Christine, I want to respond to your blog, and let you know that as I try to read and engage with it, in my own receiving I delicately move through your use of the F word. I hope that it is your way of expressing an internal anger that is valid; in the past I would have rejected the whole simply because the word was there. I’m not asking you to change your writing; I’m just letting you know that it makes me stop reading and think of your intensity. Maybe that is why you use it; though I always challenge my writing students to find a way to shock and give the same intensity without its use. My generation (I am 52) comes from a more polite and masked world. The intensity of that word for me screams pain; whereas my public high school students use it in every other sentence to the point where it is meaningless. It is true that it will become more meaningless if it is frequently used. To some it defiles the user; to others it offers an opportunity to judge; I just breathe now and keep reading, because you are an awesome writer and my sister in Christ…so love will stretch me on. I hope you will keep reading what I say too.

I have pondered what true humility is, and I am chewing on the point that those that are “relegated to the margins of significance and excluded from self-definition might not need the decentering of self; because there is already a conversion, a loss of self.” If you think of humility and conversion as a process of lowering yourself, then they have a valid point. I don’t think of humility defined that way.

God honors us as His creation. Here is a mix of a theme that has recently been repeating itself in my life. We carry the glory of God, the imago dei, like a fingerprint in us. Not because we are converted, but because we are created. So we are all born as part of his loving creation, we all respond to either love God back and receive that love or reject it. God calls us to love others because his image is in others. To know Christ is to know that he is the image of God, full of glory, and starting a process of redemption in us. This is true conversion. Frequently I am reminded that I can love in ways that are partial and judgmental, not fully as God would have me do. (So I share with you my reaction to your vocabulary. Note: if I said F*** you might react differently because I said it … It is also a matter of context…smile ).

Back to decentering. I define “humility” as “Knowing who you are and what you are in Christ”. What if that was a more accurate Christian definition? I learned this from Dr. Dan Pecota. This would mean that humility is not putting yourself in the gutter, and playing in the mud about how meaningless and marginalized you are, but acknowledging God’s imprint in you, and all of the ways that comes out in the process of redemption. If I truly can know God, and that is possible, then I know who I am in the midst of this process. It isn’t defined by where I am in the social strata, be it marginalized by male hierarchy or subjugation to an image of myself that I create but isn’t what God sees. It is the position of Christ, an elevation. Check out the first and second chapter of Hebrews… which of course is where we are going as a church study. It is also significant to me that my Principal at Shoreline Christian has chosen for the year theme Ecclesiastes, that everything is meaningless. In another odd way this connects. It is a very strange theme for a Christian school. (But then Tim Visser is awesome. He loved the play Wicked. What can I say?) It is the context of meaninglessness, the context of why we do what we do that makes meaning. So our words have validity. Our very being has validity. As we acknowledge who Christ is, we can put ourselves in context. Then we acknowledge our process of redemption, and where we stand is to know ourselves. I am centered in Christ, not “decentered”. As he changes me, I love more fully and learn that humility is knowing God, knowing who and what I am in Christ.