Staying at the Table

Thank you to all who contributed comments to Breaking the Rules. I believe that the encounter between the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and the Reverend Martha Niebanck's pickup chorus at Starr Island back in 1997 illustrates the spiritual practice that we have come to call "Staying at the Table." The practice involves patiently challenging the assumptions of the dominant culture by inviting a cross cultural conversation based on emphatic engagement. (Breaking the Rules is a selection of a sermon by Martha Niebanck.)

Staying at the table involves self awareness for those engaged in confronting oppressive social constructions because if one is to practice it one must accept that many dominant culture folks will reject the opportunity to discuss their experience and their assumptions and refuse to get in touch with their own privilege and their own familiar and personal experience of oppression. And for many who experience systemic oppression, whether that oppression is patriarchy, racism, cultural domination, imperialism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism or some other form of oppression to stay at the table seems to invite more insults and misunderstanding. Better leave the conversation and find some like minded people to share in the strength of one's own kind.

(In plain English, the invitation to deep conversation may be rejected in a less than courteous manner, so why take a chance? Because we can not escape oppression, we can only overcome it.)

Staying at the Table is personally difficult, that why it is a spiritual discipline. Still if we are to overcome racism and cultural domination we must stay engaged and invite transformation.

Gandhi read Jesus and discovered what many others have discovered, a form of engagement with violence based not on returning violence or fleeing the violator, but on loving resistance. I believe staying at the table involves a similar stance.

How different this approach is from some of the discussion of cultural misappropriation that I hear and read from my fellow Unitarian Universalists. On the one hand we have the cosmopolitans, who argue that music is music and African Americans don't own African American music. They the cosmopolitans can sing it because it is "human expression" and they are human and by singing they expand their playlist and "celebrate their diversity." On the other hand we have the censors, which argue that under no circumstance can dominant culture folk sing songs of the cultures of the oppressed without engaging in oppression.

Clearly Marjorie's invitation to Martha's group was to appropriate consciously and emphatically. But to make that invitation required the practice of staying at the table despite the protests of those who dismissed her concern as "politically correct" and "denying me a good time of just singing."