Medium Build - Yoke

I came to class on the last day of my Christian Ethics course in seminary to see a myriad of topics written on the whiteboard. The last day was set aside for review before the final. Each topic on the board was something we had covered. After about 2 hours of review, my professor wrote one more word on the board right in the middle, in the only space left.

Forgiveness.

He circled it, turned around, and said that this was a topic we didn’t cover. He said it was a topic he still didn’t understand. Then he humbly asked us if we figure it out, please let him know. Ending the class, especially one on ethics, on a topic that this tenured professor lacks understanding of, left a lasting impression.

I don’t get it either. However, listening to Medium Build’s music catalog and watching interviews with him, I get the sense that he has figured it out just a bit more than I have.

I guess it was better than the alternative
Plenty wanted more than us
Always a roof, always food to eat
Plenty of dogma-stained love

“Dogma-stained love” encapsulates a multitude of hurts doled out by the church to its people. In my experience of evangelicalism, this stained love came in the form of mission. It stained any expression of care and affection.

All-encompassing mission made my old religious life heavy. It was a burden that acted both as a stimulant and a paralyzer through the means of guilt, which was the fundamental emotion of my faith experience. Guilt for sin. Guilt for disobeying. Guilt for fearing ridicule. Guilt from shame. Guilt from duty.

I never did enough. How could I? Every second, someone dies and goes to hell—or so they told me. A convenient truth for people trying to coerce you into being more missionaly productive. However, I never met the standard the mission required, a requirement that manipulated every aspect of the Christian life to skew towards making an impact. And with the tilt came a cocktail of self-loathing, self-sacrificing, self-hating—all used to make you more missional, or at least to give more of yourself to their mission.

It was never enough. I was never enough. The yoke was so heavy. Feeling that for 15 years was a major impetus for getting out from under it and reimagining a different form of faith.

I’ve been listening to this song for at least a year. I’ve always marked it as one about the pain of church hurt and its lasting effects. And in a sense, I still think it is. But late last night, his term “dogma-stained love” took on new meaning—a meaning I had not expected.

Though Medium Build’s upbringing had its faults, he had more than others. Food, a roof, a family. The love, though, was dogma-stained. It was infused with authority-laden rules and belief systems. But it was still love. The love possessed an earnestness of passing down all that they knew. And in his reflections (even more clearly in his song J&L), he holds empathy for those who passed the yoke on to him.

It made me realize that in my story, someone thought they were doing right, whether out of care or compulsion. And it unnecessarily burdened me. And that yoke is heavy and hard to get out from under. The effects of it may ripple out for a lifetime.

But maybe forgiveness, or part of it, is not returning the favor. I was never enough for their idolatry of impact, influence, and mission. Yet, I don’t have to exclude them in the same fashion. I can find the sliver of them and their actions that held even an ounce of love, and let it be enough. I don’t have to rewrite the narrative and make them a hero. I could, though, let them be complex. I could let them be caught up in something that used them, too.

That sliver may prove to be just enough to keep me from debilitating bitterness. Maybe that’s forgiveness. Maybe I should send this to my ethics professor.

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I guess it was better than the alternative
Plenty wanted more than us
Always a roof, always food to eat
Plenty of dogma-stained love

‘Cause the yoke was so heavy
Yeah, the yoke was so

Three months away, saving savages
A dozen white bought memories
I gave them my youth, made some lifelong friends
Who no longer acknowledge me

‘Cause the yoke was so heavy
Yeah, the yoke was so

Out on my own, signing lease agreements
Flexing my agency
Wondering how I would fail without
The invisible man guiding me

‘Cause the yoke was so heavy
Yeah, the yoke was so
Yeah, the yoke was so heavy
Yeah, the yoke was so