Thank you, Scott. I appreciate you taking the time to respond here, and am also grateful that you even found my posting of the incident to begin with.

My dissertation work in philosophy was actually on the question of race and racism, and I did both political and ethical work around questions of healthy relationships and interactions with others, how social categories (such as race) impact the ways we interact with others whether we intend them to or not, and how to facilitate greater self-awareness while also facilitating greater social awareness (and then striking a balance) around these issues and others that resemble them (so-called disabilities, gender, class dynamics, etc). The courses I taught in ethics always brought in these threads in various ways as well. In these ways, I have done work facilitating public discussions on these issues, teaching courses on them, encouraging public projects that work towards changing them, and giving talks as well.

In my experience, the first step is always learning to listen harder, listen better. Many of us are comfortable with the idea that we mean well, and wish to leave it at that for being a good person. It is my belief, however, that because of how social norms influence our understanding of other people–we simply are taught certain kinds of habits by our society no matter how we’ve grown up, not that these are the same for every person–we must actually actively work at being good to others. Even Jesus questions the society he was born into, and how that society would teach any of us to treat others. With this kind of view, actively working at being a better person means having to reconsider how we interact with those around us. One way to start to do this is listening with an openness that demands simultaneously challenging our own pre-conceived notions. By doing this our goal is to better understand who we are listening to. Additionally, to transform our own pre-conceived notions (calling them pre-conceived is already admitting to them being unintended in a way, instead they are simply habitual whether we are aware of them or not) we must be willing to do the often painful work of challenging ourselves to transform some of our core beliefs (though not all), because of how they may undermine the very goals of caring for others that we would otherwise wish to fulfill. These core beliefs are often aspects of ourselves we were simply trained into by our own well meaning care givers growing up, or by our own painful reactions to experiences we’ve had with others.

As I said already, however, learning to listen better seems to be the first step. I know that your church hosted a public discussion after the service this recent Sunday. That is a wonderful practice to take up, and I hope that you might encourage the church to continue to do so, but perhaps with different facilitators that might be skilled at encouraging gentle insight with grace, as we’ve both suggested. Gentle insight in the sense of helping people to see beyond their own comfort zone, their own habits–not to encourage discomfort, but to encourage people to see another persons’ experiences and point of view.

All of that said, I would wish to be careful in claiming that the original incident had become distorted. In explaining what I mean by that I want to make clear that I recognize your very good intentions in your comment here, and in your use of the word. It just also appears as a simple opportunity to respond to your question of what to do, and illustrate my point about examining our own assumptions while we practice careful listening.

My understanding of how this all occurred is that one of the two women that visited the church had an experience of being excluded, and went on to share that experience with others, which then led to it being reported online in multiple locations, and for a public response to be planned. I do recognize that the woman has since gone on to decide that her original experience of exclusion was not intended as a slight against her by the congregant she encountered, but was instead arising from that congregant trying to be helpful. However, this new understanding does not erase her original experience of exclusion. It simply changes now what she believes that experience meant for her. This is a complicated point but I believe an important one.

As the Presbytery has so wisely seen, and as I suggest here in my follow-up post–this incident could not have been seen as potentially racist if such anti-Native discrimination did not happen regularly. If anti-Native discrimination was not already a reality this incident would have been unrecognizable as such. My worry in using the word “distortion” here is that it implies such experiences of misunderstood discrimination are based simply on faulty perception, as if that means that once the misunderstanding is cleared up, then the original experience is simply therefore false. The reason I bring this up is to point out that there is another, more complicated picture that could be allowed here. Again, the context in which this interaction operates includes the long history of anti-Native discrimination being very real, and of it happening still today. In that sense, the woman visitors experience could not be claimed false, even if the congregant did not *intend* to exclude her in such a manner. Again, this is a complicated point and one quick aspect of it that I can put more simply is just that even if this particular incident is cleared up, we are still left with the messy context of racism honestly existing in our society, operating in this incident (even if unintended), and in this case specifically, and painfully, against Native peoples.

To be clear, I’m not trying to claim you intend to disregard the importance of this reality here. I understand that is precisely *not* what you intend. I’m simply wanting to talk here through the importance and relevance of recognizing subtle language and the habitual beliefs that can be implied by such subtle language. Racism is, at its core, a messy, unclear phenomenon. Even in cases where facts of an incident are clear, racism causes those facts to be harder to read, and also in a sense inadequate to the reality of the situation. That is, facts do remain true or false, and we still must always interpret the situation in which they occur. An unfortunate example is the recent Trayven Martin case–we would seem to have the facts of the case clearly laid out and at exactly the same time race interrupts any simple interpretation in a way that would seem to support the idea that his shooter may have been acting in self-defense, while at exactly the same time also having deeper beliefs that show that his preconceived ideas seemed to be impacting his ability to read his own safety accurately. If that is true, then self-defense was likely in actuality unnecessary, though it may have felt necessary to him at the time. The situation with John Williams, the Native carver in downtown Seattle who was killed by a police officer, is another dramatic example. These are cases that show we cannot pretend the situation and its ethical read reduce simply to a matter of fact. That is, human interaction is about more than mere fact–it is also about belief, perception, the larger social framework and norms operating in the particular context, etc.

With the basic facts of this original occurrence at the church being made clear, I happen to know without doubt that the congregant that was being helpful in this situation would have never intended to exclude these women, though her action was read in that way by one of the two women visitors. Still, the larger context remains important. The church has a unique opportunity to continue to think on its very real political position in the community at large. Even when what we want to focus on is our own spiritual life, and on the grace exemplified by Jesus Christ, we are still already also operating within a political context. Jesus’s own life is the perfect illustration of how spiritual life and political life both operate simultaneously. It can be hard to negotiate such a position because of how it feels as though we are always risking either failure or being misunderstood. At the same time, it also seems to be the best way to enact Jesus’s teachings in our own lives–to recognize that he was always simultaneously also both a spiritual and political leader, and that we are denying the complex reality of these lives God has given us if we try to ignore one for the sake of the other. Jesus shines as an example of how for any of us to truly act in grace we must tend to both our spiritual lives with god, and our political context with others–they are in many ways the same life. How we relate to others is a spiritual project and experience. In that way, it would seem by acting with care, daring to listen, daring to push ourselves past our own comfort zones, in order to shine only our best most sensitive selves, we have the opportunity to bring His grace into our interactions with others, into our larger communities.

I know your good church personally, and have a lot of faith in its greatest good. In fact, that faith is why I felt so compelled to write about this incident here. God’s love comes too in pushing each other to grow beyond the limitations we need not have. His grace is exemplified simultaneously in the reminder that what we do here does not matter (Ecclesiastes)–his grace always has time to reach us that we be forgiven–and also that we must always treat those we encounter, whoever they may be, as though they are angels or Jesus at our door (Matthew).

Thank you again for your thoughtful comment. I very much appreciate it.