Loving Your Fate (even beneath fluorescent lights and drop ceilings)
And mostly I'm just referring to the way that these cultural realities appear in the background of this photo collage. A photo collage that beautifully also celebrates many of the things about my life that I love very deeply.
In this picture I'm standing in front of a classroom pull-down screen where I just showed a video essay about the surrealist filmmaker, Luis Buñuel. I'm (excitedly) talking about the series of films we'll watch, focused on how the rule of the Fascist dictator, Franco impacted Spanish culture and Spanish films. We're about to compare a fantasy film, an animated biographical film, a documentary and a melodrama. I'm wearing one of my ancient thrift store suit coats and I'm gushing about how exciting it is to watch films like these and reflect about our own cultural identify and modes of engaging difference. So many things that I love lurking in this picture.
For me, this screenshot is an emblem of how I love my job.
I teach at a University where I have had a full time tenured job for many many years. My teaching focuses on how popular culture interfaces with our lives and the public good. I invite students to understand in broader, more systemic ways how media systems work in tandem with many other cultural forces to (re)produce our deeply held values, to ferment social change, and to gestate our senses of personal and collective identity.
In other words, I invite them to watch movies, play video games, read books and use social media in a way that will deepen and enrich their days, their development, their relationships and the ways they engage in world-building of their own. What an extremely lucky way to make a living.
And if that were the only thing that I did to make a living? I would be living in a fantasy. It is the part of my job i love most, but my job -- like most of your jobs is much more full of administrative, bureaucratic attentiveness to the demands of the institution, various disciplines, accrediting agencies, government expectations, numbers, reports, emails, new rules, old rules, fixing glitches, informing constituencies...
(I could go on, but hopefully you get the idea.)
Yesterday, I listened to a wonderful podcast episode by my three favorite Jungian analysts about how vital it is that we learn to love our worlds. (Amor Fati - love your fate)
They talked about loving the world we actually live in - instead of the worlds we wished we lived in or the worlds we fantasize about living in.
They explained Jung's idea that when we don't understand the darkness (the shadow) in our own selves, often that shadow will constellate in the world around us.
Our world will be full of the darkest evils that we can imagine -- but much of the suffering we experience in these moments is due to the fact that we don't recognize the way that these precise evils also exist inside of us.
The podcast was so full of inspiring ideas that I can't possibly include them in this post but one of them (Joseph) talked about the way that Jung suggested we can avoid this external crisis -
"Those gravitational forces [of psyche] can be satisfied when they are recognized in consciousness so that they don't need to constellate concretely [...] When I am being a "yes-sayer" to the contents inside of myself, the unconsciousness can manifest in the inner world and feel just as satisfied as if it had manifested outside of your front door. It just needs to manifest somewhere. In order for that to happen, we need to have some kind of embracing welcome for those images and that information. We can't hate the world - inner or outer -- and expect to have any a sense of clarity and truth about it. "
(Episode 204 Amor Fati: Love of One's Fate, beginning at 15:33)
I think almost all of us struggle to love all the parts of ourselves and all the aspects of the world we inhabit.
As I reflected on the wisdom in the podcast -- it helped me think more clearly about how I have struggled to love some parts of my world.
Besides the bureaucracy and mundane labor, there is another TENSION that figures strongly in my feelings toward my job. It grows from the fact that I was born and raised to be a fundamentalist Baptist preacher's son. This was profoundly at odds with the fact that I am and have always been queer.
For the majority of my life, this tension created enormous guilt, self-loathing, fear, anxiety and many negative relational patterns.
In the past decade, as I came out to family, friends and many others, and as I spent lots of time in therapy, reading books and talking to many wise and kind people, most of the air seeped out of that particular tension and I have started to learn how to accept myself, and, as Jesus taught, love my neighbors as myself.
It sound as if the TENSION I spoke of affected my faith and my personal relationships -- not my job. But unfortunately, it has affected both.
I teach at a University that identifies with a religious group who identify as "Evangelical Friends" (Quakers). I experienced the expansive spirit of the "Friends" side of the equation for many years, but recently the cultural aspects of the "Evangelical" side has become a much more prominent part of my professional experience.
So the tension I experienced relative to faith was bound together with my job expectations.
When I came out, I did experience a great deal of negative emotion toward the ways that religion felt like:
- a force that denigrated me,
- distorted the Bible to support discrimination,
- taught me to lie,
- rallied public sentiment against people like me.
I'm grateful though that I also quickly I met many queer people (and allies!) who had found a way to celebrate the goodness of Christianity WHILE standing against oppression.
Much of the tension I felt about identifying as Christian dissipated.
However in the last year I've felt the professional tension ratchet up significantly. The University recently forced a gay faculty member to resign because she wanted to marry her partner. For several years, the University had been working very hard to become a more inclusive and welcoming place for LGBTQ+ students, the affiliated church had been growing stronger and more vocal in its stance against LGBTQ+ people. The dichotomy between these two realities became much more pronounced suddenly.
For years, I've been out to any of my close friends or colleagues on campus, but I've stopped short at making any public statements about being a queer person. My reasons for this choice were both complicated and personal.
For Jung, Amor Fati -- loving your fate -- meant being reconciled, grateful and fully accepting of your world: your inner world and your outer world.
Listening to this podcast helped me remember that this is in fact a place I've already arrived. I do love being a queer man. I love being Christian. I love learning about media and culture. I love introducing students to big ideas and helping them improve their gifts. I love working with good-hearted colleagues to shape curriculum and help students understand their callings.
I too graduated from an evangelical college (Baptist). There were no gay people there (except me, I thought).
And that is one of many reasons why I never had a single substantive conversation with a self-accepting, self-respecting queer person until I was in my thirties. It wasn't just that I didn't have queer role models -- it was that the straight-washing of my world was so thorough and vigorous I couldn't even muster an imagination of how to admit or acknowledge that I was (secretly) a queer person.
And so I do understand why so many queer evangelical kids flee the world they were born into, some before and some after attending an evangelical university. I also understand why so many of them hide and lie about this tension that they experience (like I did). And with all of those people in mind? I can see much more clearly the goodness of staying.
Queer kids will keep being born into worlds that won't acknowledge them, so I love being just present and bearing witness to the idea that it is possible to love your world AND to love the world within you, too.
This doesn't feel like a "coming out" post to me, because one of the things I have learned since "coming out" started for me -- is that the process of talking about something that has so long been a silent part of my life? Feels like a healing kind of integration. It's not a revelation. It is an invitation to the listener to engage more deeply.
And maybe this is what it means to you, too, as you choose to love your fate -- the world you actually live in and your internal world. Love begets love and our capacity to know and share ourselves more fully is borne out of this love.
Even under the drop ceilings and fluorescent lights.
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