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No one writes about the interplay of poetry and faith better than Christian Wiman, the editor of the acclaimed literary journal Poetry. In this essay from Image #60, "God's Truth Is Life", he explores the similarities between the devotion of the artist and that of the believer, and how they both point beyond the self, paradoxically through the act of expressing a vision that is unique to that person.
It was hard choosing just one passage to quote from his Image essay, since the whole piece is as rich and compact as a poem. Here are two samples to pique your interest:
...I once believed in some notion of a pure ambition, which I defined as an ambition for the work rather than for oneself, but I’m not sure I believe in that anymore. If a poet’s ambition were truly for the work and nothing else, he would write under a pseudonym, which would not only preserve that pure space of making but free him from the distractions of trying to forge a name for himself in the world. No, all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self—except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself. That is noble ambition. But all that comes after—the need for approval, publication, self-promotion: isn’t this what usually goes under the name of “ambition”? The effort is to make ourselves more real to ourselves, to feel that we have selves, though the deepest moments of creation tell us that, in some fundamental way, we don’t. (What could be more desperate, more anxiously vain, than the ever-increasing tendency to Google oneself?) So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost.
Still, there is something that any artist is in pursuit of, and is answerable to, some nexus of one’s being, one’s material, and Being itself. The work that emerges from this crisis of consciousness may be judged a failure or a success by the world, and that judgment will still sting or flatter your vanity. But it cannot speak to this crisis in which, for which, and of which the work was made. For any artist alert to his own soul, this crisis is the only call that matters. I know no name for it besides God, but people have other names, or no names.
This is why, ultimately, only the person who has made the work can judge it, which is liberating in one sense, because it frees an artist from the obsessive need for the world’s approval. In another sense, though, this truth places the artist under the most severe pressure, because if that original call, that crisis of consciousness, either has not been truly heard, or has not been answered with everything that is in you, then even the loudest clamors of acclaim will be tainted, and the wounds of rejection salted with your implacable self-knowledge. An artist who loses this internal arbiter is an artist who can no longer hear the call that first came to him. Better to be silent then. Better to go into the world and do good work, rather than to lick and cosset a canker of resentment or bask your vanity in hollow acclaim....
****
...The question of exactly which art is seeking God, and seeking to be in the service of God, is more complicated than it seems. There is clearly something in all original art that will not be made subject to God, if we mean by being made “subject to God” a kind of voluntary censorship or willed refusal of the mind’s spontaneous and sometimes dangerous intrusions into, and extensions of, reality. But that is not how that phrase ought to be understood. In fact we come closer to the truth of the artist’s relation to divinity if we think not of being made subject to God but of being subjected to God—our individual subjectivity being lost and rediscovered within the reality of God. Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us. It follows that any notion of God that is static is not simply sterile but, since it asserts singular knowledge of God and seeks to limit his being to that knowledge, blasphemous. “God’s truth is life,” as Patrick Kavanagh says, “even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.”
...
Wiman is currently working on a nonfiction book titled My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer. Visit his Artist-of-the-Month page at Image here.     |
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Posted by Jendi Reiter at
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Tim Mayo's first full-length poetry book, The Kingdom of Possibilities, was published this April by Mayapple Press. It was also a finalist for the May Swenson Award. Mayapple Press is a small press established in 1978 by poet and editor Judith Kerman. Editors say, "We specialize in contemporary literature, especially poetry and works that straddle conventional categories: Great Lakes, women, Caribbean, translations, science fiction poetry, recent immigrant experience, Judaica." Tim has kindly permitted me to reprint two poems from his collection below. His finalist poem from our 2007 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest can also be read here.
The Wild Boy of Aveyron
(Paris, 1801)
I named him Victor to vanquish the animal in him.
I tried to teach him to name his own needs,
to have his words rise up from the core
of his body, ball up in his throat, then push out
in well formed vowels quelling the inarticulate.
But all he could gargle out was the word lait
as if somewhere between tongue and throat
the muscles that made his words had lost their way.
Lait became his insistent call for love
and the angry expression to all the words
neither my little briberies of milk nor
my punitions could ever make him say.
Later, I tired and returned to Paris,
but sometimes, in the dark non sequitur
of night, when dreams should take me away,
Victor comes and shakes me. I watch him
press his nose against the window,
confused by its impenetrable glass,
and I see the moon’s milk-glow fracture
down upon his face and the hills, caged
between the mullions, huddling outside.
Then grinning with a feral joy, he pulls
again at my sleeve saying his one word
over and over, until he turns back, and tilting
his head up, he opens his mouth wide and waits
for the moon to pour in...and I fall asleep.
****
The Beautiful Woman
You stare at the jagged tic-tac-toe of her scars
where once a downy peach fuzz grew, and you
realize
how beauty is an emotion from which desire
splurges
like a prodigal. How it often burgeons, a sudden
flower
from a dark and unexpected place where you
believed
nothing grew.
But here...now...the livid white knots
of her skin seem to muscle into purple before your
eyes
all of that past pain which, to you, is only the
discomfort
of what you see and the embarrassment of being
caught
as you imagine the indignities she suffered for
each mark.
So you glance up at her face hoping she hasn't
noticed how
the un-erasable remnants of her past have kept
you transfixed.
You look into those eyes, dreading the wise, sad
look back,
the dismissal of it all that will scar you, too, possibly
for life.
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Posted by Jendi Reiter at
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Law professor and Milton expert Stanley Fish changed my life one semester in 1995, when he co-taught my First Amendment class at Columbia Law School. By demolishing the liberal-modernist ideal of perspective-free knowledge, Fish showed me that I could commit my life to my nascent Christian beliefs in the absence of airtight intellectual proof. At the same time, his writings on legal interpretation convinced me that I didn't need to seek another form of false certainty by ignoring the role of personal experience in how the Bible is read.
In a recent New York Times column on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination, Fish makes some important points about judicial "empathy" and multiculturalism that are, as usual, relevant to Biblical hermeneutics as well:
...[I]f a judge’s understanding of the nuts and bolts of the legal machinery is itself interpretive, the sympathies and allegiances she has will be in play from the very beginning of her consideration.
That is what Sotomayor’s critics are worried about. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) complains, “She seems willing to accept that a judge’s rulings may be influenced by the judge’s personal backgrounds or feelings.” But whether this is a matter of concern depends on just what Sotomayor is imagined to be accepting. Is she accepting an account of the way human beings invariably perform? Is she endorsing a psychology? Or is she accepting a view of how judging should be done? Is she endorsing a method? Is she being descriptive or prescriptive?
If Sotomayor is being prescriptive, if she is saying, “I will actively (as opposed to involuntarily) consult the influences that have shaped me at every point of decision,” she is announcing a method of judging that invites Sessions’s criticism.
But if she is being descriptive, if she is saying only that no one can completely divest herself of the experiences life has delivered or function as an actor without a history, she is announcing no method at all. She is merely acknowledging a truth (as she sees it) about the human condition: the influences Sessions laments are unavoidable, which means that no one can be faulted for viewing things from one or another of the limited perspectives to which we are all (differently) confined.
In fact – and this is what Sotomayor means when she talks about reaching a better conclusion than a white man who hasn’t lived her life – rather than distorting reality, perspectives illuminate it or at least that part of it they make manifest. It follows that no one perspective suffices to capture all aspects of reality and that, therefore, the presence in the interpretive arena of multiple perspectives is a good thing. In a given instance, the “Latina Judge” might reach a better decision not because she was better in some absolute, racial sense, but because she was better acquainted than her brethren with some aspects of the situation they were considering. (As many have observed in the context of the issue of gender differences, among the current justices, only Ruth Bader Ginsburg knows what it’s like to be a 13-year-old girl and might, by virtue of that knowledge, be better able to assess the impact on such a girl of a strip-search.)
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Posted by Jendi Reiter at
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Today is the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, typically cited as the first uprising of the gay rights movement. I wasn't born yet, and I didn't get a clue for another 30 years, so I had to learn everything I know about it online. (It pisses me off that the third Google result for "Stonewall" is a website called "Stonewall Revisited" which offers "Help for gays and lesbians to leave a homosexual lifestyle for Christianity". Trademark tarnishment lawsuit, anyone?)
The progressive Christian website Religion Dispatches put out a special "Stonewall" issue of their e-newsletter this weekend. Two articles there reflect the tension between mainstream acceptance and preserving a minority group's unique culture.
Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., a religion professor at Georgia State University, laments that although our popular culture tolerates and sometimes even celebrates the existence of same-sex couples, two fundamental institutions--marriage and faith communities--largely remain closed to them:
Greenwich Village has a rare beauty in the early summer, when the days tend to be breezy and nights are still cool. I have never seen the place better kept, each and every park and thoroughfare brilliantly manicured with flowers and spices positively exploding into an orgiastic display of midsummer colors. Most all of the storefronts were painted in rainbow patterns that beautifully set off the gardens. It was the summer solstice. And it is the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots that symbolically announced the birth of a gay rights movement in the United States, rights for a community that would no longer be ignored. Quite suddenly, coming out of the closet meant hitting the streets....
...The lifestyle, the identity, is generally accepted now, especially in the generation that has come of age since Stonewall. The whole thing is generational, and that generational kind of tolerance has been achieved after a fashion.
But what does it mean? What does the alchemical magic that turns private sexual activity into a public lifestyle, and then into a social identity, do to the politics of sexuality? Ironically, it turns thoughts to marriage, and not only because it is summertime in New York, and the solstice is upon us.
“Gay marriage,” for a variety of complex reasons, is still the sticking point. Many people—and I overheard this several times in the snippets of conversation inspired by the anniversary on the quiet streets with storied names, like Bleeker, Houston, and Gay—many people happily grant an individual’s freedom to do what he or she wants behind closed doors.
But churches, mosques and synagogues have open doors, at least in theory.
Marriage is a public statement, and it requires a kind of recognition that goes far beyond tolerance. That is harder to grant, harder for gays and lesbians and others to win....
Meanwhile, in the same issue, Nick Street, a journalist who is the LGBT Contributing Editor for Religion Dispatches, suggests that gays and lesbians have become homogenized in the quest for social acceptance, not measuring up well to the bohemian cross-dressing outcasts who started it all:
...The Stonewall riots of late June 1969—as well as the Summer of Love two years earlier, the Woodstock music festival two months later and the debut of the Cockettes at the Palace Theater in San Francisco the following New Year’s Eve—are examples of what Hakim Bey, a queer anarchist social critic, calls the Temporary Autonomous Zone.
“The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State,” Bey writes, “a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.”
Bey’s idea trades on the observation that orthodoxy of any kind—legal, social or religious—is essentially a living fiction, a collective hallucination. Groups that participate in this illusion take its abstractions for reality, and within that margin of error the TAZ springs into being.
And before it can be captured or commodified, the TAZ vanishes, leaving behind an empty husk. Think of Burning Man (or perhaps the Jesus Movement).
The anarchic spirit of the TAZ inevitably calls forth a violent response from those who tend the shadow-fires of orthodoxy. Crucifixions, witch-hunts, and inquisitions embodied this impulse in our historical past, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy during the Consciousness Revolution of the late 1960s also bore its mark.
As did the 50,000 deaths that Ronald Reagan abided before he uttered the word “AIDS” in public.
Today, queer culture is not so much a vector of this spiritual enlivenment as it is a passive beneficiary of it. Rather than dismantling the master’s house, many of us prefer to beseech the master to loan us his tools so that we can construct a tasteful adjoining cottage and two-car garage.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I should hasten to add. Stability has its virtues.
But we have lost sight of something that the most keen-eyed queerfolk of the Stonewall era clearly had in view: the circumstances under which human beings can flourish are innumerable, and cultivating an orthodox view of human flourishing inevitably leads to the oppression of nonconformists and the spiritual degeneration of the culture that oppresses them....
Street has a point, but in making it, he perpetuates some harmful stereotypes of his own. As my feminist consciousness grows, so does my appreciation for GLBT subcultures and queer theory, as well as the carnival of misfits that is Pride. Five minutes of shopping for baby clothes reveals how thoroughly we're indoctrinated in gender stereotypes from birth. The gay community's visible diversity of sexual personae shocks us into questioning the naturalness of these sex-role straitjackets which shame both boys and girls into suppressing one side of their personality.
So I'm all for resisting conformity. I just get so very sick of seeing the equation of marriage with conformity.
Do you actually think the dominant culture values marriage? It values heterosexual couplings, and maybe weddings, to the extent that they're an excuse to buy stuff. But the actual work of growing in harmony with another person, of shaping your lives to be a joint project of service to one another and the community, is vastly undersold. The joy of an ever-deepening connection that involves two people's bodies as much as their souls is nearly invisible in the mainstream media.
Instead, we're largely served a glamorized picture of singleness as perpetual youth, and promiscuity as self-empowerment. We see this in the adult entertainment that most men consume, and in TV series that continually break up their characters' romances in order to keep the storyline moving forward without pushing the characters to evolve beyond our initial impression of them.
As Garth says, "We fear change." Marriage is change. It means you've moved on to another stage of life, and unless you believe in heaven (and to be fair, a lot of gay people have been told they wouldn't be going there), you might be afraid it's all downhill after thirty.
My husband and I aren't trying to be countercultural or conformist. Butting heads with the dominant culture is just something that happens when we support one another's attempts to develop our unique gifts, regardless of how society gender-codes those traits. Okay, so I do the laundry and cook dinner while he fixes the computer and removes large bugs from the bathtub (he doesn't kill them because he's a Buddhist). But he also gets up early to shop for bottle sterilizers on the Internet while I'm writing my novel about gay men in love. I pick out the onesie with sequins because I want a fabulous son, and Adam puts it back because he read a baby-care book that says they're unsafe. But we both agree that Disney is Satan and electronic toys are his tools of destruction.
Living mindfully within the institutions of a patriarchal society is hard work. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
Instead of this dead-end debate over whether gay marriage is assimilationist, let's work to make everyone's marriage a little more queer. There's no necessary association between a lifetime commitment to your true love and a retreat into apolitical consumer contentment. Think about gender: which traditional roles suit you, and which feel confining? Can your partner help you appreciate all the roles you play?
I worry that the theme of "marriage makes people lose their edge" indoctrinates us into choosing an abstraction over a connection to a real person. This is fundamentally the same bait-and-switch perpetrated by religious conservatives who tell gays and lesbians to sacrifice their lovers in favor of the abstraction of personal righteousness, or obedience to (one interpretation of) Scripture. So...
Just do your thang, honey!
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Posted by Jendi Reiter at
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Correspondence with my prison pen pal "Conway" has been irregular this spring because of the ever-shifting regulations that can cause mail to be blocked without warning. His latest letter shows that he continues to take refuge in his art and to help others do the same.
Several of his poems have just been published in "Paper Thin Walls", a magazine produced by the Artist Pen-Pal Mutual Aid Project. This project is one of the social justice initiatives from the BuildingBloc Arts Collective, which is also sponsoring a touring exhibit of prisoners' art, titled "Our Dreams Don't Fit in Your Cages". From their website:
BuildingBloc is a collective of artists dedicated to using art to explore
the social inequalities in our society. Through experimentation,
collaboration, and performance, we inform, provoke, and inspire ourselves
and our audiences. We aim to spark dialogue, to create and sustain
relationships between artists and community organizations, to support
existing struggles for social justice, and to erase the boundaries between
art and activism.
In a letter I sent Conway in March, I confided my concerns about a friend in trouble, and my frustration that I couldn't do more to help her: "I wrote a poem about it this morning but poetry is empty compared to taking action in the world. Or is it? Is poetry second-rate action, the last resort of the powerless, or does it create change?"
His response, in this month's letter:
I believe that as a blossoming poet myself, I can faithfully say that (for sure) each poem that I write. Creates a change in my growth & understanding of this world and even if Nobody ever reads these scratchings that I've tried to conceive; painting pictures with words. That at least I have taught myself to define this world in this moment, and basically that is my first duty. To understand my place and to act accordingly with my fellow travelers.
Once more, my long-distance friendship with Conway has brought me back to my core mission. Options are distracting. When there's no motive for writing except soul-survival, one sees that this is the motive that breathes life into poetry, the one truly essential objective.
Flicker Out
by Conway
When, one jealous Moon
gathered its courage (prepared to die)
refused to share anymore, twilight Sky.
It was a last ditch-
gilded dream
another early, end of things.
Feeling betrayed
by a star's bright glow
another globe was caught up
before it really could know.
Like a thief contesting desire
lurking through church
to own everlasting fire.
While another Heart, fell from its perch
unclad night slept fulfilled--
nuzzling against the hurdles
of squandered adolescence.
Despite this Roaring avalanche
there was not a sound
or whimpering illusion
to be swept along.
No one to miss
or hear the splendor,
the desperate kiss of dawn.
So; In the mornings mist
among abundant bird'song,
this sacrifice too, was forgotten.
The face of a Soul disgraced
sufferingly stares, beyond vanishing sight
trembling through tonight.
As that once flawless jewel
now shares--
nothing; Nothing at all...
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Posted by Jendi Reiter at
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Our culture's secular holidays (and rapidly secularizing religious ones) can bring up complicated emotions when your family doesn't look like the ones in the magazine ads, or when your feelings about them can't be summed up by a Hallmark card. Jim Palmer's new article for RELEVANT Magazine, "Fatherless Day", offers wisdom for healing from a troubled relationship with a parent. An excerpt:
Separating pain and suffering
If you experienced abuse, rejection or abandonment from your father, the normal human response is to feel deep hurt and pain. But how you interpreted that abuse, rejection or abandonment can lead to unnecessary suffering. For example, I interpreted my father’s lack of involvement and interest in my life as evidence that I was worthless. I concluded that his rejection was all about me. The truth is, it had very little to do with me—it was all about him.
As a child or young person, when we first experience hurt with our father, we don’t have the capacity to reason through it accurately. For all practical purposes, when a father doesn’t express love and affirmation to his son or daughter, they conclude they are therefore not worthy of love and affirmation. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in Psychology to see that a person who views themselves this way will suffer deep emotional anguish, which is likely to sabotage their life and relationships.
“Healing” means identifying the false messages you took on board as a result of the hurt experienced from your father. These could include feelings of self-hatred, irrational or unfounded fears, and all kinds of self-defeating and destructive patterns of thinking about yourself, life, God and others.
The truth is sometimes hidden within a web of lies. The reality of your value, worth and identity may be buried deep within a maze of falsehoods you adopted about yourself in hurtful experiences with your father.
Depersonalizing the hurt
I’m not talking about denying the hurt you feel with respect to your father. What I am saying is that you may only be operating with half the picture. Here’s what I mean. No little boy says: “When I grow up, I want to be a dad who hurts and wounds my children. I want to reject them, abuse them, abandon them and damage them for life.” Damaged, wounded and hurt people damage, wound and hurt others. That’s not an excuse, but it means that any child could have been inserted into your place, and the damage, wounds and hurts would have still been afflicted upon them by your father.
My father had a troubled relationship with his father. My father experienced the horrors of war. My father worked two jobs, barely keeping his head above water. Who knows all the dreams he gave up along the way. My father carried all kinds of hurts and wounds I know nothing about. My understanding of my father is woefully incomplete. There is some healing that comes when this truly sinks in. It doesn’t eliminate the pain, but it helps you to absorb it.
One of the most common miracles Jesus performed was healing the blind, which I believe was partly Jesus’ way of emphasizing the significance of seeing things clearly. In Matthew 6:22 Jesus said: “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light ”(TNIV). In other words, seeing things as they truly are is the bedrock of freedom.
...
My mother recently gave me a stack of old black-and-white photos of my maternal grandmother's family, taken in the 1940s and 1950s. I knew some of them as distant middle-aged and elderly relatives, others mainly as characters in my mother's stories. They were a large family of Polish immigrant Jews on New York's Lower East Side, with all the dreams, struggles, loyalties and emotional wounds that one would expect in such a group. But it wasn't until I arranged the pictures into a chronological narrative that I really began to see these people, not as good or bad minor characters in my own story, but as individuals with inner lives of their own--inner lives that, sadly, I'll never know.
Like a family album on a much larger scale, the Bible can help us depersonalize our immediate conflicts. Its stories move back and forth between domestic dramas and historical patterns, all the way up to the clash of Good and Evil at the cosmic level. We learn that our personal story has resonance as part of a greater one, and this can give us more compassion for the other characters and patience to see how it all works out.
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Posted by Jendi Reiter at
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Back to June pride-blogging with brief reviews of three nonfiction books that offer insightful writing on GLBT themes.
Written from within the evangelical community and addressed to that community, David G. Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni's What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) makes a welcome contribution to the dialogue about faith and sexuality. Myers is a psychology professor at Michigan's Hope College, while Scanzoni is a professional journalist and nonfiction author. Her commercial magazine experience is evident in the book's concise, approachable style.
The book's argument proceeds in stages: Committed relationships have proven essential to human flourishing. Marriage benefits couples, families, and society as a whole. More and more scientific evidence is showing that homosexuality is a naturally occurring human variation, probably caused by some combination of genetic and prenatal factors, and that sexual orientation is nearly always resistant to change. (The authors document the general failure of "ex-gay therapy" and denounce the suffering it causes.) In addition, the Bible verses most often cited against same-sex intimacy have been taken out of context, when they really refer to specific abuses such as temple prostitution and rape. There is therefore no reason to oppose marriage for committed gay couples on the same terms as straight couples. "Marriage lite" options like domestic partnerships and civil unions actually do more to undermine a culture of marriage, by suggesting that less-committed relationships are equally good for couples and their families.
Readers familiar with gay-affirming theology won't find a lot that's new here, but that's not a bad thing. Seeing the same reinterpretations of Romans 1:26, etc., pop up in many places, one has to conclude that this is no longer a "fringe" viewpoint. It's a viable alternate view, supported by scholarship, that at the very least deserves to be admitted to the conversation at evangelical colleges, publishing houses, and places of worship. Hopefully, the fact that What God Has Joined Together was written by two straight allies will enhance its credibility in those circles.
I recommend the paperback edition because it includes a dialogue between the authors, discussing reactions to the book and how they themselves came to change their views on homosexuality. Scanzoni observes at one point:
I think when we keep a subject such as homosexuality distant from us, seeing it only in the abstract, it's easy to believe false information, accept stereotypes, and act accordingly. Homosexual people are then seen as an "out-group," a category distinctly different from the heterosexual "in-group." A blind spot makes it hard to see gay people as human beings, as persons who want the same things as straight people do--to love and belong and just go about their lives with dignity, as persons made in God's image.
But when a heterosexual person learns that what had been only a generalized abstract mental construct is actually embodied in an admired person who reveals his or her sexual orientation, something begins to happen. How can you continue to believe gay relationships don't last after getting to know Pete and Tom, who have been together 50 years, and have watched Pete tenderly caring for Tom, who now suffers from Alzheimer's disease? How can you claim that homosexual people are rejecting God when that life-transforming sermon you can't get out of your mind was preached by a lesbian minister? How can you believe that homosexual people are unfit parents when you see the love and care that Elaine and Laura shower on their baby, or the fun little Joey has as he plays and laughs with his two dads, whom he adores? Meeting gay people replaces an abstract topic with real people and with the universality of human experience.
As Harvey Milk said... "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
****
Whereas one might say that Myers and Scanzoni's work seeks to integrate gay and lesbian couples into the bourgeois mainstream, Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993) celebrates the deconstruction of social norms in the figure of the transvestite. Tracing the theme of cross-dressing through historical anecdotes, legends, high art and popular culture, Garber argues that wherever it occurs, it signals anxiety about the instability of some other social category, not only gender but (at various times) race, class, religion, or colonial power. "[T]ransvestitism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself." (p.17) A little further on, she writes, "there can be no culture without the transvestite because the transvestite marks the entrance into the Symbolic" (p.34) The rest of the book works out this simple thesis at great length.
Garber's book comes from that mid-1990s postmodernist period when everything looked like a text. She's a Shakespeare expert, so it makes sense that she'd use the tools of literary criticism to investigate the cross-dressing phenomenon. However, I found myself wondering whether her romance with transgression fits the experience of most trans-people. From what I've read on their blogs (and I admit that I'm a beginner here), at least some of them are quite eager to resolve their "third-sex" status into something as close to "male" or "female" as possible. They want to pass for a particular gender, maybe not the one they were born with, but also not some liminal category between.
Bottom line: I wasn't always satisfied with Garber's analysis, but I'm still thinking about the book, months after reading it, and that's enough for me to recommend it.
****
Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men, edited by Brian Bouldrey (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), is a profound and heartfelt anthology of spiritual memoirs, with contributors including Mark Doty, Andrew Holleran, Kevin Killian, Alfred Corn, Fenton Johnson, and Lev Raphael. The authors touch on such topics as the connection between spiritual and erotic ecstasy, family secrets and reconciliations, and AIDS as a modern crucible of faith. Several Jewish and Christian denominations are represented, as well as Eastern spiritual traditions.
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The Internet is full of great short fiction, both in literary webzines and on the websites of traditional print journals. Below are links to a few stories I've recently enjoyed.
Freight Stories is a relatively new online journal of literary fiction that publishes good work in a clean, easy-to-read format. I'm working my way through Issue #5 and wanted to recommend two pieces published there.
Bryan Furuness' "Portrait of Lucifer as a Young Man" is a short magical-realist piece that generates, so to speak, sympathy for the devil--maintaining a delicate balance between tenderness and menace:
Lucifer’s father was a portrait painter for hire. If you mailed him a photograph and a check for four hundred dollars, he would paint your likeness in dark, smoky oils. Not a bad deal for a vintage ego trip and the surest way to make new money look old. It was the nineteen-eighties. His business boomed.
He wasn’t the world’s greatest portrait painter, truth be told, but his clients didn’t complain, and he loved the work. Loved it so much, in fact, that when he was finished with paying jobs for the day, he liked to paint Hoosiers of guttering fame—men like Hoagy Carmichael or Booth Tarkington, men whose names rang a faint bell, but you weren't sure why, though you thought they might have pitched for the Cubs or served in your grandfather’s platoon.
The idea behind these unpaid portraits was to revive some of the subjects’ former fame, but since no museum or gallery had commissioned them (or would accept them, even as donations), they ended up lining the living room wall in rows, a jury box of befuddled uncles.
Growing up, Lucifer thought portraits were ridiculous, and that his father’s clients were shallow and stupid. But around the time of his twelfth birthday, curiosity began to gnaw at him. If his father could make a grain dealer look like a university president, how dignified would Lucifer look in oil?
...
Victoria Patterson's "The First and Second Time" takes an unflinching look at the sexual awakening of a teenage girl who is struggling to cope with her parents' divorce:
...Rosie had once been Daddy’s little princess. Before the divorce, her father had slept in the guest room on the foldout sofa bed. Above the sofa was a crudely drawn picture of ice skaters. Her room was next to this room, and often her father would climb into her bed, on top of her beige silk comforter.
He would fall asleep easily. She never got accustomed to having her father’s adult-size body in her bed, and she would not sleep. It made her feel weird, as if she was the wife and not the daughter, but she would let him stay because she knew he was desperately lonely.
She would become hyper-aware of his breathing, the way it would develop into a snore, counting the seconds between her breaths and his long breaths. She would try to time her breaths to his, but she could not.
He had hair on his arms; his lips parted when he fell asleep; a scar divided his left eyebrow; his mustache brushed against his top lip; his face relaxed. Eventually, he would stir and turn, curling into a fetal position. She would move her body if his arm or leg touched.
Always, he would wake, startled by one of his more resonant snores, or for no predictable reason. She would pretend to be asleep. She didn’t want him to feel guilty about keeping her awake.
Sometimes, smelling of moist sleep, his lips would touch her cheek, his mustache brushing against her skin. He always returned to the sofa bed. She would feel relief when he left, although she would curl into the warm spot his body had created on her bed, and finally drift to sleep.
...
Boston Review is a well-regarded magazine of poetry and progressive politics which offers several annual contests. A lot of their content is available online. Tiphanie Yanique's lush and haunting story "How to Escape from a Leper Colony" won their 13th annual short story contest in 2006. It's the title story of her new collection, coming in 2010 from Graywolf Press.
...When I left Trinidad for Chacachacare it was 1939 and I was only 14. I came for two reasons. The first was to bury my father, who had lived there for three years and had just died. The second was because I had become a leper. It was in my arm. The same arm my mother held as she walked me to the dock and left me there. Her cotton sari swishing the ground as she ran back to the main street, to catch a bus that would take the whole day to get her back to San Fernando, way down in South. I thought of her sitting in the bus for hours, her face against the glass, the hole in her nose empty because she had sold the gold to buy me a used sari and a bag of sweets as a gift for my new caretakers.
I also sat that whole day. I was waiting for the nuns to come get me. I pretended I could hear the sounds of the junction that the driver had dropped us off at. It wasn’t Port-of-Spain, but it was the biggest, loudest place I had ever been to. It was like a wedding in my village with all the food laid out for me to stare at. Men crowded around a small stand that sold raw oysters. They dipped the shells in hot pepper sauce before slurping the meat down their throats. Women reached up for brightly colored buckets and brooms that hung on display. My mother and I rushed by, avoiding getting close to people.
During our long walk, the busy road turned into a dusty path. And then we were walking along a wood dock with the sea beneath us. My mother sat me down with my legs hanging over the side and pointed to the small mound many miles out into the ocean. That would be my new home, she told me, where the nuns would take me in and bless me with the sacrament of confirmation when I was older. She did not say, if I lived to be older. Instead she kissed me on the mouth and made me promise not to eat the sweets. And she left. And then it was so quiet, with only the waves and the breeze as sounds of life, that I closed my eyes and pretended that I was back in the junction, eating oysters in pepper sauce, putting them in my mouth with my good hand.
My arm was wrapped and in a sling. Even in my mind I could not forget how my elbow was hurting me in a funny way that wasn’t about pain. Even alone on the dock I was too afraid to touch it, to give that arm the healing power of the other one. It is a dangerous thing when a girl is afraid to touch her own body. I was afraid to touch places on me that weren’t even private. And I was going to die for it. Die for having those places.
...
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I believed in you, Barack Obama.
Yes, I knew you were only a human being, not the savior of our nation, no matter how many giddy songs we sang and tears we shed when you were inaugurated in January. But still, I believed you were a nobler and wiser person than the average politician; more than that, a symbol that social change was possible, that justice for all would not be delayed forever.
I also know that you have more on your mind than whether Heather's two mommies can file a joint tax return. Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy...I get it. You don't want to be another Bill Clinton, distracted by the gays-in-the-military issue during your first months in office.
But you didn't have to file a brief in support of the "Defense of Marriage Act". I put the name of this wrong-headed federal law in quotes because it doesn't actually protect anyone's marriage. It only withholds over 1,000 federal rights and benefits from same-sex couples, even if their marriage is recognized by their own state's laws. And what's more, President Obama, you didn't have to file this brief, which substantively and in detail defends the constitutionality of discrimination against gays and lesbians, arguing that they are not a "suspect class" for equal protection purposes.
There are a lot of folks in this country who still don't see a parallel between gay rights and the civil rights struggles that ended "separate but equal" schooling and the interracial marriage ban--even though the Justice Department's pro-DOMA brief relies on the same legal arguments that once would have prevented the president's parents from getting married. But, President Obama, you led our community to believe that you saw that connection. Were you just promising marriage in order to get us into bed?
Former Clinton top aide Richard Socarides has written on the liberal political website AMERICABlog News about why the DOMA brief was unnecessary and harmful:
Like many other gay people who support the president, and as someone who had hoped he would be a presidential-sized champion of gay civil rights from the start, I was disturbed by his administration’s brief defending the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), filed late last week, in opposition to our full equality.
It had such a buckshot approach to it, a veritable kitchen sink of anti-gay legal theories, that it seemed expressly designed to inflict maximal damage to our rights. Instead of making nuanced arguments which took into account the president’s oft-stated support for repealing DOMA – a law he has called “abhorrent” – the brief seemed to embrace DOMA and all its horrific consequences.
I was equally troubled by the administration’s explanation that they had no choice but to defend the law. As an attorney and as someone who was directly involved in giving advice on such matters to another president (as a Special Assistant for civil rights to President Bill Clinton), I know that this is untrue.
No matter what the president’s personal opinion, administration officials now tell us that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) must defend the laws on the books, and must advance all plausible arguments in doing so. Thus, the theory goes, the DOJ was just following the normal rules in vigorously defending the anti-gay law.
I know and accept the fact that one of the Department of Justice's roles is to (generally) defend the law against constitutional attack. But not in all cases, certainly not in this case – and not in this way. To defend this brief is to defend the indefensible.
From my experience, in a case where, as here, there are important political and social issues at stake, the president’s relationship with the Justice Department should work like this: The president makes a policy decision first and then the very talented DOJ lawyers figure out how to apply it to actual cases. If the lawyers cannot figure out how to defend a statute and stay consistent with the president’s policy decision, the policy decision should always win out.
Thus, the general rule that the DOJ must defend laws against attack is relative – like everything in Washington. And even when the DOJ does defend a law against constitutional attack, it does not have to advance every conceivable argument in doing so (such as the brief’s invocation, in a footnote, of incest and the marriage of children). In fact, many legal experts believe that in this particular case none of the issues going to the merits of whether or not DOMA is constitutional needed to be addressed to get the case thrown out. The administration’s lawyers could have simply argued, for example, that the plaintiff’s had no standing. There was no need to invoke legal theories that were not only offensive on their face, but which could put at risk future legal efforts on behalf of our civil rights.
An earlier post on AMERICABlog News, by John Aravosis, is also worth reading for its point-by-point analysis of the DOJ brief and its potential negative impact on other gay-rights cases.
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Soulforce, the activist group that resists religion-based oppression of GLBT people through nonviolent protests and education, seeks workshop presentations for its anti-heterosexism conference this winter. The event will be held in West Palm Beach, FL on Nov. 20-22 to coincide with the annual conference of "ex-gay therapy" organization NARTH. Co-hosting the event with Soulforce are the National Black Justice Coalition and the "ex-gay survivors" website Box Turtle Bulletin. From their press release:
Heterosexism is the presumption that everyone is heterosexual and that opposite sex attractions and relationships are preferable and superior to those of the same sex. Heterosexism has been encoded into nearly every major social, religious, cultural, and economic institution in our society and it leads directly to discrimination and the harmful efforts by some health care providers and religious groups to change or repress the sexual orientation of those under their care.
Anti-heterosexism involves recognizing and questioning the power and privileges society confers on heterosexual people because of their sexual orientation. It involves respecting and fostering the inclusivity and diversity of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities....
One of the most destructive forms of heterosexism is the practice of “ex-gay” ministries and “reparative” or “sexual orientation conversion” therapies. Based on the false presumption that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality, these treatments use scientifically unsound and outdated understandings of sexual and gender identity and offer false hope to vulnerable and distressed LGBT people, especially those from conservative religious backgrounds. The harm caused by such programs can be immense, with troubling ethical violations that may include breaches in patient/client confidentiality, and outcomes that increase the risk for depression, anxiety, and self- destructive behavior. Deeply rooted in heterosexist attitudes, they frequently teach that LGBT people are lonely and unhappy individuals who never achieve societal acceptance, satisfying interpersonal relationships, or a genuine faith experience.
Furthermore, ex-gays have become a central component in the strategy to deny LGBT people full civil equality. Paid spokespersons from ex-gay ministries speak in courtrooms, school board meetings, and directly to legislators in Congress. Their goal is to convince political leaders and the American public that LGBT people can change their sexual orientation or gender identities and therefore do not need equal rights or protections.
Proposals should be submitted by August 29. Consider making a donation to support this event. Soulforce, like many other nonprofits, has been hard-hit by the recession. Right-wing ministries and political action groups that spread ex-gay misinformation are better funded and have the power of the dominant culture behind them. Help turn the tide.
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As promised, our Pride Month series this year includes reviews of the best GLBT-themed books that have come to the attention of Reiter's Block. These short fiction anthologies stood out for their fine writing, diverse perspectives, and emotionally compelling characters.
*Steve Berman, ed., Best Gay Stories 2008 (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2008).
This anthology boasts an appealing mix of genres including fantasy, horror, and crime fiction, along with more traditional literary fiction. The economic and racial diversity of the characters also held my interest. As a woman writing about gay men, I appreciated the inclusion of two female authors here. Favorite tales: Raymond Luczak, "Interpretations," the story of a sign-language interpreter working with deaf gay men at the beginning of the AIDS crisis; Holly Black, "The Coat of Stars," a magical-realist love story about a Hispanic tailor who must win his childhood sweetheart away from the fairy queen; and Jeff Mann, "Taming the Trees," which combines the rural, S&M, and "bear" subcultures in the unlikely persona of a middle-aged professor missing the one man he truly loved.
*Richard Canning, ed., Between Men (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007).
This is a fine collection of contemporary literary fiction, enhanced by Canning's introduction, which highlights important themes in the stories and places them in their cultural context. Some novel excerpts work better than others as stand-alone reads, but all authors are high-quality. Overall, the book's flavor is subtle and melancholy. Favorite tales: Kevin Killian, "Greensleeves," a disturbing account of a power game between a wife, a husband, and his gay lovers, whose motives are left to the reader's imagination; John Weir, "Neorealism at the Infiniplex," in which anger, grief, and comedy collide at the funeral of a friend who died of AIDS; David McConnell, "Rivals," the unforgettable story of a female teacher who seduces an eleven-year-old boy (an excerpt from his forthcoming novel The Beads); and Tennessee Jones, "Pennsylvania Story," the dark romance of two abused men reenacting their past.
*Donald Weise, ed., Fresh Men 2: New Voices in Gay Fiction (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005).
This anthology series showcases emerging gay male authors of literary fiction. Not surprisingly, casual sex and unfulfilled longing are common themes, though handled in a variety of ways. In my opinion, the most original and substantial tales in this book are clustered toward the end: Rakesh Satyal, "Difference," an unbearably tender and sad story of a young man who can't get over a breakup; Ted Gideonse, "The Lost Coast," in which a vacationing male couple's relationship is tested when tragedy strikes their fellow campers; and James Grissom, "A Bright and Shining Place," which addresses homophobia in the black church and how it strains one interracial couple.
*Richard Canning, ed., Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007).
Canning once again works overtime as editor to provide a masterful survey of AIDS literature from the pre-1996 period, before the new drug therapies offered HIV+ people a chance at a normal lifespan. All the stories are powerful and well-written, but I was particularly affected by the following: Edmund White, "An Oracle," in which a young hustler on a Greek island helps a man grieve for his dead lover; the late Allen Barnett, "Philostorgy, Now Obscure," about a terminally ill man gently closing the book on his complicated friendship with two women; Thomas Glave, "The Final Inning," about the suffering of closeted gay men in the black community; and Dale Peck, "Thirteen Ecstasies of the Soul," a lyrical tribute to two dead friends, told as a series of prose-poems.
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Today, New Hampshire became the sixth state to grant equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. According to an email bulletin from MassEquality, Gov. John Lynch has just signed the bill that the legislature passed earlier this spring. Thanks are due to MassEquality, New Hampshire Freedom to Marry, the Human Rights Campaign, GLAD, and other activists who worked to make this a reality.
This has been an amazing year for supporters of equal rights. Was Prop 8 the Stonewall of the marriage movement? Something seems to have galvanized voters and legislators to take action on an issue that's been sidelined too long.
However, opponents are hoping to roll back these gains, with a ballot initiative in Maine and other proposals. Now is the time for GLBT-affirming people of faith, in particular, to talk to our neighbors about why our beliefs are compatible with Scripture.
On a related note: If you're in Western Massachusetts tomorrow night, come to the Interfaith Service for Transgender Rights, 7 PM on June 4th at the Edwards Church on Main Street in Northampton. Find out more at the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition website.
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It's Pride Month at Reiter's Block? How can you tell?
As I did last June, this month I'll be showcasing the work of GLBT authors I admire. I'm hoping to have time for some book and movie reviews, as well. First up, we have The Poet Spiel, a widely published author and performance poet, whose work has been featured on the Poets Against War website. His chapbooks include come here cowboy: poems of war (Pudding House Publications, 2006) and once upon a farmboy (Madman Ink, 2008).
Nudging Man
You wonder why that kid doesn’t just stay at home
till maybe 2:00 a.m.—watch Carson—
give his eyelids the cucumber treatment—
because he gets so stiff he can barely lift his warm
beer to his face.
How he reminds you of when you pick up
a small bird
which has crashed into your kitchen window
and it becomes completely still; it does not resist;
it does not know where it is; it does not know
what it is.
You’ve always figured it was waiting for
something familiar,
another bird, to nudge it, to call to it.
But the best that you can do
is place it gently in the warmth of your armpit
in the darkness of that space where nothing
threatens it
and your body heat and the beating of your heart
are without a name
and you sense that that familiarity makes the bird
become whole again.
You see the kid every night when you slide
him a Schlitz-on-draft
across your bar—
never expecting a tip. A kid like him
will nurse one beer from 10:05, when he arrives,
till the moment
when he scores: fifteen minutes before
you close.
It takes him an hour to rise up from the barstool,
move across the room for a different point
of view—
to where the quantity of men for choosing
is mounting.
He’s barely touched his beer
but his eyes are darting; exposing signs of wanting.
Wanting it bad.
He’s available but shows no sense of knowing
he has a right
to declare that he is present, as in speaking
out loud:
“I’ve seen you here before can I buy you a beer,”
as if he fears his voice, his presence, will
reveal himself to himself;
that this can only happen by the revelation
of the recognition of him by another man.
So each hour he repositions, stands as near as he
can stand to a man—
nudges one of them.
But he cannot say a single word.
Then another; he nudges another and another.
This kid touches them but he cannot speak.
By 2 a.m. the men are sweaty and anxious
for the hot trick they’ve come here to find.
And the kid is nudging more of them
and nudging them more aggressively.
The room is reckless. Most patrons are drunk
and you’re hollering out Last call!
before they head on to the after hours bars
where some of them will do it raw, on site;
but you overhear the kid,
standing just inside the doorway at the far
end of your bar,
not drunk at all,
just as you’ve heard him so many times
at 2:15 a.m.,
point blank, his eyes certain,
entertaining the potential of unskinned meat
from some happy nighthawk:
“You wanna fuck?”
and he gets the nod every time.
You guess he finds himself while in bed—
when he is naked—
in the reflection of another man—
where you guess he is not as silent
as a stricken bird.
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Eric Reitan isn't inerrant, but he's pretty darn close.
Reitan is a philosophy professor at Oklahoma State University, and the author of Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion's Cultured Despisers. He blogs at The Piety That Lies Between and is also a regular contributor to the progressive website Religion Dispatches.
Via Elizaphanian's blog, I discovered this link to the most comprehensive and excellent discussion/refutation of Biblical inerrancy that I have ever seen. The post, on Butler University religion professor Dr. James F. McGrath's blog Exploring Our Matrix (affiliated with the Christian Century), starts with a quote from one of Reitan's articles at Religion Dispatches:
[T]he doctrine of biblical inerrancy has the effect of inspiring its adherents to pay more attention to a text than to the neighbors they are called upon to love. Sometimes it even inspires them to plug up their ears with Bible verses, so that they can no longer hear the anguished cries of neighbors whose suffering is brought on by allegiance to the literal sense of those very texts.
Reitan is thinking of the exclusion of GLBT Christians (his cousin Jake Reitan founded Soulforce's "Equality Ride"), but not only of that issue. His argument, along with the lengthy debate in the comments, clearly spells out why inerrantist theories that pit compassion against obedience are a dangerous heresy that should concern all Christians. What we're really fighting for, beyond GLBT rights, is freedom from the fears that keep us from drawing near to God. Fear of error stems from fear of committing sins, as if Jesus hadn't told us that we are worthy right now to call God "Abba", Father.
The real action on McGrath's blog occurs in the extensive comments below the post, where he takes on the argument that pro-gay Christians and others who reject Biblical literalism are setting ourselves up as authorities over Scripture. A sample:
James F. McGrath said...
There were Christians on both sides of the debates about slavery. Just ask the Southern Baptists. That's the reason they exist.
I am very familiar with the Chicago Declaration on Biblical Inerrancy. I simply agree with most Evangelicals outside of the United States in not subscribing to it. I don't find the term "inerrancy" to mean anything like what it sounds like when defined with so many qualifications.
As for these matters being settled in "the Bible", you are missing the point that Paul's letter to the Galatians wasn't Scripture when the debate between Peter and Paul was taking place. And so presumably in order to get the table of contents of Scripture as inerrant as well, you need to trust the church's authority at least that far. I suppose the question is why stop there? How do you know that God has entrusted authority to the church only so far as to get a book and then withdrawn in in favor of the book?
April 13, 2009 4:54 PM
Rhology said...
Hello Dr McGrath,
I don't see any rebuttal so far to my contention that you have set yourself up as an authority over the Bible, and that therefore there is really no good reason for you to read or take into acct any of it at all. I do think interaction with that point would really benefit our discussion here.
Yes, there were Christians on both sides. Yet, the impetus for abolition came from...Christians, not from some other group of different conviction. I should further think that it is obvious to any reasonable mind that the reason a group comes into existence is not necessarily the same reason for which it remains in existence. I don't think the Anglican Church existS, NOW, just so that the King of England can satisfy his hot pants, after all.
I am glad and sad to hear that you are familiar with the Chicago Statement. Given the strange comments you've made that display an ignorance of proper hermeneutical process, I would commend it to your reading again, so that you won't make the same mistakes an additional time.
True, Galatians wasn't even written when the Paul/Peter event occurred. Yet Galatians is the only way we know about the event and its outcome TODAY, and that's what matters. No one is claiming Sola Scriptura for the time before the Scriptura existed, after all.
I don't trust any church's "authority" for the Canon. Let me recommend James White's _Scripture Alone_ for a better idea of what we mean when we discuss the Canon. It's a popular-level book, but honestly I think it would fit where you are pretty well at this point. In a nutshell, we trust GOD to make His self-revelation known, gradually to the church as a whole, not to any one council or any one body or any one bishop. It is a testament to God's way of doing it that knowledge of the Canon gradually became known and agreed upon across a wide geographic area despite the long distances and bad communication entailed in such dispersion.
Peace,
Rhology
April 14, 2009 9:02 AM
James F. McGrath said...
Rhology, I don't believe I've "set myself up as an authority" over the Bible. I cannot extract myself from my physical human existence, my cultural, historical, and linguistic context, my Christian faith, and everything else that makes me who I am, and read the Bible without presuppositions, assumptions or influences. And so the claim to treat the Bible as one's authority is a potentially perilous one, since Christians who clearly have no interest in literally following Luke 14:33 regularly quote other passages to clobber others for not doing "what the Bible says".
Of course, one can bring in other passages to nullify this one, and while a subject like homosexuality will be met with "the Bible says..." the challenge to have no possessions will be met with "you can't take that literally, and see here there were people with possessions, and...and..." But the truth of the matter is that, when conservative Christians choose to quote the Bible about homosexuality or some other issue, but ignore its teachings about wealth and social justice, and then object that "you cannot set yourself up as an authority over the Bible", they are deceiving themselves and often others. The conservative viewpoint uses the Bible no less selectively than any other. It just has a more extensive apparatus in place to make it possible to pretend that isn't what is going on.
I think I've written enough to keep the conversation going, and so we can leave the difficulties involved in claiming that an errant church put together a collection of precisely those writings which are inerrant for another time.
April 14, 2009 9:36 AM
Rhology said...
Hello Dr McGrath,
No one is asking you to read the Bible in a way impossible for a human to do - free from presupps, etc. But one either takes the text and its meaning as authoritative and defining, one rejects it altogether, or one picks and chooses. The text manifestly means sthg, much like your comment and books and blogposts manifestly mean specific things. You are having a discussion on biblical authority etc with me right now, rather than discussing cooking stew on the surface of Mars.
You have already said explicitly that there are teachings of the Bible that you reject, and that means you think you know better (or else you're a complete idiot, and I don't think you're an idiot). If you know better, then you are setting yourself up higher than the Bible. The Bible says do this or that, you say no. It's as simple as that. I'm just wondering why you bother listening to the rest of it, or better yet, why you would cite it for any moral authority for some other question. Why not just cite yourself, since you know better?
Why follow Luke 14:33, and why cite it? Are you saying I *should* follow it? Why?
You said:
one can bring in other passages to nullify this one
This is another example of your poor understanding of biblical hermeneutics. It is the job of the exegete who takes the entirety of the Bible seriously to understand what a given psg is saying and then to understand it in light of its immediate and wider context. Seriously, this is elementary information. One does not "nullify" a text with another. One can harmonise, one can illumine, etc.
Your misunderstanding about what Luke 14:33 actually *does* mean is at the heart of your mistake here, but your wider unwillingness to take the Bible seriously is the root of the problem rather than a single symptom. Did Jesus give up EVERYthing He had? No. Did Jesus command His disciples to take with them a couple of swords just before Gethsemane? Yes. What does all this mean? Whatever it means, it doesn't mean what you said it means. The teachings are not in conflict - they are both/and, and the false dilemma you are proposing is just that - false.
There is, however, no alternative psg on the topic of homosexuality that would serve to "nullify", as you put it, the condemnation of homosexuality in 1 Cor 6, Romans 1, etc. Unless you have one in mind...
And it's fine with me to leave the church/Canon discussion where it is. I appreciate the time you put into our discussion here.
Peace,
Rhology
April 14, 2009 10:50 AM
James F. McGrath said...
Thanks, Rhology, for your reply. The reason I don't think it is possible to avoid "sitting in judgment on the Bible" is that the Bible is quite plainly factually inaccurate on some matters, such as whether thinking takes place in the brain or in the heart. Does that affect Paul's overarching point when he uses such language? Not really. We can still grasp his language metaphorically, but that doesn't change the fact that in Paul's time it was taken literally, and he does not anywhere indicate that he meant as a metaphor what his contemporaries understood literally. The same may be said of other details in the Bible: the "firmament" that holds up the waters above, for instance.
I've also posted before about the need to "read the Bible ethically", since that has come up in our conversation.
If the Bible cannot consistently be taken literally when its plain sense indicates we ought to, then we have no choice but to either reject the whole thing or to seek a core message and underlying principles that can be translated or mediated in some way into our own time, culture and worldview. But requiring that modern readers of the Bible accept an ancient worldview in its entirety in order to accept the Christian faith. Some act of translation is required, and if we cannot bypass the question of what to do with Luke's depiction of the ascension in the context of our current astronomical knowledge (for example), then we have no choice but to make a judgment about the Bible, too. Even those who attempt to maintain some form of literalism make the same judgment - they simply choose to reject modern science because of what they understand the text to say. But that's different from the ancient authors and readers who simply had this cosmology as an assumption, not something that involved a leap of faith.
In short, I don't think we can accept the whole package as it comes to us, nor do I think anyone successfully does so today, even if they claim otherwise. And if we say that we can find a way of interpreting the message, interpretation involves judgment on our part - about what is central and what is simply cultural, and about how to re-express what we believe is central today....
***
Further down the page, I was particularly struck by this lengthy comment from Reitan himself:
For even broader context than my RD article provides, it may help to locate the quote within my ongoing work on the nature of divine revelation. Some of that work is summarized in Chapter 8 of my book, IS GOD A DELUSION? A REPLY TO RELIGION'S CULTURED DESPISERS, especially on pp. 175-177. But the full development of my ideas here has yet to be published.
The gist of it is this: a God whose essence is love would not choose, as His primary vehicle of revelation, a static text. We learn most about love through loving and being loved. And it is PERSONS whom we can love, as well as who can love us. And so it is in persons and our relationships with persons that the divine nature is made most fully manifest.
Christianity affirms this when it maintains that God's most fundamental revelation in history was in the PERSON of Jesus. And Jesus was, if nothing else, a model of agapic love. His core message was love. And He never wrote anything. Instead, He made disciples--PERSONS--whom He sent out into the world.
In this context, a text that collects human testimony concerning divine revelation in history, especially one that reports on the life and teachings of Jesus, is going to be invaluable. But it will cease to be valuable if we come to pay more attention to this text than we do to our neighbors. Jesus Himself declared that He is present in the neighbor in need, and the community of the faithful is called "the body" of Christ, that is, the place where Christ is present, embodied, on Earth today. Not in a book. In persons.
When the biblical witness is treated as the proxy voice of persons who lived long ago, and we listen to the voices of those persons as we do the other members of the body of Christ, then the biblical witness becomes an invaluable partner in our efforts to understand what God is saying to us--that is, what God is communicating through the web of human relationships and the spirit of love that moves within that web.
But when the biblical witness is treated as inerrant in a way that no human being is inerrant, it trumps the voice of the neighbor and is used as a conversation-ender. It becomes an excuse not to listen to the lived experience of the neighbor. Or it becomes a measuring stick for deciding which neighbor should be listened to (their experience conforms with the biblical template) and which should be dismissed (because their experience does not conform).
And since compassionate listening is one of the most essential acts of neighbor love, it follows that a doctrine of biblical inerrancy is an impediment to such love.
Therefore, I conclude (contrary to what Craig argues here) that a God of love would NOT create an inerrant text.
Reitan expands on these points in an ongoing on "authority without inerrancy" on his blog: here, and here. This earlier post responds directly to the discussion on McGrath's blog. Tolle, lege!
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The title of this post is one of the best pieces of advice my therapist ever gave me. How often do we compound life's unavoidable pains by believing that this shouldn't happen--that if we'd only managed our lives properly, we would never be depressed? Sadness is unattractive, unless you're a teenage girl who's read Wuthering Heights too many times, and unattractiveness makes people stop loving you, which makes you sad. So be happy! It's your duty as an American. Thus goes the script.
My fellow Harvard Crimson alum Joshua Wolf Shenk has written a stellar cover story for the June issue of The Atlantic. "What Makes Us Happy?" profiles George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who has spent the past four decades studying the life choices and satisfaction levels of 268 men who graduated from our alma mater in the 1930s.
It would come as no surprise to the Buddha, nor to my therapist, that a person's resilience and interpretive framework for life's sufferings are greater predictors of happiness than whether their life is superficially free of obstacles. Is it better to be Case No. 218, wealthy, married for 60 years, but emotionally flat, or Case No. 47, who struggled with depression and alcoholism, but was a creative and energetic activist? The article suggests that a passionate life contains emotional highs and lows that the bland safety of "happiness", as defined by external success markers, can't capture. Shenk writes:
The undertones of psychoanalysis are tragic; Freud dismissed the very idea of “normality” as “an ideal fiction” and famously remarked that he hoped to transform “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” The spirit of modern social science, by contrast, draws on a brash optimism that the secrets to life can be laid bare.
Vaillant, whom Shenk describes as an optimist attuned to the tragic sense, understands that we're often ambivalent about pursuing happiness in the first place. Dissatisfaction and anxiety have survival value, up to a point:
Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?
In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.
To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”
As a
Christian, I wonder what this insight means for evangelism. It's easier to envision hellfire than grace. Is it really our sinfulness that makes God's love seem intolerable, too bright, like sunlight in our eyes? Or has the church not done a good enough job of creating a community where it's safe to let our guard down?
Religion gets little airtime in Shenk's account of the Harvard study, perhaps reflecting the secularist biases of mid-20th-century psychology. I'm curious about the role of belief systems in supporting or hindering the mature coping strategies that Vaillant deems central to happiness, and how beliefs interact with differences in temperament to either smooth away or magnify pathologies.
For those interested in pursuing this topic further, I highly recommend Jennifer Michael Hecht's The Happiness Myth, a provocative survey of cultural and philosophical prescriptions for a happy life, which have differed widely from one era to the next. Hecht suggests that historical perspective itself brings happiness by giving us self-awareness and the ability to try new options outside our culture's standards of value. She argues that there are actually three kinds of happiness, with different time horizons--momentary euphoria, day-to-day contentment, and overall life satisfaction--and that we must make hard trade-offs among them.
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Posted by Jendi Reiter at
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In a disappointing but not unexpected move, the California Supreme Court today upheld the validity of Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that restricted marriage to heterosexual couples. However, the court also upheld the legality of the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in California between May 2008, when the court granted equal marriage rights, and November 2008, when the voters took them away again by a narrow 52%-48% majority. According to the New York Times report (emphasis mine):
The opinion focused on whether the use of a voter initiative to narrow constitutional rights under Proposition 8 went too far.
Supporters of same-sex marriage, who filed several suits challenging the proposition, argued that the change to the state’s constitution was so fundamental that the initiative was not an amendment to the constitution but a “revision,” a term for measures that rework core constitutional principles.
Revisions, under California law, cannot be decided through a simple signature drive and majority vote, which is what led to Proposition 8; they can only be placed on the ballot with a two-thirds vote by the legislature.
But the justices said the proposition was an amendment, not a revision. It has historically been rare for the state’s courts to overturn initiatives on the ground that they are actually revisions, and many legal scholars deemed the challenge against Proposition 8 a long shot....
...In questions that clearly anticipated the logic of today’s majority
opinion, the justices had seemed to be seeking a middle ground that
would allow the rights they had affirmed the year before to be
preserved in the form of civil unions, which would be different from
marriage in name only. Justice Kennard suggested that the substantive
rights of gays were the same after the proposition, and all that had
changed was “the label of marriage.” That distinction was deeply
dissatisfying to Mr. Minter, representing the plaintiffs, who argued
that without the right to the word “marriage,” same-sex couples would
find “our outsider status enshrined in our Constitution.” Chief
Justice George’s opinion dealt directly with that point, stating that
the court understood the importance of the word marriage and was not
trying to diminish it. However, he wrote, the legal right of people to
call themselves married is only one of the rights granted to same-sex
couples in the decision last May, and so “it is only the designation of
marriage -- albeit significant--that has been removed by this
initiative measure.” Karl Manheim, a professor at Loyola Law
School in Los Angeles, called the decision a “safe” position written by
justices who can be recalled by voters. The change wrought by
Proposition 8 was anything but narrow, he said, and claiming that the
word marriage was essentially symbolic was like telling black people
that sitting in the back of the bus was not important as long as the
front and back of the bus arrive at the same time.
The Courage Campaign, a California-based GLBT activist group, is gearing up to propose a 2010 ballot measure that would restore same-sex marriage. Click here to watch their new TV ad (a shorter version of the Regina Spektor "Fidelity" video that they aired earlier this year) and donate. Go here to donate to Equality California and see a video of Marriage Director Marc Solomon (formerly of MassEquality) discussing their strategy to win marriage back.
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Posted by Jendi Reiter at
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Blogging for Truth is a project initiated by Rebecca Campbell. This week, GLBT bloggers and allies are invited to write articles sharing the truths of our lives and/or debunking hateful myths spread by anti-gay religious leaders and politicians.
As Pontius Pilate famously asked, "What is truth?" Who gets to tell it, and about whom? The debate between affirming and non-affirming Christians is fundamentally about the relationship of truth to power. For that reason, it should concern all Christians, whether or not they have a personal stake in GLBT rights.
The way I see it, one side has an egalitarian model of truth-telling, and the other, an authoritarian model. This leads to different ways of resolving the apparent conflict between anti-gay Biblical texts and the evidence of positive, loving, spiritually fruitful gay partnerships.
Some conservatives address the problem by redefining what homosexuality is. It's an immoral choice, it's a curable neurosis, it's a perversion. It has to be, because the text says so.
This is the rhetorical move that frightens me. "We know you better than you know yourself: your love is only lust, your identity is confusion, and if you can't change, it's because you're not trying hard enough." Basically, the conservative church is saying to GLBT people that they can't trust their own perceptions of reality, even concerning the contents of their own minds and the feelings in their bodies.
To me, that sounds like the first step toward mental illness, as well as an open door for all kinds of physical and emotional abuse. The virtue of humility is not the same as radical self-doubt. The former restores the individual to his or her proper place in a community of others with equally valid rights and feelings. The latter makes him or her a slave of other human beings--because, of course, he or she is not allowed to doubt their ability to perceive the truth.
Other conservatives would acknowledge that same-sex orientation may be innate and unchangeable, but they argue that the Bible calls all people so afflicted to live celibately. This position at least avoids the necessity of spreading misinformation about GLBT sexuality, but it's still a variation of the same power grab discussed above.
Here, human authority figures are "discerning a vocation" for an entire class of people, without knowing anything about their unique gifts or what call they themselves have heard from God. Instead of undermining their confidence in their everyday sense perceptions, the church is undermining GLBT Christians' power to communicate with God directly, without human intermediaries--the essence of Protestantism, I might add.
There is simply no support in Scripture for the notion that God created two classes of people, one able to reinterpret old traditions in response to God's self-revelation in their lives, the other forced to defer to second-hand interpretations. On the contrary, the New Testament in particular is a record of hermeneutic revolution, as all sorts of marginalized people are suddenly speaking for God in ways that confound the religious authorities. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings"--and eunuchs, women, Gentiles, slaves and demoniacs. St. Paul, who spent the first half of his life persecuting the church that he died for, is an unlikely role model for the "We Haven't Changed" crowd.
If same-sex couples are not supposed to be capable of discerning that their relationships are a conduit for God's grace, it calls into question their entire ability to perceive God's presence or God's will. Again, the Bible doesn't support this radical suspicion of one's own experience (see, e.g., Luke 1:1-4, 1 John 1:1-4). In the New Testament, personal testimony is frequently prioritized over abstract reasoning from texts and traditions. The gospel writers are, in effect, asking their fellow Jews to credit their eyewitness accounts ahead of centuries-old beliefs about monotheism and the messiah. There isn't a sense that we must avoid error by enforcing a presumption against change. "Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God" (1 John 4:1); "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thess. 5:21). Taking personal responsibility for our faith commitments in this way keeps our potential sin and error always before our eyes, which leads to day-by-day conscious dependence on God's grace.
The validity of personal testimony has political implications. It radically equalizes everyone who claims to speak for God. Spiritual hierarchy seems disfavored in the Gospels. Thus, I would suggest, any theological position (such as the refusal to reexamine apparently anti-gay texts in light of evidence that they cause suffering to innocent people) that creates a hierarchy of access to God should be viewed with suspicion.
Because Jesus was acutely aware of the social position of everyone he addressed, so should we be. To say that truth is situational is not to say that it is relative. Rather, it is to recognize that we cannot truly pass judgment on another's actions without considering the power relations between us. Do we really know the truth about this person, unclouded by our own fears and desires, and do we have the right to speak it--to speak about them or for them, without questioning how we got that power?
All of us "Bloggers for Truth" have stories we can tell about our own partnerships or those of our parents, teachers, pastors and friends--all GLBT people whose lives have been touched by the Spirit. But we also have to make the Scriptural case that stories are truths, on a par with or superior to the truths of abstract reasoning, at least when it comes to practical ethics. Time and time again I hear anti-gay Christians argue that we are biased by our personal desires (either lust or pride) while they are merely following "what the Bible says". Their epistemology doesn't allow for scrutiny of the human element in interpretation, nor of their own emotional biases, because they need the Bible to remain magically exempt from the human condition of partiality and uncertainty.
Truth-as-objectivity is a modernist position, and ironically, one that has historically been used against religious believers since the Enlightenment. Religion's despisers have argued that the "truths" of religion are tainted by emotion, not universally accessible, not severable from the accidental personal history of the believer. This is supposedly in contrast to the self-evident truths of reason (whether scientific or philosophical), which should not vary based on the identity of the observer.
In response, postmodern Christian authors such as Lesslie Newbigin and Luigi Giussani have argued that all knowledge is situated knowledge, and that in fact it would be inappropriate to approach so personal a matter as one's spiritual destiny as if one had no personal stake in it. We find truth not by suppressing awareness of our own position, Giussani writes in The Religious Sense, but by cultivating humble openness to whatever the quest for truth reveals, i.e. by letting reality speak to us instead of telling it what it must be: "Love the truth of an object more than your attachment to the opinions you have already formed about it."
If there is a legitimate Christian argument against affirming same-sex relationships, it can't be that texts trump experience, or that the impersonal is superior to the personal. Tying ourselves to the mast of that sinking modernist ship means giving up on religion's claim to truth. Somewhere, Pilate is laughing.
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Posted by Jendi Reiter at
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