Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Book Notes: Orpheus in the Bronx


In poet and critic Reginald Shepherd’s new book, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, I find it telling that the comma in the title is placed after “identity”, deliberately severing the phrase “identity politics”, just as these lyrical essays make it their mission to champion a poetic imagination that is not subordinate to the politics of race, class, and sexual orientation.

Whereas critics may chide him for not embracing certain subjects or modes of diction that are recognizably “black” or “gay”, Shepherd questions the assumption that those tropes always represent the authentic self. Without denying his experience of poverty, racism or homophobia, he suggests that he should not be obligated to build his poetic identity on the unchosen conditions of his oppression. Otherwise we lose the main hope that literature offers us, a space uncolonized by the powers that be.


The identity card school of poetry is very popular in our current era, when rhetorical fantasies of democracy and equality in cultural life have become tin-pot substitutes for the real things in social, political, and economic life. But literature is one of the few areas of life in which I do not feel oppressed, in which I have experienced true freedom. In the literary realm one is not bound by social constructions of identity, or required to flash one’s assigned identity card: one can be anyone, everyone, or no one at all. This is one of literature’s most precious qualities, the access it allows us to otherness (including our otherness to ourselves), and it is one of the things that I cherish most about poetry.

…I have written poems that directly address identifiably “black” subject matters, and it is disproportionately those poems that tend to be reprinted and to be discussed, those poems for which audiences perk up at readings. But I am just as much a black person when I write about spring snow or narcissus blossoms as when I write about the South Bronx or the slave trade, and I am just as much not. (Though the same black lesbian performance poet who implied that literacy was oppressive also asserted that poems about spring or snow had no relevance to black people or to poor people or to HIV positive people. Presumably in this view black people, poor people, HIV positive people have no experiences other than being black, being poor, being HIV positive, are nothing but their social labels, and thus they don’t experience spring or snow. I hardly need point out what a reductive and even dehumanizing perspective this represents.)
(“The Other’s Other”, pp.51-52)

We also deceive ourselves that politically correct poetry is a substitute for actually improving the conditions of oppressed groups. (Thus he refuses to join the other camp of the academic culture wars, the naively color-blind conservatives.) This dovetails with another of Shepherd’s major themes–that art is not the world, and that its value lies in making visible the creative tension between representation and reality.


Poetry is potentially liberating because its uselessness marks out a space not colonized by or valued by capital. Its “obsolescence” is also its resistance to being easily consumable; its loss of “relevance” is also a freedom to keep alive certain human possibilities. In this sense, the drive to make poetry “relevant” is a concession or a surrender to instrumental values, to the imperative of use and functionality: poetry had better be good for something. And poetry simply isn’t politically efficacious; as Auden so perceptively noted, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” The conflation of the existence of social, political, and economic elites with muddled notions of intellectual or aesthetic “elitism” is sheer obfuscation. The power elite in this country care nothing for art or culture; they care about money and power and the means to acquire and retain them. Art is not among those means.

…Poetry’s preservation of mystery is its preservation of a space not colonized by capitalism’s totalizing impulse. This is also the preservation of a space not colonized by instrumental reason. The poem embodies this space in its specificity as an event in language: a good poem is not simply a recounting or reenactment of an extralinguistic event, but an occasion of its own. The poem is a new thing in the world (or better: it is a new event), not simply a copy or an account of an already existing thing: it cannot be reduced to its “meaning” or its “content.” Part of what poetry does is remind us that things and events, including language, including ourselves, aren’t as accessible or as apprehensible as we think they are. The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky described art as a mode of defamiliarization, making the familiar strange, or perhaps revealing it to have been strange all along when not seen through the smudged and blurred lens of habit and routine.
(“The Other’s Other”, pp.53-54)

Though I don’t think Shepherd is religious, his worldview here could be described as sacramental. Substitute “the Eucharist” for “poetry” in the last paragraph above and you get something pretty close to the Catholic position. I began to believe in the presence of God in the sacraments one day when I held up the wafer and realized all matter is mysterious. The Eucharist just names that fact openly, and calls us to rejoice about it. It is not a case of turning something comprehensible into something alien, as the rationalist objection to our “mumbo-jumbo” has it. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Dickinson wrote, putting her finger on the reason why poetry is not inferior to prose.

Other offerings in this eclectic book range from an autobiographical essay to a defense of beauty and critical analyses of authors such as Jorie Graham, Alvin Feinman, and Jean Genet. I may write follow-up posts on these sections after I finish the book, but meanwhile, Shepherd’s defense of the boundary between art and life has cleared a way forward for me to understand some serious problems with my own creative process.

Never inclined to enmesh art with politics, I was unaware until about four days ago that I was enmeshing art with therapy, and also with evangelism, in a way that turned each objective into a pale simulacrum. Repeat after me: Solving problems in your novel is not the same as solving them in your life. And what is perhaps the corollary: If you cannot convince yourself that your characters can find love, hope, forgiveness or purpose, you may just be traumatized and need a week off to play with your Barbie dolls.

What seems like a plot problem (how can I rescue my characters?), or, God help us, a metaphysical problem (there is no help for anyone), may be as simple as personal burnout. I was indulging in a sort of indiscriminate “authenticity” as a reaction against feelings of shame and fear about early traumatic experiences, which through God’s grace I am moving beyond. However, as Shepherd’s essays reminded me, art necessarily involves manipulation, distancing, a smokescreen, a defense. A fruitful distortion and transposition of your raw emotions and uninterpreted facts. It’s art. Artifice. Clothing. And that’s as it should be. Go ahead and put on the gospel armor, but if you’re going to Iraq, you also need a Kevlar vest.

For someone who supposedly believes she is saved by grace alone, I have been treating my novel less like a work of art with an independent internal logic, and more like a self-administered version of the Rorschach Test. Oh no, Prue is taking her clothes off and Ada is smoking crack–what an insane person I must be, to think this up! I had better stay home and shut up before I spread my inescapable cloud of melancholy over all these poor souls who need a book with a happy ending to lead them to Jesus.

If art is not therapy, neither is it the gospel. The Jesus in my novel is not the real Jesus, and any characters who may (despite their best efforts) get saved are not real people. Their salvation or lack thereof has no bearing on my own. To the extent that I forgot this, I began to fear that I would never see God face to face, because I was looking for Him in a place where only His shadow is visible. Contra Marianne Moore, there are no imaginary gardens with real toads in them. However, there are real gardens.

What is left, then, of my vocation to be a Christian artist? To treat art more like the other activities in my life, like baking cookies or updating the Winning Writers database. It’s something I do while being a Christian, but it’s not the arena in which my spiritual fitness is proved or disproved. As the gospel song says, “The old account was settled long ago.” The challenge I must take on is not how to preach through my art, but how to let my art be itself. Just itself, not a substitute for prayer, evangelism, self-worth, or confronting actual sources of suffering that I learned to palliate with imaginative escape when I lacked the power to change my circumstances.

Dan Bellm: “Practice”


Dan Bellm is the author of the poetry collections One Hand on the Wheel (Roundhouse Press, 1999), Buried Treasure (Cleveland State University Press, 1999), and Practice: A book of midrash (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008). His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (Talisman House Publications, 2000) and The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004 (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). He has kindly given me permission to reprint the title poem from his new book below. I discovered Bellm through Image Update, the e-newsletter of the literary journal Image, which has an excellent review of Practice here.

Practice


Every seventh year you shall practice remission of debts.
Deuteronomy 15:1
How simple it ought to be, to practice compassion
on someone gone, even love him, long as he’s not
right there in front of me, for I turned to address him,
as I do, and saw that no one’s lived in that spot
for quite some time. O turner-away of prayer—
not much of a God, but he was never meant to be.
For the seventh time I light him a candle; an entire
evening and morning it burns; not a light to see
by, more a reminder of light, a remainder, in a glass
with a prayer on the label and a bar code from the store.
How can he go on? He can’t. Then let him pass
away; he gave what light he could. What more
will I claim, what debt of grace he doesn’t owe?
If I forgive him, he is free to go.

Re’eh, Deuteronomy 11:16–16:17


Read more of Dan Bellm’s poetry online at PoetryMagazine.com.

Book Notes: Undergoing God


A rarity among Christian apologists, gay Catholic theologian James Alison combines intellectual sophistication with personal vulnerability and sincerity, leaving the reader with the impression that he has truly staked his life on the beliefs he expounds. 

Alison is one of those authors whose writings all spring from a central idea. In his case, the idea is that we fallen human beings try to shore up our selfhood by defining ourselves against a scapegoated group, but Christ voluntarily took on the scapegoat role we are all trying to avoid, and thereby gave us a new identity as the people whom God loves. All comparisons among ourselves are revealed as idolatrous and insubstantial compared to our universal sinfulness vis-a-vis Christ, whose love gives us the courage to face this reality and not be undone by it.

In Undergoing God, a collection of Alison’s recent essays and lectures, he applies this paradigm to the controversy over gays and the church. A few of these essays are available on his website.

Below are some quotes from one of my favorites, “Wrath and the gay question: on not being afraid, and its ecclesial shape”. This piece, not included in the book, is a good introduction to his thought. Alison argues that both liberal and fundamentalist Christians wrongly pride themselves on their attitude toward the gay and lesbian “difference”. The truly Christian response would be to recognize our common humanity and deconstruct all conceptual schemes that make our goodness dependent on the creation of an Other, whether we affirm that Other or condemn him.


…I would like to trace with you the way in which there is both no violence in Christ, and yet the result of his coming includes violence. To trace the process by which “the wrath of God”, something literally attributed to the divinity in parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, becomes the anthropological reality known to Paul as “wrath”, and can even be referred to as “the wrath of the Lamb”.

Let me give you some background: in a classic lynch murder, such as that described in Joshua 7, where “All Israel” gathers against Achan and “stones him with stones”, the wrath of God is simply, and straightforwardly associated with the group’s loss of morale, and the subsequent build up to anger which turns them into a lynch mob. First the anger of God is detected in the collapse of morale, the melting hearts, of the sons of Israel who have just undergone a minor military defeat. So God provides Joshua with a lottery to determine at whose door responsibility for the defeat should be laid. When the lottery achieves its purpose of finding a suitable culprit, all Israel discharges stones, murdering Achan. In their very act of ganging up together, unanimously, against poor Achan, of whose guilt they convince themselves through the liturgical mechanism of the lottery, they create peace among themselves. And in that very moment when their stones are all discharged, then “the Lord turned from his burning anger” (Joshua 7, 26). Of course he did: the shifting patterns of fear and mutual recrimination which had riven the people have been overcome by their triumphant and enthusiastic unanimity. From their perspective it feels as though “peace has been given them”. This is, in fact, peace, in the way the world gives it, the peace which comes from unanimity in righteous hatred of an evildoer. But it is misperceived by the participants as peace flowing from the divinity thanks to the right sacrifice having been offered.

The power of this experience is very real, and can still be detected when human lynching has found its substitute in animal sacrifice. It appears that the role of the priest in early forms of atonement sacrifice was to cover the participants with the blood of the animal so as to protect people from the wrath. It was as though the blood sprinkled over them wove a huge protective covering against wrath. The Hebrew letters כפר from which we get “Yom Kippur” and our word “atonement” designate a form of covering. It does not take a huge stretch of the imagination to see that the freedom from wrath which came with the successful production of unanimity in the murdering of a victim, and which probably involved the participants being splattered with blood, could then be reproduced liturgically. The priest slaughters the animal, sacrificing it to the divinity, and then sprinkles the blood over the people, unanimously gathered to receive the fruits of the sacrifice. In the liturgical unanimity that occurs under the cover of the blood, the assuaging of the wrath is remembered and made newly present.

Interestingly, Israel does not seem to have stuck only with this model of sacrifice, but also had the very special Day of Atonement sacrifice where it was YHWH himself, through the High Priest, acting “in personam Yahveh”, who offered his own blood, symbolized by a lamb, for the people, who were then covered with it, this blood being taken to restore creation from the various forms of ensnarlments with which humans had distorted it. Here we begin to glimpse the notion of the victim performing the sacrifice for the people which will be brought to fulfilment in the New Testament….

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…[Jesus] gives himself to the sacrificial mechanism in a way which the Gospel writers point to as being the way proper to the great High Priest, and he becomes the lamb of sacrifice. In fact, he reverses the normal human sacrificial system which started with human sacrifice and then is later modified to work with animal substitutes. Jesus, by contrast, substitutes himself for the lamb, portions of whose body were handed out to the priests; and thus by putting a human back at the centre of the sacrificial system, he reveals it for what it is: a murder.

Now here is the curious thing. It looks for all the world as though Jesus is simply fitting into the ancient world’s views about sacrifice and wrath. But in fact, he is doing exactly the reverse. Because he is giving himself to this being murdered, and he has done nothing wrong, he brings about an entirely new way to be free from wrath. This is not the way we saw with Achan, where the temporary freedom from wrath comes with the outbreak of unanimous violence which creates singleness of heart among the group. What Jesus has done by substituting himself for the victim at the centre of the lynch sacrifice is to make it possible for those who perceive his innocence, to realise what it is in which they have been involved (and agreeing to drink his blood presupposes a recognition of this complicity). These then begin to have their identity given them not by the group over against the victim, but by the self-giving victim who is undoing the unanimity of the group. This means that from then on they never again have to be involved in sacrifices, sacrificial mechanisms and all the games of “wrath” which every culture throws up. They will be learning to walk away from all that, undergoing being given the peace that the world does not give.

So, there is no wrath at all in what Jesus is doing. He understands perfectly well that there is no wrath in the Father, and yet that “wrath” is a very real anthropological reality, whose cup he will drink to its dregs. His Passion consists, in fact, of his moving slowly, obediently, and deliberately into the place of shame, the place of wrath, and doing so freely and without provoking it. However, from the perspective of the wrathful, that is, of all of us run by the mechanisms of identity building, peace building, unanimity building “over against” another, Jesus has done something terrible. Exactly as he warned. He has plunged us into irresoluble wrath. Because he has made it impossible for us ever really to believe in what we are doing when we sacrifice, when we shore up our social belonging against some other. All our desperate attempts to continue doing that are revealed to be what they are: just so much angry frustration, going nowhere at all, spinning the wheels of futility.

The reason is this: the moment we perceive that the one occupying the central space in our system of creating and shoring up meaning is actually innocent, actually gave himself to be in that space, then all our sacred mechanisms for shoring up law and order, sacred differences and so forth, are revealed to be the fruits of an enormous self-deception. The whole world of the sacred totters, tumbles, and falls if we see that this human being is just like us. He came to occupy the place of the sacrificial victim entirely freely, voluntarily, and without any taint of being “run” by, or beholden to, the sacrificial system. That is, he is one who was without sin. This human being was doing something for us even while we were so locked into a sacrificial way of thinking and behaviour that we couldn’t possibly have understood what he was doing for us, let alone asked him to do it. The world of the sacred totters and falls because when we see someone who is like us doing that for us, and realise what has been done, the shape that our realisation takes is our moving away from ever being involved in such things again.

Now what is terrible about this is that it makes it impossible for us really to bring about with a good conscience any of the sacred resolutions, the sacrificial decisions which brought us, and bring all societies, comparative peace and order. The game is up. And so human desire, rivalry, competition, which had previously been kept in some sort of check by a system of prohibitions, rituals, sacrifices and myths, lest human groups collapse in perpetual and irresoluble mutual vengeance, can no lo
nger be controlled in this way. This is the sense in which Jesus’ coming brings not peace to the earth, but a sword and division. All the sacred structures which hold groups together start to collapse, because desire has been unleashed. So the sacred bonds within families are weakened, different generations will be run by different worlds, give their loyalty to different and incompatible causes, the pattern of desire constantly shifting. All in fact will be afloat on a sea of wrath, because the traditional means to curb wrath, the creation by sacrifice of spaces of temporary peace within the group, has been undone forever. The only alternative is to undergo the forgiveness which comes from the lamb, and start to find oneself recreated from within by a peace which is not from this world, and involves learning how to resist the evil one by not resisting evil. This means: you effectively resist, have no part in, the structures and flows of desire which are synonymous with the prince of this world, that is to say with the world of wrath, only by refusing to acquire an identity over against evil-done-to you.

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…[O]ne of the symptoms of “wrath” in our world, and it is indeed only one of the symptoms, and a comparatively unimportant one at that, is the emergence in the midst of all of our societies, whether we like it or not, of the gay question.

It is also obvious that one of the ways of dealing with this is to attempt to come up with some such formula as “look, we’re discovering that people we used to regard as weird and even evil are just different. But since they are functional to the way modern society works, just as we are, let us learn to live with our difference”. The key phrase here is “they are functional to the way modern society works, just as we are”. And this means that it is modern society, its structures of desire and survival, which get to run the show, because it is modern social structures, and their financial and corporate systems which get to determine what “likeness” is. And this means the “living with difference” isn’t really living with difference at all. It is really living with a sameness which is dictated by certain patterns of desire. And part of the way we protect ourselves against having to take seriously whether these patterns of desire really come from God, or are the pomps and splendours of this world, is by having decorative “difference” in the midst of all this sameness, and feeling proud of ourselves for being so broad-minded.

Well, I want to say: No! I am not at all interested in being given a post-modern identity which is in fact merely functional to the particular shape of wrath in our time. I am interested in becoming a son and heir to the whole of creation through the arduous discovery of my likeness with my sisters and brothers. I understand how it is one of the delusions of wrath that it is able to point to the growing visibility and public and legal acceptability of gay people and their lives and relationships and see this as an attack on the “family” and the “divinely given order of society”. But it is a delusion of wrath, like that of the Venetians against Shylock, because all it does is disguise from all of us quite how much the unleashing of desire which continues apace in our world, our capitalist, globalizing, technological world, does in fact subvert from within and change every form of relationship, including family relationships. It disguises from us how much we are all already run by these things, and how arduous it is for any of us to receive holiness of life, of desire, and of relationships in the midst of all this. And it sets things up for us to fight about this, rather than to help each other out of the hole.

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…[W]hat Jesus is doing is very especially occupying the place of shame, and of wrath. And he is doing so in such a way as to detoxify it for ever. When he pronounces himself the Gate of the Sheep, he is referring to the gate by which sheep were led into the temple for slaughter. He indicates that the Good Shepherd does what the shepherds of Israel never did: he goes in as a sheep with the sheep into the sacrificial space. They are not frightened of him since they recognise that he is the same as them. The Shepherd is thus able to lead the sheep in and out to find pasture, something previously impossible. No one ever led sheep out from the Temple abattoir. It was as one-way a track as the railway line to Treblinka. Only one who was not affected by death could lead sheep in and out of the place of shame, wrath and sacrifice, so as to find pasture. So by himself becoming the abattoir door, the Shepherd makes the sacrificial space no longer a dead end, no longer a trap. He even points out how different this is from the thieves and hirelings, easily recognisable ways of referring to the religious and political leaders who ran the Temple and the system of goodness. Such leaders never went into the Temple through the abattoir door, but rather through another way, and then from above, they took the sheep for sacrificial slaughter (θύσῃ, John 10,10). But when there was any real religious crisis, whenever wrath threatened, or the wolf came, they could be guaranteed not to stand up for their sheep, not to dare to go through the same door as they insisted the sheep go, but rather to flee and leave the sheep to be scattered and the prey of every wild beast. And this of course is true of any system of goodness to this day, such as the ones which give sustenance to those of us who are “religious professionals”.

Well it seems to me that what Jesus is doing in “going to his Father”, “going to Death”, “occupying the space of shame and of wrath”, being both Shepherd and Abattoir door, is making the place of shame, of wrath, and of sacrifice into a pasture. And that means a place where we can be nourished, find wholeness, health and story to live by. The giving to us of the Holy Spirit is then the giving to us of the whole dynamic, the whole power, by which Jesus was able to occupy this place of annihilation, shame and wrath without being run by it. And this does seem to me something very powerful for gay and lesbian people. I wonder whether our ability to be able to sing one of Sion’s songs, to find that in our hearts are the highways to Zion (Psalm 84, 5) does not at the moment pass through our ability to be able to occupy the place of shame without being run by it.

This is a difficult notion, since shame produces flight. To be able to live in the midst of shame, by which I mean of course the space of shame which has for so long been so toxic, without being run by it may turn out to be a hugely positive feat. This is the space where, because one no longer has anything to lose, is no longer frightened, knows that the only thing left that they can take away is your life, and that is already in the hands of Another, because of all this, one can develop a tender regard for those who are like one, and a tender regard leads to a creative imagination, and a playful generosity of heart.

This is where I suspect that the Holy Spirit may be beginning to produce gay and lesbian stories which will turn out to be irrefutably Christian. Where Jesus has made us not ashamed and not frightened of occupying the space of shame. Where he has enabled us no longer to be run by the wrath which has so defined us in past generations, there we will be able to discover our likeness with those others who have needed us to occupy that position because it is the only way they think they can keep wrath at bay.

You see, I’m not sure that anything, any power at all can resist shame held delicately in tenderness. And I’m not sure that anyone can predict what creativity, gifts and life will emerge from such a peaceful place.

Trans Pride Tomorrow and Other News


The first-ever New England Transgender Pride March and Rally will be held tomorrow at 11 AM in our very own Northampton, Mass. From the TransPrideMarch website:


The event is organized by members of the trans and gender variant community, and their allies, with the intent of taking a visible and positive stand for transgender rights. The March and Rally is dedicated to diverse representation among organizers and participants. We seek to educate and build awareness of the movement against gender-based discrimination.

Come join MassEquality in gathering petition signatures urging our state legislators to support HB 1722, an amendment to the Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws that would add protections for gender identity and expression.

In other news:

*Kittredge Cherry’s groundbreaking book Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ and More was one of five Lambda Literary Awards nominees in the LGBT Arts and Culture category. See a video of her reading from the book and telling some of the artists’ stories here.

*Soulforce has made their popular pamphlet “What the Bible Says – And Doesn’t Say – About Homosexuality” available online for free. Some key insights from Rev. Mel White:


Even heroes of the Christian faith have changed their minds about the meaning of various biblical texts.

It took a blinding light and a voice from heaven to help the apostle Paul change his mind about certain Hebrew texts. A sheet lowered from the sky filled with all kinds of animals helped the apostle Peter gain new insights into Jewish law.

Jerry Falwell believed the Bible supported segregation in the church until a black shoeshine man asked him, “When will someone like me be allowed to become a member of your congregation?” Through those simple words, the Holy Spirit spoke new truth about the ancient biblical texts to the Rev. Falwell, and in obedience he ended segregation at Thomas Road Baptist Church.

Even when we believe the Scriptures are “infallible” or “without error,” it’s terribly dangerous to think that our understanding of every biblical text is also without error. We are human. We are fallible. And we can misunderstand and misinterpret these ancient words — with tragic results.
…

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[The story of Sodom]…is not primarily about sex. It is primarily about God. Some people say the city of Sodom was destroyed because it was overrun by sexually obsessed homosexuals. In fact, the city of Sodom had been doomed to destruction long before. So what is this passage really about?

Jesus and five Old Testament prophets all speak of the sins that led to the destruction of Sodom — and not one of them mentions homosexuality. Even Billy Graham doesn’t mention homosexuality when he preaches on Sodom.

Listen to what Ezekiel 16:48-49 tell us: “This is the sin of Sodom; she and her suburbs had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not help or encourage the poor and needy. They were arrogant and this was abominable in God’s eyes.”…

Whatever teaching about sexuality you might get out of this passage, be sure to hear this central, primary truth about God as well. God has called us do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our Creator. Sodom was destroyed because its people didn’t take God seriously about caring for the poor, the hungry, the homeless, or the outcast.

But what does the story of Sodom say about homosexual orientation as we understand it today? Nothing.

It was common for soldiers, thieves, and bullies to rape a fallen enemy, asserting their victory by dehumanizing and demeaning the vanquished. This act of raping an enemy is about power and revenge, not about homosexuality or homosexual orientation. And it is still happening.

In August 1997, Abner Louima, a young black immigrant from Haiti, was assaulted by several police officers after he was arrested in Brooklyn. Officer Charles Schwarz held Louima down in a restroom at the precinct, while Officer Justin Volpe rammed a broken stick into Louima’s rectum. These two men and the three other officers involved in this incident and its cover-up were not gay. This was not a homosexual act. It was about power.

The sexual act that occurs in the story of Sodom is a gang rape — and homosexuals oppose gang rape as much as anyone. That’s why I believe the story of Sodom says a lot about God’s will for each of us, but nothing about homosexuality as we understand it today.
…

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[Discussing 1 Cor 6:9 and 1 Tim 1:10] …To remind the churches in Corinth and Ephesus how God wants us to treat one another, Paul recites examples from the Jewish law first. Don’t kill one another. Don’t sleep with a person who is married to someone else. Don’t lie or cheat or steal. The list goes on to include admonitions against fornication, idolatry, whoremongering, perjury, drunkenness, revelry, and extortion. He also includes “malokois” and “arsenokoitai.”

Here’s where the confusion begins. What’s a malokois? What’s an arsenokoitai? Actually, those two Greek words have confused scholars to this very day. We’ll say more about them later, when we ask what the texts say about sex. But first let’s see what the texts say about God.

After quoting from the Jewish law, Paul reminds the Christians in Corinth that they are under a new law: the law of Jesus, a law of love that requires us to do more than just avoid murder, adultery, lying, cheating, and stealing. Paul tells them what God wants is not strict adherence to a list of laws, but a pure heart, a good conscience, and a faith that isn’t phony.

That’s the lesson we all need to learn from these texts. God doesn’t want us squabbling over who is “in” and who is “out.” God wants us to love one another. It’s God’s task to judge us. It is NOT our task to judge one another.

So what do these two texts say about homosexuality? Are gays and lesbians on that list of sinners in the Jewish law that Paul quotes to make an entirely different point?

Greek scholars say that in first century the Greek word malaokois probably meant “effeminate call boys.” The New Revised Standard Version says “male prostitutes.”

As for arsenokoitai, Greek scholars don’t know exactly what it means — and the fact that we don’t know is a big part of this tragic debate. Some scholars believe Paul was coining a name to refer to the customers of “the effeminate call boys.” We might call them “dirty old men.” Others translate the word as “sodomites,” but never explain what that means.

In 1958, for the first time in history, a person translating that mysterious Greek word into English decided it meant homosexuals, even though there is, in fact, no such word in Greek or Hebrew. But that translator made the decision for all of us that placed the word homosexual in the English-language Bible for the very first time.

In the past, people used Paul’s writings to support slavery, segregation, and apartheid. People still use Paul’s writings to oppress women and limit their role in the home, in church, and in society.

Now we have to ask ourselves, “Is it happening again?” Is a word in Greek that has no clear definition being used to reflect society’s prejudice and condemn God’s gay children?

We all need to look more closely at that mysterious Greek word arsenokoitai in its original context. I find most convincing the argument from history that Paul is condemning the married men who hired hairless young boys (malakois) for sexual pleasure just as they hired smooth-skinned young girls for that purpose.

Responsible homosexuals would join Paul in condemning anyone who uses children for sex, just as we would join anyone else in condemning the threatened gang rape in Sodom or the behavior of the sex-crazed priests and priestesses in Rome. So, once again, I am convinced that this passage says a lot about God, but nothing about homosexuality as we understand it today.

Read the whole piece here. The companion pamphlet “What the Science Says – And Doesn’t Say – About Homosexuality”, by Soulforce Executive Director Jeff Lutes, is also now available online.

Pride Month at Reiter’s Block

June is Gay-Lesbian-Bi-Transgender Pride Month. Why do I care? Perhaps some of you have been wondering why a straight, married woman has such a queer blog. There are several reasons why this issue has become my particular passion.

On a personal level, I was parented by two women, and experienced firsthand how homophobia among our relatives and neighbors cut us off from an essential support network. When you can’t even admit that you are a family, you can’t ask your teachers or friends for help with family problems, which then are compounded by shame and isolation. Growing up with two very different women also taught me that there were diverse ways of being female. You could wear eyeshadow and long flowing blouses, read Victorian children’s stories, pretend to be a flamenco dancer, and swear like a longshoreman. You could wear motorcycle jackets, pump your biceps, and cook gourmet French meals. So naturally, at the age of six, I decided I wanted to be a pirate king. I still do.

There’s a scene in the Quentin Crisp bio-pic “The Naked Civil Servant” where an army recruiting officer is haranguing the young cross-dresser with the verse from Genesis, “Male and female created He them.” John Hurt, as Quentin, responds with an unflappable smile, “Male and female created He me.”

That’s how I feel, as an artist and a person who happens to have two X chromosomes. Until I discovered the notion of gender as performance, I thought I was an inadequate woman because none of the standard feminine archetypes fit me comfortably. Or rather, they all fit somewhat, and I didn’t want to choose between them. (This explains why my wardrobe is half man-tailored striped shirts and half hot-pink spandex.) Little princess, country wife, brainy girl, sexpot, corporate bitch. They’re all fun part-time, impossibly confining otherwise. Gender is like genre. When we live in subjection to a formula, it makes our art untrue.

Actually, before I got married and started using my body for something other than getting from place to place, most of the time I wanted the world to engage with me as pure mind, pure personality, a unique individual rather than a sexual stereotype. In other words, I wanted to be…a man. (Yeah, I blame the patriarchy. But it makes me hot, too.)

The point is, each of us is far more complex than a binary opposition or a set of costumes. It’s a lucky accident that I, being attracted to men, wound up in a female body. For the most part, our society now recognizes that such accidents should not determine whether I can go to school, give testimony in court, own property, or hold a job. Surely the opportunity to love another person, and seek social support to keep that love faithful and healthy, is more important than any of these.

So GLBT issues are my issues, as a subset of the feminist project of setting both men and women (and everyone in-between) free to relate to one another as fully human individuals, not as projections of a dominant group’s fears and fantasies.

My most important reason, however, is theological. Christian opposition to gay relationships is founded on a way of reading the Bible that I find legalistic and self-deceptive, with consequences that go far beyond this issue.

Let me say that I know devout Christians who are on the other side of this debate, who bear no hostility toward GLBT people and are genuinely pained that they have to preach the hard word of self-sacrifice and celibacy to this community. Liberal rhetoric about “compassion” and “fairness” misses the point because conservatives rightly elevate the Bible above secular political values. The latter group of Christians are also trying to be compassionate and fair, at least sometimes, but they’re convinced that their reading of texts like Romans 1:26-27 is the only one that properly maintains the Bible’s authority.

In practice, however, this means shielding the Bible from outside information (historical, scientific, literary, or psychological) that might force us to reinterpret the apparently “plain” meaning of the text. Information such as: Are today’s gay and lesbian partnerships different from the same-sex practices St. Paul was criticizing–as different, in some cases, as today’s heterosexual marriage is from prostitution and child abuse? From a Christian standpoint, is the relevant fact about Hellenistic sexual practices the gender of the participants, or their unequal power relations and connection to idol worship? If St. Paul condemned these acts because the science of his day considered them “unnatural”, should we change our valuation based on the growing evidence that homosexuality is an inborn and unchangeable trait, not a mere lifestyle choice?

Conservatives fear that these other sources of knowledge will displace the Bible, such that we begin judging and rejecting Christian beliefs based on their conformity to some secular ideology, rather than a Christ-centered worldview. As the spread of Enlightenment skepticism into liberal churches shows, this fear has some foundation.

However, the so-called literal interpretation is no less based on empirical data not found in the Bible–everything we know, or think we know, about the situations to which the Bible is being applied. There is no interpretive formula that can magically elevate the Bible to a pristine ahistorical position above the risks and responsibilities of applying it to an ever-changing and mysterious world. To believe otherwise is an insidious form of being our own savior, thinking we can get it right once and for all, and never have to listen to the Holy Spirit again.

By refusing to take in any wisdom from our own cultural moment, however imperfect (like all cultural moments) it may be, we only end up idolizing the cultural moment of 2,000 years ago, including all its scientific mistakes and arbitrary prejudices. Human history didn’t end there. Perhaps God had a good reason for that?

I recently took a psychological evaluation true-false test on which one of the questions was, “I know who is responsible for all my problems.” (The fact that I giggled at this one will probably count against my sanity assessment.) Something in our status-conscious primate brain is powerfully attracted to this statement. As theologian James Alison has written, the Christian message of universal sinfulness and unmerited grace constantly chafes against our instinct to shore up our selfhood by choosing a scapegoat. Jesus became the ultimate scapegoat in order to relativize all these systems of dominance. Compared to the gap between his perfect innocence and our culpability, any distinctions of merit among us are trivial. By forgiving us, he gives us a significance more real than anything we could establish by comparing ourselves to others. And that, my friends, is what upholds the authority of the Bible. Jesus–nothing more and nothing less.

Don’t Take Your Breasts to Church


Clothing signifies who we think we are and where we belong in the social order, so it’s no wonder that religious communities have long been preoccupied with dress codes. While I do believe there is such a thing as dressing appropriately for an occasion, I struggle with how that issue becomes entangled with policing women’s sexuality.

To put it bluntly, women’s clothes are sexually coded in a way that men’s are not. Outside of beaches and nightclubs, men rarely wear anything provocative or revealing when they want to dress up. Men can wear a straightforward, professional suit to any special occasion, without worrying that they are sending the signal that they no longer think of themselves as young and desirable.

By contrast, women’s formal wear is all about sexual display. High heels, short skirts, makeup, low cleavage, rich fabrics, and form-fitting clothing are meant to show that a woman is toned, young, sexually confident and worth looking at.

Standards are also more lenient for men. Basically, all they have to do is shave, put on a clean shirt with no logos on it and match their socks correctly, and their wives and mothers breathe a sigh of relief as they settle into the pews.

Women’s clothing involves many more subtle, confusing gradations of formality, trendiness and sensuality. This variety certainly makes it more fun as a potential vehicle for self-expression, but it also opens us up to be judged more harshly according to ever-shifting standards. 

Mixed messages about our clothing reflect the culture’s difficulty integrating the spiritual, physical and emotional aspects of womanhood. We learn, through the fashion choices available to us and their representation in the media, that being a strong, vital, self-confident woman includes proudly expressing our sexual nature. But suddenly, when we arrive in church, people have a whole lot of opinions about whether our lipstick is too red or our neckline is too low.

This can feel like a commentary on more than our fashion sense. In a cultural context where our strength, our value and our sexuality are enmeshed, unequal scrutiny of male and female fashions makes me worry that I’m capitulating to patriarchal theology when I put on a long skirt to visit my friend’s evangelical church. I just want to hear the gospel. Leave my ankles out of it.

Some of us, thanks to God and Herrell’s Ice Cream, are built such that anything tighter than a muu-muu will look provocative. I spent too much of my adolescence wearing granny dresses because I was afraid to attract sexual attention from rude, immature boys. Around my peers, who were sexually precocious and dressed accordingly, I felt like a little girl among grown-ups. No matter how smart you are, no one takes you seriously in Laura Ashley. You’re quaint, like a parrot who can sing the Marseillaise.

Now I’m a mature woman and I want to dress like one. This includes choosing clothes that flatter my figure and express my physical confidence. High-necked shirts make me look like a sack of potatoes. Beyond that, it takes a lot of effort to find age-appropriate, non-frilly clothing that would satisfy the conservative Christian dress code. A woman in her thirties who wears mother-of-the-bride dresses is sending a strong signal that she understands herself to be too old or too shy to be thought of as a sexual being. My booty is not ready for the rocking chair.

Meanwhile, in my liberal church–of course!–anything goes. Do I wish the teenage acolytes wouldn’t wear sneakers under their robes? Sadly, I do. Church clothes should be different from casual clothes for the same reason that the priest wears vestments: to demarcate a sacred time and place, set apart from the world’s business. Am I upset that the tanned, toned young girls sport belly-baring shirts? Only because I’m jealous that I didn’t look like that at their age, and now it would be ridiculous.

Women, let’s be honest about our anxieties about other women’s clothing. This is an area of competition for us. Sexuality is often a proxy for status, authenticity, and confidence. Some of us might like church to be a “safe space” where we get a break from fearing that someone else looks stronger, younger, or more successful. But such judgments can make the space feel unsafe for other women who find interpretations placed on their clothing against their will.

I don’t have a simple rule to solve this problem. Some would say that a certain dress code is part of the package, and if you don’t like it, don’t go to that church. Personally, I don’t see what sola scriptura has to do with polyester print dresses. We give in too easily to the cultural captivity of the gospel. Can we find a way to preserve the reverence of “putting on our Sunday best” while being critically aware of unequal pressures on men and women?

Sponsor Soulforce’s American Family Outing


Soulforce, the nonviolent activist group that advocates for gay and lesbian equality in religious communities, is sending out 21 GLBT families to tell their stories to religious leaders at six leading mega-churches:

Rev. Joel Osteen and the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas
Bishop T.D. Jakes and The Potter’s House in Dallas, Texas
Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr. and Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland
Bishop Eddie Long and New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia
Rev. Bill Hybels and Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois
Dr. Rick Warren and Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California

Each family has pledged to raise $2,000 to visit these churches between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Most still have only a few hundred dollars, so your contribution will make a difference. Soulforce families include a mother and her FTM transgender son, a straight couple who have joined the movement to support their GLBT friends, and several gay and lesbian couples with adopted children. Their profiles contain inspiring stories of how they reconcile faith and sexuality. Steve Parelli and Jose Ortiz, for example, were evangelical ministers who met during unsuccessful “ex-gay” therapy. They write:


We believe that evangelical gay Christians have a real message to the church at large: whatever Paul is talking about in Romans 1, it isn’t us. John Wesley of the 18th century taught that the Christian’s authority is based on the (1) scriptures, (2) tradition, (3) reason and (4) experience, and that whenever accepted reason and general experience show one’s interpretation of a passage of scripture to be very unlikely, that one’s interpretation is to be called into question rather than the collective experience of the human race. Unfortunately, evangelicalism of the 20th century has put such a premium on scripture it has perhaps failed to see the significance of reason and experience.

We purpose to lovingly and patiently ask the church to recover Wesley’s principles of reason and experience, and in doing so, to give us audience enough to hear our sacred journey and process by which we dared to question centuries-old accepted norms through reasoning and experience.

While you have your checkbooks out, consider these facts from a recent Human Rights Campaign mailing:

Florida is considering a ballot measure to enact a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality, civil unions and domestic partnerships for same-sex couples.

Arkansas is considering a ballot measure to ban adoption and foster parenting for unmarried, cohabiting couples, both gay and straight.

Tennessee’s legislature is debating a bill similar to the Arkansas initiative, as well as a bill that would prohibit discussion of homosexuality in public schools until ninth grade.

Find out more about current and pending laws in your state here.

Open Questions About Open Communion


A couple of years ago, my church switched from “all baptized Christians” to “all those worshipping with us” being invited to receive the sacraments, a practice that I hear is not uncommon among liberal churches. This change upset some traditionalists while making others, including my multi-religious family, feel more welcome. I’m content with the current policy, though I wouldn’t be offended if they invited non-Christians to receive a blessing at the altar rail instead.

My personal opinion about communion is similar to how I feel about premarital sex: It’s important to reserve certain intimate acts for a fully committed relationship so that those vows represent a real life change and not a mere formality. However, it’s hard to point this out to someone without shaming them in a way that is worse than the original offense. A public distinction between people (like not inviting your daughter’s live-in boyfriend to Christmas dinner) is less defensible than a private word spoken in love.

Bryan at Creedal Christian has posted a thoughtful defense of closed communion that’s got me wondering about different theories of the sacraments and what they imply for salvation. Bryan writes:


My concerns about violating Church teaching, breaking ordination vows, and making discipleship optional derive from my principal concern that this new theology moves us away from an objective understanding of Baptism to a subjective understanding. On the objective theology of Baptism, here’s what the Prayer Book succinctly says:

“Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church. The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble” (BCP, p. 298).

It’s difficult to imagine a clearer affirmation that Baptism objectively makes persons full members of the Church than this. And the implications of the “indissoluble bond” created by God in Baptism are far-reaching. No matter what I do or fail to do – no matter how far away from the fold I may drift – the “yes” that God says to me in Baptism never changes to a “no.” I can always return home, where the father will come running out to meet, embrace, kiss, and welcome me back.

That’s powerful stuff. But since its core meaning derives from Baptism and not from the Eucharist, the baptismal theology of membership and of the “indissoluble bond” are put in peril by the new theology of “inclusiveness” that shifts the locus away from Baptism to the Eucharistic table.

Among other implications, the theology of communion for the unbaptized means that Baptism as the sacramental foundation of the Church gets replaced by the individual’s desire to receive Communion as the ‘sacramental’ foundation of the Church. This signifies a virtually wholesale adoption of a ‘consumerist’ ecclesiology that turns the 1979 Prayer Book on its head. Instead of being primarily about what God does, the new theology is about what the individual human being does. It’s about what I choose and what I desire. Shifting the locus away from the “indissoluble bond” of Baptism to the individual subject’s desires, we can no longer speak (as we do when introducing the Apostles’ Creed in the burial office) of “the assurance of eternal life given at Baptism” (BCP, p. 496). The only assurance we have is what I happen to want right now.


Without pretending to understand how it “works”, I lean toward a strong theory of the sacraments as conveying God’s real presence, as opposed to a mere symbol. In our materialistic age, to say that something only happens in the mind is the first step toward letting it become unreal and irrelevant. I need a startling reminder that God can be as present to our bodies as He is to our minds. The plausibility of the Incarnation is continually refreshed when we are shown that God works this way all the time, infusing the finite with the infinite, bridging the gap between matter and spirit.


However, when we consider baptism as a similarly objective operation, making us “sealed as Christ’s own forever” no matter what we do, are we endorsing a magic-ritual theory of salvation? Is it impossible to “lose” your salvation because the water sprinkled on your forehead had objective power apart from the vagaries of your current desires? I’m more convinced by C.S. Lewis’ argument that heaven and hell are states of being (closeness or estrangement from God) arising from the daily choices that shape our character. I suspect most Episcopalians would agree, to the extent that they believe in hell at all.

Somewhat inconsistently, evangelical Protestants who believe baptism is the dividing line between heaven-bound and hell-bound also have a low-church view of the sacraments as mere symbols of fellowship. Now I am really confused.

I’m being a little unfair to Bryan, since his post wasn’t focused on soteriology, but I’d like to know what baptism “does”, in an Episcopal theology of the sacraments, beyond making the individual believer feel subjectively committed to Christ. As a practical matter, any church that’s going to re-close its communion table will have to explain this to the congregation.

What to Do When Your Glasses Break


My beloved, unstylishly large eyeglasses went kaput this week, after 10 years of faithful service. Since without them I am as blind as Mr. Magoo, I put on my driving glasses and headed to the eye doctor for a long-overdue checkup and a new prescription. I’m not sure what she said after “As you get closer to age 40…” (the very thought induced brain freeze) but the upshot was, I bought a lovely pair of Armani frames, then spent the afternoon on the couch in a darkened room waiting for my eyes to un-dilate.

Cut off from my usual sources of entertainment, I searched the Internet for someone to “tell me the story of Jesus”. If you’re ever in a similar predicament, start with the Coffee Cup Apologetics podcasts at the Internet Monk’s blog. His conversational musings take a little while to get to the theological heart of the matter, but there’s always a memorable original insight to take away. Recent topics include the New Atheists (Dawkins et al.) and what it means to be post-evangelical.

Then I headed over to God’s iPod for a sermon by Rob Bell of Mars Hill Church. Just as in his book Velvet Elvis, his preaching includes a great deal of economic, social and religious background information to show how Jesus’ parables would have resonated with his audience, yet his style is down-to-earth and approachable, not academic.

Still on my to-do list: check out the Charles Spurgeon sermons dramatized by Charles Koelsch on the Spurgeon Audio Page.

The Good Thief’s Penance


Bryan at Creedal Christian has posted this meditation from the late Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (Bloom) that I hope to remember whenever I feel ensnared in persistent sins:


So often we ask ourselves and one another a very tormenting question: How can I deal with my sinful condition? What can I do? I cannot avoid committing sins, Christ alone is sinless. I cannot, for lack of determination, or courage, or ability truly repent when I do commit a sin, or in general, of my sinful condition. What is left to me? I am tormented, I fight like one drowning, and I see no solution.

And there is a word which was spoken once by a Russian staretz, one of the last elders of Optina. He said to a visitor of his: No one can live without sin, few know how to repent in such a way that their sins are washed as white as fleece. But there is one thing which we all can do: when we can neither avoid sin, nor repent truly, we can then bear the burden of sin, bear it patiently, bear it with pain, bear it without doing anything to avoid the pain and the agony of it, bear it as one would bear a cross, — not Christ’s cross, not the cross of true discipleship, but the cross of the thief who was crucified next to Him. Didn’t the thief say to his companion who was blaspheming the Lord: We are enduring because we have committed crimes; He endures sinlessly… And it is to him, because he had accepted the punishment, the pain, the agony, the consequences indeed of evil he had committed, of being the man he was, that Christ said, ‘Thou shalt be with Me today in Paradise…’

Read the whole post here.