Barth does not suggest that the death of religion takes place when we our recognize the frailty and lack of perception contained in institutional power or assertion. Rather, religion constitutes a fundamental part of what it means to be a creature who is trying to figure out a way, any way, to determine our selves. Religion does not need to be an institution. Religion can just as easily be Jesus, soccer, democracy, marxism, capitalism, sex, chauvinism, or “purity.” Religion is always with us, because we are fallen human beings. One cannot simply choose to not follow religion.

Perhaps before we begin to exhort one another to lose religion and look to Jesus, we might begin by asking ourselves why we are so sure we are the ones who can see him. To face this question we might have to face the reality that we do, in fact, need others to discern who that peculiar, wonderful, frightening person was. Some of these are people on the margins, some are people in institutions, some are even people who began on the margins and found themselves at the heart of the church, while others began at the heart of the church and ended up at the margins. None of this is to dismiss the sentiment described by the poet or any of us who want more from our spiritual lives, who want to serve God with greater passion and clarity of purpose. The question is can we do this by   simply forgetting “religion,” whatever that might mean to you?

The point is, when we are by ourselves, discerning the identity of a man who is not with physically with us, it is easy to take deluded solace in the possibility that he looks like us, cares for what we care for, and will call us his “bff” when we see him again. But it is only when we begin to take seriously the many voices (whether in scripture, in the church, or outside of the church) of those who have reflected upon his life and reflected upon the lives of those who reflected upon his life, that we get both clearer about who he is, and in so doing become more awe-struck and silenced. May we, each day, confess our compulsion towards religion and even our attempts to draw Jesus into control.

Art has helped me to begin to think about how difference (racial, ethnic, gender) as a theological question is deeply bound to the visual and yet theology has persistently resisted this question. How do we account for difference? For bodies that look different without glossing over those differences? How do we account for the visibility of God? Of God having a face? These are questions that have been ancillary to theological reflection. The shame here is not that we have not had definitive answers, but that not having anthropology, an account of bodies and sight and materiality as a part of dogmatic theological reflection has been a detriment to theology as a process. As much as art creates a visual image, art is also a process of thought and engagement with the world and questions of who we are, who God is, and who we are together. In this way theology needs art not simply to illustrate the conclusions we have reached, but as partners in the theological process.

First, while the relentless grind of new lectures was somewhat lessened, the reality is my classes were far from perfect on the first few go rounds and required almost constant tinkering. Even my bread and butter course was not engrained in me enough to go into class with a few notes and a memorized lecture. I was still working out details, making connections, trying to fill in holes that were patched together in the frantic pace of my first year. Looking at the coming year with several new courses and still a lingering dissatisfaction with my already repeated courses, the third year is going to be more of the same.

Second, I was not prepared for the subtle demands of higher expectations of university service/participation and the blessed fruit of student conversations that arises from trying to get to know students and make them feel welcome. In my first year I was sheltered from the wider university as I got to know my department. But in my second year I began to dip my toes into the variety of lectureships, social events, and the implicit expectations held for tenure-track faculty. This was combined with wonderful, curious students with wonderful questions that always seemed more interesting (and pressing) than papers to grade and articles to write. The convergence of these two moments did not create a wave of pressure, but more an accumulation of snowflakes that, taken individually seemed weightless and beautiful, but slowly gathered on the roof of my metaphorical office. I am happy to say there was no cave-in or catastrophic danger, but there was a noticeable shift in pressure as the walls pressed out and the ceiling warped in a few times during the year.

These were all lovely, welcome additions where I learned more about the university, more about my colleagues and more about students. But students’ questions and faculty interactions also accumulate, they introduce questions and ideas and problems that sometimes do not simply dissipate when the person leaves the office. There is always an imprint of these conversations, residue left behind that needs to be sorted and decided upon. This sorting, reflecting, praying is blessed work, but more than I had expected.

Lastly, in my second year I went from the stress of getting to know colleagues, trying to decipher the many inevitable conversations that lay unspoken in faculty meetings or university wide events, to knowing a bit more about the unspoken conversations, knowing my colleagues (even if only a bit). The transition from ignorance to partial-knowledge was not an easing, but a complicating reality. These people were no longer strangers whom I needed to please, but partners in an endeavor that I was now connected to.

In all, I found the second year more challenging because I found myself more invested, in my teaching, in my students, in my colleagues and my university. Yes, such investments cost time which I found far more difficult to protect and manage in my second year. But even more than this, such investment drew me to care for these people in ways that made it difficult to protect time for research, to let conversations pass, to not let myself feel elated or disappointed at various points of the academic year.

The question I am left with this year is this, how do I manage this academic life without forsaking the level of  and connectedness that drives my teaching, advising, and writing? This is becoming a pressing question as I stare reluctantly at year three with pre-tenure review, a suite of new courses to teach, and more programmatic realities to negotiate in the midst of trying to hear my children, serve my wife, and be faithful to my church.

I am honestly not sure what balance or rhythm looks like as I reluctantly look upon the third year and the years after. But in the midst of these questions I have also been reminded of the benefits of such investment. Relationships with students and faculty have certainly been sources of tremendous satisfaction. Through these relationships, time in the classroom, reflecting on evaluations and hearing students’ stories, I have also been reminded of my calling and the privilege I have to introduce students to the wonder and power of theology.

I am also realizing that one of the fruits of doing a job well is that people give you more to plant, and that is a good thing.

In my second year I am coming to terms with the academic life, not as a season or a series of tasks to work through. The academic life is just that, a life that must be lived into with perseverance in some moments, being open to surprises, and in other moments simple wonder and awe that God has set me to do this work. In the end, I am realizing there are no bullet-pointed plans, no checklists, no promises of it getting better any time soon. This is a life that must be lived into, embraced, worked through, and listened to.

Maybe at the end of the summer or at the end of my tenth year teaching I might have a few more actionable suggestions, but for now this is the best I can come up with.

But truthfully, this morning I am brought back to the mornings of my parent’s deaths from cancer, nine years apart. On each day we were visited by the hospice volunteers and told that it was “going to be soon.” What do you say in those moments, what do you do in the meantime? Has everything been said? Has everything been done before I find myself without this person who has been my beginning, my nurturer, my friend?

So the remainder of the day is spent waiting, sitting, stirring with movements that seem so full of meaning that you can’t move without something spilling out. So we walk and talk and laugh tepidly, trying to keep all the words, history and questions of what will life look like after she’s gone, keep these words and thoughts contained within glasses we are so scared to empty.

What do we do as we wait for death? As we wait for the end of a time with our loves, our joys? Waking up this morning the death of Christ is too close. Reading of Christ begging for another cup is too close to seeing my mother’s mourning what she will not see in us as we grow. Reading of Christ’s last breath is too close to sitting with my mother as she wheezed and struggled for breath and all we could do is offer her insignificant drops of water to ease her last moments in this life. Pondering Christ’s body lowered from the cross is too close to seeing her body slowly carried down the stairs and disappearing into darkness.

Sometimes it is just too much.

But of course Christ knew this. Of course Christ knew the pain of my mother, of my father, knew the mourning they would endure not only in their last moments but throughout the course of their life and Jesus would submerge himself into it, into the the waters of our suffering.

So as this weight follows me through this day, my prayer is that this proximity of Jesus and my parents, of Jesus with their pain and our family’s loss might persist. I pray that it might persist in the questions of Saturday, but even more, that the absence of Friday might be enveloped with presence on Sunday. I pray that my parents’ closeness to Christ in their last days became an intimate union of life with the Father, Son and Spirit where there is no gap between questions and answers, longing and fulfillment, brokenness and healing, where these cups of our lives are ever pouring out and being filled within the fountain of God’s life.

And I pray that they are waiting, hoping for me and all those who remain in time with questions that are so difficult to answer.

For folks who haven’t read the book yet or are intimidated by reading theology this talk might serve as a good entry point to get acquainted with the broader argument and why it is important for theology and for the church.

The New York Times recently published a story highlighting the increase in numbers of multiracial children in the United States. The numbers of self identifying multiracial children has doubled in the United States to 2.9% of the entire population. With this data, coupled with a 2007 Pew Research Center report that interracial marriages represented 14% of all new marriages (up from 7% in 2000), we could begin to surmise an end to problematic racial distinctions and a truly new America, right?

Taken together these numbers indicate a movement towards greater acceptance of interracial/interethnic relationships as well as a greater freedom for multiracial children to claim this mixture as part of their identity. And perhaps this is the most significant aspect of these figures. While the idea of numbers doubling seems extraordinary, multiracial children still constitute only 2.9% of all children which means more often than not sexual desire and marriage is oriented towards similarity and homogeneity (it is also important to note how even mixed marriages follow patterns of desire away from African American women who marry outside of their race in the smallest numbers.)

In the midst of these numbers we must remember that multiracial identity is not confined to checking boxes. Interactions with friends, dating, interactions with co-workers do not begin with our self-assertions, but with a complicated set of markers and interpretations that the multiracial person is not entirely in control of.

The space to claim one’s “multi”ness is important, it is certainly important for myself and my children. At the same time, the existence of multiracial children does not diminish the realities of racial exclusion and economic oppression that are not only present, but becoming more vehement and stark in the wake of our first African American president. To put it a different way, we are not the future of America. Like all other people who are raised in a deeply racialized world, we are formed to resist certain notions of beauty, embrace or recoil from certain people.

At the same time, we are also uniquely subjected to stereotypes, prejudice and exclusion from multiple spaces often making it difficult to find a space or a home in communities where race or ethnicity is such a powerful, if implicit marker of belonging.

Multiracial children provide us an opportunity to see both the possibilities of becoming new people but also the contours of racial thinking and life. But even more than this, our stories and lives hopefully illumine how race works in subtle and deceptive ways. Multiracial children are not an indication of how far we have come but perhaps a reminder of how far we have left to go.

Recent trends towards the implicit re-segregation of schools, moves against ethnic studies programs, the perpetual segregation of cities all suggest that multiracial and multiethnic bodies are hardly what this country desires. In many ways the hard truth is the numbers of interracial marriages and multiracial/multiethnic children is growing despite America’s vehement or implicit resistance.

If we wish to celebrate the growth of multiracial children let us not pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, but begin to rage against the systemic realities that prevent these numbers from growing: mass incarceration of African American men, tragic inequities between white and black in access to education, anti-immigration legislation, perpetual wars that limit our economic options, images of beauty and health that implicitly deride dark bodies and work against white bodies, the perpetual differentiation, bullying and teasing that plants these seeds of difference in elementary age children.

You might suggest that this is just a list of social difficulties that has little to with multiracial children. But within all of these are implicit desires and hopes, we desire “safety” before education, for instance. Until we begin to imagine life with one another, the multiracial child will be a statistical anomaly, an accident of a few couples odd transgression to love someone who does not look like them.

But even here we multiracial folks are not immune to the realities and phobias of race. While we check multiple boxes, our lives often indicate a choice for one or the other. We are not the future of America. We too must open ourselves up to the possibility of becoming something new, of embracing difficult options and by all means we must resist claiming “multi” as a new race. What I mean here is that if we are not attentive to the patterns of desire and fear that perpetuate the 85% of marriages being homogenous, we will simply try to suggest multiracial children have a unique beauty, insight, or genetic disposition that is superior to others, that there is a social imperative to intermixture.

But this is where I am wary of the celebration of the mixed child. We are not a “new” race. We are people who are connected to by a common language, geography, or even experience. We are held together by what we are not. In this way we are still tragic because our identity as “inter” resides in the assertion that there is something pure on either side of us. Until we become aware of this delusion, of the may ways our desires and hopes and fears are modulations of who we believe we are and are not, the mixed race child will still be an anomaly, but even worse we will ignore the patterns of injustice that persist in our nation and in our world.

Multiracial children are not the answer, but perhaps they can begin to help us see the problems we face more clearly.

Inception, a mind-bending sci-fi love story takes place within a world where dreams can be infiltrated, ideas can be taken and planted, and reality itself comes to be questioned. As the credits begin to roll you cannot help but ask the question, “what was real?”Or in my case, “That ending better have been real!”

When I first saw the film almost a year ago I couldn’t put my finger on the theological thread. Seeing the movie again a few months ago the thread was dangling again, but it was only as I reflected on a section of my introduction to theology course that it occurred to me…  the Lord’s Supper, time, memory, and the Incarnation. Or more specifically, what does it mean to be within a dream within a dream? What does it mean to be within God’s dream for us?

The story centers upon Cobb, a former “architect,” a person who renders the space of the dream while the dreamer fills the space with his or her own subconscious. Cobb can no longer build these dream spaces himself because of his own diminishing grasp on what is real and what is a dream.

The reason for Cobb’s difficulty rested on a tragic consequence of his vocationa nd experimentation with entering dreams. He and his wife, Mal, had entered into dreams, then dreams within dreams and so on, so deeply that they had lived an entire lifetime within a span of a few minutes of their actual sleeping life (Each time one enters into a dream, time slows such that the time elapsed in the sleeping world is magnified in each subsequent layer of dreaming.)

When Cobb and Mal awoke, Mal could not distinguish between what was true, the life she woke up to or the life of her dream. Mal subsequently killed herself, framing Cobb for her murder because he would not also kill himself and return to the “real world” where their children were.

Consequently, Cobb was outside the law until he is presented with an opportunity to return to his children. But instead of an act of stealing, Cobb was asked to perform an inception. Inception is the process of planting an idea in a person’s mind so deeply that they believe the idea was theirs to begin with. A Highly dangerous mission ensues with Cobb and his colleagues entering into multiples levels of dreams attempting to place a thought within a corporate tycoon, break up his father’s empire.

What was so gripping throughout this film was the flux of time, the pull and power that these worlds of dreams and reality had upon the characters. As the characters moved into dreams time slowed and yet the worlds continued to be somehow connected to one another. To say that the characters entered dreams is not to say that their lives were detached from their bodily lives or to suggest an ideal. And yet within these worlds, whether the dream world or the “real” world, there was always a tension of home, of rootedness.

This week, reflecting on the readings and discussion of Christology and the Lord’s Supper in class, I was brought back to this flux of time and yearning for home. In particular we have been reading a text by Panayiotis Nellas entitled Deification in Christ. Nellas suggests, “The bread of life himself changes the person who feeds on Him, transforms him and assimilates him to Himself.” For Nellas, Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper draws the participant back into Christ’s life for humanity, into the dislocation of time and eternity that was Christ’s life.

Partaking in the meal draws us into Jesus’ enactment or performance of human life, but rather than the bread and wine being absorbed into our bodies, we are absorbed, brought into the life of Christ. This being drawn is not only a mystical union, but a bodily, visceral presence that allows the eating to participate within Jesus’ assumption of human life. In the Lord’s Supper we are taken into God’s time, God’s memory.

Perhaps Inception points to this fluidity or distortion of time and eternity, to a slowing down of action that is both lived into and performed upon us in the midst of a dream within a dream. But what if the dream we are submerged into is not our own dream, but in partaking in the Lord’s Supper we are immersed into God’s dream, into God’s desire for us.

This distortion of time and memory, of what is our thought and the thought of another for us is not a sci-fi innovation, but the confession of the eternal Word enfleshed. Jesus enters into humanity and re-creates us, re-creates time.

Here the flux of the dream, the desire for reality and yet the necessity of one’s actions are a remarkable depiction of what theologians call an eschatological reality, an already, but not yet time, where God’s movement towards us is complete and yet in our own lives we do not yet feel the fullness of that peace in our everyday life.

Entering into the church is entering into this re-created space. We can re-imagine, re-order it and yet even within this space our sense of self can become displaced, it can become a means of control and certainty. Even within this flux we lose sight of the beginning and the end and seek to re-create the world as an object for our fulfillment, for our possession. Put differently, even evil can reside within these dreams.

Could discipleship be this navigation of time and eternity, seeking to perpetually discern the shape of what is home, what is real in an ever dizzying world of possibilities? But perhaps instead of having a totem particular to us (a totem is an item that is used to help center the person who enters a dream so that they know they are awake) our totem is the also the bread and the wine, the body and blood. We are being drawn not out of the dream, but reality exists on the other side of the dream?

Every time the credits roll and I see Cobb re-united with his children I hope it isn’t a dream, I say to myself, surely this was real!

But what if this is the point? My desire for “truth” rests within a notion of time and space that can fit within my creaturely mind. What if this is exactly the illusion? What if my baptism, my partaking in the Lord’s Supper is an immersion into a new form of time, a new end whose resolution is not in being certain of my own mind, but finding that I have been brought into another’s dream? Christ’s entrance into the world draws me into God’s dream.

But part of the brilliance of Inception is to press against the notion that such a claim has nothing to do with our bodily lives. The question of the dream is not the Gnostic question, in other words. Rather the dream is the extension of a biological reality and thus represents a deep union of our body and soul. Within our dream we guard our bodily hopes and desires, fears and pain. The dream is an intensification of our bodily reality.

Read in this way we might recall an earlier Trinitarian metaphor of the Mind-Word-Will. While not perfect, the metaphor sought to articulate the necessity and difference of each person of the Godhead. But through the lens of Inception could we say that the incarnation is a drawing humanity into this Trinitarian life, not one of mere rationality, but a reality of the dream, God’s dream for us?

Could it not be the question of “how,” but “who” (to borrow from Dietrich Bonhoeffer) … whose world, whose dream do we exist within? Who are we for? Who are we with? Is the point our power over the world, or who we are in the world with?

Perhaps this is the incarnation. Jesus’ work is the displacement of certainty, of drawing us into a dream. But within this world we struggle to articulate the true and the real… who are we in this place?

This is the danger for the church… we are in a dream within a dream, deep inside the life of God but as such we are always on the precipice of becoming God’s ourselves of ordering this world towards ourselves, of mistaking reality as the thing we fashion rather than the thing that grounds our existence.

But this shift of time is also our hope, that we are being ushered forward to a place of clarity, to home, where our uncertainty, our traumas will no longer haunt us and turn themselves upon us. Partaking in the Lord’s Supper we exist within a life of possibility, of peace, of promise because our time is not God’s time and yet God abides with us within our time so that we might abide with others.

Thomas Chatterton Williams has written an intriguing article highlighting recent trends of multiracial children “passing as black.” If I let myself go I will write a short book on this before I finish, so I will refrain and simply offer a few thoughts and questions and invite your comments and thoughts as well.

Mongrel and biracial are not the same thing…. First, I think Williams is concerned that blackness is often construed so narrowly it creates a necessity to “pass.” He wants to point to biracial as more naturally a category within black existence and thus free biracial people to live into being black while also expanding what it means to be black.

I am deeply sympathetic to this project, but I wonder if it doesn’t collapse racial modalities of an earlier American era with our contemporary reality. That is, the biracial child of slavery was a child of rape or illicit love, but in either case their birth could be monetarily quantified. They were still a slave.

While some might have served in the big house, they were still chattel and the mark of their mother remained with them. Those who sought to claim their father’s life were either killed or had to undergo a social exile in order to attain their status as “white” men or women. While occupying a precarious (or often feared) space within black society mulattoes nonetheless remained black. Passing in post-Civil War society through the 1920′s represented an attempt to gain access to social, economic, or political advantage that was sometimes temporary, but oftentimes represented a complete immersion that required a cutting of of ties to any connection that could implicate one as dark.

The reason for this brief historical context is to highlight an important difference in the experience of biracial people today. Many of us remain with our parents or live in households where racial difference exists together. While Williams wants to expand the tent of blackness, I worry this expansion simplifies a reality that can only be repeatedly and necessarily complicated. That is, part of the tension felt by biracial people today is the remaining structure of racial certainty that presses upon us. And yet,  radically near or domestic realities render such formulations of certainty, and their cultural practices, unstable at best.

To simply say everyone is black is to ignore the important tensions that exist inside of households and yet are so often resisted or separated in a biracial person’s daily life. This is very different from a genealogical claim that “we all have mixture.” Of course, there are no “pure” people, but that is hardly evident from the structural and cultural realities of our daily life (as Williams himself suggests in his important book Losing My Cool.)

A recent complication of contemporary biracial reality is something like this: a biracial boy, watching tv with his white mother, exclaims something about “white people!” in disgust or surprise and turns to see his white mother looking at him in shock and estrangement. The negotiation is not merely a person in relation to a community but persons within profound relationships of kinship. This is not to say these relationships only exist within the family, but I hope to simply press a slightly different challenge in present biracial life. Williams’ resistance to passing resists the very real tensions that persist in a racial world where difference resides no longer in segregated neighborhoods that require risky, defiant, or trickster practices to bypass racial discipline.

In contemporary society, biracial politics are worked out within a household as children check boxes, choose music/friends, and navigate what it means to be a son or daughter along with what it means to be a friend. The risk is no longer geographic, but domestic. But this leads to a second important point regarding the reality of biracial life in contemporary society, the widening variety of the biracial experience.

Don’t subsume biracial identity into the black/white matrix… Second, Williams moves rather quickly past Washington Post editor, Elizabeth Chang’s frustration over President Barack Obama’s claiming himself to be black rather than biracial.

What is left unsaid in this question is how the reality of the black/white biracial person resonates deeply with the reality of both 2nd generation immigrant children as well as other variations of biracial/multiethnic life. This connection points to an important shift in biracial identities. In a positive light, this connection points to clear shift away from the racist, anti-black rhetoric of the not-too-long-ago American experience. Choosing and living into a racial identity is a possibility now for those who have a drop of black in a way that was never possible in earlier eras.

But at the same time, the tension of choosing and the cultural stakes remain high. The idea of having to tragically forsake one’s mother or father, albeit rhetorically in some cases, remains a reality of America’s racial framework. We have yet to make sense of these subtle, but powerful forces that work upon our collective imaginations and outline our social and cultural proclivities.

Such a tension is felt intensely among biracial people of many different combinations. Questions of food, language, customs are often daily questions and challenges that are not unrelated to the decisions related in the sociological phenomenon passing as black, in some ways it is a question of cultural belonging.

It seems to me this is a much larger conversation than the simple black-white dichotomy can process. We need a wider set of interpretive tools to think through how to negotiate these experiences. The realities of our brothers and sisters who are Korean/Black, Chinese/White, Taiwanese/Philipino can contribute a great deal to helping us process the challenges of being mixed-anything in a society predicated upon even a delusional sense of purity. we must acknowledge that what was a unique “black experience” has deep resonances in surprising places and this means racial politics of any sort must re-imagined.

a few random thoughts… While these thoughts have been a bit rambling, there are a few loose threads I am, frankly, still trying to make sense of.

First, while the idea of passing as black is a fascinating trend, mixed marriages of black and (anything) remain the lowest of all mixed marriages in the United States and marriages of black women to anyone else remain the lowest of all mixed marriages. There is something going on here. While many who pass as black are definitely embracing something of themselves and seeking to live into a difference that is both perceived and real, there remain real problems of representation, standards of beauty and desire that we need to account for.

Second, I can’t help but think there is an element of class here that is going without analysis. Who are those who have the freedom to choose? What are the economic and social realities that permit mixed marriages in the first place? How will the re-segregation of schools shift this trend in twenty years? Could this phenomenon be one of the first (and last) fruit of school desegregation? Obviously, Williams does not have the space to address such questions, but these are things that are rattling around nonetheless.

Thirdly, I am still struggling to figure out the difference gender makes. Contemporary fictional accounts of mixed identity have been largely written by female authors (Zadie Smith, Danzy Senna, Heidi Durrow, to name a few) but we have seen fewer contemporary accounts written by men (if you know of any please pass them on!) I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something there… I am sure of it.

Lastly, I am not sure the reality of passing as black sufficiently names the tension that some of us biracial people should feel, that our racial ambiguity gives us a freedom to pass as black without necessarily subjecting ourselves to the full reality of what it means to be black in America. This is a highly contextual claim, I know. For some mixed folk, they are identified as black first, but for others (myself included) we must declare our blackness. I have been fortunate to have been given the space among black communities of friends and scholars, but it remains a challenge and a choice in front of some biracial people.

This can look a lot of different ways, but I know my experience in the world is different than those whose blackness is a veil few can look past. This is a topic I don’t have time to deepen here, but I think it is an important point to consider in this conversation.

In all, Williams has picked up on an important shift in American racial politics and is one black Americans must continue to wrestle with as the race question becomes increasingly multiracial rather than biracial. I am glad for his contribution.

I have rambled on long enought and this is already too long, so I would love to hear your thoughts about Williams’ article, my few thoughts here or other views on what it means to pass as black.

Redeeming Mulatto… Why a theology of mixed race life? Who is it for? In many ways this book is a deeply personal journey. It is an attempt to discern my own life as a mixed race child, figuring out where to belong, realizing that belonging is itself a difficult and dangerous business. Yet, it is also a a work that arises out of a Christian faith that both grounded my disorientation while introducing new questions, possibilities and impossibilities.

Not satisfied with the trope of interracial person as “bridge between many peoples,” a product of a simple equation where “one drop” made one black, or where one could easily deny any connection to a darker heritage out of a desire to “just be me,” my introduction to theology began to widen the vocabulary with which I described my own body and experiences both as a Christian and an interracial man.

In the midst of this I came to find that my sense of dislocation, of uncomfortable multiplicity was shared by the woman I would eventually marry. A Korean American woman, formed within a pentecostal Korean church and the black church, our stories of negotiating identities and occupying surprising, but nonetheless difficult tension resonated within one another.

In her experience, in her charismatic faith I found yet another language to describe what it might look like to be “mixed” and that this was not only a sociological or biological category, but also a theological category.

In these varied ways, I hope that this book begins to make space not only for those whose lives are “mulatto” in the technical sense of the word (half black, half white) but mixed in the many ways that our modern world has created for us (Indian/white, Korean/black, all of the above, 2nd generation, white but raised in a black neighborhood, black but raised in a white neighborhood, or any other configuration one might imagine).

Truth be told, I hope in a multicultural America, we might all find a bit of ourselves in this narrative of our sinfulness, Christ’s salvific body, and a new possibility for our lives together.

With the joy and expectation of my own children being born, such expectation was an unnerving waiting. Not sure what to do, I also knew that I could not be idle, but how to be present? While my wife shared of the small and miraculous developments within her and to her over the course of months, I watched amazed, in love, but nevertheless distant. I could not feel the first flutters of the child spin within me, or the pressure of life emerging, overtaking my body.

I could comfort, I could coach, but I was also acutely aware of how indirectly I was present to that infant’s life at such a crucial moment. What I came to understand was that this distance was not a perpetual wall, but a reality that required a new way of being present, of waiting without the satisfaction of knowing that it was my work that made this life possible. My presence could only be comforting, listening, attending, receiving.

Can we imagine Joseph’s expectation as he leads Mary through perilous roads, into an empty city not only with the weight of his wife’s expectations, but a heavenly promise (or command!) ringing in his ears? When he finally settles his beloved wife in the stall, his activity, the certainty of what to do in his appointed task dissolves and all that is left is to wait, to watch, to comfort all the while wondering what will this child bring?

“How can this be?” were Mary’s words when she was first confronted with what her life, her body would become, and so while not pregnant ourselves, perhaps we all stand with Joseph in observing the pains of birth, unnerved and overwhelmed, but nonetheless commanded, exhorted to come alongside, to serve and listen and heed so that God might be born among us. Stripped of our programs and our plans of action, we wait, we comfort, we attend.

We attend not only to our families, our lists, our loved ones, but we attend as well to those for whom waiting is not a seasonal celebration, but a life sentence. We comfort those whose lives are marked by the expectation of pain that has no fruit of children at its end. We wait, we attend, we comfort the poor, the afflicted, the incarcerated, the enslaved, not because our actions save, but because the birth of God means the conception of justice and righteousness in this world and we have been commanded to attend and serve our Lord as he groans in childbirth, ushering in a kingdom of peace that we do not yet know, but is surely coming.