March Links Roundup: Baby Got Humpback

In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of…blowholes. “Humpback sex photographed for first time–and both whales were male,” The Guardian newspaper reported in February.

Despite decades of research on humpback whales, sightings of the male’s penis have been rare. Copulation by the species had not been documented by people – until now, when two photographers captured images of a sexual encounter between two whales off the coast of Hawaii.

The sighting, confirmed by scientists in a newly published study, occurred in January 2022 in waters west of the island of Maui, where two whales approached and circled a boat before engaging in sexual activity about three to five meters below the vessel.

Both of the whales were male, which makes the photos, taken by Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano, the first evidence of homosexual behavior in humpback whales as well as the first sighting of sex in the species.

In other queer animal news, a green honeycreeper was sighted in Colombia with a rare mutation called bilateral gynandromorphism. In plain English, that means that one half of the bird’s plumage is electric blue like a male, the other half emerald green like a female. The New York Times appreciates how fashion-forward our community is: “This Bird Is Half Male, Half Female, and Completely Stunning”. See pictures at the link.

It is not entirely clear how the condition comes about, but one leading theory is that it results from an error during the production of egg cells in female birds. Female birds have two different sex chromosomes, designated W and Z, while males have two Z chromosomes. An error during egg cell production could result in two fused or incompletely separated cells, one with a W chromosome and one with a Z chromosome.

If those fused cells are fertilized by two different sperm, each of which carries a Z chromosome, the result might be a bird with the WZ chromosomes of a female in some cells and the ZZ chromosomes of a male in others. “And so you get a bird that’s half and half,” Dr. Spencer said.

These stories remind me of a recent episode of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, where hosts Bradley Onishi and Dan Miller offered a decisive takedown of conservative Catholic “natural law” theory–the theology that (allegedly) deduces the purpose of human sexuality from observations of biology. Surprise surprise, that purpose is heterosexual procreation, only. But why is it, the podcasters asked, that such Christians’ ideas of biology are stuck in the era of Aristotle, or at the latest, Thomas Aquinas? No amount of evidence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, let alone modern human psychology, can make a dent in their cis-hetero-patriarchal idea of “Nature”.

Let’s just keep on with the gay links a little longer. I resonated with Jarek Steele’s personal essay “The Club” at Electric Literature, subtitled “In a bathhouse meant for cis gay men, trans is transgressive”. Steele and his trans male friend decide to integrate their local bathhouse in St. Louis, a space that traditionally “wasn’t meant for my eyes, the eyes of a man who was assigned female at birth.” For the author, it wasn’t about looking for a hookup, so much as feeling present in his body, being accepted as a gay man in a place that’s been central to their culture. “What I wanted was uncomplicated. I didn’t need acrobatic sex or a million orgasms. I just wanted to be in the room.” He describes a flirtation there that didn’t end in sex but was healing nonetheless.

Before I stopped using women’s restrooms, I was used to people talking and holding the door for each other. It took practice to master the art of men’s rooms. Walk in. Stall. Hurry. Sink. Hurry. Walk out. No looking or talking, especially at Lowe’s or even the YMCA. Maybe I was just like that because I was afraid to stop moving. Maybe they were too busy trying not to be seen to notice me anyway.

But here was a place built for anonymous sex, where looking and touching was the point. It was a temporary ceasefire with rules for those desperate to be touched without consequence, and even though Steven and I hadn’t come here to hook up, I felt a crushing tenderness toward these awkward, average, strikingly beautiful middle-aged men who came to an anonymous place to stop diverting attention, to stop feeling poisonous. Just like me.

…As I followed Steven silently back through the shadowy maze toward the locker room, a stranger emerged from around a corner. We passed each other there in the dark hallway in that bathhouse in a manufacturing district in St. Louis, late morning on a Tuesday in February. This anonymous man’s friend, if he was a friend, had turned away. I slowed to let him pass. He reached up and stroked the hair on my chest, a passing glance before we walked away from each other. I wanted to take his hand. I wanted to touch his face. I wanted to be gentle. I wanted not to be gentle. Every second of my life lived in that tender stroke of my chest in the dim light of the most nakedly male place in the world, where I had trespassed and had been wanted.

Meanwhile, Anastassia Gliadkovskaya, at the website Fierce Healthcare, reports on a potentially deadly form of exclusion: “Denied care: Trans men struggle for inclusive gynecologic healthcare”. She interviewed a patient who was turned away from several OB/GYN offices in New York City because he identified as male, which meant that his ovarian cancer was not diagnosed until he had gender-affirming surgery. Although such discrimination is technically prohibited, many medical programs still give insufficient training in gender-inclusive care, causing doctors to feel ill-equipped for such cases.

Noah Communoah’s blog Communotes, which I discovered via Daniel Lavery’s Substack, posted an article about his deconversion from Christianity that struck a chord with me. “On the Christian Question” talks about Noah’s journey into, and out of, an attraction to a hardcore faith that promised justice for his trauma.

My best friend at Simon’s Rock was Wren (pseudonymized as usual), a transmasc MCR fan and fellow fledgling anarchist. We were both survivors, and vocally so: we were not doing well. Wren was Catholic, raised in a secular family but committed to a feminist veneration of Mary— and to the transcendence of soul over body. (I’ve since learned that the latter is a gnostic heresy). At the time, neither of our bodies were a particularly hospitable place to be. We were both coping with dysphoria and rape trauma, and had turned towards Tumblr communities that were proudly sex-negative. So I experimented with the religion of Simone Weil and Catherine of Siena, of which Wren had long been a disciple. And I tried out Christianity too…

…I had serious misgivings about the basic Lutheran doctrine of solo fide, justification by faith alone. I thought that non-Christians should get to go to heaven, of course. But more than that, I thought that evil Christians should be damned to hell.

My dad is a miserable, controlling man, prone to outbursts of rage and deeply averse to any kind of therapy. He has two coping skills— exercise and prayer—and relates to both of them in excess. One of my last memories of him, right after he beat up my sister, involves him praying for forgiveness and then going for a run. He didn’t bother apologizing to us.

I found it hard to believe in a god that could forgive him.  I fantasized about hellfire for him and the other men who’d hurt me, recited Psalms for the destruction of my enemies. At the same time, on this mortal coil, I had recently embraced abolitionist politics. It made intuitive sense to me; the court system facilitated my dad’s abuse, and the cops abused my girlfriend for trying to escape her own violent home. But just because I knew policing hurt survivors doesn’t mean I was ready to give up on punishment. Hell was an eternal prison sentence, but one administered by a perfectly fair and wise judge. I secretly believed in a kind of purgatory, where thoroughly rehabilitated offenders could someday access heaven. But I knew my dad never would…

…My theology changed when my politics did, which changed with my relationship to trauma. I saw the survivor advocates I trusted, who encouraged me to see my abusers as monstrous, get outed as interpersonally violent themselves. I saw autistic and mad trans women accused of spurious abuses, then “held accountable” by removing every resource they had to survive. I read Against Innocence by Jackie Wang; I did EMDR. I just didn’t want to torture my abusers anymore.

So Christianity became something new. By this point, I had lived on my own for about four years, then returned to my mom’s house for disability care. I joined a local ELCA congregation that advertised as progressive and affirming. I made friends with the pastor, an incredibly sweet woman who I still think of fondly. And I started reading about queer theology: Jesus as dissolving the human/deity binary, the God character as a BDSM top, Paul as a sex-repulsed asexual. I loved the possibilities of textual interpretation, but I was still terrified of getting it wrong. After all, the Bible had to mean something specific, right? Otherwise what’s the point?

I quit Christianity without much fanfare. I just started HRT, moved to New York, and for the first time really felt comfortable in my skin. It just didn’t make much sense to go to church anymore. There was nothing I needed there.

I look forward to a future post where Noah explains his conversion to Judaism!

I admit it, I’m one of those bad people who can never remember the difference between Naomi Wolf (second-wave feminist author of The Beauty Myth turned alt-right conspiracy theorist) and Naomi Klein, the Canadian filmmaker and progressive political analyst who had to write a whole-ass book about repeatedly being mistaken for Naomi Wolf! In response to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, Klein has generously shared two chapters from Doppelganger on her website about “trauma-forged identity politics”. These chapters discuss “how the Nazis were influenced by European colonial and racial segregation in the Americas—and how a failure to reckon with those connections shaped and misshaped Israeli history, and contributed to exiling Palestinians into an unbearable purgatory.” It seems to be human nature to mirror our enemies instead of reflecting on ourselves.

February Links Roundup: Do You Know You’re a Rat?

The groundhog may have seen his shadow today, but did he recognize it as himself?

You may have noticed the cute “rat selfies” making the rounds on social media last month. CBC Radio has the backstory about Canadian artist Augustin Lignier, who built a photo booth for his rats Arthur and Augustin to make a point about the addictiveness of social media. The critters were rewarded with food for pressing the camera lever, but soon took pleasure in the action for its own sake.

Arthur and Augustin produced dozens upon dozens of selfies, trying out different angles like real social media pros. But Lignier says they didn’t seem to get any fulfilment from the images themselves.

“I try to show them the images on the screen, so directly after they took the picture, they can see their own selfie,” he said. “But they don’t recognize themselves, you know.”

Philosophers might well debate whether this is a cognitive limitation or a form of enlightenment. The joy is wholly in the act of creation, not the judging and self-promoting ego. For us human artists, that kind of present-moment focus would be a relief, at least some of the time!

I upgraded to the paid subscription to the Straight White American Jesus podcast because I’m obsessed with their lively combo of theological and political analysis of the Christian Right. But their cult-busting mission also extends to the left-wing wellness culture whose paranoid views end up converging with QAnon on topics like vaccines and gender-affirming care. I recommend their July 2023 crossover episode with Conspirituality podcast hosts Julian Walker and Matthew Remski.

I thought of that episode when reading this Alexandra Middleton essay in Electric Literature on Jacqueline Alnes’ memoir The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour. “When so much seems unknowable about the very body you live in, it feels nice to stand on a firm platform made from rights rather than wrongs, even if the very platform itself is a false reality,” Alnes writes about how she fell for extreme diet fads after being struck with a mysterious neurological illness. “Thinking about how many people are failed on a regular basis by U.S. health care systems, it feels totally valid that someone would click on a link to fast for 30 days to cure their diabetes, which I react viscerally to on surface level. But on a human desperation, I want to feel well and these systems are failing me, charging me thousands of dollars a month for very little care, level? 100% get it.”

Ky Schevers writes about a similar example of the horseshoe effect–radical feminists adopting reactionary views on gender–at her trans rights blog Health Liberation Now! Schevers has had an unusual life path, first identifying as a trans man, then becoming a detransition activist, and finally breaking with that community and denouncing their cult-like practices. She now identifies as transmasculine and genderqueer, with she/her pronouns, according to her Wikipedia page. Her longform article “‘A spiritual war in a way’: How Detrans Radical Feminists Influenced WPATH” goes into great detail about how her former community helped introduce stricter gatekeeping into transgender healthcare. Some money quotes if you don’t want to read the whole thing:

Though many [detrans radical feminists] are disillusioned and distrustful towards therapists and other medical professionals and may view the medical system as a whole as part of the larger patriarchy, they’re still very willing to influence it in whatever way they can, especially if they think it will lead to less people transitioning. Many did had negative experiences with medical providers during their transitions but instead of working to improve care they believe that medical transition or even the whole medical system is irredeemable and needs to be shut down and replaced with some kind of alternative healthcare. They’re similar to other people who had negative experiences with healthcare who end up in alt-health cults, who also often end up believing in conspiracy theories and/or reactionary ideologies…

…Gatekeeping only makes sense if you think you can reliably develop a process that will correctly sort out “real” trans people from people confused about their gender. But what if trans people, even those with intense dysphoria, can be psychologically manipulated just as much as any other group of people? Why would trans people be immune to conversion practices or cults?

Following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, there’s been a disturbing amount of groupthink among Jews and those who claim to be our allies. The state of Israel is assumed to represent the values and interests of the Jewish people, and criticism of the former is deemed prejudice toward the latter. I welcomed this contrary perspective from Seth Sanders at Religion Dispatches: “Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism Is More Kosher Than You Think”.

For 2000 years Jewish prayer has hoped ardently that the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) would soon be redeemed by God and led by His Messiah; some even made pilgrimage to visit or dwell with others in the Holy Land. But there is surprisingly little evidence that Jews also always longed for a sovereign State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael) or to be a Middle Eastern political power. It turns out the idea may be shockingly recent, but its novelty is hard to see because we stand on the other side of such a radical transformation in thought. The shift from Holy Land to sovereign secular state has been rendered almost invisible.

…[T]he greatest Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, wrote in 1770 that “The Talmud forbids us to even think of a return to Palestine by force. Without the miracles and signs mentioned in the Scripture, we must not take the smallest step in the direction of forcing a return and a restoration of our nation.”

It turns out that opposition to a Jewish state isn’t an isolated theological quirk but a central conviction among Jews for most of the history of Rabbinic thought. It’s contained in the Talmud itself, expounded by Rashi (the most important Jewish Bible interpreter, whose interpretation every Jewish Day School student learns first), and detailed by Maimonides, arguably Jewish tradition’s single most influential thinker…

This Messianic view is anchored in the Talmud, which says that the Jewish people must swear to keep faith in God’s plan for the world. The messianic end, when God will redeem all of reality, is a goal so desirable as to be like a bride in waiting for marriage. Thus it is in a mystical commentary on the Song of Songs that Israel is first commanded to swear three oaths: not to “ascend the wall” to where the Messiah (the Bride) waits, not to “rebel against the nations of the world,” and not to “force the End [times].”

Meanwhile, in our nation of so-called Judeo-Christian values, a lot of our food suppliers (including brands with “progressive” vibes like Whole Foods) are taking advantage of modern-day slave labor. AP News reports: “Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands”.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.

Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime.

That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.

Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past.

Discovered via poet [sarah] Cavar’s newsletter, this essay by Rachael Allen in the journal Too Little/Too Hard challenges the association of “Difficult and Bad” in how we critique writing. Allen talks about dual consciousness as a person of working-class background in literary academia, and argues that ideals of “accessible” writing may underestimate the self-taught intelligence of housecleaners and laborers like her father. When such voices do make it into mainstream publishing, they’re pressured to perform a simplified and traumatic life story that will flatter the benevolence of upper-class readers. “There is a pervading, top-down and patronising mythos of the ‘general public’ or ‘general reader’ – an idea peddled about who can tolerate what under the premise that general audiences aren’t able to manage complicated concepts, formally or linguistically innovative books, or other challenging works, precedents for what is deemed to be accessible set by the middle-class anti-intellectuals that decide it.”

Also on the topic of literary gatekeeping, I recommend this piece in Chicago Review, “Small Press Economies: A Dialogue” by Hilary Plum and Matvei Yankelevich. They call on indie bookstores, review outlets, and distributors to stop disadvantaging small press books in their economic models and attention. I can attest that these barriers are very real.

HP: There’s a failure to understand small press and indie status as a political status and responsibility. For example, look at IndieBound, an organization that represents independent booksellers across the US. They promote a short list of new books every month, selected by indie bookstore staff—a coveted honor that can help launch a book nationally. Understandably, indie bookstores and sites like IndieBound emphasize the importance of independence: you should buy from the brick-and-mortar, rather than from Amazon, and support local community and economy. You should make a little sacrifice on price to protect something you’d miss if it were gone.

But the vast majority of the books IndieBound promotes and celebrates are published by the Big Five. The same is true at too many indie brick-and-mortars. Their uplift of independent, noncorporate business stops at the door—they ask you to buy indie and pay more, but that’s largely not what they do.

MY: So how is that store serving its readers? If you’re a reader and small press books aren’t on the shelf, you’re going to buy what’s on offer. But let’s say you’re into locally and responsibly farmed food and your co-op only carries Cal-Organic, wouldn’t you be concerned?

HP: If you don’t support local farmers, they disappear. People understand that and get why they should buy produce at the farmers market. What’s keeping readers from supporting small presses, and the diverse communities they serve, in similar terms?

MY: It seems to me they can’t see it that way because those presses are hidden from view by structural and economic barriers. On either side of the barriers, institutions, corporations, and small presses themselves often pretend these barriers don’t exist—they’re normalized by the market. Very few literary consumers know that their beloved local indie bookstore is (with very few exceptions) beholden to corporate distributors. Few can imagine what’s missing from those shelves and therefore from their potential reading lives. What’s missing is countless titles from 400 SPD presses, and who knows how many others that don’t have distribution at all.

January Links Roundup: Animal Lovers

Welcome to 2024! I’ve been storing up a lot of Palestine links, but let’s start the year off with something enjoyable. Stay tuned for cancellable political takes in a future post.

The Winter 2023 issue of Orion, the environmentalist literary journal, profiled illustrator John Megahan’s contributions to biologist Bruce Bagemihl’s groundbreaking study of same-sex relationships in the animal kingdom, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Journalist Lulu Miller was both charmed by the sensitive drawings and angered that these many examples had never before been compiled or discussed in mainstream biology teaching.

Thumbing through the book’s pages, it’s hard not to giggle. This is the Noah’s ark you never heard about. There are male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.

But awe creeps in too. Somewhere around page 453 maybe, with the kangaroos, or page 476 with the bats, or nearing page 700 after the umpteenth species of warbler. How were we not told?

The deeper I’ve fallen down this rainbow-colored rabbit hole, the more I’ve come to understand that my shock at the breadth of queerness in nature is a symptom of a horrible miseducation, of centuries of science bullying the abundance of queerness off the record, of an internalized homophobia that sometimes still whispers in my ear that I, a queer woman, do not belong on the tree of life. Bruce Bagemihl’s book with Megahan’s illustrations accomplished a kind of feat of alchemy. They took two millennia worth of outliers, scooped them all together, and in so doing revealed that which had been labeled as “unnatural” to be natural. This book helped to shift a scientific paradigm; its width is humbling, its bibliography, muscular. It taught me how the seemingly humble act of compilation can be a kind of activism.

I’m not alone in seeing the book this way. When Biological Exuberance was published in 1999, reviewers called it “revolutionary,” “monumental,” and “a landmark in the literature of science.” It was listed as a Best Book of 1999 by Publishers Weekly and the New York Public Library. It would even go on to be cited in a brief for the Supreme Court case of Lawrence v. Texas (2003) as a scientifically rigorous refutation to the belief that homosexuality was a “crime against nature.”

Every generation thinks they’re ahead of their sexually stodgy ancestors. Well, Harry Roy and His Orchestra were singing about “My Girl’s Pussy” in 1931. Yes, it’s exactly what you think.

1984 Carnation Fancy Feast Cat Food Ad - Darlings | eBay

If pussies are too tame for you, consider xenogenders. In their June 2023 post “What it Means to be Slime,” Substack author NubileConcubine reflects on identification with imaginary and nonhuman creatures, and how this can express the mysterious and idiosyncratic aspects of gendered embodiment. They discuss the debate within the queer community about whether custom genders are “cringy, immature, and unreal.” This plays into the fraught relationship among transness, neurodivergence, and disability, a topic discussed at length in my current trans book group read, Cameron Awkward-Rich’s The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). Hat tip to poet [sarah] Cavar for the link.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze | Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights

This headline from The Guardian (UK) can’t be beat: “Uproar as after-school Satan club forms at Tennessee elementary school”. Those wags at The Satanic Temple are at it again, spotlighting violations of church-state separation by demanding equal access for non-Christian religions. Or, as journalist Erum Salam’s sub-header (rather disappointingly) clarifies, “Satanic clubs, whose members do not worship the devil, usually formed in response to presence of religious groups in schools.”

The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.

The ASSC is a federally recognized non-profit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.

The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.

Satanic after-school clubs are usually established in a school district in response to the presence of religious clubs, such as the Christian evangelical Bible group the Good News Club. The temple says it “does not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus”.

I’m all for anti-authoritarianism, etc., but if we don’t get to wear funny costumes and light candles, count me out.

When Satan Club went to school: What's behind the group that created  controversy in Chesapeake – The Virginian-Pilot

Apropos of nothing, I just really liked this poem by recent Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss on the Green Linden Press website, “Little Fugue with Jean Seberg and Tupperware”. Older woman with zero fucks to give–not exactly bitter but definitely tired of being sweet.

…Love, that little wood tick. That tick-in-the-ass.
Say the word enough times inside your head,
it will fall out of its meaning
like a stillborn, plop, into the toilet.

In the January 2024 issue of the Catholic magazine America, Eve Tushnet profiles Awake, a laypeople’s organization that helps survivors of clergy sexual abuse. This grassroots movement is stepping in where the institutional church has failed.

The word awake signifies a change, a new awareness of one’s surroundings. Sara Larson’s awakening came in 2018, following the Pennsylvania grand jury report on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the revelations of then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s long history of abuse. She says the news left her and other Catholics she knew in the Milwaukee area “concerned and hurt and frustrated, and wondering what we could do to help.” In March 2019, a group of people began meeting in Ms. Larson’s living room to discuss ways to respond. They called the group Awake, and it didn’t take them long to settle on an answer.

That August, Awake made its first, formal, public act: an apology in the form of an open letter to survivors of abuse. Ms. Larson says that the group decided to issue the letter because “many apologies that have been given by church leaders feel inadequate.” Awake, she says, “realize[d] that we as members of this church, as the body of Christ, could apologize as well, and make a public commitment to stand in solidarity with survivors and to work for transformation and healing in our church.”

Four years later, Awake has grown into a nonprofit organization, and its response to the abuse crisis has grown, too. The group’s mission is “to awaken our community to the full reality of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, work for transformation, and foster healing for all who have been wounded.” The group now does advocacy work and offers many programs that address the needs of abuse survivors…

Awake was born out of a conviction that survivors are members of the body of Christ: that Catholic prayer, the sacraments and all that the church can offer still belong to survivors, and that they deserve to experience the church in a way that restores, nourishes and heals. Awake also recognizes that, ultimately, survivors follow many paths of healing and discovery.

Awake welcomes members from a variety of faith backgrounds, and with various relationships to the Catholic Church. Some of Awake’s members have always been practicing Catholics. Others no longer have an interest in Catholic practices. But many have an ambivalent relationship to Catholic prayer, sacraments and worship settings. Awake strives to respect each of these perspectives because, for people against whom Catholic spiritual practices were weaponized for grooming and abuse, it can feel as though only a thin veil separates one’s present safety and healing from the trauma of the past.

Eve’s novel Punishment: A Love Story is a triumph of Wildean wit. Go get it–for the love of God, Montessori!

In the Massachusetts Review, Koa Beck’s essay “Nanny of the State” describes how becoming an authorized foster parent forced her into uneasy complicity with a carceral system.

Parents are presented with a highly individualized plan by the court to help establish a “safe” home to which their children can return without state intervention. The tonality of the courts underscores this approach: if they can get and stay sober, if they can establish a clean, secure place to live, if they can maintain a job, if they attend therapy, they can reclaim custody of their children. Everything is on them.

his isolated framework to dissect why parent and child should be separated is further reflected in the infrastructure of the courtroom: parenthood is literally evaluated on a case-by-case basis, like there are no deeply rooted, long-standing factors as to why this has happened. The siloing presents the story as if it’s isolated to this parent and this child. No two cases are identical, but many grow from identical circumstances. Homelessness overlaps with substance abuse in a poverty spiral where little to no access to mental health resources or food security or affordable housing inevitably means ricocheting into addiction or violence or both.

Blame is singular where it should be structural: Why are these parents struggling with basic needs? What about their life and their challenges render them incapable of parenting on a fundamental level? What about their inability to secure mental health services or economic security at critical stages has yielded this reality?

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2023

I finally feel cuter than my cat. Photo by Ezra Autumn Wilde; shirt by Robert Graham; body by Pioneer Valley Plastic Surgery.

2023 was another year of huge spiritual and material shifts. I am now a certified Priest of Witchcraft, having completed Year Two of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School in September. I manifested the three big things I’ve been working towards for years: top surgery, adopting my own cat, and a publisher for my second novel, Origin Story, which will be out from Saddle Road Press this summer. In case you missed it, my essay “Double Incision Diary” in Solstice Lit Mag describes how my witchcraft practice made my surgery a sacred experience.

Theodore “Big Pussy” Cavalieri DiMeow lives for snacks.

Our family visited Los Angeles, Cape Cod, Boston, and New York City this year. Shane has become the star pupil at Hilltown Sled Dogs, a camp where young people learn to train Alaskan Huskies. I wish they operated a junior high school! Shane’s other happy place is Home Depot. He is teaching me how to use a leaf blower and a power drill.

Adam and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary with tickets to Barns Courtney‘s rock concert at Irving Plaza in Manhattan. It was a Dionysian experience, with the energy of a pagan religious revival. We didn’t go in the mosh pit, though.

I did not publish many poems this year, but I wrote a lot of weird new ones about butts. There’s still time to sponsor me for 30 Poems in November. We raised over $75,000 for immigrant literacy and job-training programs at the Center for New Americans! I achieved my personal goals of raising $500, writing 30 poems, and avoiding my novel.

Some books that made an impact on me this year:

Psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou’s provocative book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (New York University Press, 2023) restores mystery and risk to our encounters with one another through limit-pushing sex or controversial art. Saketopoulou proposes that we should not pathologize trauma survivors for seeking out states of “overwhelm”. Wounds have an erotic charge, and going towards this taboo experience can free up our energy for new ways of processing what cannot be cured. It’s liberating to acknowledge that there’s no undamaged state to get back to, because then we can move forward without so much fear of contamination–what she calls “traumatophobia,” or the goal of avoiding triggers at all costs. Therapists are not immune from pushing a patient toward a tidy but illusory closure because of their own discomfort with witnessing trauma.

In fiction, I’m currently enjoying The Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2021, guest-edited by Lee Child. This series curated by Otto Penzler and The Mysterious Bookshop has been hit-or-miss for me, with some years’ entries stuffed with sad literary stories with a crime in them, rather than real whodunits. This edition will satisfy fans of old-school detection, and also has a good gender balance of protagonists and writers. If you’re feeling more literary, check out King of the Armadillos (Macmillan, 2023) by my fellow St. Ann’s School alum Wendy Chin-Tanner. Based on her father’s life story, this bittersweet novel follows a Chinese immigrant teen in the 1950s who’s sent to a leprosy hospital in Louisiana, and his father and brother left behind in Brooklyn, who must balance traditional family duties with the forbidden loves offered by the freedom and anonymity of America.

2023 was an encouraging year to be an old guy. Henry Kissinger died at 100, bringing joy to the world. Charles III was finally crowned at 75, with Camilla by his side. The guy paid his dues. But “The Crown” is still boring since Princess Di is gone.

“And now, at last, I shall be King of Engl–“

Israel-Palestine: Further Thoughts, Links, and a Prayer

In this season of Hanukkah, which, like many Jewish holidays, commemorates resistance to eradication by a more powerful empire, it’s difficult but necessary to recognize the paradox that one can be an oppressed minority in the wider world and simultaneously an oppressor in a local context. It’s agonizing to imagine the sexual violence and other atrocities Hamas committed against the Oct. 7 hostages. It equally pains me to read the Twitter reports about innocent Palestinian writers, journalists, and doctors who have recently died in Israel’s punitive bombing of Gaza. The current iteration of Zionism doesn’t make me feel safer as a person of Jewish background. The most hard-line government in my adult lifetime doesn’t seem to be keeping Israelis safe either.

I am dialoguing by email with readers who have different views from mine, and may share some of our conversations here in the future. Meanwhile, here are some readings that helped me this week.

A friend shared this poetic prayer with me, “Hanukkah 2023: We Light These Lights for Gaza,” by Rabbi Brant Rosen. The rabbi’s blog says he leads a Reconstructionist congregation in Chicago and is an activist for Israel/Palestine justice work. The last stanza especially moved me:

These lights we light tonight
will never be used for any other purpose
but to proclaim the miracle
of this truth:
it is not by might nor by cruelty
but by a love that burns relentlessly
that this broken world
will be redeemed.

Journalist Noah Berlatsky has helped me reconsider how we talk about “diaspora” as a temporary or less-than-ideal condition for world Jewry. He revisits this critique in his Dec. 7 Sojourners article “They Said Only Israel Could Keep Me Safe”.

There is no magic guarantee for safety. The Jewish diaspora has responded to this truth of insecurity by putting roots down in many places. We’ve done so with the recognition that no one place is perfect or safe, but with a faith that we can work to make wherever we are better, more welcoming, and freer for Jewish people — and ideally not just for Jewish people. The vision of diaspora is a vision not of Jewish control or Jewish dominance but of cosmopolitanism, of sharing, of allowing your neighbors to transform you as you transform them. Safety can reside not in controlling land and borders, but in an openness that sees belonging as portable and communal.

…That’s not to say that the diaspora is a utopia. But it is to say that in privileging Israel as the site of safety and hope, Jewish people forget that the diaspora is an important resource, a major influence on Jewish culture, and a critical aspect of Jewish history. Fascists like Hitler hated and tried to destroy the diaspora because it rejected purity and ethnonationalism in favor of heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism. For that and the other reasons I mention, we need to recognize the diaspora not as a weakness or failure, but as a hope, a refuge, and a site for antifascist defiance.

“A Dangerous Conflation” is an open letter in the arts and culture journal n+1, signed by hundreds of Jewish writers, artists, and activists “who wish to disavow the widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic.” Notable signatories include Nan Goldin, Tony Kushner, Sarah Schulman, Judith Butler, poet Chase Berggrun, political historian Jeff Sharlet, and actress Hari Nef. The letter proclaims, “We find this rhetorical tactic antithetical to Jewish values, which teach us to repair the world, question authority, and champion the oppressed over the oppressor.”

Two stories that make me concerned about our foreign policy priorities: “US vetoes UN resolution backed by many nations demanding immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza” (AP News, Dec. 9); “US skips congressional review to approve emergency sale of tank shells to Israel” (Reuters, Dec. 9).

According to that same AP story:

Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 17,400 people in Gaza — 70% of them women and children — and wounded more than 46,000, according to the Palestinian territory’s Health Ministry, which says many others are trapped under rubble. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths…

…[U.N. Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres said Hamas’ brutality against Israelis on Oct. 7 “can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

“While indiscriminate rocket fire by Hamas into Israel, and the use of civilians as human shields, are in contravention of the laws of war, such conduct does not absolve Israel of its own violations,” he stressed.

The U.N. chief detailed the “humanitarian nightmare” Gaza is facing, citing intense, widespread and ongoing Israeli attacks from air, land and sea that reportedly have hit 339 education facilities, 26 hospitals, 56 health care facilities, 88 mosques and three churches.

Over 60% of Gaza’s housing has reportedly been destroyed or damaged, some 85% of the population has been forced from their homes, the health system is collapsing, and “nowhere in Gaza is safe,” Guterres said.

…Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard criticized the U.S. for continuing to transfer munitions to the Israeli government “that contribute to the decimation of entire families.”

And Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director at Human Rights Watch, said that by providing weapons and diplomatic cover to Israel “as it commits atrocities, including collectively punishing the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, the U.S. risks complicity in war crimes.”

 

 

December Links Roundup: Season of Outrage

It’s December, and you know what that means–the War on Christmas has begun. As opposed to, you know, actual war, which is A-OK. Fox News’s latest outrage cycle brings us this spectacular headline from the Green Bay Press-Gazette: “U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher aims his ire at The Satanic Temple tree at National Railroad Museum”. Poet and journalist Natalie Eilbert reports:

As part of its Festival of Trees this year, the nonprofit museum included a tree from The Satanic Temple of Wisconsin, decorated in red lights, pentacles and ornaments extolling LGBTQ+ pride, bodily autonomy and the power of reading.

Gallagher, R-Green Bay, said it’s “impossible to overstate how offensive this is to Christians,” and equated the temple’s participation at the Festival of Trees with “waving a Hamas flag in a synagogue.”

The temple’s mission is “to encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits,” according to its website. The National Railroad Museum is a non-religious, private organization focused on the history of locomotives…

…The exhibition at the National Railroad Museum is an exercise in optics. Take, for example, the event name itself: It is called The Festival of Trees. Nowhere in its description does it explicitly refer to the trees as Christmas trees, which invites all sorts of creative interpretations.

Speaking of that Hamas flag, I’m getting pretty fed up with right-wing Israel supporters waving the bloody shirt of anti-Semitism, when the biggest threat to Jews in America comes from white supremacists in the Republican Party. The memory of the Holocaust gets literally weaponized to justify ethnic cleansing of our Palestinian siblings.

According to a damning new report from +972 Magazine, the high civilian death toll in the current war was avoidable and arguably intentional. If you’re not familiar with this publication, their “About” page explains:

+972 Magazine is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. Founded in 2010, our mission is to provide in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine. The name of the site is derived from the telephone country code that can be used to dial throughout Israel-Palestine.

Yuval Abraham’s feature story, “‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza”, was released yesterday.

The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.

The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.

Inside sources told +972 that Israel’s new artificial intelligence system identifies precisely how many civilians will be killed by bombing a target. The current campaign intentionally hits high-rise apartment buildings and other heavily populated areas with low military value, on the pretext that a Hamas member is inside or has lived in the building recently. These sites, called “power targets” by the Israeli military, are hit without warning the residents to evacuate, a change from previous policy.

The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it…

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

This is absolutely grotesque. If this is the price of a “Jewish state,” I don’t want it.

You know who would be fine with it? Henry Kissinger, who went to his eternal reward (good luck with that) this week at age 100. May we all live in such a way that our obituary is less salty than historian Erik Loomis’ headline at Lawyers, Guns & Money: “Kissinger is Dead, Finally Something Good Has Happened in 2023”.

One of the most vile individuals to ever befoul the United States, Henry Kissinger is dead. A man responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the world and yet the most respected man within the American foreign policy community for decades, Kissinger’s sheer existence exposed the moral vacuity of Cold War foreign policy and the empty platitudes and chummy gladhandling of the Beltway elite class that deserves our utter contempt.

Where to begin? The unnecessary prolongation of the Vietnam War to get Nixon elected, the bombing of Cambodia, replacing Allende with the dictator Pinochet in Chile, or backing Pakistan’s massacre of civilians during Bangladesh’s bid for independence? The only good thing I can say about Kissinger is that his longevity gives me hope that I’m not over the hill. I was feeling kind of down this week because I received an AARP magazine with Ringo Starr on the cover.

Let’s close on a hopeful note with Major Jackson’s poem “Let Me Begin Again” on the Academy of American Poets website. Oracular and colloquial by turns, this poem urges us to keep choosing wonder and joy, because our disintegrating world may depend on it.

This time, let me circle
the island of my fears only once then
live like a raging waterfall and grow
a magnificent mustache. Let me not ever be
the birdcage or the serrated blade or
the empty season.

Hat tip to Sarah Sullivan, our 30 Poems in November fundraising coordinator, who sent this poem as one of her daily prompts for the writers raising money for the Center for New Americans. It’s not too late to donate to my page. I’m at $446 as of December 1–help me reach my $500 goal!

October Links Roundup: 78 Degrees

Happy Spooktober!

Pumpkins by Shane.

My inner 12-year-old would like to remind you that October 2 is the 571st birthday of King Richard III. Follow efforts to clear his name at The Missing Princes Project.

78 degrees is how hot it’s expected to be today in Northampton. Thanks, global warming! It’s also a reference to the godmother of the modern Tarot renaissance, Rachel Pollack, whose book 78 Degrees of Wisdom blended psychology, mysticism, and and literary iconography to inspire deeper relationships with the cards. At Xtra Magazine, Jude Doyle assesses Pollack’s legacy as a pioneer of trans-inclusive feminist spirituality:

Here, from Pollack’s self-designed deck the Shining Tribe, is her description of the Emperor: “A number of modern tarot decks have taken on the issue of patriarchal culture. They have tended to see the Emperor as a kind of villain, with gentle, childlike males as an alternative. Such images both belittle men and demonize them.” Instead, Pollack offered, women who drew the Emperor card might try to see themselves in it: “It might be a strong experience to imagine ourselves as the Emperor. What might it be like to contain and express such power and determination?”

The Hierophant is changed to the gender-neutral “Tradition,” and that is that. It seems to be as close as Pollack ever got to a direct rebuke of her peers’ transmisogyny. Yet that tiny tweak—don’t look for male power, look for your power—changes everything about how people see these cards, and therefore, how they think about gender and power when reading them…

…Her biggest contribution to women’s spirituality, The Body of the Goddess, waspublished in 1997. For a trans woman to write a book on Goddess worship in the mid-’90s was gutsy. For a trans woman to call that book The Body of the Goddessis fucking bonkers. It’s mind-blowing. It gets more so when you open the book and find that Pollack’s Goddess not only likes trans women; she is one herself.

Pollack doesn’t ignore menstruation or childbirth as aspects of female embodiment, but she doesn’t stop there either. She also locates trans and gender-fluid goddesses throughout mythology. Some—like the intersex goddess Cybele and her likely transfeminine priestesses, the Galli—are canonical. Others are creative interpretations of existing myth: Pollack notes that the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, is “created” when a male God named Ouranos loses his genitalia. Afterward, Ouranos essentially disappears, and a brand-new, very feminine Goddess arises to replace him.

Even trans guys get a turn. Pollack tells us that Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, madness and ecstasy, was raised as a girl and was sometimes known as “the Womanly One” for his feminine looks and unusual kindness to women. In a 1995 essay for TransSisters, she gets even more detailed: Dionysus “went mad in adolescence,” was cured by Cybele, and went on to become an androgynous he/him whose myths portrayed him liberating people of all genders from the patriarchy. At rituals, Pollack tells us, “his male followers would dress as women, [and] his female followers would strap on large phalluses,” suggesting that liberation took a highly recognizable form.

Humorist Daniel Lavery is another of my favorite theologians, capering madly along that line between farce and horror. See, for instance, his questionnaire at The Stopgap, “Do You Think the Creator God Is Doing a Good Job, or Should Be Replaced by a Big Sheep or a Demiurge?” Bring back the formless void!

Gay provocateur playwright Joe Orton (1933-67) apparently had a sideline in altering library books to add satirical and bawdy images, then sneaking them back onto the shelves. You can see samples from the collection online. Not that I’m recommending you do this…

But there’s a hole just waiting to be filled.

“It’s both mystical and humiliating how your novel can know things before you yourself know them,” says the author of the queer coming-of-age novel Idlewild in this recent article at LitHub, “James Frankie Thomas on Discovering His Trans Identity While Writing Fiction”. Yeah, I know how you feel. Thomas describes a writing workshop, pre-transition, where the teacher and classmates criticized him for being coy about a self-insert character’s gender identity:

In all seriousness, I prided myself on my well-observed portrayal of teen girlhood in the early 2000s—specifically the way teen girls back then were consumed with the desire to be gay men. That was something you just never saw in fiction about teen girls, but Idlewild was going to change that. From the very first page, on which I introduced Fay as “a gay dude trapped in a female body,” I plumbed my memories of my own adolescence for universal truths about teen girlhood…

“Why not make it explicit from the start? What’s gained by withholding such important information about the character?”

And I wasn’t allowed to speak, so I just had to sit there and take it over and over. I was so flabbergasted, I bet you could see a giant cartoon exclamation point floating over my head. How had my entire workshop read my novel so wrong? Stranger still, how had they all read it wrong in the exact same way? There was only one possible explanation, something I’d long suspected but never dared to admit out loud: Everyone was stupid except me.

For what it’s worth, I also see myself in Richard Siken’s new poem “Pornography” in DIAGRAM Issue 23.4: “I want to fuck everything but I don’t want to be touched.”

Perhaps this is related, perhaps not: In the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, researchers Kristen Bottema-Beutel et al. question the objectivity of neurotypical researchers in their paper “Anti-ableism and scientific accuracy in autism research: a false dichotomy”.

Autism research focuses almost exclusively on autistic people’s perceived deficits relative to non-autistic people, and researchers rarely acknowledge that autistic people have strengths and abilities in addition to impairments, and exist in contexts that enable or disable functioning. Autistic people are often inaccurately described as missing core human capacities, and as incapable of social reciprocity or contributing to shared culture. Deficit construals persist even when autistic people show strengths in domains that would otherwise be considered positive, such as transparency, rationality, and morality.

The researchers argue that we can move away from these negative presumptions without sacrificing accuracy. They survey some now-debunked but still influential theories of autism’s causes, such as vaccines and insecure maternal attachment, which were considered objective but were demonstrably influenced by sociopolitical forces (e.g. backlash to mothers working outside the home). They also suggest that due to neurotypical researchers’ assumptions, common autistic behaviors like hand-flapping and echolalia have been dismissed as meaningless compulsions, when truly open-minded observation would reveal their communicative functions and nuances.

Speaking of repetition, this Missouri Review essay by Caitlin Horrocks, “Lullaby Machines”, reminded me of the hallucinatory early months of parenting the Young Master. Horrocks reminisces about trying to work, sleep, and stay sane while playing the same lullaby album 20,000 times. When Adam and I were reading up on parenting, one of the sleep-training books told us to keep a consistent routine. Baby Shane seemed to respond to this Spotify album of Celtic Harp Lullabies. Well, we played that thing on the iPad in his room every night for three or four years. We took it with us when we traveled. I used to joke that someday, as an adult, Shane would be at a harp concert with his boyfriend or girlfriend, “Woman of Ireland” would start playing, and he would have a Pavlovian urge to fall asleep and/or poop his pants.

Listen at your own risk.

Reflections of a Former Keller Girl

Complex feelings about this Christianity Today obituary/profile of Tim Keller, the Presbyterian pastor who defied conventional wisdom by founding a conservative megachurch in Manhattan. Keller died this week of pancreatic cancer at age 72.

In 2004, new to Christianity and Northampton, and looking for community, I became the protégé of an older female writer who started a Bible study group based on Keller’s sermon recordings. She had a sharp sense of humor about everything except the gospel, so my proposal to name ourselves the Kellerettes never caught on. When she wasn’t around, we sometimes spoke of ourselves as the Keller Girls. I thought I was female at the time. In a different life–one where she hadn’t been raised neo-Puritan and clung to it as the only apparent bulwark against emotional chaos–we might have been gender-nonconforming autistic fellow travelers to this day. We valued each other’s frankness and spiritual intensity, up to the very end, when she concluded that “we worship different Gods,” despite using the same language for our faith. I do appreciate someone who can conduct an honest breakup.

Technically, the bloom came off the Keller rose circa 2008 because I was blossoming into some as-yet-unidentified variety of queer. But 2008 was also when I realized I was a child abuse survivor, which suddenly made a lifetime of theological solutions to self-hatred seem terribly beside the point.

CT’s Keller profile begins with a pull quote summarizing his message: “We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

I used to take the first statement for granted. In fact I was relieved that the unnameable could be named. So the second half was good news–perhaps the only possible good news, as traditional Christians argued.

However, when I stopped being in daily contact with a mother who blamed me for her unmet childhood needs (while trying to break up my marriage and sabotage my adoption plans), Romans 7:18-25 no longer seemed like an inevitable description of the human condition:

For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! (NIV)

Life doesn’t have to be a no-win situation. Just remove one psycho.

Similarly, Keller’s core argument spoke to me and many other anxiously high-achieving New Yorkers, but now I want to deconstruct the pessimism that sets you up for the altar call.

At his church in Manhattan, Keller told the nation’s cultural elites that they worshiped false gods.

“We want to feel beautiful. We want to feel loved. We want to feel significant,” he preached in 2009, “and that’s why we’re working so hard and that’s the source of the evil.”

Keller explained to New York magazine that this was, in a way, an old-fashioned message about sin. But when many people hear “sin,” they only think of things like sex, drugs, and maybe stealing. The modern creative class that he was trying to reach, however, was beset by many more pernicious sins jostling to take the place of God’s love in their lives.

The task of “relevance” was to identify the idols that had a hold of people’s souls. And then tell them that they could be free.

The people of Manhattan “had lived their whole lives with parents, music teachers, coaches, professors, and bosses telling them to do better, be better, try harder,” Keller reflected in 2021. “To hear that He Himself had met those demands for righteousness through the life and death of Jesus, and now there was no condemnation left for anyone who trusted in that righteousness—that was an amazingly freeing message.”

When preachers jump to the conclusion “nothing can be done about this, so you need Jesus” they demonstrate a dangerous incuriosity about the psychological sources of our precarious self-worth. Alice Miller’s Prisoners of Childhood (later reissued as The Drama of the Gifted Child) attributes this syndrome, not to idolatry, but to the pain of growing up with a narcissistic parent. Because the child is not seen and loved for himself, but only insofar as he functions as a projection of his parent’s ego and her needs, he starts trying to earn the attachment that should be his by right.

Once I started trauma therapy and faced this dynamic in my past, I didn’t need to re-enact it with Tim Keller’s God.

I used to believe spreading the gospel was the most important thing I could do, because I defined “the gospel” as freedom from obsessive perfectionism and the shame that drives it. Today, same mission, different gospel. A relationship with Jesus can be a stepping-stone to working on your trauma, as it was for me. But don’t let it be a substitute.

 

Belonging and Believing, Revisited

This video clip from trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté about authenticity versus attachment took me back to a Reiter’s Block post from 10 years ago. Maté discusses two survival instincts that are put in tension when the family doesn’t accept their child’s true self. On the one hand, with our long maturation period, the human animal needs to stay securely attached to caregivers. On the other hand, trusting your intuition keeps you alive in the wild. A person who learns to suppress his perceptions, in order to preserve relationships, will suffer in other ways.

Is this dilemma avoidable, I wonder? Is the effect significant only in narcissistic or abusive families, or is it the human condition to be torn between loyalties to internal truth and external bonds?

Back when I went to church, I couldn’t find a satisfactory balance. In a consumer society, where free choice and competition rule, a lot of institutions focus on getting you in the door. Have fun, feel welcome, get invested in social relationships, and only later find out what’s expected of you and what the community’s real values are. Or maybe that’s just a description of neurotypical socializing. IDK.

The Temple of Witchcraft is pretty different! The foundational training is all about mind/body self-awareness and discernment of your unique highest goals, what we call True Will. The techniques are highly structured, but your encounter with the divine (theistic or not) is expected to take a form that is personal to you. The ethics resemble Buddhist precepts, not lists of forbidden acts and impure behaviors.

I can only speak to the experience of studying online, which is mainly solitary. I don’t know what it’s like to belong to a coven. Probably some of the same individual-versus-collective tensions arise, because people are people. I’d like to think that our nondualistic and dynamic worldview would make us more flexible in adjusting to these tensions than a church that thinks it has a perfect eternal formula for life.

On the level of spiritual warfare, however, I am taken aback by the short-term effectiveness of authoritarian religious unity. When everyone directs their willpower toward the same image and the same objective, that can create more powerful magic than the scattered journeys of maverick witches. I don’t know what to do about this without changing our core values of freedom and diversity.

Maybe that too is the human condition: “truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne,” as the poet James Russell Lowell said. (For a more concise version, because the Victorians sure could info-dump, the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation” is adapted from this poem.) Something they didn’t tell us in church is that this is an anti-slavery poem, urging antebellum Americans not to stay stuck at their ancestors’ level of virtue, but to emulate their countercultural courage by moving beyond their beliefs. Sounds more like us witches than a lot of churches today.

The Poet Spiel: “interpretive solo”

This enigmatic character study by The Poet Spiel brings up some questions that are never far from my thoughts. When does ritual become neurosis? Can compulsion ever cross back into something sacred? The observers’ tenderness towards the solitary man in this poem suggests that his strange routines have summoned some blessing after all, though maybe not in a way that he could expect or notice.

interpretive solo

this red-faced man
stoops his shoulders
as if to keep his heart
from view

he dabs his pointing finger
into his wasting cola
then presses it
against the center of his chin

to create
a sticky dimple
then reaches downward
with his tongue to lick it off

methodically
he fishes thru his pockets
for those same old books
of paper matches

and lines them three across and
three down then flips their covers
then repeats the sugar dimple
lick-it-off stoop-his-shoulders

as in a prayer to wendy
his goddess of this hamburger joint
where i find his bicycle
and his helmet chained and locked

every noon tending
to this sacred business of
three cups of ketchup
a double wendy burger phasing cold

no tomato just the bottom bun
wipe his palms on his knees
never let the bun touch the matches
fold them toward him

sequences no one knows
except there is a perfect way
and if he gets it wrong
he puffs his lips his face

turns redder than his ketchup
and his shoulders nearly meet
until the puffing
and the redding disappear

then he returns to the counter
where the cashiers know his name
and they know no tomato
and not to bother

with the top bun
on the double burger
he will leave
to waste