The Theology of Listening // 12.9.21

Episode description: 

What can the fractures in our identity and ancestry teach us about how to heal? We don’t get to choose who our parents are or what familial or ancestral fractures have occurred along the way. 20-something audio storyteller Zahra and 76-year-old seminary professor John Jefferson Davis come together in this exploration of their own ancestral fractures, and what telling that story can teach us about healing the fractures outside of us.

Transcript:

Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about embracing the journey in a world forever changed. Coming to you from Oakland California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

Back in 2010, when my husband Nate and I lived in the Philippines for a year, we quickly got used to an experience that we’d never had before: we’d be walking down the street, buying peanuts or lumpia from a street vender, chatting in our broken Tagalog when whoever we were talking with would point to Nate’s nose and say “Chino,” not as a question, but a fact. Little kids were especially eager to identify Nate as Chinese. Then they’d turn to me and gush, “I LOVE your pointy nose.”

All my life I’d wished my nose were less pointy, and more round like Nate’s. But in the Philippines, my nose was all the rage, so eventually I learned to just say “thank you.”

You can see that Nate is part-Chinese if you know to look for it, but it’s not obvious. It wasn’t until I met Nate’s family for the first time that I understood just how Chinese he is. Nate’s dad Jack is half-Chinese, and it would be hard to mistake him for anything else. But Jack himself is the only visible evidence of that heritage. 

Jack’s story has always fascinated me, but it wasn’t until our family made a temporary move to Massachusetts this past year that I finally got to ask him about it.

Jack: Hi there. I'm Jack Davis. My full name is John Jefferson Davis. And I'm 76 years old. I'm speaking to you from Hamilton, Massachusetts, and for much of my adult life, I've been a professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell theological seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts on the North shore of Boston, which is a predominantly white institution, although many of our students here are Korean, Latino, African, Eastern European, and so forth. We're becoming more globalized. So in recent months and years I and the seminary have been more deeply immersed in issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. 

Laura: I’ve never met anyone who talks like Jack. He’s the most professorial person I’ve ever known, and one of the smartest, too. Any time Nate and his siblings get together, their favorite pastime is imitating their dad, who they all call Pop.

In the twenty years I’ve witnessed and sometimes participated in this game, it’s only gotten better. Now even my nieces and nephews will jump in, offering their best Pop wisdom in their best Pop voices. Jack is an incredibly good sport about all of this teasing, laughing along with us as we quote immortal bits of Pop wisdom. My personal favorites include “life is a series of tradeoffs,” “it’s all about expectation management,” “what’s the back story on this one?” and best of all, this precious rare gem, “Robin, I refuse.” 

If you’ve been listening, then you know that we called season 2 of Shelter in Place “Pandemic Odyssey,” because when wildfires, pandemic parenting, and an overall breakdown of everything we held secure pushed us from our home in Oakland, the place where we sought refuge was in the town where Jack lives. We rented an apartment at the seminary where Jack works. Every morning and evening, we made the same four-mile commute that he did, but in reverse, so that we could drop off our kids with Nate’s mom and Jack’s wife Robin, who saved us in every way possible this past year. You can hear that story in our season 2 episode titled “The Lotus Eaters.” Nearly a year later, it’s still our most popular episode. But today’s story is about Jack—and also, it’s bigger than Jack. 

It’s about how what you see isn’t always what you get, and about how what we become has as much to do with what we’ve lost as what we’ve found. It’s a story about finding our way home internally not by ignoring our ancestral fractures, but by embracing them.
To help me tell this story, I want to introduce you to someone who has never met Jack, but in certain ways understands his story better than I do.

Zahra: Hi, my name is Zahra C. and I’m a member of the Fall 2021 Kasama Collective cohort.

Laura: On the surface, Jack and Zahra don’t have a lot in common. Jack is a 76-year-old theology professor. Zahra is a 20-something working for a podcast that explores curiosity from a queer perspective. But Zahra relates a lot to Jack’s story, because both of them grew up in a place where they were constantly reminded that they didn’t belong.

Jack: I was born on February the 3rd, 1946 in Honolulu, Hawai'i, and my father, who was Caucasian, had married a Chinese woman. He was a Naval machinist at Pearl Harbor. 

They later divorced and he left Hawai'i, and strange as it might seem, in the divorce, my Chinese mother wanted to keep my sister, and my father for whatever reason wanted to keep me as a single parent. So we wound up in Macon, Georgia, because his original roots were in Macon, and he again resumed employment as a Naval machinist at the Naval ordnance plant.

One of the regrets of my later adult life was never asking my father some of the detailed history of his own story of what brought him to Pearl Harbor, and what was he doing on the day the bombs were falling? I never heard those stories. 

Laura: While Jack’s mom raised his sister in Los Angeles, Jack’s father remarried and raised Jack as an only child in Macon, Georgia. 

Jack: And basically my sister grew up in Los Angeles, and we didn't really meet until my high school and college days. And we've been in the process of reconnecting as a brother and sister just in the last 10 years. 

Laura: More than fifty years later, Zahra would also move to Georgia, just 80 miles away from where Jack spent his childhood.

Zahra: I went to school in Brooklyn, New York, but my family moved to Georgia before I started kindergarten. I'm Chinese on my mother's side and Black and Native American on my father's side. I didn’t really think much about my multiracial heritage at the time—I was a kid. But looking back now, I can see that my story picked up in a place where my classmates reminded me that, compared to them, I was different.

Jack: Growing up in the heart of Jim Crow South as a mixed race, Caucasian-Chinese person I didn't look quite white but I didn't look quite non-white either. It was basically black and white and those color lines were very strictly drawn on. 

Race, of course, it's, a socially constructed category. White privilege and white supremacy has been baked into American law from the very beginning.

So over the course of time various other nonwhite groups have been considered white. In the 19th century, of course, Southern Europeans, Italians, Romanians, certainly Jews were not considered white. The Irish, the Irish and the Italians became white in the 19th century. 

Most of your listeners will be familiar with the Asian exclusion act, in the 1880s. Here, it's fine for these Chinese people to build our railroads here, but becoming citizens no way, because they're not considered white and not until after the 1920s. Of course where Japanese people, considered white and they could be locked up, of course, during the second world war and interned and not until the late 1960s, of course, in terms of white privilege and American la in loving versus Virginia, the U S Supreme court finally struck down the anti miscegenation laws here, which prohibited not only blacks and whites from marrying, but also Chinese and whites in most state jurisdictions.

I've often thought if my father had been working in a Naval shipyard in say Norfolk, Virginia, rather than Hawaii, which didn't have these anti miscegenation laws I would not have been conceived.

It was a highly segregated society. Even though I am half Chinese, I was socialized as a white person. So in grammar school all the way through high school, there were two separate and unequal school systems in Macon, one for white and one for black.  And also strangely enough, the high schools were segregated, not only by race, but also by gender. So I went to the all boys white-only high school and graduated in 1964, 10 years after Brown vs Board of Education. In downtown Macon, there were movie theaters for the white people and the black people.

Laura: Today 68% of Macon’s residents are Black, while only 29% are white. When Jack was a kid those numbers were more like 50/50. But both then and now, less than 1% of Macon’s population are of Asian descent. 

Fayette County, where Zahra grew up, was less diverse than Macon—about 90% white, 4% Black, and 4% Asian. Mixed-raced people like Zahra made up only about 1% of the population. 

Zahra: When I was a kid, adults constantly told me what they thought I looked like—Polynesian, Filipino, Indian. If I told them my actual ethnicity, they'd say something like, "I see it now!" Like Nate, I do have Chinese features if you look for them, but they're not very obvious. 

Jack: I remember being very self-conscious frequently both because of my physical size being small and shorter than most of the boys in my all boys high school and middle school, and feeling othered at multiple levels . . . being the last to be chosen on the softball team, for example, during, you know, phys-ed classes in middle school, but also the not infrequent questions from other kids, you know, “are you Chinese or Japanese?” I didn't look quite white, but I didn't look white non-white either.

Laura: Even though there is a half a century gap between their upbringings, Jack and Zahra’s experiences are remarkably similar. Both of them lived in parts of Georgia where the Asian and multi-racial population was small. Both of them were extremely bright students who defined themselves through academic excellence. Both of them grew up with frequent probing questions about “what” they were, but few people who wanted to know who they were enough to listen to their complicated histories.

Zahra: When my mother would come to school to celebrate Mother's Day, my classmates would ask if I was adopted. Some of them would pull back the corners of their eyes, ask if I ate dog at home, or even say that my mother should go back where she came from. 

When it was my father's turn to visit the class, my classmates would ask if the other Black students were my cousins or purposefully mixed up our fathers. It felt like they were saying "I don't see you, I don't want to."

Jack: Growing up in a predominantly white environment here and my father and my stepmother, neither of whom were college-educated, looking back, they weren't what I would call racist as such, but they had shared some of the racial attitudes of their day. 

Laura: For both Jack and Zahra, there was pressure to assimilate, to downplay the ways that they were different from the people around them. For Zahra, having a multiracial identity began to feel like a persistent pain point.

Zahra: I wasn't teased for being multiracial, but my identity was often a convenient excuse for people to make rude comments or insensitive jokes.

Even though I was a kid, I understood that my classmates were reflecting the attitudes and sometimes the exact words they heard from their parents. The few times I felt brave enough to talk to my teachers, they’d just tell me to be the bigger person. I think some of them understood that there was deep-rooted racism that encouraged those harmful attitudes, but the burden to fix it was always on me. At that point, I was so exhausted by these conversations that I didn't even want to do anything. 

As I got older, I recognized those insults from white classmates as the casual racism that they were. Most of my friends were the few other people of color in the school. Some of them had identities that overlapped with mine, which meant overlapping insults, but at least we had each other. 

Laura: Jack learned to side-step those insults and probing questions by immersing himself in school. His Chinese identity was a fractured one that for many years was unavailable to him, so he forged his identity around what he was learning in school.

Jack: I can't speak a word of Chinese. I didn't have a sort of racial awakening until much later in college. Being sort of an introverted nerd, I was basically a physics and math person. going to Duke university and planning to get a PhD in physics and be an atomic scientist or something.

Laura: When he went off to college, Jack found an identity he hadn’t gone looking for. While he was at Duke, he encountered a campus ministry called Intervarsity, which expanded his scientific understanding of the world to include a spiritual one, too.

Jack: My undergraduate background was not religion or theology. Unless I had come to believe that the Jesus that I read about in the Bible a was actually a historical human being, crucified by the Romans, raised bodily from the dead on what we now call Easter Sunday morning and appeared to disciples and so forth, I would have to believe that actually the laws of physics and chemistry are the ultimate arbiters of truth and of the final and only truth. So the ultimate truth is either the second law of thermodynamics and entropy on the one hand, or it's the resurrection of Jesus on the other.  

I think if I didn't believe the resurrection was true, I would be an atheist or a Buddhist. I still believe that it's true in spite of all the flaws in my life,  in my family, in my school, in my religious tradition, I still think that that story is a good story and the true story and the most comprehensive story. I would say that my faith gives me hope. 

Laura: Jack never completely let go of that scientist part of himself. After seminary, he was was hired as a theology and ethics professor at Gordan-Conwell seminary, and that blend of science and religion has made him a great teacher. Forty-six years later he’s still there. 

But only in the last decade has Jack begun to realize that the rifts in his personal identity could connect him with the larger divisions he saw all around him.

Jack: I can really identify with a lot of seminary students, especially second generation Korean and Chinese students who come to study with us trying to figure out their identity and their histories. 

The irony is that one of my daughters, Elizabeth, who is now working for the National Security Council, is fluent in Mandarin, can read, write, and speak Mandarin. So she has reconnected with that piece  of the family ethnic heritage that I'm only partly connected with.

Laura: This partial connection Jack feels is what Zahra calls "ancestral fractures." It's the feeling that comes when you’ve missed the opportunity to learn about your history and connect with the people who came before you. It’s what Jack feels when he thinks about the questions he never asked his dad about his time at Pearl Harbor. It’s the depth of relationship and cultural connection he never got to have with his mom before she died, or even with his sister who is a country and a life away in L.A.

Zahra: When something gets fragmented, it can be discouraging to piece things back together on your own. This happens in so many ways: the death of loved ones, the reduction or destruction of a homeland, the absence of hereditary history or a common language, forced separation from family and community members. That metaphorical and physical disjointedness leaves us with questions and no way to get answers. 

Ancestral fractures represent incompleteness. Like Jack, I didn't have the opportunity to ask my grandparents about their stories. On one side, we had a language barrier because I didn't speak Chinese and on the other, we didn't share enough time together before they passed away. Without having an assured history to recall, it's hard to feel like a complete member of our respective cultures.

Laura: As Zahra got older, that understanding of ancestry unraveled in a new way. Zahra started mapping out her family history, but information on genealogy databases suddenly stopped after her great-grandparents. Zahra's Chinese grandparents lived in New York and didn't speak the same language. Even when her family moved from Georgia to Florida, her grandparents on her father's side lived several hours away and weren't healthy enough to recount their history. When they passed away over a decade ago, Zahra felt like they took their stories of her Black and Native American lineage with them.

Zahra: Now that I'm older, I know that I don't owe anyone any explanations about who I am or how I came to be. When I enter a space I bring my identities with me, individually and in conjunction with each other. I still experience curiosity about who I am, but I'm allowing myself to prioritize my own curiosity and understanding of my identity first. 

College was bittersweet. I spent all four years of school on various executive and organizing boards for student identity groups, my sophomore year I was the Vice President of the Asian Students' Alliance and as a junior, I was the President of the Mixed/Biracial Students' Alliance. I loved fostering a community with my friends and even if we weren't in the same identity organization, we still celebrated each other. But as an underclassman, I'd be stretched thin because there were so many groups I could be a part of. Because I was a student-athlete, had a work study job, and a part of a groove society, I had to be decisive about what meetings I attended. Suddenly, I was being asked why I was more involved in some groups over the other, as if I prioritized one identity over others, and it really rotted my enthusiasm. Despite the nuanced discussions I would lead during general body meetings and the movements I initiated within the school's athletic department, it still wasn't enough.

Laura: While Zahra was leading student organization politics, Jack was encountering them as a professor.

Jack: The student government put on a lunchtime forum in which several African-American students, Latino students were telling about their experiences, both on campus and in surrounding communities. Being followed in a store, because it's assumed if you're black, you're going to be stealing something so experiences like that. 

To hear their stories was part of my education process.  I think recent events have made us aware of prejudice against Asian Americans. they have said, well, look we too have been, othered, misunderstood, mistreated and disrespected. My own background has made me more empathetic to the way they view functioning in a predominantly white institution. I can now have a greater appreciation for many of our second generation Korean students at the seminary who say, "Well, look, we have our own issues too."

But to be very honest and confessional here—we live a very sheltered and insulated experience living in Hamilton, Massachusetts on Boston's North shore, which is at least 98% white.  

Laura: Jack started having conversations with his colleagues, people he’d never realized were having a different experience than he’d had.

Jack: People that live in Massachusetts like to think of themselves as being very progressive, but some of the words and slurs he has suffered on multiple occasions in Beverly were just appalling and very hurtful. In retrospect, I realize now that there were certain things about being a black scholar in a predominantly white evangelical institution, and even more recently, some conversations I've had with another one of my colleagues, who's a Korean American and some of the experiences that he has had. 

Laura: Jack is half-Chinese, and so it hadn’t occurred to him that his experience as a professor was different from the experiences of other people of color. But hearing those experiences made him realize that he’d had a proximity to whiteness that had protected him from a lot of the racism his colleagues and students had experienced. 

Jack: We had some deeper conversations. The steady drip of personal lived experiences, their sharing with me some of their experiences, not only in white culture, but also in predominantly white institutions, was an eye-opener. To hear their stories . . . that was part of my education process. 

Zahra: I didn't want to write my senior thesis about myself. Actually, I really pushed back on it when I met with my advisors because I was like, "That's just about me, that's not interesting. Who cares?" 

It's one thing to share the pieces of myself with people I know and trust, but I felt like I was revealing and exploiting my identity for the sake of the story. 

My advisors reframed my thinking, telling me to think less of this as an autobiography but more like an opportunity to illustrate why I see the world the way I do. I could write as transparently as I wanted to, but only I could give permission for people to read my whole story. Not only that, but it wasn't my job to make people understand my story. 

Once I internalized that, I gave myself permission to care less about disingenuous conversations focused on pinning down my background when there were others who did see my multiracial identity, but it wasn't the only thing they saw.

Laura: When we hear about systemic racism—in the church, in our schools, in our country—it’s hard to know where to begin in undoing the damage. It’s a wound that can’t easily be healed. But for both Jack and Zahra, the first and most important part of that process comes down to listening. 

Jack: Being an empathetic listener is probably one of the most important skills you can have as a religious leader pastor. If you cannot listen you're not going to be very helpful in terms of the spiritual growth of the people in your flock.

A lot of our theological students are trained how to speak, to talk, to teach, to preach—(but) not how to listen. In a friendship marriage, family, church, or an NGO, listening is a hugely important leadership qualification. 

It's just a good way  to grow and teach a course in comparative religion. And of course, Judaism is a piece of that. I've remembered a statement by a Hasidic Rabbi saying, “look, a good rabbi is willing to learn from even the most poorly educated Jew. You have something to learn.” And of course, in the rabbinic tradition, it's a very text-oriented, very learned, high education standards but the humility to listen to someone different . . . because I think some of us are coming to realize here that all white people aren't politically or socially homogeneous and neither are all black people politically, religiously, or socially homogeneous either. So to actually listen to the person that you're talking to can be very interesting and therapeutic for us all.

Laura: Zahra experienced this firsthand not in the classroom, but with an Uber driver heading to the train station. 

Zahra: It was November break and I was running late to the train station, and my driver was a little fidgety. I got in the car and the driver immediately asked me where I was from. I felt that familiar pang of exhaustion that I experienced a lot on my mostly-white campus. I said I was from Florida—not the answer he was seeking—but it didn't deter him. He said that my school was outside of his usual route, but he picked me up because of my name. 

As my driver told me that Zahra was a common name in West Asia and North Africa, where he was from. I realized that he was excited to talk to me and hear my history. I felt bad telling him that I wasn’t actually from either area, and for a moment he was silent. But then he said, "That's okay." He told me that his family had lived in this area because it was a sanctuary city, a city that protects people from being deported illegally. 

We talked about how isolating it was to be somewhere new and to not see anyone who shared your origins, or to be asked probing questions, or to just be ignored. He said he usually avoided picking up college students because they could be rude—or worse, silent. It was rare that he met someone who was genuinely interested in his story.

At the end of the ride, my driver asked me if I knew what my name meant.

I told him I know my name is Swahili and it means "flower" or "flowering". It was chosen by both of my parents because it reflected both of their lineages because, like other women on my mother's side of the family, I'm named after a flower. 

But for my driver, he knew my name as Arabic and that in that language, it does mean "blossom", but it also means "bright". He said that it fit, I was the first student to be interested in and actively listen to his story. That made his day a little brighter. 

When he said my name in Arabic, he said it in a way that was familiar to him but new to me. When I hear people say my name differently than the way I say it, it normally triggers memories of people mutilating how they say  "Zahra", like Zahara, Zara, and Sarah, and never changing what they say, no matter how many times I correct them. But this situation wasn't humiliating or degrading. Actually, it was okay. 

I grew up with a strong sense of self but in this moment, I realized that my driver was seeing a different version of me. He didn't uncover something new within me, but he did leave me with new considerations about what people hear when they're truly listening to me. He took my fragmented identity and sewed in another, different meaning of my already-complicated name and for once, I didn't want to rip out the seams.

Being encouraged to talk to someone who actually wants to listen doesn't only create a safe space, but it preserves an enthusiastic history—not just for ourselves, but for future generations.

Laura: In his often-quoted poem, song of Myself, Walt Whitman wrote,

The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?

Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,

(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?

Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

I know Whitman probably wasn’t thinking about multiracial identities when he wrote this poem, but I think he was thinking about identity and the fractures that end up shaping us.

The past and the present wilt, we contradict each other and ourselves, we contain so many versions of ourselves, some of them truer than others. But when we talk honestly about who we really are, when we walk with others and speak with them before they are gone, we become large. We learn to listen.

As we were working on this episode, Zahra pointed out that by preserving a bit of Jack’s story, I’m offering my own kids a path back to their own Chinese ancestry. 

When Zahra listened to that Uber driver tell his story, she gave him a path to recount his own story from North Africa to New York. When Jack listened to his colleagues who had experienced racism inside and outside of the seminary, it gave them a path to expose their own wounds—but it also began to change Jack’s experience of his own identity not just as a part-Chinese man, but as an American and even as a Christian.

Jack: I'm still on a learning curve. I think this has been sort of a—not a Damascus road experience—but sort of a steady little drip, both through personal experiences, but also reading. As an academic, sometimes the most important thing that happens to me in a day is a book or an article I have read. 

Laura: Jack is a scholar to the bone, and so he began reading everything he could get his hands on—not just about racism toward Asians, but about our country’s history of racism in general. He was shocked by what he learned, particularly when it came to racism within the church. 

Jack: What I've been reading in the last five years has changed my perception of race. 

James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree and Black liberation theology  has shown me that the white version of gospel and the Christian story is not the whole story. I feel that the Jesus and Bible orientation by predominantly white theological tradition needs to recover the pieces of the gospel preserved in the Black church of America. 

Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman was a book which Martin Luther King carried with him and read and re-read frequently. Reading Thurman reminded me that Jesus was not a member of the privileged class. Jesus was not like the apostle Paul, a Roman citizen. And in terms of social class, he didn't have the social standing of a priest or a Levi, much less a member of the Sanhedrin. He was unordained. He did not have a college degree. He did not go to seminary and his father was a builder or a carpenter. Reading that book helped me to see Jesus and the religion that Jesus founded through a lens of social class, which oftentimes is underrepresented in a lot of academic theology, which in my trade has been predominantly white, European, and upper middle class.

Laura: Zahra is a scholar, too. Over the course of the next couple of years after that Uber ride, Zahra developed the term “ancestral fractures” to describe that pain of feeling disconnected from that ancestry. 

Zahra: Deciding to write a thesis that centered ancestral trauma was kind of heartbreaking, especially  when I realized that I needed to name the specific disconnect I was feeling from departed loved ones and that their departure deeply affected how I saw myself. But the thing is, an ancestral fracture isn't a complete break. 

Just like a skeletal fracture, you have to be okay with staying still wherever you are right now. We can't resurrect the people we have lost or recover documents that are irreparably damaged, but we can tell stories. The people in our lives right now still have invaluable stories to share and ways to listen, you just have to be willing to pull out a recording device, sit down, and have a conversation. Ancestral fractures do mend, they might not be completely healed at the same time as us, but sharing our histories starts the process.

Laura: For both Jack and Zahra, listening and learning the histories outside of them has been just as important as learning to tell their own.

Jack: Isabel Wilkerson, The Color of Other Suns (is) a wonderful read. She's done hundreds of first person interviews. And this book is all about the amazing human history stories of about 6 million African-Americans who migrated from the Jim Crow South beginning around the first world war through about 1970. It's been one of the great internal migrations of human history and taking selected people from Mississippi, from Alabama, from Atlanta, Georgia, and followed their lives as they migrated and searched for jobs in Detroit, or went to Harlem, or Los Angeles. From my very sheltered vantage point, I could think about race and racial issues in categories, black and white, or in terms of issues, racism, or discrimination or policing or whatnot. But what the book by Isabel Wilkerson has done for me as to give me not just the voices, but the inner feelings of people that I have never met in which I do not meet in my predominantly white nice suburban Eastern Massachusetts town. 

I think history is so important. I’ve realized that my own understanding of American history has been very skewed and selective. In the last five years or so, I've been reading more in terms of critical race theory and so forth and , learning to appreciate terms like white fragility, for example, and white privilege and white supremacy. 

There's a lot of history about American racial history which is not understood in my community. Americans in general who think they know a lot about race jump from Abraham Lincoln and the emancipation proclamation to Martin Luther King and the civil rights—and don't really know what was going on under reconstruction, especially Jim Crow . . .  what was happening before Rosa parks and Brown V. That a very important history which has convened to misshape our still residentially segregated society today. 

We're living in a hugely divided country, 

I agree with previous president, Barack Obama. He said until Americans have a common set of facts, we cannot have a united country.

I'm in total agreement with that. So in terms of a common set of facts, I think religious and non-religious people here, can we agree on a common set of facts and where we get our facts? 

I tell some of my students here that, in terms of truth, it's very helpful a to know your Bible B to know American history and C to be scientifically literate. Okay. So that there are scientific facts about how the world works. There are historical facts about what actually happened in the history of what is not called the United States of America, whose version of history. Which voices are we listening to? 

If I come to grips not with some mythologized version of my past, but with my real history, and acknowledging the exploitation perpetrated on black and native American people. I will be better off spiritually. 

Laura: Zahra has spent a lot of time thinking about how to heal fractures on both sides of the family.

Zahra: I had to challenge what we consider canonized history, like census reports, DNA tests, and other historical documents. For my senior thesis, I spent a month archiving the oral histories of both the matrilineal and patrilineal lines of my family, and yes, I think of them as branching lines instead of "sides" or fractionated identities to divvy up. It really excited all of my family - it had been ages since my grandparents spent Lunar New Year with my mother and it had been ten years since I had been in the same space as my aunts and uncles. I treasure a lot of what I learned about my history, but I don't think they realized that I was archiving the places we occupied together. In New York, the tiny apartment was crammed with seven bodies and perfumed with roasted chicken and mountains of white rice capped with saucy vegetables swimming in preserved pieces of duck egg. I can still feel the surrounding heat bubbling around oxtail stew in a tiny kitchen in Florida while laughter swarmed the front yard. I wasn't just savoring the stories, I was savoring the space my ancestors created.

Healing my ancestral fractures is more than revealing the lines of my history, it's about preserving the people who tell it.

Laura: Jack feels limited in a different way. Even as he’s learning and growing in his seventies, he knows that not everyone around him is ready to be challenged in the same way. 

Jack: I've realized that some of my more conservative Christian friends tend to get very defensive about history. And oftentimes when I have an opportunity, it will just be, very confessional, telling about my own learning curve and some of my own biography, growing up in the Jim Crow South because my very conservative white evangelical friends are committed to the concept of truth, an objective truth outside my mind here.

I'm finding that even to raise the question of reparations here introduces guilt induced defensiveness, not just white fragility but defensiveness  So I would want to frame the question of reparation strictly in matter of guilt. Let's talk about generosity. Let's talk about love of neighbor and who is my neighbor.

I have profited indirectly by the unjust actions of my predecessors. And I do believe as a Christian that God views me not simply as an independent individual, but also as part of a culture and a society in that have an obligation to care for my neighbors and for my fellow citizens and try to do what I can to level a playing field that has been unlevel for the last 400 years?

I should be willing to pay more taxes in order to have better education, healthcare, better access to housing for all people in this culture, not simply as a matter of strict justice, not because I'm strictly guilty of the sins of the past here, but out of a generosity and love of neighbor to try to do what I can to level the playing field.

Laura: For Jack, these realizations have come through listening—to colleagues, to the words he’s reading, to the histories he’s learning, and to the histories that are still unfolding. And in that listening, he’s found himself evolving in his understanding of both his faith and his politics.

Jack: George Floyd was a wake up call, Charlottesville, the murders in the Charleston church. I would say that it has pushed me toward a more progressive Understanding on matters of race and politics.  

And unfortunately in the history of American Christianity in the last hundred years, the political left and theological liberals have taken the social justice side of the teachings of Jesus, where as the political right and the theological conservatives have taken the personal piece, and especially sexual morality piece of the story. And I think both have a piece of this, but it's hard to talk across those political social and religious divides now. And so I think that the Christian Church, especially my evangelical pieces, needs to get more in touch with the original key kingdom message of Jesus here. 

Sincere people have sometimes got it wrong in terms of what the Bible was trying to teach her, what it wasn't trying to teach. So, in other words, we're talking about what philosophers would call epistemic humility. And I think again, that's oftentimes in short supply.

Jesus did not identify with any of the partisan political positions of his day. The message of Jesus was change your life, change your way of thinking.

The message is that God wants to rebuild a just community, where truth is told, where the poor are cared for, where people aren't put into prison here unjustly, where people care for widows and aliens and migrants here which the governing authorities, the politicians are people of good character. It's a just social order. 
One of my favorite columnists is David Brooks writes for the New York times and I've always remembered something that David Brooks said years ago.

And he said, look, if you really want to draw people to your movement, whether it's a religious movement or social justice movement, the best way to do that is not to preach at them or try to argue with them, but to build a community whose way of life they find attractive. 

And historians tell me that that's why the early Jesus movement grew from a tiny minority in the Roman empire become very large and influential and it wasn't through politics. It wasn't through programs, it wasn't through money. It actually wasn't through dynamic public preachers, it was building powerful communities. And those early Christians, by the way, felt that there was somehow a divine presence, a yes, a supernatural presence that you could feel it in the air okay. That they could not get elsewhere.

I think we have taken politics too seriously, and we should concentrate on being better followers of Jesus, focused on forming our own communities, where we tell the truth, where we keep our promises, where we care for each other and where we love our neighbors. 

Laura: 

Laura: In her conversation with Krista Tippett on the podcast On Being, civil rights legend Ruby Sales said,

“We live in a very diverse world, and to talk about what it means to be humans is to talk with the simultaneous tongue of universality and particularities. So, as a black person, to talk about what it means is to talk about my experience as an African-American person, but also to talk about my experience that transcends being an African American, to the universal experience. So I think we’ve got to stop speaking about humanity as if it’s monolithic. We’ve got to wrap our consciousness around a world where people bring to the world vastly different histories and experiences, but at the same time, a world where we experience grief and love in some of the same ways. So how do we develop theologies that weave together the “I” with the “we” and the “we” with the “I”?” 

For Zahra, developing a theology that weaves together love of our neighbors with experiencing each other’s histories with the understanding that what we appear to be is not all that we are has taken on the very simple, quiet form of presence. Of listening. Not to all of the voices outside her, but with the walls of her grandparents’ New York apartment.

Zahra: There are countless pictures of a tiny Zahra sitting in my grandfather's lap and even though our language barrier meant we didn't talk about much, I remember always feeling safe and loved. A part of sitting together was because there wasn't a lot of space in the apartment with a long hallway you had to squeeze yourself across because it was so stacked with generations of photographs and memories of everyone's childhood - my mother's and my own. Every evening, children's brazen laughter would harmonize with the sigh of buses lumbering across the street. Nothing has changed since I was born.
Even if you took the apartment out of the city, it would never be quiet. A part of me being Chinese is the noise; my language has up to nine different tones, my grandmother was attached to a portable radio that spouted daily news in a way she understands, and there's always a sharp hiss of something being steamed. Even if there was nothing to say, there was always sound.

When I outgrew my grandfather's lap, I sat on the couch. Ever since I was a kid, I would wonder what my life would have been like if we stayed up North. I wouldn't have just closed the distance between me and my grandparents, but maybe we could have crossed the language gap between us for good. But we had to sit in silence and I used to resent that space between us so much. I see it when everyone is volleying conversation across the dinner table, or when we have phone calls that can only last less than a minute.

Even though I can say "I love you" over the phone, it doesn't explain how I miss being with them. Technology can't recreate my grandfather's favorite chair groaning as he nods off, or the careful plinks of hot water pouring into my grandmother's mug. My grandparents used to be active - walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and back or bartering with stall owners for produce in Chinatown - but even as their health declines, they're still finding ways to shuffle around their apartment for me.

Every time I see my grandparents, even when I was young, they insist on standing up and walking to me. They always say I've gotten taller, ask if I've eaten yet, and squeeze my hand as if they're reminding themselves what it feels like to hold me again. The last time I saw my grandfather, he was recovering from a health ailment. When I surprised him, he started crying and I couldn't hug him or my grandmother as tightly as I wanted because I'm worried I'll break them. 

When I find my way to the couch, I see my grandparents. I can see that they're getting older and more frail, but they haven't changed that much since I was a child. When they look at me, they don't just see me as I am now. They see me at 18, at 13, at 8, all sitting in the same spot on the couch. There's no TV, but the city still whirs with noise and the linoleum still squeaks and the portable radio still delivers the news in a language I cannot understand. The same space I used to hate is now the thing we want the most. 

My grandparents and I can't say much to each other anymore - their memory is starting to fade and sometimes, it's too painful to stay awake. I never try to push them into conversation, so we sit together in silence. Sometimes it's interrupted by the clock announcing the hour or static gurgling from the radio, but it's still enough.

We can't speak the same language, but we belong together.

Support Credits:

As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, our little easter egg to thank you for sticking around—and I promise you, this one’s a good one. 

But first, . . . 
The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Zahra C. was our co-writer and editor for this episode, Nik Schaffer was our assistant producer, and Nathan Wizard was our audio editor. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 3 Kasama Collective trainees are Bethany Hawkins, Hannah Fowler, Meridian Watters, Nathan Wizard, Nikki Schaffer, and Zahra C. 

Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.

OUTTAKE: