Oh friends, do I have a treat for you today - a full video interview with one of the greats!! Lisa Sharon Harper is a powerful force for good. I heard her speak for the first time at the Justice Conference in Chicago back in 2014 (I think?) and I was hooked on her teaching. If you’ve known me for five minutes and asked me questions about justice, I likely recommended her book, The Very Good Gospel to you.
Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to build a relationship with Lisa through video calls, meeting in-person, attending her Ruby Woo pilgrimage, and being a part of the Global Writers Group for two years where she wrote her book Fortune. She’s spoken into my ministry life, my parenting life (will tell you this Instagram story in a second!), and my writing/publishing life.
So much of my love and justice theology is formed by Lisa’s teaching and wisdom. I’m so thrilled to share this with video with you. I asked her six questions and we ran the gamut!! Publishing, ordinary life, storytelling, history of slavery, how to know that YOU ARE ENOUGH, what it looks like to mentor equitably… glorious.
There’s a transcript as well with a little disclaimer about the program I use - you can access that here! I’d like to share a few quotes with you to skim and I welcome your feedback, comments, and messages. Hope this is a blessing to you - I love, love, love you and I’m so grateful to be your internet neighbor.
Interview Quotes:
#1 What's one of one piece of advice that if you had gotten it sooner, it would have changed your life?
Lisa: Oh, my gosh. Wow… That you are enough.
Lisa: I swear. My whole life would be so different if I had known that earlier. And it's not to say that I regret the life I have. I don't. But I think my journey has very much needed me to get to the point where I understand I am enough. Because I couldn't do what I'm doing now unless I knew that. And I really did not know that for the vast majority of my life, you know, I would say probably till about. Maybe seven years ago, about six or seven years ago, I finally started to understand I am enough. And that was actually when I left Sojourners. Not to say anything was wrong with Sojourners, but just that was part of the learning. And then actually and then also, you know, losing friends over my stance on Black Lives Matter and not just friends, but like organizational relationships and things over that I just realized. I am enough. I don't. I don't need to be liked by everyone and I don't need to be considered high in their esteem. I don't need their esteem. I need God's esteem. That's all that matters.
On perfection:
My point is that in white evangelicalism, the way that it works, it set up a system, a system of, of how it reproduces itself that fed on and exacerbated the brokenness that was already in me, that was seeded by oppression, historical, familial oppression and intergenerational oppression. So. I just think I mean, it was a process, a real process of coming out from under that. But I have to say that for me, that process really parallels my journey of rediscovering the good news or really discovering the actual good news of Jesus for the first time, You know, decades into my journey with Jesus, I kind of met Jesus anew. And that was through this biblical concept of shalom, as I began to understand that it's not about being perfect.
Lisa: That's not God's concern at all. Like literally not even never even would have thought. God never would have even had the thought that God was trying to make everybody perfect. That was a Greek project, not a Hebrew project. And our faith is not Greek. It's Hebrew that God's concern on the first page of the Bible is the overwhelming goodness of all the relatedness. Well, that shifts everything then. It's not about me being enough or being perfect enough. Then it's about how much can I love, right? It's literally just about, you know how I love.
Lisa: And that's a whole lot easier to get through in life. And, you know, you can make decisions to love people who are less lovable. Yeah. And those decisions, though, in the evangelical, my evangelical mind said it would have been I am loving so that I can be more holy and acceptable to God. But I don't love to be more acceptable to God now because I know. God. God knows that I'm human. And ash and mud. And Earth.
Lisa: And a beautiful earth created by God. But I'm just Earth. God is God. And I am not. And God's desire for me is not to be perfect, but rather to love and be loved. So now my goal, what I do, what I call others to do, is to love and be loved. And any barrier to that has nothing to do with being perfect or being enough. It just has to do with. Being. Experiencing all that God has for us in life, the love that God has for us in life…
And I was taught in youth groups that to sin is to miss the mark of perfection. But that is a Greek understanding of sin, because the word sin is a Greek word. It's not even. It's not even how God would have understood it. The if, if that is true. What I said earlier about the first chapter and what God declares very good, then sin is not that sin. How we would understand sin in the Hebraic context is anything that breaks any of these relationships. Well, that really does change everything. All of a sudden, the Bible is actually an ethical document, right? It's actually God is most concerned with how we treat each other and how we treat God and how we treat ourselves, how we treat the rest of creation, not only individually, but also through the systems and structures we create. Because God created systems and structures in the very beginning that were very good because they were blessed, they weren’t cursed.
On Mentoring:
Lisa: So let me just say this. What I have learned in my decolonizing journey, which is really the journey I've been on for the last 20 years, is that I've learned that the mentoring relationship actually, first of all, should not happen one on one. That or at least if it does happen, it needs to happen in the context of community. And it's much better, I think, actually, to have to have mentoring in a community in the same way that, let's say an Africa, they had rites of passage ceremonies, you know, within the Mandinka or within the Yoruba, like the men would actually go out in the woods and have a rites of passage, women out of rites of passage to. And it wasn't just her mom that did the thing or the uncle that did the right. It was all the men who came together and actually helped all the boys of a certain age to move into that into their manhood and taught them what that really meant, all of what that meant. And once they had passed and they had that, then they were men. Then they were responsible at that point. And I think that communal experience of training up. It's one that we don't do in America.
Lisa: Let's put it, it's an art that's being lost. It's one that communities of color do much more than in white communities, but even communities of color, especially those who have high, high experiences of interaction with white communities, are losing that because we're beginning to to adopt the emperor's clothes, like we're beginning to adopt the Empire's ways of doing things, maybe to thinking we made it or whatever. Now we're going to do it. No, it doesn't work. And you can say that. But just by the suicide rate within the white community and and the toxic masculinity that is rising up right now and creating an overflow of white male toxicity. Right. So. So I think that mentoring, first of all, for me is not only among women the way that it was taught. I mentor across gender, I mentor in community. And I think I actually have to grow into mentoring not only me with a community of mentees, but actually a community of mentees, mentoring a community of or rather mentors, community mentoring a community of mentees. I think that really has to be the model. And we're probably going in 2023 to move that direction. Our conversation actually just gave me that. Aha. And I think we're going to move that direction.
Mentor Monday: Lisa Sharon Harper