By: Alison Poage
On the last day of January, The Very Rev. Dr. Cynthia Kittredge preached about the sudden loss of Texas French Bread, an Austin bistro that was destroyed in a fire after 30 years of business. Cynthia was feeling the loss of the beloved meeting place where she had shared so many meals with the people she loves. She became aware that, while a great many people were grieving the same loss, some were proposing that the burning down of a bakery was “not that bad” when considered in the larger context of COVID-19 casualties. No one died in the fire, so maybe we were making too much of it.
After considering this, Cynthia said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Cynthia went on to share something she had read in an opinion piece by Kathryn Schultz. In this essay about the human tendency to minimize our small griefs in comparison to greater losses, Schultz writes, “Still, when we find ourselves counting our blessings this carefully, it is generally because some of them have gone missing.”
If you listen to the recording of Cynthia’s sermon, you can hear a collective “Mmm” from the congregation right at this moment. I was one of those voices. The counting of the blessings is a tradition that is familiar to me. Whenever I think, “I’m sad that my child has to experience kindergarten during a pandemic,” I quickly add, “but I’m grateful he’s healthy.” I am a dutiful and habitual counter of blessings.
The pandemic didn’t make me this way. Truthfully, I’ve always categorized most of my problems as “not that bad.” When my parents divorced when I was eleven, I didn’t tell my friends for months. My parents never fought in front of me, so it was clearly “not that bad.” What was there to say? I am even more likely to sweep my grief into the “not that bad” bucket since learning about my privilege in the U.S. as a white person and as an educated person. Not only do I have everything I need, I actually have more than my fair share. What could possibly be missing?
On February 17, 2022, in the Black History Month panel session Well Now: Let’s Talk About Black Mental Health, I heard Dr. Marlon C. Johnson say that white people have also experienced racial trauma. Dr. Johnson, who is leading the seminary’s Racial Trauma Initiative, referenced Resmaa Menakem’s 2017 book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies. In this book that’s been assigned in several seminary courses, Menakem wrote, “while white-body supremacy benefits whites in some ways, it also does great harm to white bodies, hearts, and psyches.”
Upon reading Menaken’s words I felt enormous surprise, and also relief. An invitation had been extended to me to explore what I feel every time I check the box “white.” The feeling is…well, I’m not sure yet. It’s like a void. I can’t even name what it is that’s gone missing. In some ways it’s like my appendix: something that used to be a part of me, and I’m not sure what purpose it served, but now it’s gone, and there is an emptiness.
As soon as I stretched into this emotional space, a second (and more familiar) thought occurred to me: “Surely any racial trauma I experience is not as bad as what my neighbors of Color have experienced and continue to experience today.” The “not that bad” bucket was right under my heels again and, once again, sweeping up my grief was looking like the correct thing to do. After all, what about what I had learned in Layla F. Saad’s book Me and White Supremacy about white centering? If I talk about racial trauma as it affects white people, aren’t I centering the white experience as a result of white fragility?
After considering this, I’m going with, “No, I don’t think so.”
A few days before the Well Now panel, a seminarian told me Dr. Catherine Meeks, Executive Director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing, had been recommending the book, The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry, to students. In this book published in 1970, Berry grapples with the wound caused to white people by inflicting racial wounds upon Black people. Berry wrote, “I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it. And I want to be cured; I want to be free of the wound myself, and I do not want to pass it on to my children.”
This example of talking about white racial trauma doesn’t read at all like white centering to me. This reads to me like love. Like living into what Saad calls becoming “a good ancestor.” Maybe the broom and bucket can sit in the corner for a moment longer because, like Berry and Saad, I am thinking about the children.
For the first ten years of my career I was a children’s librarian working in public library settings. Children’s librarians emphasize the importance of reading to young children because we identify parents as their children’s “first teachers.” What I notice today is that children are our first teachers when it comes to expressing grief. When a beloved toy goes missing, young children share their sorrow freely. They don’t say, “I shouldn’t be crying over this because at least I have stable housing.” I can remember a morning when a toddler I love burst into tears at the breakfast table. When asked why he was crying, he could barely get the words out through his tears: “My waffle is bending.”
This emotional reaction to his waffle bending seemed a bit much. Was I tempted to sweep his problem into the “not that bad” bucket? Absolutely. After all, at least there was food on the table, right? But I work at Seminary of the Southwest, and many of the methods of communication I learned in the past have been radically disrupted by other ways of being. Whether it was the Holy Spirit, the conversation covenant, or the echoes of teachings from our Mental Health Counseling faculty, I managed to refrain from shaming this child for expressing his feelings. I held him, made a safe space for his grief, and offered him a tissue. We moved on, and the waffle bending was never a problem again.
I think the problem lies in “counting your blessings” if those words are really code for self-judgment, or an underlying belief that we shouldn’t be feeling grief in the first place if we have other needs that are being met. When I judge and sweep away my feelings, I am left feeling like a child who is not cared for when she’s hurt. This child will at some point, sooner or later, act out. The “acting out” will have real consequences for me, for my neighbors, and for the children.
As I write this on the last day of February, Russian President Putin is waging war against Ukraine. The tragic consequences of this ultimate “acting out” will cause pain, dismemberment, terror, loss of home, loss of security, lasting trauma, death, and mourning for many people and creatures. The grief that many of us geographically distanced from this war experience will also be real. Let us resist the urge to tier the pain; comparing our grief to that of our neighbors will not heal the world.
Healing the world begins with our own body. I know it can be scary to sound like we are whining, or self-absorbed, or concerned with problems that are “not that bad.” Sometimes we have been shamed for expressing our grief. It may feel safer to take up the broom and sweep it up. But attending to our grief, no matter the size, is the way forward to peace.
Cynthia reminded us that we do this hard work not alone but in community, with shared rituals. “As we worship here together,” Cynthia preached, “let us not hesitate to name what we’ve lost and, in naming it, clarify what kind of community it is that we seek to rebuild.”
This emphasis on community reminds me that Dr. Johnson, in the Well Now panel, encouraged us to “check in” with someone else when the naming of the losses gets painful. He also said: “Don’t let that pain drive you away from understanding yourself, because you’re worth it and you were created to be seen, not to be a shadow.”
After considering this, I heartfully agree.
How will you allow yourself to be seen today?
What blessings seem to have gone missing in your life?
How might naming your losses heal your own heart? The hearts of those around you?
References
Fearon, F. (Host), & Cumberbatch, J. (Panelist), and Johnson, M. (Panelist). Well now: let’s talk about Black mental health (video file). Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1113671522723937
Kittredge, C.B. (2022, January 31). Sermon from Christ Chapel (video file). Retrieved from https://ssw.edu/community/christ-chapel-online/
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands : racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.
Saad, L. F. (2020) Me and white supremacy: combat racism, change the world, and become a good ancestor. Sourcebooks.
Schultz, K. (2022, January 25) How to make sense of our covid losses, big and small. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
More resources from the Booher Library about trauma.
This spring, Sowing Holy Questions explores creating what is next, the new normal, grieving for what we cannot return to, and being “beside ourselves.”
