Everyday Consciousness

Everyday.  You never know which version of your spouse or child will awaken each day.  Sometimes something is a little off, he or she is just not themself today. Now imagine there is another side of the coin.  Imagine a personality without a person.  An essence without a being.  Everyday you wake up in a different body, in a different life.  Everyday you find yourself in a new home, a new person who can be male or female, who is your chronological age, who always is in close geographical proximity to the day before. Maybe this could explain those days when you did not feel like yourself.  Maybe you were inhabited by A.

In the YA novel Everyday by David Levithan we are invited into a story about a personality, a personality that has no body,  no home, no parents, only a self, which calls itself A.  This being, (is it a being if it doesn’t have a permanent material form?) this A, is a consciousness that does not have one body, instead A has dwelled with thousands.  Always.  One day with the life and body of an immigrant girl who cleans houses with her family, and only speaks a language you do not know!  The next day an immense football player, the next day his twin brother.  Everyday is based on a provocative premise: how do you live not only with other people, but within their lives.  Can you stay unattached, can you never interfere?  This A, for it the answer is complicated.  How do you live without connection and friendship? How do you do no harm in a life where you are the guest?  A strives to do no harm in the bodies and lives it inhabits.  This is rather difficult to do!  Imagine ‘Freaky Friday’ without the insider information of the parent child relationship, or the appalling ‘Wife Swap’ without the handbook. Everyday offers a complex narrative that draws us into the multiple lives that A inhabits: and how this complex life demands a morality, empathy and respect for neighbors and strangers.  A approaches most days as a stewardship of lives that are not his//hers, of people who will have to live with the consequences of her/his choices.

Even when we cannot see it, everyone, every body, heart and mind and soul is as precious as the most precious object you can conceive of.  Everyday. The word became flesh and dwelled among us.  God became one with humanity, one with us, one for us in the flesh and blood and heart and mind of a regular guy in the middle of nowhere.  It means a whole lot of things, and I can direct you to tomes full of strong suggestions.  It may mean that every day, any day, God himself could be present in anybody you meet. 

One of my favorite storytellers, a moderately famous writer-director of the action-adventure-fantasy genre is frequently asked:  why do you write strong female characters?   His answer is ‘because you keep asking me that question.’  What if all people, the ones you like and the ones you don't like so much, what if each were regarded as precious, as capable of being heroic characters?  What if the question and answer were expanded to all people, to guys and gals alike? What if we treated each body as a life with which to do no harm and empower when needed?  The news has recently been thick with terrible stories about young men and young women, families and communities and bodies and tragedy.   American and international headlines and trials that lay bare that we have done a dreadful job of raising young people to know that not only are their bodies precious, but so to are the bodies of the people around them.   

I have been working with young people in churches for the entire span of life of the young people involved.  And I want to believe that those headlines could never involve our young people, ‘my’ young people.  But I cannot.  I know to much.   I know there is so much that we have left undone. We, by which I mean my Episcopal Church, we have done a lot of work on gender expression and sexuality, but have we even begun to talk about a healthy theology of the body?  Have we chosen to wrestle endlessly about being inclusive (which we should) at the cost of failing to grapple with leading people into a healthy stewardship of all bodies?  EVERY BODY is should be loved and honored in ways that do no harm. We need to say this.  We need to help people understand that while we do not occupy each other’s lives like A, the reality is that in some ways we do.  We need to raise young people of strong character, people who know this truth to be as firm as gravity.  We need to teach and show and practice a way of life that understands what A learns, that doing no harm also means standing up and intervening to protect someone in harm’s way.   

So friends, compadres, fellow pastoral, formational leaders, parents and life companions: what can we, what can we do to shift this situation? ??