This Sunday morning post refers back to the devotional post from Galilee Life, the Christian (and "conservative") alternative to Etsy. (Yes, it's Mailchimp. I apologize. I've opened e-mails in browsers and seen them turn out to be from Mailchimp many times, and in several years only two of those e-mails presented problems. But you might want to back up your computer files before opening. Nice people use Mailchimp; unfortunately it seems to be easy for nasty people to hack into.)
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Is looking back always bad? Short answer: no. In the Lord, it can be a beautiful reminder of just how far you've come.
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In the early 1980s I attended a church college. Regular readers already know that.
For those who don't know, church colleges tend to attract a majority of students who are not actually Christians. Their parents joined a church and have applied heavy pressure to keep them in. They were baptized or whatever at the age the denomination recommends. They went to Sunday School...
"What are your thoughts on today's Bible story?"
"Can we call out for pizza?"
They spent their teen years like that, pretty much. While most of them were being protected from teen drug addiction and teen parenthood, as their parents hoped, they were actually being immunized against developing real spirituality. For them, church is a place where other people want you to sit around wasting time, mainly to prevent you from doing things you would naturally want to do, on your own, such as drinking alcohol, taking drugs, and making babies.
Teenagers who have any real spirituality, however immature, and adults who are really on a spiritual path, also attend church colleges, often in order to become ministers or missionaries, sometimes just to study the Bible. They totally do not fit in with the majority of their fellow students.
So there's a tendency for the more serious students to form small groups of their own. After a freshman year when I didn't like being "accepted" by one of the little prep-school cliques who spent gorgeous sunny afternoons indoors looking at their school yearbooks and wailing about the possibility that they looked fat, and was then sort of adopted by a brilliant young actress who'd had a conversion experience in drug rehab, I started sophomore year in such a clique. The actress and I and another serious little girl, who was the Dean's niece, found it easy to run in a pack of three girls and three boys without forming "couple" relationships. Other students could go their own way. No problem.
"We don't want cliques at this school! We don't want people to feel left out!"
By the end of the term I was feeling left out. The actress and one of the boys had been expelled (for drug offenses) and another of the boys had flunked out. The other girl and boy were nice, but not close friends. We didn't even claim a table in the cafeteria. Sometimes I sat at a table that other students avoided before 5:30 because, at 5:30, a lot of older nursing students claimed it; if I was still there when they came in, I didn't get up and leave, and they had nothing much to say to me but thye weren't snobs, and in fact they paid me to type their papers. (All of them were Black.) Sometimes I sat with the girl Mother had told me to ask for as a roommate. Well, Mother didn't know the girl's name, but she had said, "If you ask for a roommate who speaks French or Spanish, that'll help you learn more of the language." So we hadn't become roommates but we were friends, mainly through the Puerto Rican girl's efforts, and sometimes we sat at the table where conversation was in Spanish. Sometimes other people in the arts departments sat with me, since we were in the same classes, but they all seemed so much older and richer and more sophisticated, I wasn't sure about claiming them as friends. I did not have the kind of friend I could write songs with, and I didn't really care a great deal about other kinds.
In the second term of sophomore year I moved off campus, because now I was old enough to sign a lease, and it saved so much of the taxpayers' money. Now I could just work and study and write. That suited me just fine. I made the Dean's List.
"What's the use of going to college in Washington if you're not developing the grace of hospitality?! You can't just hole up on your own and miss out on all the social life! You should watch Hyveth Williams," whose son is about my age but who was an undergraduate ministerial student and in some of my classes. "She has Friday night Bible study salons. That's the sort of thing you need to learn here, that you couldn't learn at public school if you only want to save money."
I watched the future Dr. Williams. I went to her Friday night gatherings, travelled with her when she was asked to preach practice sermons. She gracefully accepted the chore of being my, and several other students', first close Black friend. She was one of the few people who are remembered and missed at schools after they've graduated. I learned something, too, about the layers of friendship, from her. Any of us kids could vent our feelings to her about course work and social life, and she vented her feelings about those things to us. What she meant by saying she was "mothering" us, in Will I Ever Learn, was that none of us had a clue about the personal and professional harassment she was dealing with. She didn't burden us with that. You don't meet people like her every day.
Then she graduated, and now the people in those three different social groups who were my friends, on some level or other, were upperclassmen. I didn't feel older, richer, or more sophisticated, but I did have my own place, job, and money. Other junior-year students in that situation drew together. By the end of September we were a group and claimed a table. A long one. Sometimes two tables pulled together.
One afternoon in September, when I hadn't completely scheduled out the luxury of writing in a diary, I made a little list. I asked myself who were my favorite people, and why I'd heard the same judgments passed on them that I was always hearing passed on me.
("Who was passing harsh judgment on whom? What did I say? Who said what?" is the sort of thing the People Who Were Never Going To Be Friends would say if anyone mentioned hearing harsh judgments passed on them by Seventh-Day Adventists. Why would anyone bother to remember? A healthy mind does not obsessively analyze unpleasant conversations. It was college. My mind was too full of pleasant and/or educational words to store the details of the verbal abuse. All I remember about the verbal abuse was that a great deal of it went on, and most of it was the sneaky deniable kind: "But I didn't say 'Why are you so antisocial?' in that judgmental way, I only wanted to know if you could tell me why it is that you are so antisocial, in a Christian way, so that people could try to help you" is a typical reaction. In the S.D.A. dialect of verbal abuse "antisocial" meant "having a life of your own and not being especially interested in me," it being presupposed that people who are really antisocial, in the sense of criminal, would never be found at S.D.A. churches or schools...though they are.)
Then I asked myself about whom, if anyone, the People Who Were Never Going To Be Friends found anything good to say. Well, the school did have what might have been called a popular clique of people who were often commended by school administration types, though they weren't really a clique in the sense of all hanging out together. But they did have something in common, I could now see, besides being older and richer than I was. By now they weren't necessarily older, and if they had access to more money most of them were earning less. They were the children of particularly influential members of the church. Churches that belong to large international denominations have little hierarchies of church officials, however part-time or low-paid those people's jobs may be, and those hierarchies generate a form of office politics. So, if your father or grandfather was a minister, or your aunt was a church secretary, you might actually be getting paid for holding office in "student government" and anything else you did was likely to be commended in assembly. If your father never actually attended a Seventh-Day Adventist church meeting in his life, as mine didn't, the school administration people might like you but you were not going to be groomed for membership in the older people's little clique.
I didn't blame the student government types but I did think they and their social lives were on the boring side. I mean to say. I knew a girl who was in that crowd, and liked her, and the column she wrote for the school paper was about shopping. Not bargain-hunting for groceries and library book sales, which would have interested me, but shopping for useless gift items. Obviously, in the crowd of people who were earning our own money to pay for things like rent, food, and school supplies, that idea was dead on arrival.
I don't remember consciously thinking: "Hey, there are as many of us as there are of them, more of us are full-grown adults, and we're 'smarter.' We could become THE popular clique." I don't know that anyone consciously thought that. It just happened.
What I was actually feeling, that year, was depression. If I described the way I felt to any psychologist active today, I'm sure I'd get a prescription for an antidepressant in fifteen minutes. It was physical fatigue from not sleeping enough, and social fatigue from not spending enough time alone, and early-stage celiac disease from eating the S.D.A.-approved wheat-gluten-based vegetarian diet. About the only emotional "erroneous zone" I needed to worry about was my willingness to believe that my feelings came from my thoughts instead of my physical health. The psychological thought of the early 1980s had me worrying about the fact that I was worrying.
Anyway I felt unhappy, more specifically very very tired, when I was alone and I wanted to believe that the cure for that was filling the time with more social activity. I was too young for heart disease but I "go, go, goaded" myself to the point of falling asleep on the job. It was so easy. All I had to do was find people who were more interested in talking about themselves than in attacking me, and listen to them, really listen, as if I'd never heard their stories before, which in fact I hadn't. I was nineteen.
"Oh those two? Well the really pretty one's not so bad actually, you know, she's Dr. --'s niece, but the short one's the real Queen Bee of that clique.,,well, you do know what she's got--C-cups!"
Say whaat? They meant me? Yes, they meant me. During the second term school administration types were always summoning me to have little talks about this new problem, that now that I had friends and a busy social calendar I was seen as a Queen Bee.
"There is no organization. There is no leader. There's a fellow who has a van, he's dating someone else now actually, and there's the ministerial student who buys the tracts we hand out when we do that, but it's not a club. It's just that once or twice a week I still eat in the cafeteria, and people I know sit together. Sometimes somebody has an idea for something to do. That's all. It's not as if we didn't invite freshmen. Sometimes we recruit freshmen."
Distributing tracts in public places was something the church had mostly given up, partly because it made us look like Jehovah's Witnesses. One of the older ministerial students had the bright idea of reviving it and would buy cases of fifty tracts for people to distribute. It was mostly the fellows' thing, because most of the White girls in the crowd had been conditioned to feel afraid to be off campus after dark. Some of the Latinas--I should say young women, because they were older, some with full-time jobs and some married--weren't afraid, though, so after a few weeks I joined the crowd. I'd go with whichever of the boys asked first. The Latinas ventured, in pairs, into rougher neighborhoods where more Spanish was spoken. I went to the shopping plaza where students normally shopped in the daytime, where the majority of the population were older and White, but some of the younger families moving in spoke Spanish.
"Y cuanto cuesta?"
"No le cuesta nada, senora. Es gratis como el don de salvacion que pagaba Cristo. Para el librito se lo ha pagado ese caballero."
I was the one who added the half-dozen Spanish editions to the stack of twenty tracts in English we gave away. I was also the one who spoke first to the lady shoppers. My usual buddy on these missions was tall and dark, and in the process of fulfilling an ancient (in the college sense) prophecy that some day he'd grow into his feet and look like the young Ronald Reagan. He was a good fourth-generation church member, handing out tracts in good faith, but his physical presence intimidated some people who did not know this.
He was supposed to be my boy friend, in some sort of non-touching S.D.A way. He and I worked well as a team, and I loved him for that reason--if only other people had been able to stop fantasizing about what they thought they would have done if they'd had our physical attributes. We compared genealogies and determined that none of our ancestors had been in the same place at the same time for two hundred years. Several of them must have been close before that time, then, because we were the genetic equivalent of cousins. I showed people an old snapshot of my father and everyone thought it was an overexposed picture of this friend, and everyone agreed that I looked remarkably like his sister. So he and I were great friends until someone would suggest that we were a couple, and then whichever one of us had heard the insinuation would think "Him/Her? Well s/he is growing into the feet/C-cups, but kissing her/him would be like...EWWW! ICK!" and we'd stop speaking for a few weeks. It's funny in hindsight. At the time it was a source of tremendous teen angst.
Anyway I was not completely passive in this tract ministry, but the Latinas were much bolder and more active than I was, in their soft-spoken way. Later someone wrote a book about how the Spanish culture favors a kind of modesty that kept Latina women from being recognized and promoted on jobs. When speaking Spanish you normally don't even say "I" at the beginning of a first-person sentence; the word for "I," yo, also means "self" and "ego," and in most situations using it can be avoided by using either a verb form that embeds the message that the person speaking is the person described as acting, or a more complicated verb form that embeds a message that something just happened and was nobody's fault. Some people who learned Spanish first have said they felt selfish, immodest, and rude just speaking English, because English grammar requires so much use of "I." Little things like that run through the culture in many ways, especially for women. One result can be that managers don't realize how much good work a Spanish-speaking woman is doing; another result can be that, if the managers notice this woman's good work, co-workers may feel that, while merely seeming to give them credit, she was sneaking ahead of them in some devious, treacherous way.
One of the things Adventists do that causes confusion between them and Mormons is that both groups have student missionary programs. Mormons traditionally anoint a few selected male students as "elders" and send them out proselytizing, by twos, on bicycles. Adventists offer summer jobs as door-to-door book peddlers to students who apply and train for the jobs in the spring term at each college. (Colporteur is French for "neck-carrier," although carrying books in a harness strapped across the back of the neck is no longer required.) The trainees are "The Colporteur Club" and attend meetings where they're taught about salesmanship. In summer they are paired off and assigned to territories where they stay at someone's house and drive around in a car, preferably the car one student owns; they park the car and separate, each one working one side of the street, approaching strangers' homes alone. They get a little pocket money during the summer and a substantial scholarship toward next year's tuition, based on how many books they sell.
Most of the freshmen my friends and I invited to join us did not become real members of the crowd. I think they may have been the ones complaining that we were "intellectual snobs." (We liked learning things and took it as read that other people did too.) One girl, however, was moving and thinking as fast as any of us, and became my friend. Let's call her Jane Doe. She had always wanted to be a colporteur. My parents and jobs had almost stifled that ambition for me, but her parents said she could be a colporteur if she could work with me. So I wanted to be a colporteur too. She had a car and would do the driving. We went to club meetings and practiced door-to-door sales with grown-up salesmen up to the end of the term, in April.
In May I called the program manager right on schedule. "Did we get Big Stone Gap?"
"Jane Doe and Mary Roe got Woodbridge, where they'll be staying with Jane's parents," the manager informed me. (Jane's motives for being a colporteur had included living away from the'rents.) "You got the D.C. area. You can stay where you're living, keep your job, and distribute books in the city. What you and those boys have been doing is too good to waste. Your boyfriend has actually brought a man to church already,,,:"
"He wouldn't work downtown either," I said. "Neither of us has a car and we're not stupid enough to haul hundreds of dollars around the city on bicycles."
"So you can work the suburbs. More money there anyway, and more families likely to buy the Arthur Maxwell books for the children. And we think it's fantastic the way you reached out to our Hispanic community, getting those older girls involved..."
"They got me involved!" I wailed. "I'll have to tell my parents about this."
So of course my parents said "You're coming home and staying with your rich, sick, 87-year-old great-uncle." So I did. I'd already been talked into transferring to university instead of just doing a normal senior year at college; in July I was officially accepted, and in September I went there.
I was seriously annoyed, though, by the program manager's attitude toward the Latinas. They weren't in the Colporteur Club; they had their jobs and families to stay with, in the summer, rather than going off to live in some new town. He might legitimately not have realized how much they'd been doing. Or then again he might have been one of those older White people...we didn't call them "racists" back then, because they weren't violent haters, just benevolent, patronizing idjits. People my age knew, though, about those older White people who blithely assumed that any Anglo-American was more competent than any other kind of person. Knew and were much offended.
I was not mature enough to follow through on that. In hindsight I think that what I should have said was, "Please, sir, I want Ester Lopez and Lilian Garcia," or whatever their real names were, "to take over. They'll only work together, but they're the bravest among us and the best salesmen. Is it too late for them to have the training and join the official program? They need tuition scholarships too. I wanted to get out of the city for the summer, and have another job that will let me do that." Then I should have talked to Ester and Lilian and urged them to petition, in their soft-spoken way, for the job that was being offered to me. They were full-grown women; both of them had cars. They would have been good at that job. But I didn't do any of that, because I was nineteen and saw only small glimpses of the world beyond the end of my nose.
Time passed. The book called Chiquita's Cocoon documented that that kind of thing was going on, may have raised some people's awareness of it. Mostly those older White people retired. I stopped attending church, because God's House is no place for the verbal abuse games I wanted to stop playing, and lost touch with Ester and Lilian. I worked with other Spanish-speaking people, some of whom had learned all too easily to speak loudly, say "I," and move to the front in a crowd.
Mother continued to attend Seventh-Day Adventist meetings and bring in their literature. In the 1990s I read in the Review & Herald that the Adventist denomination in North America seemed to be falling apart, but the denomination was being kept alive by rapid growth in South America. Other Christian groups were also reported to be growing rapidly in Spanish-speaking countries.
More recently, Etsy and E-Bay conspicuously snubbed sellers of Christian-theme products, then positively censored sellers of Republican-theme products. The company that stepped forward to replace these people's platform was called Galilee Life. The name is meant to suggest that it's a Christian-friendly business. People of any faith or none can join, but the newsletter they receive is Christian, with the option of receiving devotional messages in the e-mail. The newsletters are written in perfectly fluent US English.
The names of the managers are Spanish.
North Americans of Spanish descent aren't stuck in any kind of cocoon, if they ever were. They are finding their own ways to step forward, without giving up traditions of modesty and politeness. They are, for one thing, rapidly becoming a majority in Protestant churches. It's no longer likely that anyone will assume that, if people called Smith and Sanchez work on a project, it was Smith's project or idea.
As I observed in 2016, before Candidate Trump bought out the election between Candidates Cruz and Carson, progress has been made.
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