Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Theory: Love It or Hate It?


Two of my greatest passions in life are creative writing and Christian faith, and I’ve been wondering what it means that I approach them in very different ways with respect to the role of the theoretical intellect. In fact, the first sentence of this post was originally “…creative writing and theology,” which I changed to “…and Christianity,” and finally to a more active and experiential phrase that is more of a goal than an honest description of my spiritual life. As a writer, I flee from literary theory like a helicopter escaping a war zone. As a Christian, I spend much of my time insisting on the importance of clear thinking about theology, and trying to provide a foundation for the same.

Does this discrepancy reflect a natural difference in subject matter, or is it a sign that my religious life doesn’t go deep enough, compared to my enjoyment of my own imagination? Is this related to the fact that I talk to my novel characters when I should be praying? Sometimes I feel like I’ll never be done hunting for idolatry in the corners of my mind, hidden under things that always seemed admirable before. It’s like my bedroom ceiling during ladybug mating season. Eventually I have to put down the Bugzooka (the Buddhist answer to flyswatters) and go to sleep, knowing that I may be sharing a pillow with a few spotty little friends.

So, some thoughts. What they add up to, I hope my loyal readers will tell me.

Theory & writing: I get so discouraged when poets launch into jeremiads against literary movements that differ from their own preferred style. The world will not end because someone is writing free verse or using less than 17 syllables in a haiku. Poets whose writing explores problems at the boundaries of language despise poets whose work could be understood if you read it aloud on the bus, and vice versa. Poetry may be at special risk for this phenomenon because it’s already more meta-textual than fiction, more concerned with its own workings; also because the crumbs of academic security and public acclaim are so much smaller that the pigeons squabble over them more fiercely. Intolerance is never pretty, but the “One True Religion” attitude seems particularly absurd in creative writing, which is by definition personal, original and idiosyncratic.

I write to find out things I don’t already know that I know. Anne Lamott’s excellent book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life compares writing a novel to taking dictation from the little boy who’s playing in the basement of your subconscious. At least for the first drafts, you just listen in while he’s doing his thing; you don’t give him an outline of the themes his make-believe is supposed to embody. Theory would get in the way. By the same token, I’ve come to believe that I shouldn’t set out to write an “innovative” or “experimental” poem. Innovation, if it happens at all, arises naturally out of the need for a new form to express a new thought, and often isn’t crowned as a breakthrough till years later.

I love Bird by Bird mainly because it validates the novel-writing process I’ve discovered for myself as the most comfortable and productive one: namely, having absolutely no idea what I’m doing, but complete confidence in it anyhow. Other books by equally good writers would give the opposite advice. I don’t care. All I need to know is that someone did it my way and didn’t die. I have no need to insist that all writers go through my particular dharma door.

Theory & faith: In my religious life, what came first was my childhood sense of wonder and my passionate longing for something that lay just beyond the horizon of human perception. In that respect, it’s not unlike the leap of faith I take as a writer. The ineffable draws me onward. Only the desire implanted unshakeably in my heart tells me that my journey will lead somewhere worthwhile. The absence meanwhile is a bittersweet pleasure, a spur to forward motion, a space in which to embrace my role as lover and seeker.

One of the beauties in which I see God’s presence is the beauty of theology. Long before I found Christianity convincing, I fell in love with its harmonious intricacy, its ability to address life’s most important questions within a system that was satisfyingly complex yet coherent. Perhaps I don’t see the same beauty in a lot of literary theory because the latter is about second-order questions. Theology is not God, and isn’t always prayer, but it goes right up to the limits of the sayable. It knows where the action is. Literary theory is words about words, theology is words about Reality.

There’s also an anti-intellectualism in today’s religious climate that’s mercifully absent from how we think and talk about literature. Few people expect to become good writers without studying the thoughts and methods of one’s predecessors, and learning how to think critically about one’s preconceived notions. If the same level of intellectual seriousness was expected in our religious life, I wouldn’t need to spend so much time defending the very idea of the Nicene Creed, not to mention its content.

Writers are expected to master their shame and fear in order to learn from tradition. Though the diversity of acceptable techniques increases at the more advanced levels of the craft, there’s wide agreement on some basic standards that quality writing should follow. There are respected authorities in the field. A beginning writer who rejects the notion of authority, who feels invalidated by the suggestion that anybody has something to teach her, would be advised to get her ego under control.

The church, by contrast, too often coddles that kind of immature personality, either from a loss of belief that there are any standards for Christian faith, or from fear that doctrinal specificity will lead to fatal dissension. The stakes are higher, it’s true. The Thirty Years’ War wasn’t waged by rival MFA programs. Still, I think the liberal churches in particular could learn something from the self-discipline and detachment that their members expect from themselves when they’re wearing their “academic” hat instead of their “Christian” hat.

I care more about unity in theology than in literary theory because for me, religion is about describing our shared reality, while writing creates a multiplicity of alternate realities that reflect different small pieces of the human condition. Also, the church as community needs something loftier than the roof-repair fundraiser to unite around, while the writer’s work is solitary.

At a time when fewer and fewer Christians can articulate why the Trinity, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection make a difference in how God’s forgiving love transforms our lives, it’s hard for me to get past the task of rebuilding an intellectual foundation for belief. I need this foundation to create the community that will safely support me on my scary walk toward God.

Imagine being a writer in a society where good books and bad ones were given equal and superficial respect, and reading too much of either type was suspect; where English teachers and literary critics were routinely mocked, in pop culture and within schools themselves, as crushing the natural beauty of creative souls with their arbitrary rules of grammar and exposition. Writers shouldn’t have to be that lonely; Christians, even less so.

Out in Scripture: Revelation 21


The Human Rights Campaign publishes an e-newsletter called “Out in Scripture” that applies the weekly lectionary reading to themes of interest to the GLBT community. This week’s commentary on Revelation 21:22-27 appealed to me:


[This passage] is a word of hope for God’s ultimate and eternal blessings to those who have been faithful in spite of being excluded, oppressed or even exiled. However, that initial exclusion can be problematic to many readers. Revelation 21:27 says that “anyone who practices abomination or falsehood” (New Revised Standard Version) or “does what is shameful or deceitful” (New International Version) will not enter the city. Most members of the LGBT community know the pain of having the words “abomination” and “shame” as labels placed on them and their lives. LGBT people should not internalize these words as a particular condemnation of them. All of humanity is subject to the shame of idolatry. It is not sexual orientation or gender identity that creates an “abomination” but our raising those things of the created order to the level of “gods” in our lives.

God calls us to be good stewards of all the gifts and blessings given to us, including human sexuality. When we make idols of money, power, institutions, relationships and, yes, even our sexuality, then we are in danger of not entering the city of light — simply because we’d rather stay in the shadows.

Jesus Blah Blah Blah


I’m a good theologian. I believe nearly everything I say, and can talk myself into the rest. And yet sometimes it all seems rather ridiculous. To talk about God? Shouldn’t I just be sitting here with my mouth hanging open in awe…”buh-buh-buh”?

At the Wheaton conference on the church fathers, keynote speaker Christopher Hall cited St. Gregory of Nazianzus‘ admonition that you shouldn’t do theology unless you have a pure heart and meditate often. Otherwise it becomes a competitive sport, or an arrogant attempt to penetrate all of God’s mysteries through human reasoning. Unless one simultaneously engages in perceptual and behavioral habit-formation within a church community, it’s best not to bloviate about the Almighty.

So I won’t.

William “Wild Bill” Taylor: “Time Served”


the face of the broken man appears to one man 
   with the loud
mouth and shaking godspeed

in the crack houses where the lost and found
are gathered in the speakeasy future

of dying dung wounds
and the alabaster holding tank screams

you have warrants out sinner
credit for time served?

the pregnant mother whose back is covered
in a black tattoo haze of the Mexican 
   subculture

no insurance suspected driver’s license
INS has a hold on you

Christ is processed through
he needs to see the nurse

his chest x-ray is negative for TB
but his wide MIA sternum shows a broken
heart

unseen tears for those soon to be booked
checking out with duplicate fingerprints

he gave me his baloney sandwich
and I knew my that my warrants had been 
   erased

this time…

Poetry Roundup: Templar Poetry, Kore Press


Review copies of several poetry books have found their way to my desk this month, and I wanted to mention a few I’ve enjoyed. I remember how greedy I was for books in high school, when the $15 cover price of a slim volume seemed impossibly extravagant. I read the same few authors repeatedly: Auden, Sexton, Eliot, Robert Hass, Mark Strand. Now I can hardly do justice to the many books that I get in the mail, and I don’t have the luxury of rereading. Something is wrong with this picture. It’s probably the same character flaw that’s responsible for my novel’s excess of subplots. Too many competing priorities.

Some books worth slowing down for: I was very pleased to discover a new publisher from England, Templar Poetry, which runs a chapbook contest with a good-sized prize and better-than-average book design. A lot of chapbooks look like they were xeroxed and stapled together at Kinko’s (the name does mean “cheap book,” after all). Templar’s have full-color covers with French flaps, and are printed on nice ivory matte paper. So far I’ve read and admired two of last year’s winners, Angela Cleland’s Waiting to Burn and Judy Brown’s Pillars of Salt.

Cleland is a masterful writer who never over-explains her meaning. Like Robert Frost, she writes poems that work on many levels. The surface narrative is quite clear, but the more you study it, the more you see that she is using that narrative as an extended metaphor for something more important. Where a lesser poet might say, “X is like Y,” Cleland spends the whole poem telling the story of “X”, but with such subtly loaded language that the reader makes the connection to “Y” on his own. Take for instance her opening poem, “A Guided Tour”:


We asked to see the mechanism.
Asked if he would show us how
it worked, this exquisite machine.

Cogs turned, clean and golden;
oiled springs, fine-coiled stamen
quivered in our minds as we imagined.

But he frowned, his brow like
the sky, and with huge, jealous,
delicate hands, he hid his design,
as if afraid we might cheapen it
with ham-fisted home-made attempts.

Behind his hands the catch snapped
shut. It echoed round his workshop,
rattled screws in the countless devices
that spun and circled us like questions.

One of us nodded. We all nodded,
agreed, of course, this was for the best,
each one with his hand in his pocket,
each one fingering his lock-pick.
I read this as a poem about original sin, but note how wisely Cleland avoids the familiar tropes (garden, apple, good and evil) in order to seduce us into identifying with the knowledge-seekers until the very last lines, when we see that the protagonists are not trustworthy after all. The tour guide’s “huge, jealous” hands and his “brow like the sky” are clues to his God-identity, while the unexpected “delicate” drops the first hint that he is not just a mean authority figure but a compassionate protector against the real damage that his audience could do.

What I appreciated most about Judy Brown’s chapbook was her eye for physical details that captured a place or a character. Because her authorial voice is not intrusive, the occasional aphorism or emotional revelation has that much more impact, as in these lines from “Life in the Green Belt”:


Far away in the real countryside
I was slimmer
and one thing led to another.

But here and now
at the edge of a deserted golf course at dusk,
we lay spikily in unattractive positions.

Your unhappiness and my unhappiness
lay between us like two of my relatives.


Most of her poems are more hopeful than that; one of my favorites is “Passenger,” about a shard of glass embedded in her head from a car accident, which fell out 17 years later:


…When I lifted my hand, it fell, a diamond

from the devil’s spittoon, onto the crested paper,
the nailtip of a stalactite breaking.

Did I feel alone without my tough glass star,
its chunk of crystal shining by the bone?

It had brought me more darkness than light
so, for all our long companionship, I let it go.

The other review copies I’ve been reading are from the Kore Press First Book Award series. Kore Press is a well-regarded publisher in Tucson that specializes in poetry by women. I am still trying to find something intelligent to say about Sandra Lim’s Loveliest Grotesque. Her language is beautiful and fascinating, but so nonlinear, so anti-narrative, that I often can’t figure out “why this word and not another?” So far, about one-quarter through the book, I’m most enamored of the title poem and “The Horse and Its Rider”. The latter’s mood reminds me of all those great old ballads about the girl who’s swept away by the sexy bandit. Here are the last lines (the line-break slashes are part of the poem):

someone who belongs to another / what difference does it make to be here alone?
/ take this street, take this hand / eros has a thousand envoys /

now / now / wait for all the arrows to hit their mark / now / now I am going to be
happy / conditional / hardly birthright / strange, worn, contented dolls /

the piano nobile / an endless pageantry / now / let you be lifted / as a frost, old age
will take us /

cleave then / which way

The title, of course, made me picture a literal horseman, but it could also be an allusion to the classical image of reason as the charioteer who masters the horses of passion. Evidently, from the emotions and disjointed style of the poem, the horse is the one in control here. “Which way?” It doesn’t matter; the speaker is along for the ride, even if it ends badly (“as a frost, old age will take us”).

Another Kore Press winner, Elline Lipkin’s The Errant Thread, is quite different. She writes clear, controlled narrative poetry with a deep awareness of connection to history — mostly European history and culture, but also the mythic figures who symbolize women’s struggle in a man’s world: Philomela, Dickens’ Miss Havisham, and in this poem (my favorite from the collection), the Maiden Without Hands from the Grimms’ fairy tale.


Conversation With My Father

After we speak I go to the hardware store
to decide on a drill, feel each black–packaged tool
bristle with its will to do harm. I interlope
among bit sets, arrays of blade and shaft,
gun–like metal shapes that brag of power.
The word–whir of our talk still buzzes its drone
a hot saw always left in the corner, ready to hack.
Important — safety instructions flutter then drop.
I follow your advice on what’s needed to needle
a skin of paint, the force it takes to punch the wall.

How much better if I could have been like Athena,
springing clear as a doe, neat as a sum, blasted out
of your head like a sweep of clean logic. If only I could
have been pure as a product of the mind’s mitosis,
justified as when ‘if’ begets ‘then,’ and ‘a’ equals ‘c,’
each chamber of reason I passed smelting an iron–ore
layer over my breast. How alike we could be when
I emerged, balanced as an axiom, threaded straight
as a theory, and born armed, with bow and arrow in hand.

Instead, in your grip, I was Thumbelina, a glass angel,
a set of porcelain arms crossed behind a back.
My hand was to stay undissolved as a spun–sugar
lump until asked for, approved of, then towed down
an aisle. But I’ve told you I can’t be good as
Grimm’s girl, when we stand near the ax I draw
my wrists back. Each pointed finger is my true weapon.
I won’t let you bronze the cut cups of my palms.

Poem: “Wishful Thinking”

   
To avoid you I go to the toilet,
push dust around the cellar, swipe the 
   slick decay
of leaves from the gutter. Nothing revolts you.
You’re so bored you’re falling out of the sky
but persistent as sleet,
not like myself whose Bible stops at January,
page-a-day saved by inertia from Easter.

Sometimes you ask me to lie down in the middle 
   of haste
like a madman’s blanket. Before how many 
   doorways
will I be thrown down?
Sometimes at dawn I climb the rope with 
   monkey hands
up past fear and gravity, beyond hoarding 
   myself.
An animal knows how much it can take.
I hoist the weights like a rower, one and 
   the other and one.
Don’t tell me yet what trial this is training for.

You’re the pillow under my head
and over it. You’re the hole in the road
that the gas truck hits, jacknifing into 
   gorgeous flame.
The woods above the highway are dark 
   with bears.
A lost child sees the glow, stumbles back to 
   her parents’ camper.

And what if there were no one pursuing? No storm
to blow my windows out? I could sleep 
   without whispers,
wake without guarding my eyes.
My friend the rational sunshine
says you’re wishful thinking, Santa-Claus daddy
come down through ashes just to indulge me.
Oh, but it’s cold on the roof of my life
under the flashbulb moon,
with no rumors of hooves sharpening above.
No one to know when I’ve been sleeping,
or with whom.

Now that you’ve gone, I won’t look at the shapes 
   of clouds,
dream-beasts that can’t resist your tearing apart.
No face remains; love’s rubbings even unpaint 
   the doll’s cheeks.
Spare me this corner, I said, and you left
the whole field bare
under an endless platter of good weather.
Wishful thinking: that moment darkened by the 
   brush of evening
when the child locked in the toystore wants 
   to be found.


   published in Literature & Belief, Vol. 26.1 (2007)

Helen Bar-Lev: Poems from “Cyclamens and Swords”


Cyclamens and Swords, a new book from Israeli poets Helen Bar-Lev and Johnmichael Simon, has just been published by Ibbetson Street Press. This beautifully designed book is illustrated with Helen’s watercolors and sketches of Israeli landscapes, which someday I will acquire the technical ability to reproduce on this website. Meanwhile, she’s kindly allowed me to reprint two poems below:

The Map on the Back of the Shower Curtain

The world appears pale and backwards
and indeed a bit obsolete,
on the opposite side
of the shower curtain

I search for you my country,
little mapspeck
amongst plastic folds
perhaps three other nations
have the distinction
of being smaller than you,
but that is all

I compare your pinkness
with the enormous expanses
of greens and browns,
yellows and oranges

And am amazed at the fuss
the world makes over you
as though Madam Justice
put you on one scale
and the rest of the world on the other,
to balance things out

Everyone wants you,
little lovely country,
and I who love you
with the passion of unreason,
with the naturalness of one who lives in and for you,
am able to understand this

But they,
they cannot know


   ********

A Hot Cup of Corn Soup

She was skinny as a skeleton
her age disappeared into her thinness,
did not disclose itself;
neither young nor old,
she was a woman eternal

We met each morning,
she on her way into the building
inside my painting,
a nod and a pleasant shalom
and our days continued separate

It was seven degrees below zero
in Jerusalem and there I was as usual,
weaving branches into my watercolour,
with fingers which would not stop freezing,
too imbued with the need to create
than to heed the wisdom of remaining
at home in front of the heater –
even water tanks cracked on roofs
cascaded their contents
over buildings, onto streets,
then froze there, treacherous

At ten a.m. that day she brought me a cup
of hot corn soup – a gesture unexpected,
unprecedented, through those many winters
I had sat on the ground, painting Jerusalem
we chatted, I asked her age,
her history of six and one half decades
spilled out onto my page into my heart
unwilling to believe, down from the roof
of the twenty-storey building where her
son, ten, ben z’kunim* and friends had been playing
when he fell, fell, into her grief
into her thinness, into this place
where she was working when her older sons
came to tell her, down down onto the couch
of the analyst who said
life doesn’t continue forever,
one day you’ll be with him again

One session, no more, then she went on
into her thinness, waiting for the reunion with her son,
until then, knowing he was watching,
approving, she continued doing kindnesses,
such as bringing a cup of hot corn soup
to a freezing artist on a February morning
in Jerusalem


* ben z’kunim = a child born to parents late in life 

   ********

Cyclamens and Swords can be ordered through Lulu.com or by emailing hb*****@***********et.il or j_*****@***********et.il . Prices are 65 NIS (including postage to Israel), US$18 (including postage to US or Canada), 14 euro (including postage to Europe or Australia), or 10 pounds sterling (including postage to the UK). Payment accepted by cash, check or PayPal.

Charity, Unconditional But Not Unwise


In this post on responding to panhandlers, Internet Monk adds his always-interesting voice to a debate that has preoccupied my Bible study group for some time. Christ calls us to give generously and nonjudgmentally; does that preclude any inquiry into whether the recipient is truly needy, or likely to misuse what we offer? In my opinion, ensuring that our intended “help” is actually skillful and effective should take priority over feeling good about the purity of our generosity. The I-Monk finds scriptural support for this position:


Matthew 5:38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41 And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42 Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

The Biblical teaching on compassion for the poor, justice and generosity are well-established and crucial for a life of following Jesus.

The establishment of deacons and of guidelines for who is a “widow” indicates that the early church was aware of the issues that arise when Christians must make judgments regarding benevolence. I Timothy 5:3 and 5:16 indicate some are “truly” widows and others are not.

Paul condemns those who refuse to work, yet still seek to eat. The existence of such verses as 2 Thessalonians 3:10 and 3:12 make it clear that the church knew what a freeloader was. Notice Paul’s defense of himself in 2 Thessalonians 3:8 nor did we eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. Consider the ethical background of that statement: It is wrong to receive support as charity when support from work is possible….

Money given to aggressive panhandlers is money that can’t be given to the truly poor. Go to any ministry that deals with people who are truly poor. They will tell you that almost none of those poor people would be on the streets begging in America today because of the dangers, the criminal element and so forth. Addiction, mental illness, con artists and criminal intent are on most of America’s streets. The truly poor will be known to local shelters, ministries, schools and social workers. There are many opportunities to give to families and children who truly need the money and would never be begging on the streets with a story such as we commonly hear from panhandlers.

Every situation of compassion also has elements of wisdom. My son recently asked me for financial assistance to attend a writer’s workshop. I am not going to automatically give him the money in the name of Christian compassion. I am going to be a good steward and a good manager of what God has given me, and ask questions before giving. This is true at every level of giving. I receive hundreds of appeals every year. Dozens of students and missionaries ask for my support. (Many of them make far more than I do!) I am very, very selective about who I give to, and I ask many questions before giving. I believe this is God-honoring, as much as the generosity itself.

Jesus’ words are meant to underline the compassion and freedom of the Christian. Our generosity is an important expression of our discipleship. At times, we need to give with much less than perfect knowledge, and at times we need to obey the Spirit as he gives opportunity. But we are also to know the “streets and highways” where we are, and we are not to volunteer to be robbed as a witness. Aggressive panhandlers like Sundays, and they like Christians. We need to give them a dollar, a coupon and a brochure for the local “Help” office. We need to give to the truly needy a gift that will make a difference in their lives.

The parallelism of verse 42 is important as “beg” and “borrow” relate to one another. The one who borrows is making a promise to use wisely or even to repay. It is the neighbor in need, not the panhandler, that Jesus has in mind, I believe. The poor are our neighbors, but the person actively seeking to abuse another’s charity elicits a different response.

The article includes several useful suggestions on nonmonetary ways to help panhandlers and distinguish between scam artists and the needy. Read the whole thing here.

Notwithstanding all that, I will probably continue to give to some of the street people in my small town, because I feel disrespectful walking past them without acknowledgment. In New York City, where ignoring each other is the height of etiquette (and the beggars are much scarier), maybe I won’t. Another rule of thumb: if I’m spending more time agonizing over a dollar to a panhandler than over my own purchases of mindless crap, it’s time for a soul check.

Chabad Meditations: God in Exile


Chabad.org today sent me this “Daily Dose” from the writings of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem M. Schneersohn, as translated by Tzvi Freeman:


They have banished G-d into exile.

They have decreed He is too holy, too transcendent to belong in our world. They have determined He does not belong within the ordinary, in the daily run of things.

And so they have driven Him out of His garden, to the realm of prayer and meditation, to the sanctuaries and the secluded places of hermits. They have sentenced the Creator to exile and His creation they have locked in a dark, cold prison.

And He pleads, “Let me come back to my garden, to the place in which I found delight when it all began.”