Be the Gift: How Performance Became My First Religion
Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #5
The catechism of my childhood wasn’t written down anywhere, but it was repeated so often I could have embroidered it on a pillow. “Be the gift.” That’s what faithful people did, I was taught. Your worth came from what you contributed, the burdens you carried, the needs you met. You became valuable by being needed. You built identity through service. Be useful. Be competent. Be strong. Be the one others rely on. If you were hurting, be the gift anyway. If you were confused, be the gift harder. Service was how you earned your place.
No one presented it as doctrine. It was more like humidity—always present, always assumed, unnoticed. It took me decades to see what was hiding inside it.
I see now that the Christianity I inherited was shaped by the racial imagination of my region—quietly teaching a way of being in which strength, self-sufficiency, and contribution were signs of faithfulness, and needing anything from others felt like moral failure. None of the people who practiced it intended harm. They were handing down what they’d received.
But formation doesn’t depend on intention. It depends on atmosphere. And here is one fact that reveals that atmosphere more clearly than any label could: my entire spiritual formation had occurred inside an enclave that never exposed me to the fullness of the Body of Christ—and I had been calling that “orthodoxy.” The congregations of my childhood were overwhelmingly white—on occasion a few Black or brown worshippers appeared, but never in a way that made the church feel shared. I did not experience truly integrated worship until my fourth decade, standing inside Canterbury Cathedral as a Canterbury Scholar in 2008, joining priests from across Africa as they chanted praise.
For almost four decades, Sunday morning was racially segregated. Not by decree—at least not in my lifetime. Simply by imagination.
And the atmosphere of our churches was mirrored in my home.
My Dad always captured “Be the gift” with one of his favorite mantras: “Be at home wherever you hang your hat.” He meant that we were to construct our identities through toughness, adaptability, and persistence. That’s what “be the gift” meant in that environment: excel, carry, achieve, supply, perform. And because I was good at performing, I became the perfect student of this formation. I learned early: don’t need too much. Don’t break down. Don’t expose weakness. Don’t ask for help. Don’t rely on others. And above all: don’t fail to contribute. It was a spirituality of self-construction—the Kantian autonomous self disguised as Southern piety. No one meant harm. The water just flowed that direction.
Nietzsche would have recognized the pattern immediately. He had a name for it: “slave morality”—the attempt to construct worth by out-serving others, a moral heroism masking the wound beneath.1 I didn’t read Nietzsche then, of course—I only lived the consequences. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the truth: it is just ressentiment sung in a softer key, and like all ressentiment, it cannot survive self-honesty. But self-honesty doesn’t come early in life. It comes when something breaks.
First Break: Duke, 2006 — Carter and Douglass
Two decades ago, during a graduate seminar at Duke, J. Kameron Carter began reading Frederick Douglass in a way I had never heard. I didn’t walk out enlightened. There was no flash of clarity, no intellectual fireworks, no moment where the furniture of my mind rearranged into order. I walked out disoriented. Confused. Fogged. Unsettled. Carter’s reading of Douglass wasn’t offering a tidy critique. It was detonating something inside me.
Here is the irony I didn’t have the maturity to name back then: the Christianity that formed me had never placed me in the same pew with Black Christians, yet the theological truth that would eventually re-form me was being handed to me through the witness of an enslaved man—Douglass—interpreted by a Black theologian who exposed the very grammar that had shaped my world. Carter showed that Douglass, though he escaped slavery, was still captive to the modern theological imagination—one that treats identity as achievement, dignity as something seized, and agency as something defended. Douglass had fled his oppressors but inherited their anthropology: the autonomous self striving for worth.
And then the painful shock: I recognized my own formation in Douglass’s captivity. Not the circumstances—God forbid such comparison—but the grammar. The grammar of identity-as-striving. Identity-as-performance. Identity-as-construction. Identity-as-achievement. The grammar beneath “be the gift.” Carter wasn’t critiquing my parents. He was critiquing the theological air we all breathed. And something in me cracked, though I didn’t yet know what was breaking.
I didn’t understand Carter’s triadic grammar at the time—I only felt its destabilizing force. “The Easter people both receive the gift of identity and denote the Giver so that others might receive it.”2 I did not hear that as liberation. I heard it as crisis. Because if identity is a gift received, then everything I had built rested on sand. And if the purpose of my life was to denote the Giver, not to prove my worth, then my entire formation had prepared me to do the wrong work first.3
I didn’t know it then, but that seminar began a twenty-year pilgrimage—a long arc of confusion, disorientation, reorientation, and eventual clarity that now finds its way onto this page. Carter didn’t free me. He unmade me. And then started me walking.
Break Two: Canterbury (2007)
A year later, in Canterbury Cathedral, the racial imagination of my region finally came into view. As a Canterbury Scholar, I prayed with clergy from across Africa and Asia. For the first time in my life, I was worshipping in a fully integrated congregation—Black and white Christians, male and female, different nations, all chanting the same psalms. And it hit me with nauseating clarity: I had been formed in a Christianity that made this reality impossible back home, and we had called it “faithfulness.”
I didn’t yet have the phrase “racial imagination of my region,” but I could feel the edges of it. The world I thought was simply “church” was, in fact, a church whose center was far narrower than the Body of Christ, and my compulsion to be indispensable fit it perfectly. Carter’s reading of Douglass and the sight of African priests leading worship in Canterbury did the same work: they exposed the lie beneath my formation. I did not know what to do with that exposure. So, as usual, I tried to outrun it.
Break Three: Big Slide, 2017
When Claudia died in 2017, the old habits rose up, but something else rose with them. The day after her death, the girls, my Goldendoodle, Sadie, and I hiked Big Slide in the Adirondacks—a mountain Claudia and I had once hoped to climb together. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but we were acting out a kind of wilderness parable. The climb was demanding, the heat unrelenting, the trail steep in ways that felt out of proportion to our strength. We kept going anyway. Not heroically—simply because grief has its own momentum, and walking felt easier than standing still.
Somewhere on that mountain, the girls steadied me more than I steadied them. My tears came without warning, the kind that loosen something lodged too deep for words. And as they did, I sensed the faintest shift inside me. That hike was not a performance of strength but a kind of self-emptying—an honest surrender to a wilderness I did not choose, accompanied by two daughters who loved me through it. I didn’t yet know how to name it, but that moment marked the first time I understood that “being the gift” had finally failed me, and that something quieter—something like grace—might be waiting in its place.
The Grammar That Finally Named Me
Only much later—after parish life softened me, after exhaustion and small epiphanies, after the Being-With of others widened my window of tolerance, after my deep dive into how our minds work—could I finally name what Carter had really given me in that Duke seminar. He hadn’t handed me a new idea. He’d handed me a different grammar for being human.4
Not: be the gift. Construct your worth. Build your identity through holy usefulness.
But: receive the gift of identity you cannot construct, and denote the Giver so others might receive it too.5
Identity as reception, agency as denotation, mission as making the Giver visible.
Only later did I see how that grammar lined up with everything else I was learning: shame as the affect that tells us we need to be received; authentic pride as the emotion that lets us contribute without needing to prove we exist; attachment theory’s insistence that secure dependence precedes agency; Wells’s incarnational theology reminding us of God’s refusal to “fix” us from a distance and instead accompany us in the places we most want to perform.6
All of them saying, in different registers: You were never meant to build your own foundation. You were meant to stand on the one given.
And from there, contribute.
The confession that sets this essay in motion is simple: I spent most of my life trying to be the gift without ever having learned to receive one.
Essay 4—The Gift of Shame, A Theology of Receiving—was the long work of learning to receive.
This is the work of learning to contribute without collapsing back into construction—to imagine what ordered pride might feel like for someone who has known only achievement as oxygen.
There are deeper grammars still to learn about agency, dependence, courage, and the stories that carry us, but each of them begins here: with the small, stubborn willingness to stop building what can only be received.
For now, it’s enough simply to name that.
The rest can come in its own time.
Nietzsche’s account of “slave morality” in On the Genealogy of Morals names a moral posture born from ressentiment, in which worth is secured through self-denial, service, and reversal of values. Though Nietzsche applied it to the moral psychology of his age, the pattern he describes—identity constructed through moral heroism masking deeper wounds—illuminates the formation I later recognized in myself.
In his essay Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Identity, J. Kameron Carter reads Frederick Douglass through the lens of modern theology’s failures, showing how even Douglass’s heroic escape could not free him from an identity shaped by the Enlightenment ideal of the autonomous self. Carter argues that modern theology taught Douglass—and teaches many of us—to imagine identity as something seized or secured. His counterclaim is profoundly simple: the Easter people do not construct identity; they receive it. And their vocation is not to assert themselves but to denote the Giver so that others might receive the same gift. It was that grammar—not a new idea, but a new way of being human—that first began to unmake me.
When Carter speaks of “Easter people,” he is naming a community whose identity begins in resurrection rather than effort. In Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Identity, he draws a sharp contrast between the modern self—anxious, self-constructed, and endlessly performing—and the Easter self, whose life is received from the risen Christ. Easter people do not justify themselves; they are justified. They do not secure their own dignity; they bear witness to the One who gives it. For Carter, resurrection does not offer a spiritual upgrade to the performing self; it inaugurates an entirely different anthropology, one in which identity is gift, agency is participation, and the Christian life itself becomes a form of denoting the Giver.
Carter’s gift in that seminar was not a concept but a grammar. In Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Identity, he argues that modern Christianity catechized us into imagining identity as something we build—selfhood as a project of exertion and self-justification. Against this, Carter retrieves the older Christian grammar in which identity is fundamentally received. The Easter people, he says, are not self-made; they are given their life in Christ and called to denote the Giver through the way they live. Carter wasn’t inviting me to adopt a new idea but to inhabit a different anthropology—one in which worth is not constructed but bestowed, and agency rises from communion rather than performance.
Carter’s contrast could not be sharper. In Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Identity, he argues that the modern imagination—whether secular or Christianized—trains us to treat identity as something we must build, prove, or protect. The self becomes a project, and usefulness becomes a quiet sacrament of belonging. Against this, Carter retrieves the older Easter grammar: identity is a gift received, not a possession achieved, and the vocation of the Christian is to denote the Giver so that others may receive the same gift. In this grammar, agency is not self-assertion but participation, and worth is not constructed but bestowed.
In Constructing an Incarnational Theology, Samuel Wells argues that God’s primary posture toward the world is not intervention or problem-solving but accompaniment. God “is with” before God “does for.” Wells reframes divine action not as a distant act of correction but as a presence that shares the conditions of our lives, including the places where we are most tempted to perform, to hide, or to manufacture worth. His incarnational theology insists that healing begins not with God fixing us from afar but with God dwelling with us in the very vulnerabilities we are taught to overcome.
