Rhetoric Race and Religion
I seem to always be trying to fit in to something, somewhere.
Shortly after I had my daughter I tried, quite unsuccessfully, to fit into my pre-pregnancy jeans—the big ones. No luck.
Once my daughter started school I tried fitting in with other mom’s—in Pre K they were artists and organic farmers who made their own clothes.
In other words, I didn’t fit in.
Now that my daughter is in grade school the mom’s I meet are all different—which makes fitting in sort of a non-issue. Unless of course, I join the PTA, which I will not likely do. Mostly because I’m sure I just wouldn’t fit in.
Lately I’ve wondered why I didn’t leave this desire to “fit in” behind, in the cafeteria in seventh grade when I definitively decided teasing my bangs was a line I just wouldn’t cross.
I thought I’d given up “fitting in” once and for all.
When I first became a Christian I unwittingly rekindled my love affair with “fitting in” when I joined the church.
The first church
The first church I joined was easy for me to fit into. It was comprised of a bunch of ragtag twenty-something artists in NYC, of which I could’ve been the poster child. It wasn’t until I moved south, to Texas, to the buckle of the Bible Belt that I became conscience of a struggle to fit in.
In a recent session with my Spiritual Director (see my last post for more on that), we talked about religion being something I put on, like a dress. It was a dress I fit easily into at the time of my ‘conversion,’ but which, lately, has been feeling a little snug. Like, two-sizes-too-small snug.
I became a Christian in my mid-twenties, and in the years, months and even weeks leading up to my baptism, I was flirting with disaster.
It was the sex, drugs and rock and roll version of disaster, and I thought Christianity would shoehorn me out of a destructive lifestyle. I put it on like a dress; it covered my past transgressions and gave me purpose and identity. But there was more to my decision to become a Christian.
I had begun to develop an awareness of God’s presence and activity in my life.
This awareness grew in power and frequency the deeper I dug into my community of Christian artists, and the deeper I dug into learning who the God of the Bible really was.
But more than 10 years later, I’m realizing that this dress I put on, the religious aspects of Christianity, is not necessarily what Christianity is about. In my attempt to fit in, I seem to have squeezed myself into something I am now outgrowing.
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