- Please discuss the role that your faith and religious tradition play in your life and why you want to pursue a career in community organizing rooted in faith.
My faith is a practice of deep intimacy – to speak to it directly is to completely miss it; it is to make it platitude, cliché. I understand more and more why Jesus would speak in parables; why, when Jesus was questioned about being the Messiah, he could not answer their questions except to remind them that it was their decision to cast judgment not his.
I remember my audition for America’s Got Talent. Initially I was exceptional! Beyond all others I shined. Moving through the ranks I found myself on stage before the celebrity judges: David Hasselhoff watches Adam Hudson with enthusiasm! And standing I experienced utter rejection. I was the last performer for a dead audience and I was booed and mocked off-stage. It was utterly traumatizing to be rejected so blatantly – to reject the dream I thought I desired. I shared a beer with a rejected mime after the show; I did all the talking.
I also remember my COR application last year. I talked about my history growing up in the Bible Belt, my faith the New Testament Jesus, my rigorous collegiate studies in philosophy and religion, and my development in spirit, scholarship, and volunteerism in graduate school. I spoke about the institutions that inspired me to organize … and … I bored the hell out of myself. More than that, it was an application written by a man unable to confront his own healing, unable to get honest with himself about his addiction.
There is a great line from an artist called Feist that goes something like: “If you don’t want to be rejected then don’t audition.” That is not my faith. Jesus was able to live his life without fear of rejection because he was never auditioning; he was simply walking in the Spirit; Being One with the Father, Jesus still knew the difference between God’s business and his own. Jesus always withheld judgment of himself because that was God’s business. Where in the past I have obsessed about my rank, my health, my money, my work, my authority, my, my, my … the practice of my faith – of healing – has been one of surrendering to the power that bids me to life and breaths my next breath.
As a person of faith, a follower of Christ, I have deeply struggled with a contemporary world obsessed with judging one another. I often find myself with a spirit of resentment so heavy I have to consciously intervene with prayer and mediation. Bound to aggrieved communities I have suffered with them in the form of addiction. Healing from addiction is extraordinary work because it intervenes on judgment with love – it stands as a creative communal solution to systems where judgment has reigned. Not only that but the spirit of addiction reaches across social dividing lines. All of industrial society is addicted to consumerism in its multi-thorned dream.
Again, I have become aware that to truly heal and empower others through organizing I must heal myself. The great work at hand begins with the recognition that the individual is intimately bound up with the social and ecological worlds. I am the problem; as much as pollution poisons our biosphere I poison communities when I continually sink into privilege, ignore my calling, isolate my love, and betray my health.
Through faith I believe my dreams can heal from the wounds that thorns have continued to scar and fester. Through organizing I know I have a method to live my faith – to actualize divine dreams in a new world, because it will take a new world to live them.
