I learned how to break a man’s arm this week. I’m taking a rather intense self-defense class right now. Here is the blurb about the class: Our Vision is for women to have the skills and capability to be destructive to anyone attempting to violate them. SHIELD is a close-range fighting system created specifically to empower women against sexual assault.... It emphasizes on close-range fighting to be efficient to fight in tight quarters using lower body strength to generate power. This is a safe space for women to learn practical and effective full-contact self defense. You can’t say it clearer than that: This is a class designed to teach me how to use violence to injure another person. It’s a public statement of my willingness to do some serious, and possibly permanent, damage to another human being, of saying that yes, my life and my body is more important than some ideal of peace and non-violence, that if it comes down to him or me – I choose me. Given my self-chosen identity as a pacifist for the past fifteen years, it’s a biggish step for me to say that sometimes, non-violence is not the highest value. It requires transgressing my peace and forgiveness party line. I don’t want to be attacked, of course, nor do I look forward to the idea of hurting someone else, but you know what? It’s not my fault that it’s a violent world. There’s a place for non-violent resistance, but for every Martin Luther King, there’s a Malcolm X and the Black Panthers and the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and I don’t know if I want to tell them that they’re wrong. Maybe every Dr. King needs someone on the margins holding guns to make him seem more reasonable.  Of course, I’m not the leader of a movement or trying to change the world. My choice is not particularly altruistic: I’ve simply weighed the options, and if the choice is getting raped again or effing up the rapist, I’ve decided that my well-being is more important than his.
For some people, that seems obvious, but too me, it’s not – or at least, it hasn’t been. None of it’s as clear as many people seem to think. I’m not sure I should trust the ones touting the peace and love Jesus any more than the ones promoting God and Country Sunday, because whatever happens in my future, I’m fairly certain that Stanley Hauerwas will not be there to help. It’s not like I walk around expecting some guy to jump out at me from behind a corner and try to drag me to his van. Most likely, I will never actually use my new skills, but this class is part of a broader process in my life of valuing reality over theory. I want to start with what IS right now, not what someone somewhere said what OUGHT to be. Maybe I’ve (finally) exorcised the notion that there is a “real” Christianity out there somewhere floating in the ether that I must find or be forever damned. I’m no longer willing to live my life according to a set of otherworldly, abstract values that are more important than my very life – or someone else’s. I’m no longer willing to place ideology or theology or any other –ology over and above my actual, lived experience. (Fist bump to Dorothy Smith! ) And my experience says that I’ve had all the martyrdom I can stand, that this body and this world matter more to me than whatever is floating beyond the clouds and more than my alleged immortal soul. So, I should probably get back to work so I can pay my real world bills...
Christy Lambertson lives in Los Angeles, where she makes rather good mojitos, refuses to root for the Lakers, and blogs at Dry Bones Dance. | 
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