A is for things I don't know

Ahistorical, Aethical, Atypical, anthropomorphism, analogical predication, axiological grid, blah blah blah.
School is what it is. School.
Give me patience Lord.

Domination: A Persistant Resistance to Lies

Hello my name is Zeke Allen, I have yet to be sober for any amount of time but I am here and that is worth something I guess. I have participated, propagated and been subjugated to the powers of domination. Through years of enculturation, both consciously and subconsciously, it has seeped into my being and now I am left to sort through my mess and begin some spring cleaning.
In our country and world, radicals are killed. By radicals I mean, those that refuse to give in to and consciously rebel against oppressive systems. I am part of some of these systems of oppression. Within the Christian church at large, anyone who speaks against institutional Christianity in a way that threatens its power is demonized and considered a heretic. For instance, as I begin to find my voice as an advocate for scandalous grace I am met with much opposition. I have become a staunch advocate for the voice and rights of women. My wife is a female pastor who has continually been subjected to demeaning, misconduct by her male peers and to a much larger construct those within the communities she serves. A few examples of peer oppression are: (1) dress- female pastors are constantly judged and weighed by their appearance and clothing. If a female embraces her femininity and wears clothes that fit she is considered a slut or racy, if she is overweight and wears loose clothes she is considered a slob, if she cries she is considered over-emotional and unable to adequately execute any judgments needed for successful leadership, if she is overpowering people are put off because “women just shouldn’t be that strong”; (2) voice- too soft and you are being seductive, too sarcastic and you are a “bitch”, too insightful and you are dangerous, too loud and you are egotistical, and too radical and you must be put in your place; (3) tolerance- it is generally acceptable that women should just “tolerate” inappropriate comments regardless of their origin or overtone; and finally (4)family- people find it almost impossible to believe that a woman can be both a great mom and a great professional.
I am a heterosexual male and am beginning to find my voice as a staunch supporter of gay and lesbian acceptance and empowerment within the church. This is so threatening to the church institution and somehow to the greater political system that it just makes people mad that I would even tolerate such “people” much less accept them as one of us. It is not enough to “tolerate” and to be silent, for this is in effect to agree with any oppressive system you see occurring. It is doubly offensive to become aware of a system of oppression and remain silent on the matter. Apathy is one of the greatest diseases within our American society today. To do nothing is to approve and that, for me, is no longer adequate or permissible.
I have participated in the domination system in so many ways. I know there are many of which I am yet unaware of but the following are a few that I am now aware of. I am survivor of sexual abuse and yet I have been a minimal advocate for others who have yet to find any voice and even greater who feel isolated and powerless. I realize that my inaction and my voicelessness have propagated the system that silences the voices of the abused for fear that we might as a society become aware of the crisis of abuse in our communities. As one in ministry among this society, I have allowed the voices of peers, who advised me to not ever share my story the power over preventing me from sharing my story in hope that it might empower others to voice theirs. I have, in past relationships both intimate and friendships, participated in the systematic hierarchy of males and females as I interacted quite differently with males and females. I gave males more voice and more power thus allowing them more influence in my life and my choices. I have participated in the myth of redemptive violence by initially advocating the “war on terror” blindly following the “leaders” of our country. I have further participated in this myth by placing my children in front a TV that advocates violence- in particular MMA. My family recently attended a wrestling match of one of my students. My three year old son leaned over to me and asked “when are they going to start hitting each other?” That hit me hard knowing that I had exposed him to the myth that beating each other up was a sport and acceptable. Most of all, I have been silent. I have allowed apathy and fear prevent me of finding my voice and acting on that which so often burns inside of me.
We resist the domination system and its myth of redemptive violence by action and voice. We must, as awake and sober people, pursue a persistent resistance to all injustice which comes into our view. We must sensitize ourselves first and then put words to our ideologies and then action to this purpose. We must combat apathy and act with hope in justice. Even when failure seems imminent, we must engage in a persistent resistance for all those around us who go about life unaware and apathetic to the lies they are being fed.
Are we really free? Again, my name is Zeke Allen and I will seek a persistent resistance to systematic domination. I won’t be put down, silenced even if I am let down, kicked out and shut out. I will not go away. If a door closes, I will find a window to crawl through. “Hope comes in the morning. Today and every one after that I will tenaciously seek awareness and action. My prayer and mantra shall be: “Open my eyes, set my feet on justice’s path and let me pursue truth beyond comfort”.

Poo-pooing Peace

Hi, my name is Zeke and I am an addict. I am addicted to intensity and because of my addiction I have not modeled or embodied peace nor the art of just "being" in any moment.
This blog is entirely for my own benefit. I consider it a journey of self-reflection and self-therapy. This reality of intensity is a mixed bag for me. It has afforded me the luxury of advancement and respect among many of my peers and collegiate acquaintance's. On the down side, it has cost me many dear friends, much pain in my marriage, and years of lost joy and happiness. I have been unable to enjoy and rest in the blessings that I have experienced personally along with the miracles experienced around me.
Intensity among the corporate world is a valued commodity. It is equated with drive and embodies the tenacious American ideal which has driven our country to success. It is elevated as a trait from our earliest years. Intensity and drive is encouraged among all academia and valued so greatly among the business world that to be lacking in this area is to be less than the best among peers.
Even though I am intense, I am beginning to realize that this is a bunch of CRAP! A huge pile of smelly, stinking, rotting CRAP! Yet again we have been sold a wolf in sheep's clothes and we have put it on, proud, and pompously so as to gloat about our advancement and achievements.
Yet again I have been lied to by my culture, by my schooling, and even by my church. The priority of intensity consumes the capacity for wholeness. This reality has left us all broken, unbalanced, and unwittingly numb to the necessity of the lost art of just "being".
As with all my confessions I try to address the why. Why have we, as a society and people, bought into the belief that intensity and drive is the quintessential characteristic for success and happiness in the world? Is it because those with the most drive most often outwork and out-advance others of less drive? Is this reality because our companies and economics have been structured to elevate such character?
What motivates this tenacious drive? BTW- these are lies!
(1) Money. Pure adulterous money. This, so that we can buy stuff, gain economic status. Lessens the increase happiness and joy? Love and quality of life? Relationships?
(2) Renown. Our vanity requires the acceptance and respect of others even to the point that our personal image is dependent on the approval of peers and co-workers.
(3) Stuff. The person with the most and biggest toys is the winner. We are taught this from the earliest ages. We long for the toys our neighbors have that are better and bigger than ours. While we play pong on a commodore 64 our neighbor plays rock band on their X box 360 and it makes us crazy that this "injustice" and "in-equality" is "oppressing" us.
(4) Love. The more we have materialistically, the more people will love and admire us.
So what is the truth? What is the reality that we need to know to be content, happy, and joyous?
Let me diverge a minute... I have been afforded the opportunity over the last 13 years of ministry to serve in many different capacities in the mission field. This service was locally, regionally and globally. I have seen extreme poverty in all of these areas. What is almost beyond my comprehension is the happiness and joy that is present among the very poorest of people I meet. What gives? This is so beyond anything we are taught and affirmed in the world. Every trip I go on where I experience joyous people who have so little I find myself lost in a sea of self-discernment. My enculturated idealism's shattered and my mind whirling with the in-your-face reality that has challenged the very core of my belief system.
Action...
Remember. When I return to the everyday world I live in- my nice, relatively wealthy, suburban church and life I must remember. Remember the joy, remember the conditions that I found joy and the persons who lived the joy.
Confront the lies. I must confront my intensity and drive with a idled presence which demands silence and carves out bustle. I have to name the demons of my own life. My desire for cool clothes- vanity at its best. The best woodworking tools- people did what I do by hand forever so I need to get over it. My desire to spoil my kids with toys- dolls and race tracks. To play, play, play, play with my family. To pray, pray, pray for others. To listen twice as much as I talk. To rest, idle, and listen in silence for nothing in particular. To read more. To think less. To be content with B's, mediocrity, and to allow failures even if it means it costs me face. To be courageous enough to let people see me fail. To be brave enough to trust another to be my friend, even if they make me mad and disappoint me. To smile even though I have bad teeth. To laugh at myself even when I totally screw things up. To worship however, whenever, and unaltered by those around me. To speak truth and live peace. To rest. To love. To live without the need for success, validation, or even self-glorification. To make things more about others than myself.
As I begin this work, I am mindful that knowledge is the fist step to recovery. Now I know and so I can never go back. I have no pie in the sky lofty ideas about instantaneous completion. This will be a life and beyond work but one of greatest importance. I pray for the Spirits guide and eyes which are wide-open to the opportunities to embody such things.
I will no longer promote nor affirm the self-glorifying characteristic of intense tenacious living. Just be. Love. These things are how we will truly live. So yet again I am a work in progress. One day at a time.

My unfortunate contribution to moral degredation

Hi my name is Zeke and I am a co-conspirator in the degradation of human morality.

I think that is about how it would begin. FYI- this one is gonna hurt.

We live in a time today when green is in- it's about freakin time! Everyone is beginning to be concerned about their biological footprint and the biological footprint left by our economic factories and the like. I am excited to see what amazing scientific advances spring forth in the dawn of crisis arising up in our planet. It is going to be amazing and hopefully miraculous because if it is not we are all in for deep, deep trouble. While this topic and others like it offer significant demand for blogger's, I am of no help to this intellectual endeavor. However, I feel completely obliged to engage, through my own discovering, the ethical and moral imprint we each leave on humanity. To discover what positive and what negative imprints I may have left in the past and through this journey to determine how my future actions might change for the better.

Beyond our seemingly inconsequential time on earth is a footprint in humanity. We, whether we like it or not, influence others. This influence may very well be unconscious or transparently out in the open but there is, nonetheless, influence. As I contemplate on the current moral state of the country, faith, and world that I live in, I am painfully aware. I am aware that, while our cognition towards moral in-propriety is more knowledgeable than ever, our belief in the single actions contributed by one individual toward moral change is seemingly inconsequential to the betterment of the whole. This has resulted in an apathetic and couch-potato morality that we are all a part of- like it or not.

Self-disclosure time. I am, unfortunately, a part of this decay. I am part of the do nothing crowd- by the way this is a euphemism because to do nothing is to do something which in and of itself is horribly troubling. I have sat on the sidelines and let choices, religious, political, and more, go by without ever giving voice to their moral implications. To do nothing is not only to imply approval it is to validate others to have the authority to make decisions and enact statutes however malign they may be.

How? I was raised up in a great family with loving parents. We handled conflict by not talking about it. My parents were poor farmers and that left little time or energy for political or social justice involvement. We did well to subside. I grew up in a small town with no immersion in the potential for change from a vocal minority. It was as it always was and would always be that way or so it seemed. This is tapestry with which I began to paint my life post-high school. I spent all of college growing spiritually as I discovered the hunger deep inside of me for God and for deepening a life in the Spirit and in community with others of like assent.

I feel powerless. Powerless to change anything even within my local church which might generate a more reconciling posture towards all people of all backgrounds. I hunger so much for a church that is postured this way. Yet, among injustice even within my church, I have done little to nothing. Through my actions, I have become the most vile of people- neither hot nor cold but lukewarm (rev 3:16). I have done nothing in the sight of injustice.

I have done nothing to participate, generate, or empower others to stand up in the midst of ethical and moral infraction and cry out for justice and demand grace for all peoples. To my female friends, I have allowed my silence to slurs and oppression contribute to the encultered subjugative dynamics of females within society. To my gay and lesbian friends, I have allowed my fear of employment and controversy to prevent me from crying out for what I see to be clearly Gospel which accepts all peoples, regardless of their sexual orientation. I have allowed my Hispanic brothers and sisters to be marginalized and oppressed by not speaking up and not educating myself of their language so that I might bridge the lingual gap which causes so much infraction upon their normative social rights. I have done nothing to stand up for my young brothers and sisters in ministry that continue to scream out for change and for reform and for grace even as I see numerous passionate people and peers drown in the bureaucracy as their passions ebbs to disenfranchisement. To the abused, I have been silent of my own history and this has neither validated your own pain or offered you any hope of a future story. I have, through silence, allowed you no alternative but to keep quiet, no window to see the other side of silence and no road to help you track someone on the journey out. For this I am most sorrowful.

I have contributed by doing nothing. For this I am ashamed. I hope to grow into my voice. I yearn to stand up in the midst of the exclusiveness and demand inclusion. I seek to vocalize the needs of those who cannot find their own voice and to become a reckoning figure in the battle for the inclusion of all peoples into society and to a greater extent the church. I will aspire to speak even when it makes people angry. To hear even when it means I will be one of the accused and to act beyond my comfort and be somebody. To be somebody who refuses to do nothing!

Confessions- Subjugation of Women

Hi. My Name is Zeke Allen. I have been sober for one minute but will return again very soon. I admit that I am powerless over my sins and I bare them with the hope that they will lose power over me and my life the more I speak and write of them. I have participated both consciously and to a greater extend subconsciously to the subjugation of women including but not limited to: my wife, all the women who are my family and friends, all women who are acquaintances, co-workers and the like.



Purposed goal-setting leaves little room for accommodation. We see from whence we stand and that is most often tunneled. Vision, as we in America say of one with great leadership, means also lack of vision. It is the yen with the yang. Let me expound. When a visionary sees that to which they are to be/ reach/ aspire to there is no peripheral view other than the avenues by which others can help attain that vision. Perspective is everything and nothing.



I have come to loath and awe at the concept of perspective. On one hand, perspective allows a human to be sensitized to the views, pains, and joy of another person. It can go so deep as to see with their eyes the world and thus gain yet another angle of life and its surrounding. It is a blessing such that a flat 2-D image can be given such life if it were made into 3-D.



On loathing, as we see with the eyes of others we also see and feel the pain of others and often the causality of that pain lay within something we personally or as a larger group have contributed toward bringing undisputed responsibility and consequential guilt. To see is to feel is to loath thyself.



Subjugation of women. One of the great unequals in the world throughout all cultures is male-dominance. People go to great lengths to preserve, grow, and deepen the human ideology that men are somehow supposed to lead all females. This is a LIE! I have been taught LIES! From my earliest years LIES!



A thought appears to me now in sobriety that screams- "On what floor of Hell itself did some great evil place this oppressive ideology into the minds of humanity and do so well to propagate its existence throughout history. I must admit that many women can outperform me in every aspect of my role as pastor, nurturer, care-giver, preacher, role model, parent, woodworker, musician, and healer.



I believe that most men seek to keep women oppressed: underpaid; overworked, unequal job placement, unequal advancement, enculturated idealism for the body; as the measure rather than mind and heart. After all it is more comfortable to have someone "under" you, that makes a person feel elevated and superior. Men oppress women for fear that they might get outclassed or even outworked by a woman- ego ego ego. Men oppress women to try to hold on to some sense of control. It is fear- the deepest most primal fear of men is that they can not be in some control of their destiny.



How have I participated? To all of these and much much more and unfortunately at many times in my life I have been a co-conspirator in oppression. My insensitivity to the cultural oppression of women, my unawareness of the powerlessness young females feel over their boyfriends and older women over their husbands. I have failed to be an advocacy for inequality. To say nothing is to approve and that is one of the greatest ills one can serve up. Silence is a cancer that spreads throughout humanity. For some reason I have believed that to be silent is better than speaking up- now I question "Better for Who?"


How have I come to see? Being a Christian- not the canned, institutionalized Christian who has been fed everything they believe but rather the Christian who thinks, prays, studies and reads. Secondly, my wife- a preacher within the United Methodist Church and graduate of OBU and Brite Divinity. I could write a significant book about the oppression, degradation, and sheer meanness she has experienced within the ministry setting alone as a female minister. These oppressive forces have come both from other persons in ministry and from congregants. Most people would be horrified to hear these stories but these are for her blog and not mine. It is through our marriage and beginning to see through her pain and experiences the real and active oppression of women in society and more specifically in ministry. I am ashamed to be a part of moral humanity that still finds it sinful to allow women in leadership positions. Andrea has helped me see and helped me learn how the subversive and flagrant oppressive forces towards women move and work.


Me. I am a recovering oppressor. I have abused my power as a male in relationships and ministry. From my first dating relationship, I was ignorantly insensitive. Even as my awareness grew my enculturation remained. When is it exactly men are taught that it is "normal" for guys to act superior to ladies? Regardless of when, it certainly happens. For this reality alone, I owe every lady I have ever been in relationship with from grade school on this message- "I am so sorry, if I ever made you feel bad, hurt you, or jaded you by acting superior to you. Please accept my apology as an act of true repentance and respect for you."



So now that we all know what a pompas rear I have been, where to from here. I have begun about two years ago seeking to right wrongs I have caused in peoples lives. I call them, facebook them, or write them and apologize and then pray blessing upon blessing in their life. I will continue to seek to act on my now wide-eyed awareness and stand up whenever and wherever injustice arises. I will act when injustice is out in the open and when it is subversive. I will seek to un-enculturate those I come into contact with. I will be a male who heralds the gifts and equality of women. I will be more sensitive to my actions, to my words, and to my life.



Lastly, "hope springs eternal". There is today, a gift indeed. I will choose today to purpose my actions, season my words, and live out my ideologies regardless of those that surround me.
Silence is worse than participation. Step up and be real men love and live equality.

Confessions- Disclaimer

For just one minute I am going to make it right and fess up but as soon as these words leave my computer I will be contributing again in some form of it. I will attempt in my next few blogs a systematic confession. Not like a little child who took an early taste test of their birthday cake or even like the teen whose 1st subscription of Maxim magazine arrived in his mothers mail box- much to her surprise. These confessions will be an archaeology dig in my life, an unearthing of that which I never knew lay within me (much to my own horror). This all happened when one day I connected my heart to my brain (18 inches ya know!). Consider yourself forewarned for all that follows.

TEST