Mother to Son with Jasmine L. Holmes

The past few years have seen many discussions in American society and the Church about how we handle issues of race and ethnicity. Author Jasmine L. Holmes has addressed this topic from a very personal angle, writing a series of letters to her own son called Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy on Identity and Hope. She has some excellent insights about how the Church should think about justice and reconciliation, how we should engage with one another in general, and what it's like to be a mother of boys. This is a valuable discussion on a timely topic. Also in this episode: A somewhat unusual birth story leaves Jasmine on edge.

Links for today's episode:
Official book page
Jasmine's personal website
Jasmine's Patreon page
Twitter
Instagram
Facebook
Let's Talk podcast
Dayton Triangles football team

Transcript

Jon Guerra: 0:08

I have a heart full of questions quieting all my suggestions. What is the meaning of Christian in this American life? I'm feeling awfully foolish spending my life on a message. I look around and I wonder ever if I heard it right.

Amy Mantravadi: 0:27

Welcome to the(A)Millennial podcast, where we have theological conversations for today's world. I'm your host, Amy Mantravadi, coming to you live from Dayton, Ohio home of the Dayton Triangles football team. No, the Triangles aren't around anymore, but they were one of the original members of what eventually became the National Football League. They won the first game ever played in that league, beating the Columbus P anhandles 14 to 0. Today, it's safe to say that Columbus has D ayton beat in the football department...along with Cleveland and Cincinnati. But enough about football. Let's turn to the main topic for today. I'll be interviewing author Jasmine L. H olmes about her beautiful book, Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy o n Identity and Hope. She wrote these letters to her e ldest son when she was pregnant with his brother, and in them she shares her thoughts about various forms of identity: familial, racial, and spiritual. She addresses some of the most pressing questions about ethnicity and racial reconciliation, but her book has relevance beyond those debates. It is also a picture of how mothers relate to their children and how that kind of familial love should be characteristic of how all Christians e ngage with one another. Scripture tells us that all human beings are created in the image of God and thus filled with infinite worth. In Genesis chapter one, verses 26 through 27, we read,"Then God said,'Let us make mankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.' So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female He created them." Unfortunately, humanity fell into sin, and ever since that point we have been turning against each other and failing to value each other's worth. In the words of James, we have been making distinctions among ourselves, becoming judges with evil motives rather than obeying the royal law to love our neighbors as ourselves. We have shown partiality, committing sin and being convicted by the law as violators. But the good news is that Jesus Christ, by laying down his life and taking it back up again, has made possible reconciliation not only between God and man, but also between man and man. This ushered in a new era in which the mystery of Christ was revealed: that people of all nations w ould be part of God's household, and that in the seed of Abraham, which is Jesus Christ, all the nations would be blessed. Paul writes about this so wonderfully in his Epistle to the Ephesians, speaking of the way that Jews and non-Jews were reconciled i n Christ."For he himself is our peace who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall by abolishing in his flesh the hostility, which is the law composed of commandments expressed in ordinances, so that in himself, he might make the two one new person, in this way establishing peace, and that he might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near, for through him we both have our access in one spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and a re of God's household." That's Ephesians chapter two, verses 14 through 19. That is the biblical basis on which we ought to embrace one another i n love, regardless of ethnicity. Now let's go to the interview where I'll be discussing this issue and others with Jasmine.

Jon Guerra: 4:14

[inaudible]

Amy Mantravadi: 4:16

And I'm here with Jasmine L. Holmes, the author of Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy on Identity and Hope. She was educated at Thomas Edison State University and has taught every grade from preschool to 12th grade. She's part of the Let's Talk podcast, blogs at jasminelhomes.com, and has contributed articles to Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, Modern Reformation, and Fathom. You can support her work at patreon.com/jasminelholmes. Currently she is teaching humanities and Latin at the sixth grade level and her published works include Identity Theft: Reclaiming the Truth of our Identity in Christ, to which she was a contributor; His Testimonies, My Heritage: Women of Color and the Word of God, to which she was also a contributor; and the book we're going to talk about today, Mother to Son. You can catch her on Twitter and Instagram@JasmineLHolmes or on Facebook/JasLHolmes. So Jasmine, I understand from your book that you're a fan of birth stories, is that correct?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 5:25

Yes. I am a huge fan of birth stories.

Amy Mantravadi: 5:28

All right. Well, I did some digging around to try to find one that was particularly interesting. In fact, I think it's probably the oddest birth story that I've ever heard. Do you know anything about the Suriname Toad?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 5:42

No.

Amy Mantravadi: 5:44

Well, most people don't, so I'm not surprised that you haven't heard about it. As I said, I did some digging around and on the website of the San Diego Zoo, this is what it has to say about the reproductive process of the Suriname Toad."Males call to the females by making a clicking sound underwater. A willing female releases 60 to 100 eggs and the male fertilizes them and pushes the eggs onto her back, where they stick to her skin. During the next few days, her skin grows up and around the eggs, forming a honeycomb structure of pockets and eventually encloses them completely. After hatching, the young ride on her back for three to four months, continuing to develop under her skin. When ready, the fully formed toadlets push and squirm to loosen the female's skin. The pockets on her back open up to reveal the snouts and waving feet of the toadlets. When they're ready, they pop out of their holes and head for the water's surface to breathe and begin life on their own. The little toadlets can start snapping at food right away and don't care if that food happens to be a sibling. The mother then sheds her skin, ready for the next breeding season." It really warms your heart when you hear a birth story like that, doesn't it?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 6:58

I was so scared for the mother! I was like,"Are they going to eat her?" I was on the edge of my seat. I'm so glad she's okay.

Amy Mantravadi: 7:07

Well, the mother's okay, but apparently the siblings are not. I actually thought of this because my husband and I love to watch nature documentaries, and we saw some feature on this a few years back, and I remember when I saw it, it was the most bizarre birth that I'd ever witnessed. So I just thought I'd throw that in there, along with a lot of the more heartwarming birth stories that you've probably heard.

Jasmine L. Holmes: 7:36

That was so scary. My heart was beating so fast.

Amy Mantravadi: 7:38

Well, moving on to a more serious topic of your book and discussing the purposes of your book. You say that you want"to see brothers and sisters of every tribe, tongue and nation dwelling in unity, not by flattening God-given ethnic and cultural identities, but by living in the gloriously diverse reality of those identities for his glory." So I'm wondering how do we tend to flatten out the identities of our brothers and sisters in Christ, and do you think this is a result of fear or letting ourselves off the hook or something else? What are your thoughts on that?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 8:16

Yeah, I think it can be the result of a lot of things. Some ways that identity can be flattened is just an unwillingness to have conversation about different identities, different experiences, different backgrounds, different ethnicities. It kind of happens when we get threatened by differences instead of embracing them as God given and God ordained. And that can happen for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it's fear. Sometimes it's fear that the person is trying to draw us away from making the gospel the main thing. Sometimes it's guilt over what our ancestors did or didn't do. Sometimes it's pride- just not wanting to be taught anything. And sometimes it's just trying to do the best that you can to love people in spite of differences by pretending like those differences don't exist. So I think that there's a variety of reasons and I want to be careful not to ascribe one to everybody.

Amy Mantravadi: 9:13

Sure. It's a very complicated issue. It's hard to then put everybody into one category and probably good not to do that, but I appreciate you talking a little bit about that. Toward the beginning of your book, you do take a moment to reflect on the nature of the mother-son relationship, and you write that,"Mothers and sons have been part of God's redemptive story since the beginning of time. My love for you,"- that is, for your son who you're writing to-"is the echo of a heart that has been beating for a millennia." I just thought that was such a sweet and beautiful couple of sentences that you had. In light of that, are there any particular mother-son relationships in Scripture that have really resonated with you as you raise your children?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 9:57

Mary and Jesus, definitely. As somebody who loves a good birth story, the fact that Mary was nine months pregnant on a donkey's back is incredible to me, but also just the fact that this young girl- that her womb was used to carry the king of the universe is incredible. It really speaks to God elevating motherhood and even elevating birth and elevating child rearing and showing us how important that is that he made it central to his plan for the saving of creation.

Amy Mantravadi: 10:35

Yeah, and we're definitely- I mean, as we record we're in the Christmas season. This will be probably released after Christmas, but it definitely is a time that we're having that brought to our mind. And I know definitely going through in the past couple of years pregnancy and then childbirth, I did feel a little more connection with Mary and with her story, and that's one that for various reasons has been a little deemphasized among Protestant Christians, but I think that there's definitely a rightful place for focusing on that. And as you pointed out, she's the culmination of all that long line of mothers throughout the Old Testament, coming down to that relationship. One of the most powerful parts of your book for me was when you said the following:"Sweet boy, I do not say these things to jade you. As I teach you these lessons, I pray that they don't come from a place of bitterness or a life ruled by fear. I want them to flow from a place of wisdom. I can't just see you as my sweet little boy. I have to visualize the man that you'll become, and I must prepare you to face the world in his skin." I appreciated when you made comments like this, because I'm sure some people will claim that you're raising your son to be distrustful of or even bitter toward others. What do you think that comments like that would fail to capture about the experience of being a black American and how do you strike that balance as a mother between proper vigilance that's in line with biblical truth and a mindset that is overly bitter?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 12:07

Such a binary perception of America, American history, American culture. Either it's all good or it's all bad. Either telling the truth about America's sometimes racist history is going to be something that's helpful or it's going to be something that's damaging. And I really think that taking our American exceptionalism out of the center of our focus is going to be such an important step in me answering this question. So I'm working on a book right now about ten black women in American history who I think that we should know about, who I didn't know about before I started working on this book. And one of the major critiques that I get from people is,"Okay, but is it going to be a book that talks bad about America? Because there's enough books out there that talk bad about America." And it's like, this book- To see the stories of these women as only a reflection of America is to limit God's glory in the lives of these women as people that are used by him. America is incidental to the story that God is telling in the lives of these women, and America is incidental to the story that God is telling in the life of my son. So my goal is not to raise him to be, you know, the most patriotic person in the world. My goal is not to raise him to be a person that hates America. My goal is not to raise him as a person who is completely focused on racism to the exclusion of everything else. My goal is also not to race him as a person who ignores racism. My goal is to raise him as a person who holistically sees that God's hand is moving in history and moving in his life, and he has been given unique opportunities because of that ethnicity, because of his parentage, because of the place that he was raised to give glory to God in the context that he's in. And I think that once we move kind of America's street cred and America's rep out of the center, we're really, really able to see God's glory just shining through.

Amy Mantravadi: 14:04

Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to having a vision of God's plan and his kingdom that's bigger than just America, and historically American Christians have had a real tendency to see ourselves kind of as the new chosen people of God, and some of that goes back to a lot of rhetoric that's popped up in American history at different times. But if you think about the fact that we know that human beings can tend more toward sinfulness or righteousness, depending on how much God is working in their lives- so it makes sense that nations made up of human beings would sometimes tend more towards sinfulness and sometimes more toward righteousness. But I do think that it's a tough line probably- not speaking from personal experience- but I would assume as a mother of a black male child particularly, like you talk about, that is a little bit of a tough road to walk because people bring in all this political baggage to their assumptions that they then place on you about how you're raising your son, and they- Some people, of course, tend much more toward the America's always good narrative and some toward the America's always bad narrative, and of course the truth is somewhere in the middle. So yeah, it's a lot of pressure to put on someone like you to try to be raising your son in the midst of all that. But some of the things you talk about in the book are a really good approach to that. You speak about your own journey to motherhood, which has involved not only moments of joy, but also moments of grief. How has God used these experiences to shape you as a mother and as a Christian?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 15:39

He has used my miscarriages in particular to show me the fragility of human life- the preciousness of human life. He's made me almost an extra measure thankful for the two healthy boys that I do have because I have seen up close and personal just how much sustaining he has to do from the moment of conception until the moment that they're born. He's shown me that as fragile as babies are in the womb, I'm that far fragile as an adult, and I still need God to constantly oversee my health, my life, my livelihood. He's just used it to emphasize my need of him, not just for myself, but truly in trusting him for the lives of my children.

Amy Mantravadi: 16:30

I think that's good that parenthood provides us with so many metaphors of the spiritual life, and like you said, it could help us realize that even in this era of scientific progress, we can feel almost invulnerable sometimes, and then you have something like that, or this year happening with the whole world with the coronavirus pandemic, when we realize,"Yeah, life really is still very fragile." So it's always a good observation to have. Two popular and common phrases that you discuss at length in your book are first that,"Race is just a social construct, and second that we should"just preach the gospel"- in response to calls for racial reconciliation that we should just preach the gospel. You explain that each of these phrases contains an element of the truth, but both end up being largely unhelpful. Could you explain that a little bit?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 17:22

Yeah. For the"race just a social construct"- It's so interesting because the same people that say race is just a social construct don't really want to talk about how or why race became a social construct and who made it a social construct. So"race is just a social construct" then just becomes kind of a dog whistle to silence people from talking about race and not necessarily,"Hey, an actual conversation about that. That is true that race is a social construct. How did that become a construct? How has that social construct been used and to what benefit was the social construct of race constructed?" So that one is just kind of- it's an empty thing that people say that is true, that race is indeed a social construct. We are all one race: the human race. The argument isn't that different ethnicities are worth different things, right? Or different ethnicities are inherently different kinds of people. The argument has always been that this social construct has been used to denigrate and to disenfranchise certain people for hundreds of years. So saying that race is just a social construct is just like the cream on top of the conversation. As far as"just preach the gospel" goes, that one's a little bit more of a minefield because it can sound like I'm saying the gospel is not sufficient for really facing issues of race, racism, ethnicity, confusion, all the above in the Church. And the phrase"just preach the gospel" sounds really good on its face, but the gospel of Christ isn't just all the good things that we're supposed to be doing. The gospel of Christ is literally the story of him coming to the world, dying on the cross for our sins and reconciling a people to himself. There's a lot in the Bible that's not the gospel. There's a lot in the Bible that's law. There's a lot in the Bible that's exposition. There's a lot in the Bible that's commands. The gospel is the message that we are called to preach. The supremacy of the gospel is incredibly important and cannot be overstated, but the truths of the gospel have to be applied in ways beyond just preaching the gospel. And what I mean by that is part of preaching the gospel is preaching that once we are saved, how do we walk in the new faith that we've been given? That walk is not technically the gospel. That walk is after the gospel- it is separate from the gospel. So I think it can be a misunderstanding and a misapplication of what the word gospel actually means and what the purpose of the gospel is.

Amy Mantravadi: 19:55

And one of the problems with both of those phrases is that word"just." Race is a social construct, but to say it's just a social construct ignores the way it's been used and what it's meant in human history. It is more- at this stage it's much more than just a social construct, and then just preaching the gospel can make it sound, as you said, like there are no implications- like that incredible message of the gospel would have no effect on our lives, and the fact that God has reconciled with us would not affect our desire to reconcile with each other. So, yeah, I thought that the passages where you talked about that were very helpful. This book was written before the historic protests that occurred in 2020 following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. In light of your recent reflections, which I'm assuming you like everyone else have had about this, is there anything that you'd like to add to what you wrote in your book? Or do you think that this is pretty much just confirming a lot of the stuff that you had already written?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 20:59

I have been very blessed in that there is nothing that I would like to add or take away from my book. I think because it was written to address a specific moment in my life and to address my son at a specific crossroads in his young life, that book captures a moment of motherhood that I wouldn't change for anything. It's what I wanted to tell him in that moment. You know, I was pregnant with my second born son. It's what I wanted to tell both of them in that moment, and the truths are timeless and apply in a time where America is filled with historic unrest, but will still apply when America is at a place of more peace.

Amy Mantravadi: 21:42

Yeah, I think that's a good point. You spend a significant amount of time, especially toward the end of the book, explaining principles we should keep in mind on social media and when having political discussions. And of course, conversations about race are some of the more controversial ones we tend to have. And this highlights the fact that politics and the internet both tend to amplify our differences and lead to a worsening of our discourse here in the U.S. Our communication in both areas, at least to me, seemed to get even worse this past year. So what are some principles Christians should keep in mind when engaging on social media or discussing controversial issues?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 22:21

Social media...it's just a slice of the pie. These conversations and these changes really do happen in person and in community. And so using social media as a stand-in for that is always going to be a sub-par representation of what it's actually like to walk alongside people. Social media....t's a way for us to show off the best of ourselves, but it's also a way for us to show off the worst of ourselves, and I think that understanding that and living our lives in light of the truth that social media is a tool, not a supreme thing that needs to be the center of our lives is really important. I think also just intellectual honesty, which can only happen if we're less concerned about fitting into a certain camp and more concerned about the truth of the gospel. Sometimes I upset people on the Left. Sometimes I have set people on the Right. Neither of those are my home because this world is not my home. So I think just really understanding that these little camps, these little tribes are not our homes really contributes to integrity in this discourse.

Amy Mantravadi: 23:24

Yeah, I think those are some good, helpful points. You have a couple more books in the works, one of which you alluded to briefly. Any more hints as to what you'll be tackling next?

Jasmine L. Holmes: 23:34

So the book about the women, a young adult version of that book, and then I'm also working on a book about-What can I say without giving too much away? It's about shame. I'll just say that it's about shame: womanhood and shame.

Amy Mantravadi: 23:49

All right. Well, those all sound really interesting. You know, particularly I love history and Church history and the history of the African-American Church, or I guess you could say the African-American portion of the Church universal has been largely ignored. And so I think it's great that you're bringing some of those stories into greater light. So we'll look forward to that. And thank you so much for joining me to talk about your book. I enjoyed it and hope you did too.

Jasmine L. Holmes: 24:18

Thank you so much for having me on.

Jon Guerra: 24:44

[inaudible].

Amy Mantravadi: 24:46

It was an honor to speak with Jasmine today about her book, Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy on Identity and Hope, which is published by InterVarsity. Press be sure to keep an eye out for future books from this proud"boy mom." For the uninitiated, boy mom means mother to at least one boy. It's a thing- I swear. We have membership cards. As always, today's music is by Christian recording artist Jon Guerra off his album, Keeper of Days. If you enjoy this podcast, consider leaving an honest review on iTunes or wherever you are listening to it and tell your friends about it. As a matter of fact, tell your enemies as well, since they probably need to be convicted by the Spirit. Now to him who is able to protect you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, blameless with great joy, to the only God our savior through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen.

Jon Guerra: 25:41

Is there a way to live always? Living in[inaudible] hallways. Don't know my foes from my friends and don't know my friends anymore. Power has several prizes. Handcuffs can come in all sizes. All sizes love has a million disguises. The winning is simply not one.