Learning to Love the Tension

White women, a little Latina, and some probably very inaccurate bridge science

“This is my sweet spot.” I said to my husband a day or so before I left.

A weekend with a bunch of women talking about God and our feelings— it’s what Nicole Mason™ lives for.

It’s an environment I was used to. An environment as familiar as it was frequent to my ministerial past.

Spending the first seven years of my ministry career within complementarian spaces meant women’s spaces were my bread and butter. To this day, my office is still adorned with group photos and feminine grins of all the women I have loved and ministered to throughout my past. Women I have cried with and to. Women who I have explored the great questions of the Divine among and around. Women who made me the minister that I am, though not all would probably approve of the one I turned out to be.

I have loved a lot of women in my 29 years of life on this earth. And statistically speaking, a vast majority of those women have been white.

And so while stating, “women’s spaces were my bread and butter” sounds far more eloquent and concise, I feel it necessary to refine such a statement to the following:

White women’s spaces were my (sourdough starter kit) bread and my (trad-wife-hand-churned) butter.

Drop me smack dab into the middle of a morning, week day Bible Study led by some LifeWay curriculum and I was in the zone. Invite me to a Gospel Coalition Women’s Conference and I’d know every speaker in attendance, even the few women of color still theologically conservative and apolitical enough to be approved of. I thrived within these environments. I was comfortable, confident, and sure of myself within them.

Until all of a sudden, I wasn’t.

And truthfully speaking, I wasn’t aware that I wasn’t until roughly a week or so ago.

It had been a while since such an environment consumed me. Don’t get me wrong, our church still has its fair share of white women. However, it had been a long time since I had been surrounded by only white women. Especially in a religious capacity.

And yet, here I was again, surrounded by an environment that experience had taught me should be comfortable, familiar, even ideal. Yet, everything within me suddenly realized, it wasn’t. I wasn’t.

I wasn’t comfortable. Instead I felt awkward, unsure, and unaware.

I wasn’t familiar, not anymore, not with their references, their perspectives, their ways of thinking about, or even speaking about God.

I wasn’t ideal, the ideal guest that is. I didn’t really seem to fit, jive, or mesh well. My references, stories, and speaking about God all felt clunky, out of place, and at times even inappropriate.

Here I was, in a room surrounded by white women talking about our feelings and God— a situation I had been in, thrived in probably a million times before— and now all I felt was so deeply and fundamentally different.

And not just different from them, but different from the version of myself that several years earlier would have still thrived among them. And there was an intense amount of insecurity in that for me.

I’d never been one to go with the flow. I’ve always been opinionated, passionate, and unbothered by offering pushback. But there was always a safety in knowing which of my opinions would be the ones to stir up trouble. There was a confidence in knowing just how much passion my peers could take. There was a subtle assuredness in knowing exactly how much pushback I could voice and still be heard. And all of a sudden, all of that was gone. I felt words tumbling out of my mouth that I had said with such frequency in the several months prior, I didn’t even stop to think how radical they might sound to someone who had never heard them before. I tearfully expressed honest yearnings and questions that simply felt too heavy to first be weighed by “good” theology or proper “orthodoxy.” I felt so disconnected from the experiences around me, I had no way of knowing what off-the-cuff comment or silly, light-hearted joke, might land me on the wrong side of what was normative, expected, or preferred. The not knowing is what was new to me. The not knowing is what terrified me.

For the first time in many, many years, I was completely dependent on the white women around me to choose whether or not they wanted to accept or receive me exactly as I was. I lost all ability to properly mask my differences, to couch my oddities, to skillfully orchestrate exactly how I was being perceived. I laid bare, fully exposed, a vulnerable version of myself that the old me wouldn’t have even approved of. And just like that, an even older version of me — a five year old, whose brown grandparents showed up to her white private school with thick accents and weird sounding nicknames¹— felt brought to the forefront of my soul, literally begging me to make use of any one of the tricks and tools I had learned throughout my life to downplay my differences and find a way to assimilate, be accepted, and belong. I could feel her urgency, her fear, and her longing. Her embarrassment and her shame overwhelmed my senses.

But because of how brave I was at 26, leaving behind a church culture that would never choose to fully celebrate nor accept me…

And because of how brave I was at 27, reading theologically “weird” and uncomfortable books that were written with the language of my Popo, and uncovered the rich history of faith first modeled to me by my Tita…

And because of how brave I was at 28, allowing that “weird” theology and ancient form of faith to develop in me an altogether different understanding of church, community, fellowship, and belonging…

This brave 29 year-old didn’t have to make the same decision that fearful 5 year-old once did. I don’t think she could have even if she wanted to.

I wish I could say that means this 29 year old sat proud and unashamed, spouting off her favorite indigenous meditations without pause and speaking loud about injustice with her full chest. That 5 year-old was still pretty damn strong-willed, okay? She couldn’t let such utterances out without at least some hints of doubt and timidity.

She still shaded most of the time with layers of insecurity and sadness. All she ever wanted was to be accepted by the white girls…and here I was grinding down her deepest desires to ash with a metate.²

But I still believe there was a sincere moment of healing for that little girl, in not only losing her long-fought ability to assimilate, but also in losing her desire to. I don’t think she ever could have anticipated being proud of her heritage, believing her part-time upbringing in the southside of San Antonio would be far more theologically formative than her 2.5 years of studying for a Masters in Ministry. I don’t think she ever would have believed that she would take part in a “Women of Color” leadership cohort that, granted, she still feels like an imposter within most days, but that continues to help her stand firm and stand proud in an identity she spent a majority of her life learning to hide from. And I don’t think she would have ever assumed that all those years spent watching and learning, masking and conforming, would later help her not to be accepted, but to be un puente³, connecting the white women whom she always sought approval from to a vast and far more diverse experience of faith that will probably never be approved of by most of their peers.

I am a light-skinned Latina, half raised surrounded by my hispanic family and their culture, half raised surrounded by white religious spaces and theirs. I come from a long and complicated line of Jalisco women and from a long and complicated history with white evangelical churches. I feel uncomfortable in about 99.9% of religious spaces I occupy now, never fully feeling settled or fully “myself” within any.⁴ And
I am learning to be okay with that.

Because part of being un puente is tension. It’s feeling pulled and stretched in multiple directions. It’s feeling the pressure and the weight of multiple forces at once. And it’s learning to work in rhythm and tune with such opposing weight to keep from falling down.⁵

I’m still learning what it means to vibrate well in the midst of these tensions. I’m still learning what it means to keep from falling down. I’m learning that bridges can be scary and not everyone wants to take the journey along one. I’m learning that some people just straight up hate them.

But most importantly, I’m learning that some people, some very special and daredevil people, love them. They learn to love the tension too. They get used to the discomfort, unease, and uncertainty that comes with standing by someone who won’t ever fully fit into any one space. And they support and celebrate all of the healing, unlearning, and re-learning the bridge needs to do to find her own stability.

My sweet spot isn’t white women talking about faith and God anymore.

But it isn’t always my Women of Color cohort either.

Right now, my sweet spot is in the tension between them. It’s in the tension I often feel in the midst of them. And I am learning to love that spot. That sweet, uncomfortable, terrifying, brings up all my inner-child-wounds and deepest insecurities, spot. Because that may just be the spot that both worlds need me in most, that 5-year-old-me needs me in most.

For them, and for her, seré un puente.

1. In a sea of “Grandpa and Grandma”, “PopPop and mama G”, “Papa and Nana”, a little me had to muster up the courage to shout out “Popo and Tita” from across a crowded room.

2. The ground stone tool used to grind up grains and seeds, like corn for making tortillas.

3. a bridge

4. The .1% is our ever sweet and precious micro-church that is the only religious space I have ever felt fully known and accepted.

5. I read exactly one brief summary on the science of bridges for this paragraph. None of you engineers come for me. I am aware it’s probably very inaccurate. Let’s call it artistic license.