This document summarizes a paper presentation about religious educators resisting white fragility and the lessons that can be learned from mystics. It begins with defining a mystic as someone who lives with a transfigured perception of the ordinary that draws them into communion with creation. It then outlines four elements for transformative change: getting proximate, changing narratives, finding resilience and hope, and embracing discomfort. Specific strategies are discussed for each element, drawing on the works of Bryan Stevenson and Willie James Jennings. The full paper is available at an online link provided.

1. Religious educators resisting white fragility:
Lessons from mystics
paper presentation to the AD Pro Seminar
University of St. Michael’s College
30 September 2016

2. a word about my contexts…

3. basic outline of paper
• begins with a broad definition of “mystic”
• draws on the frame of one contemporary mystic (Bryan
Stevenson)
• describes white fragility as a habitus
• offers strategies for resisting that formation

4. a mystic is someone who lives life through a
“transfigured perception of the ordinary” that draws
them into deep communion with all of Creation

5. four elements for transformative change
• getting proximate
• changing the narratives
• finding what sustains resilience and hope
• embracing discomfort
Stevenson

6. (1) getting proximate

7. habitus of white fragility

8. “White people in North America live in a social environment that
protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated
environment of racial protection builds White expectations for
racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate
racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White
Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress
becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These
moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger,
fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and
leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn,
function to reinstate White racial equilibrium.” (DiAngelo, 2011, 1)

9. (2) changing the narratives

10. Willie James Jennings’ question: “Why is racial
belonging more decisive for Christians, than Christian
belonging? Why does race animate our sense of
belonging much more powerfully and tangibly than the
Christian faith that so many of us share and confess?”
Jennings’ lecture

11. his answer requires us to retrieve a profoundly
different epistemology, a deeply relational
understanding of knowing in the intimate grasp of
God — indeed, a “transfigured perception of the
ordinary”

12. (3) resilience and hope

13. hope grows through communion, through a
“transfigured perception of the ordinary” — a way
of knowing that draws on far more than narrow
cognitive reasoning, and is deeply relational

14. “It is as if there is a hidden glory radiating from each person
which will reveal itself only to those who have been able to
focus outward and wait in generosity, thus allowing their own
hidden glory – hidden especially from themselves – to pour
forth. Even as the observing I/eye is elided, the glory pours
through…” (Ross, 2014, 224)

16. “This is the peace that characterizes the person who has re-
centered in the deep mind, so that the two ways of knowing,
which are interdependent, flow together as they are designed to
do in an integrated way of knowing, the whole being more than
the sum of its parts. Peace in this context is not an affect but
rather a way of being in the world.” (Ross, 2014, 196).

17. (4) embracing discomfort

18. “Life inside this new space, then, carries uneasiness and even a
discomfort as those within it attempt to negotiate powerful cultural
claims of kinship. It is in the face of these tensions that Paul’s
declarations of a new citizenship (Eph 2:19) indicate profound risk
taking for anyone who wishes to claim identity in the new space,
that is, to claim being Christian” (Jennings, 2011, 273)

19. empathy, not just sympathy

20. ways to do this…

21. paper draft available here:
https://www.academia.edu/27756283/
White_religious_educators_resisting_white_fragility_Lessons_from_mystics