiful summer evening to celebrate the gift of love and diversity can be instantly reduced to a scrambling panic by reports of gunfire.

Fortunately, in this case, there was never an active shooter. But we’ve all been trained – either actually trained in schools or workplaces or trained by the experience of consuming countless news reports. We’ve been trained to believe that it could happen anywhere at any time. We’ve been trained to expect it.

The saddest part of the experience to me was that it came as no surprise. When I saw the wave of people running my direction I immediately thought, “active shooter: run.”

That is the America we have allowed to devolve all around us. It’s not the country I want to live in.

It is, however, my country. So I will do what I can to help something better come to life here. I’m posting this and making another contribution to Everytown for Gun Safety. I invite you to contribute to a gun violence prevention effort. In the name of love.

Fasting

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I checked out of Facebook for Lent and declared a “social media fast” for the season. It’s been almost a month now, and I don’t miss it nearly as much as I would miss chocolate had I been stupid enough to think that setting that aside for a season was a good idea.

It's Lent, so here's a cross.
Photo credit: Hannah Lederle-Ensign

Actually, I am glad to have set aside social media for a while. It’s opened up some space for thinking about the vast distance between creating and consuming, or, at least for pondering how I consume media and, more significantly to me, how I produce it. It’s also led me to pondering the role of the citizen in the age of social media, and evangelism.

Hm, maybe I really was spending way too much time on the book of faces.

I was, oddly enough, an earlier adopter of Facebook. I’m usually late to all the tech parties, but my volunteer work at Camp Hanover made me aware of the Facebook back when it had an article and you needed an .edu e-mail address to get on. I remember in the summer of 2005 walking into the middle of a conversation among camp staff about how many friends they had and having the whole concept of “friending” on Facebook explained to me. When the site opened to old folks in the fall of 2006 I created an account thus forever ruining it for my children, who were teens and younger at that point.

I haven’t completely stepped out of all social media this spring, but, as has become age-appropriate, Facebook is the social media site that I use the most. I’m on Twitter, but a Lenten fast from that site feels kind of like giving up standing on my head: it’s something I can do but I have never really figured out why so I don’t do it often. I may not be too old to stand on myhead, but I’m way too old for Instagram and I only use Snapchat to send silly pictures to my kids.

But in recent years I’ve spent more time on Facebook than any other single source of media, from Netflix to legacy media to news sites or podcasts. Only MASN broadcasts of Nats baseball games could come close!

So I have been interested to see how stepping out of social media would feel. Frankly, like Michael Stipe at the end of the world as we know it, I feel fine.

I do miss a couple of particular aspects of the Facebook piece of social media – pictures that friends take of cute babies or vacation vistas, the daily trip down memories lane, and the occasional laugh-out-loud cleverness of friends.

But there’s so much that I do not miss at all: the lure of arguments and the pervasive rudeness in most every vaguely political comment thread; the cynicism embedded in so much of the snarkiness; the dearth of original thought.

The last one is, as it turns out, what I miss least. It’s not that people on Facebook are not creative. I know for a fact that many of them are, and sometimes even on Facebook. It’s that most of us don’t use Facebook as a platform for sharing our creativity. Instead, most of us use it as a platform for amplifying what passes for creativity from sources that have the stamp of approval of corporate America.

That, most significantly, includes political commentary, but it also includes arts, music, religion, and creative culture more broadly. Most of us, most of the time, use Facebook reacting to or sharing content found elsewhere in spaces controlled, to varying degrees, by corporations.

This concern doesn’t even address “fake news” and those paid to spread it around, which is its own set of problems.

There’s a lot not to miss, as it turns out, but it does seem a bit strange to say I don’t miss the dearth of original thought. It’s like a double negative: I don’t miss what’s not there?

Not exactly. More accurately, I think we’re missing out on the great opportunity that social media offers.

Which is why, during this Lent, I’ve increased my use of YouTube despite proclaiming a “social media fast.”

It was honestly only after about three weeks of “social media fast” that it occurred to me that YouTube is, in fact, social media. YouTube still feels more media and less social to me. Actually, I have used the site a lot like legacy media most of the time.

It’s been a site for viewing a slice of video that doesn’t make it to prime time, or to watch slices that made it to prime time when I didn’t. That is to say, I catch up on a lot of Stephen Colbert’s monologues, which, strictly speaking, don’t actually appear in “prime time” anyway, for what that’s worth.

I also watch a fair bit of video about niche hobbies, such as disc golf and guitar playing. YouTube, in other words, has been TV for things not popular enough to get on TV, or for things I was too busy (sleeping) to catch when they “aired.” It still feels a bit like Wayne’s World if local access cable providers paid absolutely no attention to copyright.

But I’ve also used YouTube as a platform for sharing original, creative work. I’ve had a “channel” at least since middle child and I created Crooked, a documentary about the music culture of Virginia’s Crooked Road heritage route.

Late last year a tech-savvy millennial suggested using YouTube as the simplest solution to wanting to live-stream worship from the wee kirk. So we created a Clarendon Presbyterian channel and I became a televangelist. The experience with that, to date, is also way more “media” than “social” and we’ve got a grand total of 7 subscribers at the moment. Joel Osteen can no doubt feel the foundations shifting beneath his 17,000-square-foot mansion.

Creating a weekly video post, or vlog post, to use a really hideous term of art, has occupied some of the time I was spending on Facebook. Has that been a good use of the time?

I was going to say that I’d leave it to others to judge the relative value of what’s come from the time, but I actually believe that I can offer a judgement at least as accurate because the act of creating always has a value that exceeds the thing created.

So, to be sure, an audience can judge their own experience of receiving – of consuming – the thing created, but only the creator can judge the value of the experience of creating. I have no doubt that the value to me of the practice of creating short videos far outstrips the value to me of the practice of consuming content on Facebook.

And they are both “practices” – actions or activities to which I give my time, and which shape me in ways both intentional and not. The practice of posting short videos shapes me as a creator, as a thinking, as a writer. The practice of consuming content on Facebook shapes me primarily as a consumer. The platform’s algorithms are designed to do that, and they are good at it.

The practice of creating necessarily shapes me in far more productive ways.

In a democratic republic citizens are charged with creating the rules that govern the republic. “We the people, in order to create a more perfect union …” must, therefore, be creative if such a republic is to be being created in our time.

If social media matters, and clearly it does, it must matter as a location for the creative work of citizenship. That’s not the only way it matters, but it does matter in that way.

I’m not auditioning for a role in the social media police. Everyone is free to engage as they want and as they will. I’m only staking out for myself the contours of my own space amidst the whole of it. Lenten discipline, as I understand it, is not about reforming the world. It’s about reforming how one lives in it. Practices shape us, and we shape the world, but we really do have to first be the change we wish to see in the world.

When I step back in to the Facebook space I will step with the intention to use it as creatively as I am able. I’m not going to share content created by people I don’t know personally. I don’t personally know anyone whose creative products have corporate machinery behind them or who have massive markets, so it’s part of the shop local ethos. I’ll share things of value from people I value, and that will include sharing things I create myself. If I link to a think piece from the New York Times, for example, I’ll only do so in connection to a think piece of my own. After all, the purpose of think pieces is to compel thought.

This is a still from Crooked; it's compelling, so I'd share it

I will for sure continue to post pictures of things that strike me as beautiful, interesting, or humorous.

There has to be space for beauty and humor. Of course, as the late Joe Wilson, then director emeritus of the National Council for Traditional Arts, said in Crooked (the film Martin and I made a half dozen years ago), “there’s always a part of humor that’s not very funny […] the part that dehumanizes.” “Always” may overstate the case, but only slightly. Still, I believe there’s a narrow gap that good humor can aim for that lets the air out of inflated egos, points out the foibles of the self-important, and helps ground all of us in the midst of the absurdity that marks so much of life. So, I’ll try to bring non-cynical comic asides and loving smart-assery, and invite you to hold me accountable when I miss the mark.

Social media is what we make of it. When I step back into it, I'm going to try to make it better.