Of course, it is stories -- not statistics -- that change us and expand our hearts. On Sunday, I shared about an experience that changed my heart resulting from an assignment in seminary. In an ethics class focused on the way the arts shape our theology and moral lens, our final was to create a piece of art that challenged us to compassionately portray a person or group of people we perceive as "the other." After my initial proposal of doing a project on a "neutral other" was rejected, Dr. Wheeler challenged me to choose a "non-neutral other" -- someone who was threatening or even perceived as an enemy.
I walked out of her office with the assignment to portray a white supremacist with compassion. I was angry about this assignment and really didn’t want to engage in it. After sitting with a blank canvas for too long, I searched for a documentary on white supremacy finding White Right: Meeting the Enemy directed by Deeyah Khan. Familiar with her film Jihad, I knew I was in for a soul-searching experience. Deeyah, a British Muslim woman came to the States to live alongside white supremacists to learn more about them. In almost every interview, Deeyah was the first Muslim woman, sometimes the first woman of color these - mostly men - had ever met. Nearly all of them shared with her awful histories of abuse, neglect, and violence in their childhoods. The hate groups they found themselves involved in were the first to offer them belonging, resources, and a sense of real family. So, they adopted the shared values of the groups they experienced love in - even though that translated into violent hatred of another.
So, I created the portrait of one of the Neo-nazis who carried a tiki torch through Charleston, SC in 2017. This linoleum print was made by carving out the pieces that are left white in the printing process. There is a catharsis in etching I found poignant in creating this — that what is cut out reveals the image. I chose to print with black ink to uphold the way the black and white thinking tends to operate. In the flames of the tiki torch are written the words the Neo-nazis said in the documentary or in the streets of Charleston. Those red words of hate are reflected back onto the person in the orange words which are all of the internal thoughts of self-hatred and memories of abuse or violence highlighted in the film.
This assignment challenged me in so many ways to capture a new image of an enemy. Like Peter whose heart is expanded when he receives the vision of a sheet with “profane” foods that God tells him are in-fact holy (Acts 10 & 11), how can we invite expansiveness at our tables by starting with challenging the images of our hearts? How can we drop from the head to the heart when co-creating the community we need to be activated in the world? What is the first step in breaking down the walls of our heart?