11.8.15
Imagine an affluent community… newly built subdivisions with street names like Ivy Bluff, filled with impressive houses built in the latest style with three-car garages and manicured lawns. The schools are some of the best in the state, with the kids going on to Ivy Leagues, following the careers of their parents, who now work long hours to keep their children decked out in the top name brands their social scene demands.
This community is over 90% White. The poorer Whites and the town’s few Blacks and Latinos staff the fast food restaurants and the chain stores where the kids go with their parents’ credit cards. There’s very little crime in this community; everyone knows each other; everything seems stable and in control…
Imagine in this same community a syphilis outbreak affecting over 200 teenagers, some as young as 12 and 13. Imagine cherubic, sweet-faced, middle-class white girls with 20, 40, or 100 sex partners. Imagine being a parent in the Ivy Bluff subdivision and hearing that your 13-year-old girl contracted syphilis at group sex parties, sometimes out on the edge of town, with a group of African-American boys, mixed race kids, and homeless youth.
In 1996, in Conyers, Georgia, a syphilis outbreak among teenagers was reported to the Georgia Division of Public Health. The outbreak was spread by a highly sexual group of fifteen young, affluent, white girls. The journalists who investigated it remarked,
We were struck by how widespread the kind of [unrest], and loneliness, and hunger for structure and experimentation was, among kids all over the community.” One of the journalists described the girls as “what I would call sweethearts…. They had soft faces, soft expressions, [soft voices]. …shy smiles. … you had [this] tension between the way they looked and the kinds of things that had been happening in their lives.
That comment could also be made of me when I was a teenager. I lived here in Midland and attended Trinity School. I was the model student and daughter – I got straight-A’s, won all the awards for both character and achievements, played varsity sports, did community service… it all looked just right on the surface as far as most could tell.
But it wasn’t the whole truth. Some of my friends knew differently – that when I spent the night at their house, I would sneak out – even if they wouldn’t come with me – to walk many dark city blocks to sneak into the house of a boy I hardly knew and would never see again. …That I’d be willing to bring tequila into the school in a contact lens solution bottle and drink it with my friends in the bathroom before chapel.
Soon I felt quite like Jekyll and Hyde: dark starkly divided from light, good divided from bad. This continued into college for me. Alcohol helped tremendously, as black-outs meant I didn’t even have to remember the darker side of me that emerged. …
So what was the deal? Did I, and these girls in Georgia, just need better parenting? More abstinence education? More structure? More consequences?
Even then, as a teenager, I intuitively felt somehow that my rebellion was about something deeper.
Thankfully, my mom knew, too, and although she couldn’t completely rescue me at the time, she planted the seeds that eventually helped me heal. For one, she listened… and she gave me Naomi Wolf’s book Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood. Wolf points out that female adolescence is often a time of fanaticism that can display itself in obsession with horses, for example, the rigors of eating disorders, body piercing, strict vegetarianism, shoplifting, or mystical conversions.
Naomi Wolf says, “What were we doing with these ritualistic behaviors and obsessions? At any given time, our fanaticisms had a perfect internal logic. All of us were, in our different ways trying to create tests for ourselves so we could know we were graduating the stages into womanhood.”
Our culture doesn’t have meaningful rites of initiation to prepare teenagers. So they try to engineer their own rites, most of the time hurting themselves in the process. Teens rebel, I think, because somewhere unconsciously they understand that the adults are not telling them the whole truth, are not giving them what they need to live in a complex and messy world.
When I heard the story of the girls in Georgia, what was immensely compelling to me was the variety of boundaries they transgressed. These girls broke not only their community’s norm against premarital sex, but also transgressed even more powerful norms of race and class. In their strikingly homogenous community, these “sweet” girls “crossed the tracks” and associated with the marginalized: homeless, African-American, and mixed race youth.
This was not simple misbehavior, but a forceful – probably unconscious – statement about their whitewashed culture.
The sociologist Peter Berger describes society as interlocking systems that constantly enforce the status quo, carving out a structure of apparent stability by pushing away anything dark or messy. Think of such popular films as American Beauty, American Psycho, Pleasantville, or The Stepford Wives. As Berger says, this is “the bright ‘dayside’ of life, tenuously held onto against the sinister shadows of the night.”
The marginalized and the “misfits” in our society end up serving for us – usually unconsciously – as a walking manifestation of the underground we have tried to repress. Perhaps the infamous mid-life crisis emerges from the need to reckon with the desires and alternate identities we’ve kept below the surface in order to succeed and fit in.
The descent into darkness is in some ways a dissent against our anesthetized culture. In her memoir The Words to Say It, Marie Cardinal struggles with her own dark depression as well as the memory of her mother’s depression, and she explains the difference between their two experiences, saying:
If I had not become insane, I would never have emerged. As for my mother, she forced back her insanity until the end…It was too late… She was afraid to rebel through the words and the gestures of rebellion, she didn’t know them. THEY had never taught them to her.
In our culture, we typically silence voices of dissent, whether those voices come from those who are different, or even from our own shadow sides. We stubbornly try to hold the darkness at bay – whether that darkness is difference, or trauma, or just the inherent complexity of life. The power dynamics of our culture are rooted in the suppression of certain human desires, perspectives, and experiences.
To live fuller lives, we have to disrupt the narratives we assume as given and courageously unearth perspectives, desires, and thoughts from which we have estranged ourselves. They are dangerous only because they are repressed.
Wisdom stories from many traditions indicate that in order to find lives of abundance and blessing, we must wander through the desert, wrestle in the wilderness, or descend to the underworld.
One of my favorite myths about descending to the darkness is a story 4,000 years old about the Sumerian goddess Inanna.
The story goes like this: Inanna, Queen of Heaven, abandons her realms to visit her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld. This dualistic world feels like my high school where we had to navigate the no-win dichotomies of prude/slut, goody-goody/slacker, prep/geek, Inanna/Ereshkigal. So how can Inanna’s descent to her dark sister help her become more whole?
She probably gets off on the wrong foot…!— She prepares herself by gathering about her the seven me (an untranslated word): objects of ornamentation and protection. She also gives orders to her faithful servant to set up a lament if she does not return from the underworld.
As Inanna descends, she must pass through seven gatekeepers who each make her remove a piece of her me: her crown, bracelets, staff… Each time, Inanna asks, “What is this?” Each time, the response is: “Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”
Eventually she must enter the underworld completely naked. The text says:
Naked and bowed low, Inanna entered the throne room.
Ereshkigal rose from her throne.
Inanna started toward the throne.
[The Annuna,] the judges of the underworld, surrounded her.
They passed judgment against her.
Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.
She spoke against her the word of wrath.
She uttered against her the cry of guilt.
She struck her.
Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat,
And was hung from a hook on the wall.
Of course this is what we fear will happen in the darkness! We fear that if we open up to difference, to loss, to the unknown – we’ll be destroyed. …
But let’s see what happens next…Above ground, Inanna’s faithful servant has noticed something is awry…the servant goes to the patriarchal figures of Heaven and Earth, asking for help to save Inanna.
They each say no, protesting: “Inanna craved the Great Below. She who goes to the Dark City stays there.”
Sound familiar? Sounds like our own internal monologues: “I got what was coming to me…I should have known.” Or the external voices: “She was asking for it.” “It’s their own fault.” “It’s not our concern.”
But then her servant visits the God of Wisdom. In great contrast, the God of Wisdom responds very empathically and then does an odd thing – He fashions from the dirt under his fingernail two tiny, seemingly insignificant creatures, to whom he says:
Go to the underworld,
Enter the door like flies.
Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, is moaning with the
cries of a woman about to give birth.
When she cries, “Oh! Oh! My inside!”
Cry also, “Oh! Oh! Your inside!”
When she cries, “Oh! Oh! My outside!”
Cry also, “Oh! Oh! Your outside!”
They do as the God of Wisdom says, sliding under the door and past the gatekeepers, right up to Ereshkigal’s side. Although she does not acknowledge them, they cry with her as she moans for her insides, her outsides, her belly, her back, her heart, her liver.
They patiently mirror her pain.
Finally, Ereshkigal looks up, and asks in surprise, “Who are you, moaning—groaning—sighing with me?”
She is so pleased, she offers them gifts of rivers and fields in harvest, but they do not accept them, asking only for the corpse of Inanna, which Ereshkigal finally releases. They sprinkle the food and water of life, and Inanna arises. She returns above ground and our part of the story ends.
So: two tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures redeemed this awful scene in the depth of the Underworld. All the creatures did was witness and mirror the Queen of the Underworld’s pain.
When we are face to face with the shadow sides of our neighbors, when we “cross the tracks,” when we fall into the darker parts of ourselves, I believe only compassion transforms.
Only patient witnessing of what is will lead us into fuller living where the darkness ceases to be something to fear.
So, I urge us: As we in this church cultivate this oasis of a community, let us remember not to make it that “bright dayside of life, tenuously held onto” against the darkness, whether that darkness be difference among us, or shadows within us.
The African teacher Malidoma Somé says, “it is the absence of radical and genuine recognition and acknowledgment that makes suffering grow larger.”
Let us open in compassion and be a radical witness to all that is.
So may it be. Blessed Be.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon