I've been thinking about the value of being uncomfortable.
For more than fifty years, I had power. No, I didn’t hold public office or accumulate wealth I could leverage; I didn’t come from a lineage of social privilege. Quite the contrary: I was raised in a working-class family, went to California public schools from kindergarten through college, and was a scholarship student during graduate school. Ah, but in 1966, when I was twenty-five years old, I was ordained into the Presbyterian ministry and inherited the power of a pulpit to preach from and a lectern to teach from, power which I exercised for five decades.
And what a time it was to have a pulpit! It was as if society kept lobbing me obvious subjects to preach on, continuous opportunities in significant circumstances to exercise the power of my convictions with my most persuasive language.
For me, the issues came in roughly this order: the confluence of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war, Watergate, women’s rights, farm worker’s rights, LGBTQ rights, Bill Clinton’s behavior, 9/11, terrorism, wars in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. And there were always these more personal and growing concerns: the rise in divorce rates, fears about drugs and sexual promiscuity, economic inequality, and the perpetual grievances of the poor. Week by week I wrestled with the same challenges: What are my convictions about this issue? What does my congregation want to hear from me? What does my congregation need to hear from me (which was often something very different from what they wanted to hear)?
I was often enlisted not just to speak out about these issues but also to organize marches and committees and study groups. In my own community, and in the communities that were being oppressed, I was invited to lead. This was another heady part of this call to witness to my beliefs: people who were suffering were asking me to use my power on their behalf, counting on me to help them find their way to justice.
When the church I still attend decided in the early 1980s to take on the task of blessing same-sex unions, I was asked to staff the task force, made up of LGBTQ members and straight members and chaired by an older straight white man. It felt like a privilege, to me as a straight man, to be chosen to lead such a diverse group on a subject that was more about them than me. I was proud to be asked.
When our church created an Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race, the first organization I was a part of that was a collaboration between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, I again felt proud that a woman from our parish and I traded off chairing the task force for the six years of its existence. I took it as an affirmation of my esteem in this religiously diverse group that I was chosen time and again to lead.
Though I had been active in Civil Rights marches and protests since the 1960s, I made my first close friendship with a Black man in the early 2000s. I took it as a sign of my inherent decency that when we went to lunch together at a popular Pasadena restaurant, I was the only regular customer there who had a Black person as a lunch companion. I was pleased to bear public witness to my inclusive character.
Can you spot what's off about these stories? For decades, I couldn't, and didn't. I felt like a good person doing good and important work and receiving the appropriate and well-deserved admiration of others. But that's not the whole story, and I've come to realize that the whole story is one that many of us who have been born into racial, social, and economic advantage don’t articulate, even to ourselves.
I've been struggling to understand what happened to me; it’s a story I’ve not read or heard about from others, but it seems worth sharing because I’m sure I’m not the only one who got caught up in the confusion between our best efforts and their harmful consequences we never were aware of.
In the decades since, my power has diminished as my leadership has ceased to be necessary. Each of the social justice movements I’d been associated with and helped to lead developed leaders from within who took charge; nobody needed me at the head of the table. In retrospect, of course, I agree with (and even applaud) this transfer of power.
But there are aspects of this change that I’m only now owning up to. I must confess that I mourned the loss of my leadership positions. Someone else now controlled whatever pulpit or lectern was in the front of the room. I felt like I was no longer needed and, worse, no longer wanted, and that whatever power I’d exercised was no longer useful. It has taken a long time for me to process this change in my role as leader, to give up the pulpit and lectern from which I’d once been asked to lead, and to admit my grief at these changes.
As I’ve thought through these losses over time, I've come to recognize my own personal stake in the exercise of my power. And it’s helped me to understand what was distorted in the stories I was telling myself about myself.
I liked my leadership role in the LGBTQ community, and my place in the interfaith community. I liked the narrative that said I was needed and could help, the narrative that appreciated my skills as a leader, and especially the narrative that told me I was a good person or, more precisely, a good white person, a good Christian person, a good man, a good straight person, standing in opposition to those bad people who we were fighting against. I was the better person. Looking back, I think I was committed to these causes because of how they made me feel about myself as much as I was committed because they were the right thing to do.
I’m coming to terms with my loss of power, and with the realization that I had a huge personal stake in my position as a leader in communities of justice that no longer particularly need my power in the way I used to exercise it. And I have to say that it hurts to feel that what I did well for all those decades has little or no current influence in how I’m perceived now. The battles I fought and was often asked to lead, the battles I won, the changes in our culture that I helped to accomplish – I feel little lingering appreciation for all of this from the communities I worked with.
What is even more painful, in some communities that once enlisted my leadership and witness I’m now frequently reminded that I am part of their problem. I’m identified with white supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny, gender bias, structural racism. Sure, I know I’ve been a part of these evil structures and I’m willing to own my complicity, but it’s difficult to have my redemptive role in that list of cultural victories drowned out by this insistence on my complicity.
I’m finally recognizing and getting over my defensiveness about my loss of power, my loss of acknowledgement for what I helped to accomplish in oppressed communities. I’m now at the point where I want to continue in the conversations about justice, including what happened in the past, what is happening now, and what structures of personal and cultural power should look like in the future. I want to be aware of what my role can be now in the never-ending efforts to "let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a never-ending stream."
I confess that I wasn’t well prepared to deal with the discomfort of this transition in my identity from a powerful witness against oppression to whatever I am now. I am clear on a few things: that my role is to follow and not to lead, to listen and not to talk, to support and not to direct. And I’m learning, however slowly, that being uncomfortable like this can be a positive thing in my life. It teaches me something important about my resilience and open-mindedness (or lack thereof). It teaches me to accept the place now offered me in witnessing, organizing, and acting on behalf of still-marginalized communities.
There is one community in which I still have a responsibility to assert my leadership, though - and where I think I can make some real progress. I have not only the power but the responsibility to speak to my own constituency: older straight white people (and especially men) who need to join the cultural confederacy we once dominated, but as equal and no longer superior members. I can understand now how our grasp on power has become a lingering injustice. Indeed, the unwillingness to give it up (even by those who profess to care about and hold dear the social justice values as I did my entire life) is one of the barriers to building a future society which is more one human family and less conflicting bands of combatants defending their own turf and trying to co-opt one another’s territory.
I’m still trying to figure out how to work through these feelings. I'm coming to grips with the uncomfortable but true realization that nobody owes me appreciation for doing the right thing. And I’m fairly certain now that this means getting out of the way and letting others take the power and leadership roles that used to be mine, while I work on cleaning my own house. It’s a journey I’m still adjusting to, but I'm glad to be uncomfortable these days.