How my Nov. 30 just got scooped up

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And here is why. It is a safe and enthralling opportunity for me to test my ability to resist splitting and "itting". We use these words at my skoo, Mars Hill (I can never resist saying 'skoo'). Itting, first of all, is a term used (sort of) by German Jewish mystic Martin Buber in his 1923 work I and Thou. "Itting" is interacting with a person as if they are an It (an object) rather than a You (a human being). Itting is inevitable, it's like our default mode, so there's no use feeling guilty, but still it's like, if you ask me, some itting is worse than others : {

Splitting is making something "all good" or "all bad" in your mind, instead of being able to hold a person's goodness and badness both at once. In watching the Brittany documentary I have an idea of which of the two directions will pull me more, but that's the whole point. Along with most of America, I love to scoff at Brittany and all the rest. It's amazing. I have heard some of the kindest, Ghandilike people I have ever met, bash Brittany. Publicly. But...why? I don't know, it just feels good. And, mind you, I do not think all hate is bad. I believe hate is part of the necessary spectrum of human emotion that has its time and place. What I love, though, is those times I ride my wave of hate all the way up to the point of catching myself in a state of loathing and then going, "Oh, look. Here again, I have marked someone as unlovable and subhuman. Someone I've never even met. Interesting. I've placed her firmly in the margins, right next to the trash cans out back."

And as soon as I hear "margins," I know who I will see, in my mind's eye, standing beside Brittany. Jeebus. Who used to go around apparently making it a point to locate the most hated groups in his home culture, and then going and standing beside them, befriending them or doing other obnoxious things like freeing them from death.

So I love it (in hindsight) when I get caught hating, because it ends up stretching my understanding of myself and human relating, and deepening my respect and love for Jesus, who I do allow myself to split off as "all good". What happens with that actually is that my idea of "good" ends up getting continually reconfigured and increasingly complicated and mysterical. I mean mystical. I mean mysterious.

So. Now that I've already dissected the Brittany doc experience ahead of time, it will probably end up being some big fake-feeling effort for me. But I'm still watchin.

I letchu know if I "it" the Brit.