Ethical Autobiography

I just wrote this ethical autobiography for my ethics class at PLTS. I thought you all might enjoy it:

I confess to having a major addiction in my life right now: Joss Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” I know that my weekend is approaching when the next few DVDs of the show arrive through my netflix account. Once all my school work is done and my apartment is clean from my week, my favorite thing to do is to sit down and to find myself imagining that I am in Sunnydale, California where Buffy Summers is fighting supernatural forces of evil, with her specialty being vampires, with her friends assisting her in this battle.
I mostly started to watch it to understand why some of my friends back in MN think that the show is just amazing. You see, on one hand, I feel like I should be appalled. I worked for Pace e Bene, a non-violence organization last semester and I believe fully in nonviolent conflict resolution, and feel like I should not support Hollywood images of redemptive violence. The idea of dividing the world into “good” people and “bad” people (even if they are mostly portrayed by fictive vampires) is not a worldview that I generally uphold. The other thing is that my major in college was sociology where I found that my true passion was for examining gender and media from a lens of sociology and cultural history. While I do find it refreshing that the primary fighter is a strong female figure, it does follow the common Hollywood problem of putting women in “types” when they are together as her friend Willow is a very intelligent woman and Cordelia is a very beautiful woman. Its as though a woman can not be both. From a feminist perspective, there is also the problem with the eroticism behind the vampire violence as well. What can I say? I have a heart for justice and I have been trained to be immensely culturally critical.
I guess that this is the side of me that many people tend to see as I really have strongly called to be a voice for justice in the world, and in the realm of my ministry. From this perspective this does not make any sense. However, from a few other perspectives about my life journey, it makes perfect sense.
You see, I have always had a strong inclination to enjoy the world of fantasy. I was able to sing arias from Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at a very young age, and I have adored both the glorious music and the story of magic that accompanied it my whole life. I have also always been an avid reader, reading any books I could get my hands on and spending my money on books. As a child, I absolutely adored C.S. Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, and any stories about evil witches that I could find. In high school, I adored Arthurian legend from the lens of Marion Zimmer Bradley and T.H. White. In college, my obsession was for Tolkien and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books and the movie Labyrinth. Stories about magic, other-worldly creatures and travels to magical lands have always been incredibly appealing to me. I honestly love the fantasy section of the bookstore and some of the amazing things that can be done with these types of stories on the screen in our digital age.
Yet , when I started to really see that I had a heart for justice in my surrounding world, this is something that I did struggle with. A common motif in these sort of tales is to portraying characters as either being definitely good or bad. Occasionally, there are exceptions to this, and occasionally characters are portrayed as both, but this is not a paper on the literary analysis of these tales. I have often heard the argument that these characters in these stories, like the vampires on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, are pure evil and therefore the violence in these stories are justifiable. However, when I analyze this on my own, my Lutheran theology says that all people tend to be both saints and sinners, both good and evil. Is the portrayal of one type of creature/character/ or person as pure evil in a story truly helpful in terms of the way we want to categorize the world? The way I have personally come to understand this in my own way of thinking of dealing with issues of injustice is to view actions as being bad, but people not necessarily being evil. An example is that when George W Bush was president, I was strongly opposed to the militaristic actions that he took, but I made an effort to be opposed to his actions as a president instead of being opposed to George W Bush as a person. Because of this idea of good people versus bad people, these kinds of stories often involve at least one intense battle of some kind in the climax of the story and the denouement is frequently the resolution of this battle. This is something that I know that I have had a strong tendency to struggle with in my love of these kinds of tales, which includes my current obsession with “Buffy,” when I advocate for nonviolence in my surrounding world.
I have made sense of this in my own sense of ethics by realizing that I do not like what I consider “realistic” portrayals of violence. To me, this means that I tend to handle it better when one of the characters involved are not human, but happens to be something like a vampire, an evil witch or any other fictitious creature (at least to our own sense of awareness). And I generally prefer a comic portrayal of a sword fight or a fist fight over the use of guns and bombs. There is something that is more artistic about this on the screen as it has a lot more dance-type moves. Because when I observe these more dance type moves, it seems like something that can be portrayed on the stage as well.
In considering the stage, it makes me also think of some of the decisions that I had made about my life in my youth that I found to be incredibly ethical decisions for me at the time. You see, I had done a lot of theater when I was in junior high and high school and I have a deep respect for good theatrical movement as a result. I was always taking acting classes and I performed in a numerous amounts of plays. I found that I loved it quite a bit. I loved the process of bringing a story to life before an audience. Even though I tended to be exhausted afterwards, it really did thrill me quite a bit. Initially because I had a lot of enthusiasm for theater as a teenager and encouragement to pursue it, I strongly considered being a theater major in college initially. There were a lot of reasons why I decided not to pursue theater professionally even though my love of it has never gone away, which is why I never wound up taking a single theater class in college.
In my mind, there were some very ethical decisions not to do this. To begin with, I wanted to be a strong role model for young women and felt that the images of empowered women in plays and movies are incredibly minimal, even though I love many of these stories for one reason or another. My other ethical argument against this was that I did not want to join the masses of people who were hoping to break into show business somehow who often were unemployed and/or living in poverty when they were dreaming of making it on stage. I was privileged to receive a college education at a good liberal arts school, and I wanted to do something that would enable me to make more of a difference in my surrounding world.
My problem? My other strong interests were in literature and creative writing, and I found that I spent a lot of time on vocal music because it was both enjoyable and easy for me. The thing is that these were other strong artistic pursuits which left me back to the ethical dilemma of my economical argument that I had before in pursuing anything in the arts professionally. And while I found these pursuits to be very spiritually rich for me, I did not feel like I was contributing anything good back to society either as I had no desire to teach in the arts.
I finally ended in a sociology major because I felt like I was really exploring issues of poverty, racism, and injustice in more detail in my sociology classes than I was able to in any of my other classes. These were the issues that I felt like I ought to be pursuing with an undergraduate degree. I think that on one hand, it really was a vocational calling to be dealing with justice issues more directly. On the other hand, I found this to be an ethical issue as well. It was an ethical imperative for me that these were issues that I had the tools to really explore these issues of inequality in our culture. I guess that I had a deep sense of utilitarianism in me, as I wanted to find something that not only I enjoyed, but also could benefit more people than just myself in the long run no matter what I did with this degree.
After I settled on a sociology major, I started to pick up a music minor for my own pleasure and to be very active with Amnesty International because of this imperative and sense of urgency I felt to be addressing issues of inequality in our world. However this was around the same semester that September 11th occurred. I did view this as a great tragedy to our nation. However, I had a dream a few nights before September 11th, where I saw some buildings tumbling to the ground and I was helpless as to what I could do. In the background, I heard a commanding, gentle voice telling me these words over and over again, “TELL MY PEOPLE I AM A GOD OF PEACE.” Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion, but it was one that I felt mandated to bring because of the dream I had. It was then that I found another reason to stop the intensity that I had with my music books, as I realized that my voice was still being used, but in a way that I had not expected.
After that, working for justice and peace became a really central piece of my life. It came with some high consequences of my losing some supportive friends who did not like how far I took this, and it caused me to break off an engagement and while I did pursue some interesting projects, they were not always the kinds of things that tended to land employment right away.
I still struggle with a lot of the same questions now as I did then in asking questions as to whether products are fairly traded, what various companies practices are, ecological effects of driving my car, stressing nonviolent conflict resolution, etc. However, while I still have these same ethics, I feel like I approach them a lot differently now than I did when I was in college. I really feel like in college and in my early twenties I made sure that MY perspective was heard and I did have a strong tendency towards self righteousness in the way that I did live up to my own sense of what was right. In a way, I think the rest of the world seemed “wrong.”
I jump ahead 6 years later now since I have graduated from college. I do not want to talk about it in detail, but not long after college I had a near death experience in a car accident and I was completely disabled for a period of time. In this time, I had to depend a lot on other people and I was determined not to let my disabled body make me be a negative person. Maybe that is one of the things that transformed my ways of approaching these kinds of issues quite a bit, as I found myself committed to building bridges with all of the people surrounding me, not just the people who seemed to think like me.
Also since then, I have grown into this sense of really wanting to serve in parish ministry, which affirms this need to build bridges with people as well. I think that deliberating ethical ramifications of things like the products that I buy, my environmental impact on this earth and being a voice against violence in this world is important to the way that I deliberate my place in the world. However, I do not view it my role in pastoral ministry to impose my own opinion on other people, but to find ways to help people deliberate these issues out. If they come to similar conclusions that I have, then I think that finding ways to take action as a congregation is appropriate. But I realize that there is a diversity of opinions that people can have as well, and I have come to have a deep reverence and acceptance for these varieties of opinions.
And as my heart has grown to accept a large variety of opinions on difficult issues, I have found that I have been able to revisit parts of myself from a different ethical perspective than I did before. It leaves room in my life for a perspective that includes speaking against war and violence in our world and an obsession with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”