19

Her Name Isn’t Mom.

The year is 3150.

Anthropologists, wearing the reflective silver jumpsuits with chest insignias that all future people wear, are huddled over the opening to a shaft. At the bottom of the shaft lay human bones, old pieces of plastic and glass, and fragments of writings.

Most of the writings are rotted and unintelligible. But one particular section of text is as clear as the day it was printed.

“I have a dream.”

This piece of text is preserved and displayed in the Museum of Histories, Earth/USA Wing. Under the sealed text and under soft lighting, where thousands of beings – human and otherwise – can read, is a holographic placard. It says,

The above text, perfectly preserved for over a millennia [Earth years] supports the prevailing theory that earthlings in this particular hemisphere were enthralled with the science of dreaming.

And then you are unfrozen from your cryogenic slumber. And after a few months of stretches and acclimating to the future, you and some others don jumpsuits and go to the museum where you see the ancient text and the commentary below it. And you come somewhat unglued. The science of dreaming?

The future folks are missing it entirely. Why? Because they don’t have context. And without context, they can only go on what they see. They don’t understand racism, how it was destroying lives and how it in many ways came to a head in the 1960’s in the strangely segregated southern region of the former USA. They are unaware of Dr. King, what he did, said and why. How great shifts were beginning to take place. What it cost him. They’ll not understand he was hoping aloud in the poetry of an unrealized dream what it would take for the quality of the human experience, irrespective of one’s measure of melanin, to increase.

So they just put a display up based on what they did know. Intentionally or not, by deciding on the meaning without having the context, they have disrespected hundreds of millions of people and Dr. King himself.

So you provide the curator with the context and they fix it and everything’s fine. The end.

Many of us have learned on the level of instinct that to honor and even love the scriptures, we must understand the context from which it comes.

How helpful it is to learn that the Bible is actually dozens of books, written generally from the bottom of society, its heroes the ones with the boot of oppression on their necks.

How helpful to understand the original language was far more metaphoric and illustrative than English’s desire to be concrete and precise and specific.

How helpful to understand there is a celebrated, multi-faceted Jewishness running behind Jesus’s words to a society trying to figure out how to hold on to their identity within a Roman Empire who demanded near spiritual devotion to Caesar.

There’s a lot going on in the background that shapes and reshapes how we interpret what we see.

The background always shapes and defines the foreground.

That’s why when I tell people I have a velvet unicorn picture hanging on a wall in my home, they look at me with concern. But when I tell them the wall is in my garage, they laugh, somehow relieved. Where it hangs changes its meaning, changes how one receives it.

Searching out and appreciating the not-so-immediately-available context is how we show that we understand – or desire to – what’s really going on. It’s an expression of our sincerity, our taking one another seriously, our Love.

So if Christ’s summary of this Book we’re trying to take seriously is “Love,” then we might need to work on applying the same dutiful contextualizing to the objects of this Love.

My father sat down with me and we thumbed through an old photo album. Grainy photos of grandparents, great aunts and uncles I never met. People dead for so long I didn’t even miss them anymore. But my dad started speaking to their context, and to his own.

And tears filled his eyes as he explained the life these photos could only hint about for those who lived outside their context.

His grandfather had committed suicide a few years before I was born. This man was one who made my father feel loved like almost no other. Made dad feel like a favorite. But when the old man’s wife, my great-grandmother, passed away, followed painfully soon by his daughter, my great aunt, the man lost his hope and his mind and took his own life in his bathtub.

Soon after that my dad met my mom, and both those teenagers were very quickly thrust into young and unplanned and unprepared parenthood.

And then dad graduated the police academy and began dealing with people as a State Patrolman, one who others are rarely glad to see. His job was rewarding, but took an immediate toll.

This job he did on swing shifts, never for years finding stability to his rhythm. He enforced the law with a mind bruised from his deceased grandfather, his interactions with the public, and perpetual lack of sleep.

My mother and father moved nearly a dozen times, with two young boys in tow, in just a handful of years. Dad was placed and re-placed as rookies often are. Mom was in many respects a single mother, charged with keeping a noisy house of toddler energy sane while dad was gone, and then keeping a noisy house silent when he was home trying to sleep between shifts.

Then Dad’s mother died. He showed me a picture of her holding me in a diaper. He’d lost his confidant. His advocate.

Then he lost his father four years later. His safety net for hard times now completely untied.

My mother had already lost her father as a teenager. Now she was losing a father again. And pieces of her husband.

Grief and pain descended on my house. There was laughter. I can remember a lot of laughing. But pain and tension undergirded it.

Then, after a few more years, mom and dad lost their marriage.

One house was two.

Dad turned the album’s creaky pages, tearfully recounting the chronology. And it occurred to me, like awaking from a coma:

His name isn’t dad.

Her name isn’t mom.

That’s just the title a mere two people on earth – my brother and I – call them.

He’s Jim. She’s Teresa.

There is an entire story, a seemingly infinite amount of context, outside of the framework I had ever seen. There was so much more to him and to her than I had gotten used to interacting with and judging based on it meeting with my preferences and expectations. How hard, how impossible at times, life had been for my parents. “Wait a minute,” I later remarked aloud, “they did a damn good job.” Now I was honoring them for who they were outside of my own narrow context. Just like I hope my kids do for me.

I never loved my parents more as an adult than the day I recognized that there was a story outside of the framework I was part of. And I was never as able to have the Compassion, understanding, acceptance and the respect like I had when it clicked that they weren’t unpaid extras in a movie about me.

Now I could see that they were real human beings. If anything, I was the new cast member in the movie about them. In a strange way, without allowing myself to condescend, this was when my parents became also my brother and sister, because now I could see enough context to suffer with them. Together.

And if they had context enough to enhance my value and respect for them to such a staggering degree, who else might not be soulless, non-union actors in the Steve show? Who else might have reasons for their beliefs, their actions, their feelings? Who else had backstories for their current performances?

The word respect is made of the words re and see. It has in it the effort to take another look because the thing is worth more than a first impression. Compassion and Love dictate that we respect human beings, over and over and over and over, because we’re coming to realize our great capacity to totally, embarrassingly misread someone without taking the time to observe the backstory. Yet all we ever wanted was for someone to know ours.

Today, you are 99% wrong about everyone you hold opinions about. That figure may be low. In our growing sense of Compassion, such as we would like leveled at ourselves, let us respect the human beings around us enough to see what lies beneath that which our made-up minds insist it already has pegged.

See. Then re see. Then re re seen. Again and again and again until you know their real name.