Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Episcopal Diocese Secedes Over Gay Issue


The Fresno, CA-based Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin yesterday became the first full diocese to split from the national church over disagreements about the Bible’s view of homosexuality. The diocese, which is also one of the three US Episcopal dioceses that rejects the ordination of women, voted to place itself under the authority of a conservative South American congregation. Over 50 Episcopal parishes have seceded from the national church in the past few years to protest the trend toward recognition of gay relationships. CNN.com has the full story here.

I find it sad and ironic that in the name of upholding “tradition”, certain Episcopal congregations are playing fast and loose with our entire system of church governance, as well as dishonoring their vows to respect the authority of their bishop. There are many Protestant denominations that operate on a more congregationalist model, where individual churches are free to reshuffle their allegiance when doctrines or personalities clash. The Episcopal Church is not one of them.

Is the episcopate a flawed system? Do we want every person, every church, to vote their own conscience and pull up stakes when their superiors fall below some level of doctrinal purity? That’s a popular position, especially in hyper-individualistic America, but don’t call it historic Anglicanism. It’s more like those 1970s wedding vows where you promised to stay together only as long as you were both meeting each other’s needs for self-actualization.

And they say the gays are ruining marriage.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Holiday Edition


Ship of Fools has posted its “Kitschmas Gifts” list, featuring 13 products to make your special someone say “WTF??” My favorite are the Thongs of Praise. Nothing says “Not tonight dear, I have a headache” like panties with the Virgin Mary on them.

Not to be outdone, The Onion‘s holiday gift guide includes essentials like Bacon Strips Adhesive Bandages. (Not recommended for people with dogs.)

For the second year in a row, Going Jesus treats us to the Cavalcade of Bad Nativities. Paddleball Nativity, Leprechauns in the Manger, Sad Kittens Nativity and more!

Poemeleon Prose-Poem Issue Now Online

 

Online literary journal Poemeleon has just released its latest issue, which is devoted to the prose-poem. In addition to poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Christina Lovin, Eve Rivkah, Cecilia Woloch, yours truly, and many others, Ann E. Michael contributes a thought-provoking essay about typography as a conveyor of meaning.


Poetry has been represented through the typographic art for several centuries; but until recently, few poets have spent much time considering how typography affects the form of the poem. After all, the printed page seems “merely” physical, inanimate, without the breath, rhythm and music that vivify the poem in performance (even if the reader performs it silently, while reading). The printed page has traditionally been the realm of the editor or designer, not the poet who is more accustomed, perhaps, to confrontations with the blank page. But now that we can, essentially, typeset our work as we compose, poets are becoming more aware of how margins, line spaces, and tabular settings can be indicators in the work and alter the form in which the poem is presented—can animate it further. I think prose poets, in particular, could discover in typography a tool with which to push this flexible form in interesting directions.

In verse, a good poem is more effective with its line breaks intact. Even lacking line breaks, the form will peek out from the justified margins because the rhythm, the rhyme, the breath is imbedded. A verse-poem’s line operates on rhythm (and, when read aloud, breath) foremost, with phrasal pacing as a sort of minor premise. With prose, semantic pacing, and the sentence as a unit, have the upper hand. Pacing and rhythm are dependent upon syllabic stress, word choice, sentence length, punctuation, and line breaks, which act as visual cues. In prose poems, the writer/editor’s choice of margins on the page may also be used as visual cues.

With prose poetry, perhaps even more than with free verse, because the formal structure is not on the surface, traditionalist detractors may assume that the form is a thoughtless free-for-all. Prose poetry removes the familiar cues of rhyme, meter and line breaks that tell us “this is a poem”. Like abstract painting, this can foreground other aspects of the artist’s materials that we formerly overlooked. Though it risks becoming gimmicky (a flaw I find in much “concrete poetry”), creative typography can illuminate the significance of the visual choices we make when writing and reading.

Aficionados of the prose poem can read more examples and essays on the subject in the journal Double Room.

“The Race Unwon” and Other New Writing by “Conway”


My prison pen pal “Conway”, who is serving 25-to-life at a maximum-security facility in California for receiving stolen goods, has sent me another packet of exciting new work this month:

The Race Unwon
by Conway

Like withered old leaves on a Hanged mans tree
absorbing the useless sun’light they save
to power only an abandoned memory
inside dreary chill shadows of his grave

with unquenching air recycled-n-stale
our sun was walled out of existence
unable to recover warmth from the veil
brought on by the shame of persistence

unnatural walls, kneeling left pleading
yet still a judgment remains sitting
among the rubble of babylons leading
thrown-up, jumbled enormous forbidding

In these volumes of created humanity
necromanced from the living dead
Baptized by fire with insanity
running cold as the blood being shed.

Chase me away from their stench
erase their stench from me
I’ve no more vengeance to quench
nor do I desire this bitter memory

though the waves still sing your song
over & over with pounding pain
those stone-washed kisses so strong
break on the horizon in vain

On the border this concrete grows
a burial ground for the spurned
as conspicuous injustice glows
gleefully while innocents burned

into my barbed-wire cradle I settle
as it winds-n-twines around twirled
trapped inside this thorny nettle
no sunbeam’ steal into our world

left abandoned we learned to choose
we allow nothing into our heart
sad but true, the worst race we lose
will be those we never did start…

****

Trapdoor

Our eyes have groped thine melted sands
us trees in the snow reaching out for warm light
suffocated by whiteness.

the Sun only dissolved the asphalt
reflected the concrete, crumbling like stale crackers.

All these faces tied together on the same chain
staring out through a teasing televisions lens;
A world of opportunity offered and taunted
without scents, never relents.

So close, but yet so far away;
This distant planet’s rebuked
by icy winds
forgetting their place in the pecking order
listening for prompts
still the only sounds offered
turned into useless static
untuneable noise, apologizing
for a despicable crowd’s opinion; wonder
about thunder’s irrelevance.

When the earth falls open, to swallow your soul
then, like a trapdoor spider
closes back up to hide the hole…

****
In the Chalk

I never liked the chalk board in school
it reminds me of another day
when my sister went away
they called her JANE DOE
because no one claimed her body when she died
But, I was there that day
it was the last time I cried

You see this woman had a future growin’ up
but now that’s all in the past
she grew up in the ghetto some say way too fast

At first she went to church
it gave her proper focus as she excelled
when situations became tough she hardly made a fuss
from the madness she rebelled

All the players in the hood kept missin’
whenever they tried to get at her
and though their game was tight
to her they didn’t matter

but as the years went by
her attitude began to change for the worse
her demeanor decomposed, and
she started dressing like a tramp and began to curse

she put her pops to shame
and started getting passed around a lot
so he blamed it on our mom, said it was her fault
for all the slutty clothes she had bought
“just look at how the girl walks
and God have mercy the way she talks”
she’s only just a child and already got a kid
you can’t blame it on the daddy
it must be something the momma done did

They both knew her life was in danger
when she started walkin that walk
but never thought the day would come
they’d find her in the chalk

I found her outline that night
on the corner of our street
under a streetlight where all the gangsters meet

I snuck out of the house
and watched them take the yellow ribbon down
when those cops cars rolled away
I approached the spot with a frown

That chalk told a story of an empty death
of someone all alone
an angry pool of blood was in the chalk
when I saw it I started to groan
I fell to my knees and started to cry
I looked up in tears and asked “God O why”

Why sister did you have to leave
you told me God was just, you made me believe

My tears were falling in the chalk
as I lay in her last place
then the sky burst open and lightning flashed
I looked up and saw her face
there were tears in her eyes
as she looked down on me with a smile
then the rain washed the chalk and blood off the sidewalk
I followed it for a while

down the gutter it went and finally to a drain
and when it disappeared
I swear I felt my sister’s pain

When I graduated college
I came back to pay her a last visit
I sat down by the drain pulled out my diploma
I graduated sister this is it

I couldn’t hold it in no more
my tears started falling
they fell into the drain and I swear
I heard my sister’s voice to me calling

She told me she was happy
I grew up to be an honest man
“keep working for the future do right the best you can”

Just remember one last thing
“talk is only talk”
you can always walk away
don’t end up in the chalk…

****

Notwithstanding the above poems, Conway also has a comic side, as in this recent exchange from our letters. On Nov. 3, I wrote:


With the advent of cold weather, squirrels have invaded the roof above our bedroom. It’s amazing how much noise they can make, considering their size. It sounds like a hockey game up there. Adam tried throwing pepper in the hole (he even had the carpenter cut a little door in the wall for this purpose), then hanging an inflatable owl off the dining-room window, and now we have the bedroom computer playing owl-sounds all day. Whoo whoo! Whacka whacka! As of today, the roof-repair guys are finally here to patch the hole, so the exterminator can come and not worry that the critters will get back in as soon as he leaves. The rule is that if he catches them alive, he either has to kill them or release them on our property—too bad, because I can think of a few people to whom I’d like to deliver a sack of live squirrels.

He responded on Nov. 27 with the following anecdote:


A friend of mine got the shaft on a business transaction. She was not able to physically recoup her losses and law enforcement was out of the question, if you know what I mean. So, homegirl goes down to the pet store and buys $40 worth of crickets, then she buys 5 Hefty trashbags full of packaging peanuts. Enters the domicile of the party and dumps crickets & nuts all over the building. Chirp! chirp! yee haw!

Book Notes: Openly Gay Openly Christian


Rev. Samuel Kader’s Openly Gay Openly Christian: How the Bible Really is Gay Friendly bridges the gap between serious Bible-believing Christians and those who want to affirm gay and lesbian relationships. The latter group includes liberal churches and theologians whose relationship to the Bible is vague, superficial or outright antagonistic, which has tended to confirm conservatives’ fears that gay-friendly theology waters down the faith. Many evangelicals have never heard a solid Scriptural case for GLBT inclusion.

Kader’s scholarly analysis of “clobber passages” in Genesis, Leviticus and the Epistles makes that much-needed case, though in other chapters he repeats familiar pro-gay readings of the Bible that I think are strained and potentially distracting. Hunting for examples of same-sex pairings in the Bible (David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi) unnecessarily sexualizes all intimate bonds, a reductionism to which our culture has been prone since Freud. Moreover, while it’s true that Christians are free from all of the ritual prescriptions of Leviticus, Kader sometimes slips into trivializing the holiness code, arguing that Christians who eat shrimp or wear blended fabrics have no right to criticize gays. But these are minor problems with what is nonetheless a very valuable book.

Kader analyzes the key words in Hebrew and Greek that he says have been mistranslated as forbidding all same-sex intercourse. Using Strong’s Concordance to track where these words recur in the Bible, he recontextualizes the clobber passages and demonstrates that none of them describe a committed, monogamous relationship between two men or two women. For instance, the acts actually being prohibited in Leviticus 18 and 20 are the fertility rituals of neighboring pagan nations, which involved temple prostitutes, and also possibly the practice of soldiers raping a defeated enemy king or military leader.

What gives this book credibility, besides the rigorous textual analysis, is that Kader sounds like a genuinely orthodox, evangelical Protestant. Rather than appeal to modern secular ideals of tolerance or a generalized Christian ethic of compassion, he emphasizes that the issue is legalism versus salvation by grace. Welcoming gays into full Christian fellowship is exactly the same kind of scandalous, progressive leap as welcoming Gentiles was for the Jewish Christians in the early church (see the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10). And it is justified by exactly the same evidence: the empirical evidence of the workings of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those once considered beyond the pale.

Saints and Laborers


One of the pleasures of praying the Daily Office is the juxtaposition of Bible verses, prayers and spiritual readings that makes me reflect on familiar verses in a new way. 

Yesterday’s gospel was the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, in Matthew 20:1-16. That’s the one where Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a landowner who pays all his workers the same amount, whether they worked all day or only for an hour. This parable sometimes comforts, sometimes outrages, and always fascinates me. To feel validated as a human being, I need to believe two somewhat contradictory things: that God cares about fairness, and that God loves each of us unconditionally, in some way that doesn’t depend on our relative merits. 

The online Daily Office at Mission St. Clare includes brief biographies of saints and great Christian historical figures. To these, also, I have a complex relationship. Sometimes I feel deeply and personally cared for by these people whom I have never met, who faced martyrdom so that I could know the gospel. Other times I’m uncomfortably aware of how high they set the bar. Isn’t envy often rooted in fear that the same miracles will be expected of us as well? Saints and geniuses expose how the heights of endurance and achievement that we wrote off as safely impossible are actually within human reach.

I’d bet that most people wrestling with the vineyard parable, like me, automatically identify with the workers who did more than the average and felt shortchanged. Compared to the saints, though, nearly all of us are more like the late-hired workers, who should be grateful that they get an equal share in the kingdom of heaven despite their meager contribution.

Poetry Roundup: Teicher, Rodriguez, Rose


In the course of researching winners of major contests for the next Winning Writers newsletter, I came across some exceptional poems online that I wanted to share with readers of this blog. One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2008 will be to get caught up on my review copies because there are so many exciting new books being published. Here, samples of three very different authors:

Jennifer Rose’s second book, Hometown for an Hour, has won several prizes including the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. Structured as a series of postcards from cities ranging from Gettysburg to Mostar, the book explores experiences of rootlessness and belonging. For instance, in “Provincetown Postcard“, she writes:

The street’s deserted,
as if a villain and the sheriff were
about to shoot it out, though nobody
peers from behind these shutters
except the endless pairs of sunglasses
staring toward June. Eight o’clock.
A church bell and one foghorn sing an aria
so poignant I want to cry. The marina
swizzles its lights into the harbor.
It’s Tuesday. I must be the last tourist
in P-town. How paradoxical “home” is–
you must get sick of it to earn the right
to have to stay in spite of that. I’ve never been
able to take any place for granted
like these year-rounders I see scratching
their lottery tickets at the Governor Bradford.
Where would they go with their winnings?
How do we know where we belong?
…

Read more poems from this book at her website.


Chicano author and activist Luis J. Rodriguez has written several acclaimed volumes of poetry as well as a memoir about growing up in the gangs of East L.A. He is now an advocate for disadvantaged youth, and the founder of Tia Chucha Press in Chicago. Read excerpts from his work at the Academy of American Poets website. In the title poem from his collection The Concrete River, he depicts barrio youth getting high on inhalants to escape from their bleak urban landscape into a beautiful, dangerous hallucination:

…We aim spray into paper bags.
Suckle them. Take deep breaths.
An echo of steel-sounds grates the sky.
Home for now. Along an urban-spawned
Stream of muck, we gargle in
The technicolor synthesized madness.

This river, this concrete river,
Becomes a steaming, bubbling
Snake of water, pouring over
Nightmares of wakefulness;
Pouring out a rush of birds;
A flow of clear liquid
On a cloudless day.
Not like the black oil stains we lie in,
Not like the factory air engulfing us;
Not this plastic death in a can.

Sun rays dance on the surface.
Gray fish fidget below the sheen.
And us looking like Huckleberry Finns/

Tom Sawyers, with stick fishing poles,
As dew drips off low branches
As if it were earth’s breast milk.

Oh, we should be novas of our born days.
We should be scraping wet dirt
        with callused toes.
We should be flowering petals
        playing ball.
Soon water/fish/dew wane into
A pulsating whiteness.
I enter a tunnel of circles,
Swimming to a glare of lights.
Family and friends beckon me.
I want to be there,
In perpetual dreaming;
In the din of exquisite screams.
I want to know this mother-comfort
Surging through me.
…

Read the whole poem here.


Craig Morgan Teicher’s collection Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems won this year’s Colorado Prize for Poetry. In this poem, “Ten Movies and Books”, first published in La Petite Zine, disjointed capsule summaries of unnamed classic movies and books turn out to be more about the reader’s bewilderment and longing than about the books themselves. Excerpt:

9

The twist is that, the whole time,
while he’s been trying to help
the boy, who is plagued
by his ability to see and speak with the dead,

Bruce Willis is dead. I’m sorry.

I’ve ruined another movie. But someone else
probably told you already. It’s still good, even if

it’s ruined for you.

*

Poems are meant
    to be read
in private, in bed, when

no one else is in the bed
    with you.
Never speak about poems.

Never tell anyone that you
    have heard
of them. Every poem

that someone discusses
    with someone
else disappears or breaks.

In fact, even reading a poem
    to yourself
hurts what little chance it has.

10

Holden Caufield
is pissed about everything.

He goes on and on.
Everyone just wants to make him better,
but he is too beautiful

for the world. Maybe everyone is
until they turn sixteen
or seventeen. After that,

maybe only some are too beautiful.
…

****
I will break Teicher’s rule #9 by directing you to read the whole poem here.

 

Juliet OC: “Just This Here Now”


A member of the British writers’ forum ABCTales.com who writes under the pen name Juliet OC has contributed this lyrical, intense story that combines raw emotion with careful literary craft:


“Just this here now… just this here now… just this, here now… just this, here, now,” she whispers the mantra into the incensed air. “Just this… here… now… only now is important, we only have this moment… just this, here now.”

A river rushes past my left ear, it bubbles and fades as distant bells grow closer, like the church on the hill on summer mornings, or cows in an Alpine meadow. The dog collapses into my side, he only lives for now; just this, here now. I screw his fur in my palm, and he throws his head back into my lap as I breathe in on, just this; and out on, here now. I imagine us in a painting, the title; Dying in ecstasy, sub-title; just this here now. My sister snores in the hospital bed as I lie on her ‘real’ bed, her old bed. She doesn’t lie on it anymore, not even in the daytime.

The phone rings in another room, I am allowed not to answer it. I have been given permission to be; just this here now. I don’t want this to end – I want to stay here on this bed, quiet and still with the sounds of bells like tiny cymbals, reminding me of an India I have never been to, and a rolling rumble that resonates deep in my stomach like distant thunder after the storm.

The back door slams. Someone shouts, “Hello!” I open my eyes and find I am back behind bars….

Read the whole story here. Read more by Juliet here.

Robert Orsi: Scholarship as an Act of Love

 

Catholic historian of religion Robert A. Orsi delivered the 2007 commencement address at Harvard Divinity School. His speech, “Love in a Time of Distraction”, is reprinted on page 8 of the Harvard Divinity Today summer newsletter, online as a PDF file here. This excerpt stood out for me:


Scholarship is the practice of disciplined attention to the world as we find the world, in its undeniable otherness and difference, but most of all in its obdurate and resistant presence. It is our privilege in the humanities and social sciences to go as inquirers into the company of other humans in the present and the past. We meet these men and women and children in the archives, in texts and in fragments of texts, and in the field. We find them always in the immediate circumstances of their lives, at work on their worlds; we find them in webs of relationship with each other that come to include us, once we have entered their worlds, in the present and in the past. And we meet them in the circumstances of our own lives, from within our own stories, gripped by our own fears and desires and hopes. “Research is a living relationship between people,” Sartre wrote. “The sociologist and his ‘object’ [which Sartre puts in quotation marks] form a couple, each of which is to be interpreted by the other; the relationship between them must be itself interpreted as a moment of history.”

Understood this way, scholarship is the practice of a particular kind of love. Veritas is Harvard’s motto, but the ground of veritas is amor. The love of your family and friends has sustained you these years; your love for what you were studying kept you going. Love is there, too, at the heart of our epistemology. The canons of modern reason insist that love is the nemesis of rationality; scholars must be objective, love is subjective. But the paradox of scholarship in the humanities is that the more we are present as particular persons and scholars to the world—the more “subjective” we are—the more the world stands forth in its realness and otherness—the more “objective” it is. The deepest challenge of epistemology is not an abstract “objectivity” but the fearlessness to be radically present to the other as we permit the other to be radically present to us. This is the sacramental dimension of scholarship; sacramental meaning the practice whereby the self comes face-to-face with the real.

The Depressed Christian


Christians prone to depression, as I am, can feel extra burdens of shame and doubt. We’ve heard the best news in the world, yet we can hardly motivate ourselves to butter our toast. Are we failing to work the program, or does the program itself not work? Are we setting a bad example in a world already inclined to believe that our faith is useless at best, harmful at worst?

Travis Mamone’s article The Boy with the Thorn in His Side at Relevant Magazine asks these exact questions. With humor and pathos, he describes how he read The Bible Code last year and became paralyzed with fear that the apocalypse was imminent. Though he eventually debunked that specific worry, he was disturbed by how easily the habit of panic returned, despite his faith:


When will this struggle be over? I had been dealing with mental illness for most of my life now, and I was getting sick of it. There was nothing else I wanted more than to just wake up one day and no longer have another anxiety attack. Ever! The Gospels report that Jesus once drove demons out of a man who hid in caves and cut himself with rocks. I thought all my demons were supposed to be gone.

And then it hit me: this is exactly like the thorn in Paul’s flesh!

I can’t imagine how my weakness and hang-ups can possibly give glory to God. When people look at me, I want them to see a strong man, a man whose life has been changed by God. More often, however, people see my failures and moments of weakness when I let the negative thoughts drag me down. What kind of testimony is that supposed to give?

Or maybe that’s exactly the kind of testimony I’m supposed to give. If I had the strength to battle my demons on my own, I would have never given my life to Christ in the first place. But the truth is I’m not. I tried to do it on my own, but just fell back into the same cycle of depression and getting better and falling back again. It wasn’t until I came to know God that I realized I didn’t have to battle it alone. In fact, the battle is not even mine to begin with; it is God’s. There are moments when it seems as if all is lost and the darkness is completely taking over. But then there always ends up being something to keep me going; it could be a Bible verse, a memory of being blessed, or a gut feeling that everything’s going to be okay. God’s mercy always shines through the darkness.

There a particular Bible quote that comes to mind: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Cor. 1:3-4). Maybe there’s some one out there right now, huddled up in his or her room, wondering when the darkness will end. Maybe this person is waiting to hear a story such as mine, a story that’ll make him or her realize, “Hey, I’m not alone!”

Today, that person is me. Thanks, Travis.

Check out Travis’ blog at http://tmamone.blogspot.com/. (What’s really disturbing is that the “What type of hipster are you?” graphic accompanying yesterday’s post looks exactly like me on a bad hair day. And you wonder why I’m depressed?)