Writing, Parenting, and Working in the Mess: Authentic Spirituality and Social Justice

Soon it will be Ohi Day (or maybe it is today?--I am forgetting whether Ohi Day is October 25 or 28!), the Greek holiday celebrating Metaxas' decision to say "Ohi," or "No," to Mussolini. According to the legend, Mussolini showed up at Metaxas' door one morning when Metaxas was still in his pajamas and said, "I'm going to take over Greece now." Ohi! Metaxas shouted, and that was the beginning of Greece's involvement in World War II. Of course it didn't really happen that way, but that's the version I heard as a child. I have spent much of the last three weeks saying no. No, don't leave Morris, please stay and fight, I said to the victims of a recent race-related hate crime in Morris (still unsolved). No, I won't stand for a bias incident reporting system that doesn't work, I told our administration (thankfully, it is in the process of being fixed). No, I won't stand for the administration's silence about the re...

Two questions I have been pondering lately, both of which came to me in a dream from my grandmother, who spoke in perfect English as she never had in life, pressing in against the cold, asking me: What is your life’s greatest regret? To what are you called to bear witness? Let me begin at the beginning, in September 2001, when the GLBT campus organization at the University of Minnesota, Morris, called Equality, nominated a gay man for Homecoming Queen. He wins in October of that same year; the student who is crowned king is also a gay man. Let me bear witness to what happens next. The letters to the paper, from farmers and ministers and out-of-town parents, saying hateful, horrible things: We are all going to hell. How dare we break such a sacred tradition. How dare we live in Morris. How dare we exist, period. Let me bear witness to the phone calls the student receives, hateful and threatening, and to the way he quietly leaves the campus and the town as a result, gives up on college a...