The Pandemic Stole My Power
Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash
A few months ago, at the end of July, I helped host the conference of my dreams: we brought together practical theologians and ethnographers who study Christian congregations and huddled together for a couple days sharing insights, visions, and challenges about this church that we so love-hate. I got to bring my pedagogical creativity to crafting exercises and conversations between scholars, and I got to share some of the work I’d been doing with people I deeply respect and admire.
During one of the sessions I led, I kept asking questions about how we bring this type of engaged, ethnographic learning to theological education. Later that night I sat next to someone I didn’t know very well at dinner, and she looked me in the eye and said something to the effect of, “All those questions you’re asking, what if you already have the answers? What if you’re the one doing it? Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop. You’re on fire. It’s working.”
It was affirmation that I so badly needed to hear, both because of how starved I was for it, and how, in that moment, I realized just much I had let the pandemic take away my power.
Certainly in the absence of community like the one I was experiencing that weekend, so much of us struggled, but it was the politic-making of vulnerability in the pandemic that really sent me reeling. In my teaching and scholarship, I will chide my students when they semantically imagine disabled people out of society (“society treats disabled people like…”), but during the pandemic, I could see and feel the world imagining its way out of a crisis in a way that systematically exiled and disregarded disabled lives, making them at best obsolete and at worst, impossible. It wasn’t so bad when we were all in the crisis together, but as able-bodied people assumed risks that my family couldn’t assume, our lives just became smaller and smaller, not to mention irrelevant and insufficient.
I felt like I was crying into a void. Why holler when no one is listening, because then you truly come to look like a blubbering, pandering fool? What is the point in trying to make people listen, especially if their actions show you that they don’t really care?
I felt sheepish in my advocacy, because it appeared to make no difference. I felt bad about myself, because my requests for accommodations were being met with silence or indifference. I felt like an imposing, annoying, clanging gong, so I gradually stopped talking about it.
But if there are dark forces at work in the world, I’ve come to believe that they are the ones that cause us to question our deepest callings, render us silent in the face of adversity, or circulate the kind of narratives that keep us suspicious rather than sympathetic toward others. At that very conference I had a chat with a former student about some of the resistance I’ve been met with in this passion for teaching about ethnography in theological education and she quipped, “Well, what if they were just intimidated by you?” From her vantage, she could see something I couldn’t see: maybe the resistance wasn’t confirmation that I was doing the wrong thing or doing it wrong, simply that the people I was pushing against had their own stuff going on, or maybe they just weren’t ready for me. The answer wasn’t necessarily to stop trying.
Way back in 2004, when I’d graduated from college feeling on top of the world, then gone to Puerto Rico for a few months to set up a new Youthworks site, only to end up back in my childhood bedroom without a job, I’d somehow gotten an interview that fall with an ecumenical advocacy organization called Bread for the World. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but whereas the predominant paradigm for fighting hunger and poverty in faith circles often amounts to charity, for over fifty years Bread for the World has taken a different tactic. Informed by the bravery and wisdom of the prophets and the critical advocacy of Jesus’ ministry, they work to speak truth to power and partner with and implore those in power to make better polices for poor and hungry people.
I think I got an interview namely because I wrote something in my cover letter about Jesus being a radical. When they asked me what I meant by that back then, I didn’t have a clear answer, but decades after taking that job with Bread, and now becoming a disability advocate, I think radicalism is something like having the imagination to call people to work for a world that is far better than the one they currently live in. Radicals aren’t satisfied with the status quo and they aren’t afraid to say so. They are restless for justice in a world that is a bit too easily satisfied.
I’ve written a bit about how the biblical practice of lament rescued me in those dark months of the pandemic, because although my cries may have not fallen upon sympathetic ears, God could take and bear all my anger, frustration, and indignation. God’s bottomless well for my tears and anger made a difference, and on this side of the pandemic, I’ve been reminded that I’d rather be the kind of person who speaks up even when or if it doesn’t make a difference, because that’s who God has called me to be.
I think we often imagine the Holy Spirit to be gentle and motherly, but one of my students pointed out that mothers are actually wiry advocates for their children, so we’ve got to get our heads around our prejudice and biases to wise up to how the Spirit works. When no one listens, my advocacy is still a spiritual gift. When it makes me unpopular, my advocacy may still be the work of the Spirit. When it calls us to justice, however convicting, challenging, or downright radical it is, it’s the Spirit.
Did the pandemic call you to question your calling, too? Have you ever felt like a fool for speaking up, for wanting, believing, and imagining that there is a better way? Well, as a few wise women once said to me,
“What if those naysayers are just intimidated by you?”
“And all those questions you’re asking, what if you already have the answers? What if you’re the one doing it? Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop. You’re on fire. It’s working.”
Be the person God has called to be. It may just be the only thing that makes a difference in this world.
Rev. Dr. Erin Raffety
Erin Raffety is a cultural anthropologist, a Presbyterian pastor, and an ethnographic researcher who teaches and researches at Princeton Seminary and Princeton University. Her book, From Inclusion to Justice: Disability, Ministry, and Congregational Leadership released in 2022.
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