10 of Wands - Do I Choose to Walk the Hard Road? (October 21, 2020)

Do I choose to walk the hard road? I asked what I needed to know in this moment and here we are - the 10 of wands - do I feel burdened or blocked? - YES! Difficulties - absolutely - I guess I get to explore my whiteness this is definitely NOT what I wanted to write about today - can I get a break from thinking about it - me - my whiteness, my white fragility, my white centering, my whiteness - thinking about these things - social justice - unpacking my white privilege and my white supremacy. I just finished leading a book circle on Layla F Saad’s Me and White Supremacy - it was an incredible journey - peeling back the layers of myself week by week it was often hard as I had always thought of myself as one of the good ones - an ally but in all honesty I’m not, I’m not one of the good ones - I’m a white person who does not yet get my privilege - I certainly never asked for it - I think back on my life and I’ve struggled. Have I struggled as much as a person of color? No way - not even close - but if you had asked me in those moments of darkness - I would not have thought of privilege and power - I’ve often felt powerless. As a child - as a girl who had a strong religious upbringing, church at least three times a week - my father gave me rules about what to wear, how to dress, the length of my hair, what jobs I would have, what music I could play on my violin, where I could go - who I could hang out with - how I would be raised - what I could do with my life - my sole purpose as far as I could tell was to marry a good man - church going and devout - I would keep house for him - support his endeavors - as the Bible says - be a helpmeet - serve him as the church serves Christ. I would bear children - who would also go to church I could cook and clean and be seen and not heard - I needed to dress like a girl I had to sit on the gym stage while my classmates stared - as I could not dance - too suggestive - of course as a 2nd grader or a 4th grader - I did not quite understand what that meant. So I sat on the stage feeling so alone and so different - and of course as I got older - I got used to it. As a child I wanted nothing more than to fit in - to be accepted but each time I thought I’d got close - something would happen to set me apart. Was it the slumber parties - I so wanted to go - to spend the night with other girls my age. But when the invite came - my dad would say I will pick you up at 7am - 7am? Why? So I could go to work in the garden with the family - so I would not be influenced by those ungodly girls. I tried to go once or twice - one girl had a swimming pool - so I asked if I could swim too - my dad said only if you wear a t-shirt and pants. The one time he would allow me to wear pants  - he preferred me to wear dresses and skirts  - as a girl should - but there were a few things that I did that made it hard to be dressed like that. Mowing lawns, my paper route - I could own a couple pairs of jeans but if it seemed like I was wearing them too often they would get taken away. My violin - I loved to play but come Christmas time I would get the talking to - remember  don’t play the hymns - just the secular music - so in front of an auditorium of people I would sit - holding my violin on my knees while my classmates played Silent Night or The First Noel - the questions oh the questions - why can’t you play these songs? Well according to the Bible and my dad singing God’s praise can only be done via your voice - no musical accompaniment. How do you explain that to a 4th grader these larger theological concepts? What can you say - how do you explain that you simply want to blend in - to be part of the crowd - be swallowed up in a sea of other kids and then - in this moment I realize that my friends of color and people of color - by no fault of their own are made to stick out rather than blend in with rules that are not the same for everyone - this world is created for whiteness and is meant to keep them apart rather than accept their differences and my heart breaks…