Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Prison Poetry by Conway: “Possessed”, “Rusted Actor”


Last month I introduced the readers of this site to “Conway,” a prisoner at a supermax facility in central California who’s serving 25-to-life under the state’s three-strikes law for receiving stolen goods. Conway (a pseudonym) is a skilled writer and artist, and an avid reader, despite the difficulty of finding either writing paper or decent books in jail. One would hope that the authorities would be more supportive of an inmate trying to better himself, but unfortunately he often finds them putting up obstacles to his education instead.  Some excerpts from his letters:

Oct. 15, 2006


I just received your letter and the poems. They were all very good. I so much appreciate you sharing them with me. They have nothing at all for reading around here 🙁   so pretty much gotta hear everyone’s war dogs when we go outside to exercise in the cages (kennels).

They don’t allow us to have contact with each other (physical) so we get chained up and escorted to these 10′ x 18′ cages all lined up. So, whomever you’re next to is who you talk with – wow! there are some very strange cats around here….

Possessed

   Barbed wire invades
the edge of this nakedness,
inside my concrete jungle.
   Towers loom the perimeter
flexed giant fists waiting,
to crush the lost wretch.
   Chain link webs surround
hypnotic formless foggy
death traps.
   Strange fears chill
of peering silhouettes
outside-in from hollow giants.
   As vents whistle and moan
terrorizing the hardest of soul
till possession is complete…

Nov. 8, 2006


I started a book (reading) “Anna Karenina” – never read any tolstoy before – he seems to be extremely longwinded; I traded a drawing for the book so got to read it all now 🙂

Haven’t wrote in my story for two weeks now, ran out of lined paper so will have to wait for my sister in Washington to send me some….

Anna Karenina – I’m reading it in the mornings 5:30 a.m. till 7:30 a.m. when the lights come on and everyone is still quiet – they slide our trays through the slot at 7:30 or so and it’s nonstop interference till the lights go out around 10 p.m. They extended my time in the hole another 6 months – some new regulation that if you’ve been sent to the hole 3 times within your sentence then you are assessed an indeterminate SHU (segregated housing unit) so I must remain disciplinary free for six months before I get back out to the main line – whatever! only thing I miss is radio and contact visits….

Rusted Actor

Hulk of skeleton rusting
   vines-n-bramble entertwined
through around over and under
   your aged girth.

Such a monster were you
   with the old man riding
completing your power trip
   the earth was no match.

Now the old man
   has passed, and ages gone
since you’ve been gassed
   with care and love.

Contempt though you had
   for all in your way, shredding
a path with steel spikes
   low gutteral growls, belching
your black breath with fury
   whenever challenged.

O’ the wizards of alchemy
   created such a monster
when they snatched your specter
   from out ore smelting
that demonic frame of bolted gears.

But you’re not so tough
   now that my father shows you
no more concern, even flowers
   mock with indignance unmoved.

I could wake you!
   Maybe someday I will conspire
with your mechanical madness
   just to show those wild interlopers
wrapping your rusted torso.

But for now you shall sleep
   while those bushes and vines creep
through your iron bones
   building your disdain.

I know my father
   would feel your pain but he’s gone
he’s passed you onto me
   so you see only I remember
your destructive glory.

I put you in this story
   old beast I care for you
in the least
   but dare not wake you up
for now.

You remind me too much
   of the love I lost
when my father was tossed
   off your back, you
then crushed him with your track.

Wretched machine!
   you were that dread actor
horrid old tractor, so
   may you rust in Hell…

Shower of Stoles Exhibit Affirms GLBT Christians


Now through March 14, Smith College in Northampton, Mass. is hosting the Shower of Stoles Project, an exhibit of liturgical stoles and other sacred items from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender church leaders from 26 denominations in six countries. These beautiful one-of-a-kind vestments are accompanied by personal stories of the wearers’ quest to share their spiritual gifts with a congregation that also accepts their sexual orientation. There are also “signature stoles” covered with messages of support from straight allies. 

The exhibit will resonate with anyone who has ever loved a church community yet felt pressure to hide one’s difference from them, whether that difference is ethnic, sexual, theological, class-based, or a matter of personality. This Robert Frost poem, which was displayed with the exhibit at Smith, spoke to my own continuing sadness about not finding a church that loves gay people and preaches the gospel:


Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it–it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less–
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

(I find it amusing in a sick way that the banner ads accompanying this poem online are for “Funeral Ringtones” and “The Soulmate Calculator”.)

Everything That Glitters


When criticizing certain sins and excesses (particularly the ones we’re not tempted to commit ourselves), we frequently fail to ask the question, “What is the good thing that this person is seeking in the wrong way?” As a result, the listeners feel condemned, and we feel frustrated at their refusal to want what’s best for them. This article on the Golden Calf from the Chabad-Lubavitch website shows a more compassionate and effective way to frame the question:



How did G-d address the gold-sickness of His newly chosen people? He didn’t abolish gold. He didn’t even take away theirs. He told them to use their gold to build Him a Sanctuary.


Compulsive overeating is a horrible disease: it’s unhealthy, it can even kill you. But the urge to eat is not only healthy — it’s vital to life itself.


The same is true of every negative phenomenon. There is nothing intrinsically bad in G-d’s world: every evil is a perverted good, every psychosis a healthy instinct gone awry.


So before we get all riled up over that woman with the two secretaries, let us try to understand the tendency of humans to splurge, flaunt and luxuriate in their wealth. We understand why we need food; we understand why we need shelter; but why do we crave gold?


In essence, the craving for gold is a yearning for transcendence. It is man saying: I am not content to merely exist and subsist; I want to exalt in life, I want to touch its magnificence and sublimity….

The answer, however, is not to squelch these strivings, but to purge them of their negative expressions. Use your yearning for gold to make a home for G-d.

On a more contemporary note, I love the country song “Everything That Glitters” by Dan Seals, a man’s bittersweet ode to the woman who has left him to raise their daughter while she rides the rodeo. He feels she’s given up something more valuable for something of lesser worth, and yet he also sees the beauty and daring with which she pursues her dream. It’s a song about how to understand and forgive sins without excusing them, and to hope that someday the other will come to love what you love. (The lyrics convey some of this, but for the full effect, you need to hear the tender way he sings it.)

Saving Jesus (Episode 6): 99.44% Pure


After an Ash Wednesday hiatus, the Saving Jesus class resumed at my former church this week, with one of the participants as leader because the minister was out of town. In his absence, amazingly, several people revealed a deep understanding of and attachment to the Incarnation and salvation by grace. It made me hopeful that this church could once again be on fire for Christ if it had the right leadership. “Shall these bones live?”

The video presentation about Jesus’ teachings focused on several instances where he reversed his culture’s usual understanding of purity: the famous parable of the Good Samaritan, and two brief sayings from Matthew 13:31-33:


He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.”

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”
According to the video, the mustard plant was a weed that could take over the garden. Yeast was considered impure or unclean in Jewish culture. How is God like the mustard plant? Maybe you don’t want Him in your life, because His presence can get out of control. Maybe He’s hiding in something or someone you think of as beneath you. When your openness to discovering God outweighs your attachment to fixed ideas about pure/impure, high/low, you are getting a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.

With the leaven, Jesus gives us a powerful metaphor for the Incarnation. God is not tainted by commingling with impurity. In fact, He becomes the impure substance (takes on human flesh) and dies, is consumed, is merged into a new thing, the bread of life.

In the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), the priest and the Levite don’t pass by the nearly-dead man because they’re hypocrites. They are simply observing the purity laws that would make them unfit to perform their duties if they touched a corpse. Because the Samaritan belongs to a despised group of apostate Jews who accepted the Torah but not the rest of the Old Testament or the rabbinic laws, this ironically gives him the opportunity to help where others failed.

One of the class participants pointed out that Jesus actually never says that the Law, or the concept of purity (ritual or ethical), is BAD. This is in contrast to the simplistic antinomianism of the theologians on the video, who mainly see Jesus as a revolutionary leader in a world comprised of guilty oppressors and innocent victims. No less than the Levites’ purity codes, this utopian liberalism helps us avoid facing the universality of sin. As the old joke says, there are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who think there are two kinds of people in this world and the ones who don’t.

As the discussion progressed, the class concluded that Jesus spoke in parables and aphorisms because he wanted to frustrate our habits of dualistic thinking. Wisdom involves balancing competing principles in a way that takes account of the individual situation, whereas we love to pick our favorite rule and apply it mechanically to every case. Wisdom begins with actually seeing the other person, instead of first seeing our own ideas about him. Of course, when we rely on our own observations, we must face our responsibility for our mistaken judgments (no more hiding behind the rules), which makes us aware of our need for grace.

That’s the gospel, boys and girls! Enjoy it.

Richard Rohr: Reflections on Marriage and Celibacy

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico, wrote an article for Sojourners magazine back in May 1979 (not available online, alas) called “Reflections on Marriage and Celibacy” which I had to quote here for several reasons. First, because I’ve been frustrated by how some Christian conservatives idealize the nuclear family, particularly the woman’s self-sacrificing role therein, as if codependence were not a form of idolatry just as dangerous as cold-hearted careerism. Second, because the last line quoted here (boldfacing is mine) beautifully expresses how my relationship with God is so precariously balanced between adoration and terror.


For Jesus, the kingdom is the possibility of universal compassion: it is community and not just kindly coupling. Marriage is a school, a sacrament, and a promise of the coming kingdom, but not itself the final stage. Jesus dethrones married love in order to enthrone it in proper perspective. The specific love points to the universal, but only the “love that moves the sun, the moon, and the other stars” can finally protect and make possible the specific love of a man and a woman.

Jesus seems to be concerned about widening the family circle to include all the life that God is offering. He knows how paralyzing and even deadening the familial relationships can be when they have cut their lifelines from the larger truth and more universal love. Family can be both life and death. Church also can be both life and death. Church and blood family both have the greatest power to wound and the greatest power to heal.

The gospel believes in family, but it is never going to limit itself to the blood relationships and call that alone family: “Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me.” Good American Christian religion would never dare to say those words on its own. When we do, we recite them falteringly, because we cannot really understand the radical nature of Jesus’ vision….

If the community model of church has seldom taken hold, it can probably be attributed to many causes: individualism, authoritarianism, clericalism, fear, plus an overly intellectualized communication of the gospel. But the cause that I would like to deal with here is a certain kind of apathy (a pathos: no feeling), a fear of passion, which has consistently and ironically kept our incarnational faith from dealing with relationships, sexuality, emotions, bodiliness, and the power of love in general.

I am hard put to find a single century in our 2,000-year history since the Word became flesh in which there has been consistent and positive church teaching on the sexuality of this enfleshed creation. We have run from it, denied it, camouflaged it, sublimated it, died to it, sacramentalized it (thank God!) — but we have only in rare and mature instances really faced it, integrated it, and allowed it to raise us to God. We are afraid of the Word become flesh, we are afraid of heaven much more than we are afraid of hell. We live in an endless fear of the passion of God, who feels fiercely.

Blogging the Bible at Slate


Slate columnist David Plotz has been taking a lively tour through the Old Testament at Blogging the Bible, a series that combines chapter-by-chapter plot summaries with humor and contemporary cultural references. The column’s subtitle, “What happens when an ignoramus reads the good book?”, captures the essence of the project: reading the stories with fresh eyes, unencumbered by a religious (or anti-religious) agenda or the stiff piety that shies away from the Bible’s earthiness and flat-out weirdness. As Plotz said in an interview with Christianity Today:



The danger is that if you sound too casual, then people might think you’re not taking the Bible seriously. But it would be a lie for me to write in portentous language. If I were using high liturgical language or high rabbinical language, that wouldn’t be me.


Also, the Bible is often taught like that—in a formal way with moral lessons attached—but you miss the fact that this is an incredibly bawdy, hilarious, fun—hellacious, even—text. There’s a lot of sarcasm and wordplay and glee and craziness. Sometimes, I think to myself, I can never be as crude as the stuff in Judges. Or, I can never be as sarcastic as Elijah.


So, no, I don’t think I’m being too flip. The Bible is flip all the time….


There’s a notion that the Bible is pure and holy and full of family values. Thous, thees, shalls, shants—that’s all there. But what’s also there is human behavior at its most base level. Behaviors that are weird and gleeful and strange.


The writing is like that, too. There’s no stiffness to it. It’s loose and playful. So I feel like the blog should be like that, too. Obviously, I’m making allowances for my own writing, but I think there’s license to do that. You misunderstand the book if you think the only way to write about it is in an awed, distant, timid way. It’s a book that demands appreciation for all its liveliness.


US Challenged on Psychological Torture of Prisoners

One of the great non-stories of our post-9/11 world has been the brutal, depraved way that the US government treats so-called “enemy combatants” seized in the war on terror. We have incarcerated hundreds of people without trial, often based on secret evidence, and denied them access to counsel. These are not individuals who have been tried and convicted of terrorist acts. The American public and media have no way of knowing who these people are and whether they have committed any crime. The Bush administration simply says “trust us”.

Amazingly, the suspension of due process and human rights standards in America’s military prisons (as in America’s prisons generally) is no secret. It’s reported in the media, but somehow this shredding of the Constitution has never generated the same level of outraged buzz as, for example, a picture of two men kissing. 

In an article by political commentator Naomi Klein, Friday’s Guardian newspaper (UK) reports that our government’s widespread practice of deliberately driving prisoners insane is finally being challenged in court:

Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to “break” prisoners are finally being put on trial. This was not supposed to happen. The Bush administration’s plan was to put JosĂ© Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla’s lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government.

Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an “enemy combatant” and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a “truth serum”, a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.

According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are “part of a continuing interrogation program” and sees his captors as protectors. In order to prove that “the extended torture visited upon Mr Padilla has left him damaged”, his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that “Padilla is competent” and that his treatment is irrelevant….

Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla. According to James Yee, a former army Muslim chaplain at GuantĂĄnamo, there is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. “They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over.” All the inmates of Delta Block were on 24-hour suicide watch.

Human Rights Watch has exposed a US-run detention facility near Kabul known as the “prison of darkness” – tiny pitch-black cells, strange blaring sounds. “Plenty lost their minds,” one former inmate recalled. “I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors.”

These standard mind-breaking techniques have never faced scrutiny in an American court because the prisoners in the jails are foreigners and have been stripped of the right of habeas corpus – a denial that, scandalously, was just upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington DC. There is only one reason Padilla’s case is different – he is a US citizen. The administration did not originally intend to bring Padilla to trial, but when his status as an enemy combatant faced a supreme court challenge, the administration abruptly changed course, charging Padilla and transferring him to civilian custody. That makes Padilla’s case unique – he is the only victim of the post-9/11 legal netherworld to face an ordinary US trial.

Read the whole article here. (The reader comments are also worthwhile.) Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: Rise of Disaster Capitalism will be published in September.

Meanwhile, veteran civil-rights crusader Nat Hentoff keeps the spotlight on our government’s shameful treatment of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was kidnapped by the CIA and secretly deported to Syria, where he was tortured for 10 months in an underground cell before Syrian officials admitted that he had no connection to Al Qaeda. Heads have rolled in the Canadian government, which provided the shaky evidence to the CIA, but US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales continues to deny responsibility for the incident. Read the Village Voice story here. (Hat tip to Catholic bloggers Eve Tushnet and Mark Shea, who have done a heroic job challenging the pro-torture line taken by some Christian conservatives.)

Write to your representatives. Donate to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Do something!

Poem: “Poem for Simone Weil”


To think of faith as mine
is to bar the door.
My precious, my purity,
truth’s little coin I can bestow
or hoard, or nail up to gleam
like the prize on Ahab’s mast.
Is it humility that dumbs
men who should beg for this?
They affront me who have not seen death
shining in the plattered fish’s eye
and on the sleek braided bread,
death diving through the blue air
on the metal wings they trust.
A spoonful of ashes
where the tower stood.
Or still stands. Time collapses
in my eyes like God’s.

This thing I believe
happened once to a man
who possessed nothing but his death—
father-forsaken, letting the light
of the nations go out
like a match dropped from burnt fingers.
What obedience to refuse
to set an example
of faith’s triumph, which is but a subtler
triumph of the will.

I was on that hill, on the spit of land
where the walls fell into flame
and all around me wept, amazed and bloody
as babies after a hard birth
into all that cold space called the world,
their first permanence shaken.
Now you see what I see,
I thought
with relief, God help me.


      published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Spring/Summer 2003

Diana Butler Bass Gives Up Lent for Lent


This article on Beliefnet by Diana Butler Bass (author of Christianity for the Rest of Us) helped me understand why I give up such strange things for Lent. Things like my superego, or going to church, or worrying about my soul. It does feel odd to relish this season as a 40-day holiday from guilt while my friends are skipping meals (something I despair of ever doing). Now I have some company. Says Diana:


A few years ago, I stopped struggling with my bad attitude toward Lent. I gave up Lent for Lent. I skipped Ash Wednesday, made no promises to God, and instituted no rigorous prayer schedule. I wanted to enjoy one March with no onerous spiritual obligations.

An odd thing happened, however, during my Lenten non-observance. I began to understand and experience Lent in new and deeper ways. When freed from expectations and requirements, sermons and scriptures spoke to my soul. By the end of Lent, I found myself willingly attending extra services, including two Good Friday liturgies. On Easter Sunday, the resurrection broke over me with unexpected power – with love joyfully overcoming the intense introspection that built during my non-Lenten weeks….

When I gave up Lent for Lent, it become clear that I needed to give up the idea that certain religious disciplines would bring me closer to God. This belief had plagued me since I was an evangelical teenager struggling with my congregation’s expectation for a “daily quiet time.” Never able to maintain this program of spiritual rigor, I felt like a Christian failure. When I finally admitted that I could not do it, I experienced a new freedom in prayer. Giving up led me to a richer and deeper connection of God in prayer, and led me to practice prayer in ways that resonate with who God has made me to be – unique, meaningful, and transformative. Not a program, but a way of being.

Lent tempts Christians to try to fulfill other people’s expectations of what spirituality should look like, usually related to some sort of religious achievement or self-mortification. But Lent is neither success nor punishment. Ultimately, Lent urges us to let go of self-deception and pleasing others. These 40 days ask only one thing of us: to find our truest selves on a journey toward God.

Giving up Lent for Lent meant giving up guilt. Although I have been back to church for Ash Wednesday many times since I gave up Lent for Lent, that year freed me from spiritual tyranny and helped me understand Easter anew. The journey to Easter is not a mournful denial of our humanity. Rather, Lent embraces our humanity – our deepest fears, our doubts, our mistakes and sins, our grief, and our pain. Lent is also about joy, self-discovery, connecting with others, and doing justice. Lent is not morbid church services. It is about being fully human and knowing God’s presence in the crosshairs of blessing and bane. And it is about waiting, waiting in those crosshairs, for resurrection.

C.S. Lewis on Love versus Unselfishness (from “The Weight of Glory”)


If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.


Read the whole essay here (PDF file).