In today’s blog post, Andrew Brown, a religion columnist for Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, makes a pithy case for why Christians should support gay marriage. Brown deftly avoids both the liberal fallacy that sex between consenting adults has no public moral dimension, and the conservative fallacy that gays are just disordered straight people.
Brown observes that before the issue was forced into the open, the Church of England quietly ordained gay men who were in stable long-term partnerships, on the theory that they made better priests than potentially promiscuous singles of either orientation. Writing about one London bishop who had this sub rosa policy, Brown says it is important to recognize that “it wasn’t in the least bit liberal. He did not believe that the sex lives of his clergy could be a private matter, still less that they ought to be. He would have agreed with St Paul that sex could be so disruptive and so dangerous that it must be channelled.”
This insight about sex informs the conservative Anglicans who feel that gay marriage is a threat to the family. They’re protecting important values, they’re just wrong about where the real threat lies. Brown continues:
When they say that they are defending the family, they are sincere. They understand that families matter, and that restraints have to be put on adult sexual behaviour if children are to be brought up reasonably selflessly. Children need hope and self-discipline: they don’t invent them all by themselves, and if they do they don’t hang on to their inventions without encouragement. They learn them from the adults around, who can only teach by example.
And the adults, in turn, keep themselves on the strait (not straight) path of righteousness partly because they are afraid of being found out. It may be reprehensible to do the right thing for a squalid and ignoble reason, but it is better than to do the wrong thing for a squalid reason. So one of the great slogans of the liberal society, that it doesn’t matter what consenting adults do with each other in private, turns out to be false. It does matter what other people do in private, even when they are not parents. Our natural prurient interest in gossip reflects this fact in a rather repulsive way. Other people’s sex lives are a legitimate matter of public interest – not just in the News of the World sense that they interest the public, much though they do – but because they also affect everyone around them, and influence their behaviour as well as their feelings.
Thus far the strong case for a conservative sexual morality. But there is a final twist. The stronger the case is for reining in sexual appetites, the more wicked it becomes to scapegoat gay people, and in particular open, monogamous ones like Gene Robinson. They are not the problem. As the wonderful New Yorker cartoon has it “Gays and lesbians aren’t a threat to my marriage. It’s all the straight women who sleep with my husband.”
What the Akinola-ites deny is that there is such a thing as a natural homosexual. To them, a gay man is merely a turbocharged straight man, like the Earl of Rochester, who boasted of his penis that “Woman nor man, nor aught its fury stayed.” On the other hand, what many of their opponents deny is that there must be painful restraints on our sexual (and other) appetites if civilisation is to survive. It’s hard to tell which are furthest from Christianity. But the people who believe in unrestricted sexual freedom tend to grow out of it; the pleasures of scapegoating and self-satisfaction only increase with age.
(Emphasis mine.)
Category Archives: Notable Quotes
Self-Care as Lenten Discipline
I give up strange things for Lent. During a high-pressure year in college, I gave up my superego. Another year, I stopped going to church, because arguments over theology were making me prideful and distracted. The goal of these counterintuitive resolutions was always to jolt myself out of legalism, to develop a healthy sense of humor about my so-called good behavior and start living in God’s grace.
But this year, I forgot all that. I made big plans. Lent was the equivalent of a corporate productivity retreat. Six weeks! Surely that would be enough time to write a book on gay theology, work on my novel, be a good friend to everyone on Facebook, and (oh, right) do my job.
Now I am cranky, exhausted, yelling at the telephone, and dreaming about being the unpopular contestant on “Stylista”.
It is hard for me to believe that the world, my world anyhow, will not come to an end if I do what I really want to do: dial back my social life and service projects so I can be alone with God and my novel. I can’t pretend that I am closing the door and turning off the phone for the benefit of anyone but myself. “People aren’t supporting me,” I say, when I’m actually the one who isn’t telling them what I need–because I’m afraid that they aren’t strong enough, or that they will stop loving me, or that it’s just plain weird to tell a flesh-and-blood person, “I’m sorry, my novel character outranks you.”
My husband, another stunning overachiever, talked to me recently about the discipline of renunciation. He has been increasing the time he spends in meditation, and working on his impatience to change the world all at once. Suddenly, “renunciation” began to sound like a sweet word, a blissful self-indulgence, like getting a massage.
Just as awareness of sin is only tolerable and productive after awareness of being safely held in God’s forgiving love, healthy renunciation requires a prior commitment to one’s own self-worth as a child of God. Just after Ash Wednesday, the womanist blog The Kitchen Table published a wonderful post about how the Lenten call to sacrifice can be mis-heard by women who have been socialized to suppress their own needs. Blogger Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote:
I was sitting in the audience at an extraordinary event honoring the intellectual contributions of black womanist theologians Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, and Jacquelyn Grant. These womanist foremothers are the sisters who courageously challenged the deep and often destructive assumptions of academic theology and ethics.: assumptions that either ignore or silence black women….
I had been looking forward to this event for a month. It turned out to be the perfect way to spend Ash Wednesday.
These preeminent scholars themselves were not on the panel. Instead, the panel was composed of second generation womanist scholars who were their students: Rev. Dr. Joy Bostic, Dr.Teresa Delgado, and Rev. Lorena Parrish. Together they articulated an ethical and theological vision for black women in America and in the Diaspora.
Their message was a challenging one on the precipice of Lent because at they offered up a message that black women must refuse being transformed into sacrificial lambs for the good of everyone but ourselves.
These women refused to uncritically embrace the notion of sacrifice. Instead they forced us to ask what would happen if we imagine that God and our communities are deeply, unalterably invested in the existence, survival, and thriving of black women. Would a God, a church, a home, or a community that was committed to our survival, our joy, and our redemption be so willing to use and abuse our bodies, our talents, our hearts, and our gifts while offering so little in return?
These sister scholars laid hands on the discomfort I’d felt earlier in the day and lay it bare before the entire gathering. The created new insights by drawing on the work of white feminist scholars, black male liberation theologians, and even traditional church doctrine to craft new meaning from the Christian imperative for Lenten sacrifice.
Dr. Delgado asked us to reconsider the communion assertion: “This is my body which is broken for you.” What if we read that idea in light of contemporary women’s experiences of forced sexual slavery, intimate violence, and soaring HIV infection? It seems that the bodies of poor and black women are indeed broken by and for others.
Dr. Bostic then offered a stunning counterpoint by invoking Toni Morrison’s powerful, woman preacher from Beloved: Baby Suggs Holy. Morrison, through Baby Suggs Holy, calls black men and women to love their flesh and to resist allowing it to be broken. This woman preacher, standing in space she clears for her prophetic witness, encourages black men and women to love their embodied selves. “Here in this here place, we flesh; Flesh that weeps, laughs; Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.” The holy act is cherishing and nurturing the self, not denying it, not limiting it, not covering it in sackcloth and ashes.
Yes, I agree with your assessment that as a nation of privilege we are called to sacrifice our consumption and privilege to end oppression and inequality. But as black women we must be careful to complicate and challenge the idea of sacrifice. We have too often internalized this Christian call for self-sacrifice so fully that it became self-denigration. We nail ourselves to a cross just to serve and please others. And others allow us to do it. They smile on our sacrifice, claim that our suffering is redemptive, and enjoy the ways we relieve them of discomfort. They act out their patriarchy and racism all over our lives and we too often accept it as though it is the cross we are supposed to bear in order to prove ourselves worthy of divine love.
From the audience the Rev. Dr. Joanne Terrell reminded us of her work which constructs a new theology of joy and fun. She admonished us that we act as though loving our lives is a sin. We behave as though pleasure and happiness are ungodly. Dr. Terrell sounded like Baby Suggs Holy to me, telling us to dance our way into the arms of a God who loves our audacious, happy, fabulous, whole selves and does not need us to crawl to divinity half-starved and over burdened.
Maureen Sherbondy: “Vanishing Sarah”
This piece first appeared in the Knoxville Writers’ Guild Anthology, Low Explosions: Writings on the Body. Maureen Sherbondy’s collection of short stories and flash fiction, The Slow Vanishing, will be published this fall by Main Street Rag. Visit their New Releases page to buy this book at a pre-order discount price of $9 (normally $13.95). MSR has also published two of Maureen’s poetry chapbooks, After the Fairy Tale and Praying at Coffee Shops.
Vanishing Sarah
Bit by bit, Sarah vanished. It began slowly — a swatch of fingertip tugged off. Everyone wanted something: her five children, her corporate husband, the in-laws, the neighbors, her two terriers, the PTA, her four younger sisters, the church parishioners. They were the takers, and she was the giver; this is the way it had always been. She barely noticed the initial throb of missing fingertip. The dull pain was interrupted by the disappearance of the small toe on her left foot, removed by her husband. Then, an ounce of flesh above her hip, which, really, she didn’t mind, as there had been so much extra flesh since that fourth pregnancy. The removal of flesh was like being gnawed by a very large rat. Chomp chomp. First she swatted the hand of the taker, a PTA parent this time; then she accepted this loss and waved goodbye as the ounce of flesh floated out the open window.
Phones rang endlessly with additional requests: to bake two dozen cupcakes for the school bake sale, volunteer for the book fair, organize the church charity talent show. Then the takers became ruthless. They descended, a swarm of hands and teeth. A finger, wearing her wedding band, floated away from the four-bedroom brick house, and then a large toe left the suburban cul-de-sac. Her slightly bulbous nose sprayed with tiny freckles drifted into the sky, a loss which made smelling the burning cupcakes difficult. She saw twenty freckles in the night sky lit up like red stars.
At night, achy, feeling scattered and lost, she closed her eyes (still intact, she had covered those with palms, no fingers) trying to find a dream where only givers lived. But, piece-by-piece even dreams parted.
When the children and husband and in-laws and PTA and church parishioners searched for Sarah, to ask just one last little favor, all that remained was a stain — a perfumed outline of who she had been.
DIAGRAM Essay Winner Matthew Glenwood: “John Henry’s Tracks”
Online multimedia journal DIAGRAM, edited by poet Ander Monson, is a uniquely satisfying blend of the surreal, the philosophical, and the darkly humorous. In addition to original poetry and prose, they feature offbeat and obscure images from specialized texts, hence the journal’s name. Ever wondered about the proper proportions of a love seat? Do you know everything you ought to know about the appurtenances of perpendicular drinking? Perhaps you need ideas for unusual leg positions. DIAGRAM has it all.
On a more serious note, Matthew Glenwood, the winner of their most recent Hybrid Essay Contest, offers the rhetorical masterpiece “John Henry’s Tracks”, a passionate piece of writing that draws connections between the famous folk song, plasma-selling, Hurricane Katrina, and the dehumanization of the poor. Sample:
John Henry was a mighty man,
Born with a ten-pound hammer in his hand.
—”John Henry”*
Some dirt-diggers in the Holy Land claimed to have found the bones of Jesus and his family. Jesus’ son, too. We’ll probably never know for sure if those were the holy bones or not. That kind of news could prove ungentle to dreamers. Like finding the remains of Amelia Earhart under her front porch steps, or the skeleton of a baby bird beneath its nest. We would hope for a wider arc to the hero’s journey than bones at the starting point. It could be called bad news if Jesus, the alleged foreman of Heaven, left bones behind. News that says nobody’s going very far.
But it wouldn’t be the whole truth. There is somewhere to go.
We can go sell our plasma for fifty American dollars a week.
The journey to the Biolife Plasma Center in Marquette, Michigan came easy for me. I just had to follow an abandoned train track for a few blocks. The track met the edge of the woods along the shore of Lake Superior; rabbit, chipmunk and deer crisscrossed it as beasties would any ready made trail, for there were no tracks left on that line. The rattle of my mountain bike startled ducks from the shallow waters of the ditch alongside. In winter, the flat, open space doubled as a cross country ski trail. You might say everything ran on that track except for rails.
The region, too poor to have a reason to run its trains, pulled up many of its train tracks, and commerce that way moved at the speed of wild grass. The poverty of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is probably why the plasma company came to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. That and the local college students, the reliably poor. As any farmer with a bad back could tell you, the easiest of tall crops to harvest is one that stoops to meet the hand of the harvester.
At the plasma center, technicians tap into the natural resource of your veins. The process takes, at most, a couple hours, and you’re paid for it. It’s easy money, and couldn’t come much easier; all you have to do is exist. The plasma company calls itself a “donation center”, but really it is a selling center. Poor people coming to sell the one possession they unquestionably own: the materials of their being. Take away those materials and the world would have no more poor.
Our folk songs say that John Henry could drive steel harder and faster than any man. The job of a steel driver was to pound holes in rock by hammering a long metal drill held and rotated by another man known as a shaker. Dynamite was then dropped into those holes—tunnels blasted into mountain stone. Steel driving was done for the mean benefit of the train companies laying track across the nation. In other versions of the song, steel driving was intermixed with pounding spike into the rail lines.
One day a salesman brought a new steam-driven drill to the line. John Henry, fearing for his job and for the jobs of his fellow rail workers, challenged the machine to a contest. John Henry declared to his captain:
Lord, a man aint nothin’ but a man
But before I let that steam-drill beat me down
I’m gonna die with a hammer in my hand
John Henry won. But after beating the machine, he suffered a heart attack and died. That’s to say, he could do no more work for the train company.
Like Jesus, no one can prove the John Henry of legend. Some stories say he was an ex-slave working for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway during the Reconstruction days of the South, following the Civil War. People disagree on where, and if, the events of the song took place. One man thinks the contest of hammers happened in Talcott, West Virgina. But everybody knows that you’ve got to bite the coins that come out of Talcott.
About twenty years ago, a man in my hometown got caught in one of the big machines of the mining company. A rock crusher, if I remember right. He was the father of a classmate. I ought to have attended the funeral, but didn’t. In those high school days I was discovering the books of the American Transcendentalists: Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau. “Transcendentalism” was a big word to me at the time. The idea of it is that you can ride your porch swing to the truth of all flowers. The notion sounds sound to me, still. But, being young, I felt as if I had inherited a mansion up in the blue air; as if everything wrong were, with an idea, suddenly right.
The daughter of the killed miner, my classmate, needed some consoling, but I was too shy, too awkward at social graces, to be one of the people to give it. I had no consoling to give. Her father was a good man of Finnish descent; he left behind a large family. The family had a new lesson to learn about the worst of all possible outcomes. As for me, I had my books which said spirit dances with matter.
Much of my life has passed since those books. Those Yankee writers of old are truer to me now than when I was young, and it’s likely that I need them more now. But an idea isn’t much true unless we are willing to wear its dirt. A frog of ugly sits at the center of true, and his appetite is Void.
Rather than the gift of a mansion in the sky, transcendence now seems to me a lifetime of lonely carpentry. Carpentry on a house nobody can see. And that house won’t shelter from the rain, but make us wetter. Those who ply this trade might not finish even the front steps before the cold evening comes on, before the closing whistle blows. Maybe no one completes the house called Idealism— built, as it is, on the foundation that is the suffering of the world. The hammer is usually abandoned with much work left to do; it hums only a little while with the vibrations of the last nail driven, until stillness takes it.
Had the good miner’s death happened today, I would’ve gone to the funeral. The fact about our portion of transcendence is that some of us get flattened in rock crushers. The fact is that there is blood on the machine.
And in the machine.
Sometimes the crashing waves of Lake Superior, powered by strong winds, sounded like a train through my apartment window. But, in the city of Marquette, the only real locomotion taking place was the centrifugal force of the Autoapheresis-C machine (made by the Baxter corporation) separating plasma from blood. The word “apheresis” is Greek for “take away”.
Read the rest here. Read another piece by this author in DIAGRAM 1.6.
The “Unwritten Constitution” and Biblical Interpretation
Debates over constitutional interpretation have much to teach us, I believe, about ways of reading the Bible. Perhaps more so than the average religious person, lawyers and judges are particularly conscious that they are choosing among different interpretive methods whenever they read and apply a text, and they’ve developed a sophisticated language to discuss this.
I don’t know whether this was always the case, but the adherents of “plain meaning” and “original intent” in the legal sphere frequently share the same conservative politics as Biblical literalists, while political progressives are more likely to see both legal and sacred texts as dynamic, ambiguous, and responsive to changing needs. In both cases, I suspect the deciding factor is whether we see our ancestors as more likely to be right than ourselves. Is the moral awareness of humankind progressing, or declining–and can we be trusted to know the difference?
As for my own personal view, it’s complicated. Some things are better than they were 200 or 2,000 years ago (democracy, the rights of women and minorities, freedom of religion, modern medicine), some are worse (pollution, nuclear weapons, 24-hour adult video channels); thus it has always been. But since we’re the ones who have to live with the consequences–not our ancestors, and not the authorities who interpret them for us–I think we should get the final vote on what a text means.
In the latest issue of Harvard Magazine, BusinessWeek editor Paul M. Barrett reviews legal superstar Laurence H. Tribe’s new book, The Invisible Constitution. The framework he outlines below may help clarify similar debates over the Bible (emphasis added):
Tribe argues persuasively that the most conservative jurists on the closely divided Supreme Court—chiefly Antonin Scalia, LL.B. ’60, and Clarence Thomas—get it wrong when it comes to deciphering our foundational legal document. The originalists, as they are known, contend that judges can look only to the literal words of the Constitution and the “original” understanding of those words held by the men who wrote and ratified them. That’s why the conservatives find it laughable that anyone could ground in the Constitution a woman’s right to choose to seek an abortion. The Constitution doesn’t mention abortion. The Founding Fathers would never have countenanced the act. Case closed.
Not so fast, Tribe says. Jurists of all stripes derive their interpretive principles from sources outside the text of the Constitution, and many of these principles cannot even be traced directly to the document’s words. My favorite example of this seemingly self-evident but often-obfuscated observation is the basis of originalism itself. The Constitution nowhere instructs its inheritors to interpret its opaque terminology (“equal protection,” “due process,” “cruel and unusual punishments”) according to the original understanding of its drafters. The Constitution doesn’t offer guidance on whether to read those terms as static or evolving. There’s an argument to be made that the Founders’ intent deserves special deference, or maybe even something approaching exclusive deference. But such ideas are drawn from someone’s version of what Tribe calls the invisible Constitution: the unwritten premises and intuitions and experiences that have accumulated over more than two centuries of law and politics in America.
Tribe’s liberal version of the invisible Constitution is no secret, and he does not elaborate much on the substance of his views in this book. He believes that judges—whether they lean left or right—inevitably champion the values they perceive as underlying or animating the ambiguous admonitions and protections outlined in the Constitution. In articulating those values, judges give meaning to a phrase like “equal protection.” For him those words, applied to questions of racial relations, can be used not only to strike down intentional segregation but also to uphold race-conscious policies (“affirmative action”) that seek to remedy the lingering injustices of slavery and Jim Crow. For Justice Scalia, equal protection suggests that race can never be taken into account in any way in forming public policies. That’s a legitimate argument. Tribe’s point here is only that it can’t be settled by simplistic appeals to literalism or the parlor game of WWJMD (What Would James Madison Do?).
To use a favorite phrase of postmodernists, any text always already contains “unwritten premises and intuitions and experiences” without which we would be unable to relate it to the rest of the world. Naturally, those unwritten addenda can be elaborated implausibly or in bad faith, and as Barrett says, they can be turned to liberal or conservative ends. But if we don’t admit that they exist, we’re claiming an illusory objectivity for our preferred viewpoint.
I’m planning a post soon about whether the Bible itself gives us any guidance about preferred interpretive methods. For now, I’ll leave you with these provocative questions (and if you’re very good, one of these days I’ll turn comments back on): Does the Bible ever tell us to believe something because it’s “in the Bible”? What other reasons for belief are urged upon us? Does the Bible know it’s the Bible?
Keith Olbermann Receives HRC Straight Ally Award
MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann received an Ally for Equality Award at the Greater New York Human Rights Campaign’s gala dinner two weeks ago. Olbermann, you may recall, made waves for his heartfelt denunciation of Prop 8. Below is a video of his speech, in which he talks about the experiences that awakened him, as a straight white man, to perceive prejudice against other groups and fight discrimination in all its forms.
I especially appreciated this insight, which Olbermann shares at around 9:30 minutes into the 13-minute video:
…We live at a time when everybody—especially, it seems, the purveyors of hatred and prejudice against religions, or races, or sexual orientations, or height, or hair color—everybody actually believes that they are also the victims of some kind of prejudice: the horrors of affirmative action, the destruction of the religious sanctity of marriage, or of course bias in the media. Yet very few of these folks ever make the great mental leap—if you are a victim of prejudice, the specifics of the prejudice become almost irrelevant. It is the hate that counts. If you have been on the receiving end, if you are even for the briefest of moments merely mistaken for a member of a victimized group…if you really are just brushed by this plague of hate, you have been given a gift. It’s brief, it’s cheap, it’s everlasting. You have, as the old saw goes, walked the mile in the other person’s shoes. If you are a victim of prejudice, you should now hate prejudice.
Olbermann understands the wrongness of the zero-sum thinking that calls same-sex partnerships a threat to heterosexual marriage. Shoring up our status at the expense of any group–sinful or not!–is exactly the opposite of what Jesus told us to do. Rather, our experience of suffering should make us more attuned to the humanity of someone else who is now suffering in the same way. This, I think, is one lesson we can draw from the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18:21-35.
In our complex, diverse society, it’s not uncommon for the same person to be disadvantaged by some characteristics while actually accruing privilege from others, or to be privileged in some contexts in their life but disadvantaged in others, even for the same trait. A conservative Christian may experience secular-liberal prejudice in her job as a university teacher, and sexism when she tries to buy a car, but when she casts her vote at the ballot box for Prop 8, she is still standing with the interests of the power structure–wielding the church-backed power of the majority to disenfranchise a stigmatized minority. One grievance drives out another.
In my experience, spiritually hungry people who can’t bring themselves to consider Christianity are not stymied by rationalist worries about miracles, evolution, or reason versus revelation. That may have been an older generation’s main concern, but not now. Now they’re upset because Christians seem to be the enemies of compassion and human rights. Someone has to step outside the vicious cycle of entitlement and prejudice. If it’s not us, what kind of gospel are we preaching?
Speaking with the Authority of Love
I try to do a lot of things without God’s help, and it doesn’t go very well. No surprise there. (With God’s help, sometimes it still doesn’t go well, but I feel better about it.) The project that means the most to me these days is speaking out about equality for GLBT people–in my fiction, on this blog, in the church, and in difficult conversations with Christian friends who have a non-inclusive interpretation of Scripture.
Sometimes, in this process, friendships are strained, support networks break apart, and my very commitment to God is questioned by my fellow members of the Body of Christ. That’s the hardest part. Without God’s grace, I am standing only on my own righteousness, that little melting ice floe in the stormy sea of judgment. Loneliness and fear tempt me to seek others’ reassurance that my beliefs are correct: in essence, asking other people to stand between me and God in the way that only Jesus should.
When I pray the Psalms every morning, it strikes me how many of them invoke God’s protection against slander, humiliation, and misunderstanding by those close to us. Still, somewhere, deep down, I have trouble believing that I have any right to pray these prayers when those I perceive to be my adversaries are fellow Christians–and not only that, but Christians who have been steeped in Scriptural learning to a degree that intimidates this recent convert.
But what is learning, without the heart? A Biblical hermeneutic that exalts the “pure” text, in opposition to input from science, history, experience, and our innate sense of compassion and fairness, is (in my opinion) cutting off the Body of Christ at the neck, and rejecting the Incarnation.
In the latest issue of our parish newsletter, our rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Northampton, the Rev. Catherine Munz, shared some thoughts about the source of our authority to evangelize, excerpted below. I found her words quite helpful as I struggle to believe that God’s forgiving love will cover me when I step outside the approval of human authority figures. Cat writes about the challenges of sharing the gospel when Christians have a reputation for prejudice and abuse of power:
On inauguration day I was blessed to receive a ticket for the festivities at the Academy of Music [a Northampton theater where the ceremony was shown on a movie screen]….When our new president mentioned in his speech that America was for Christians, and Muslims, and Jews, there was no response. When he added “and non-believers” the crowd cheered and applauded. I know, I know, this is Northampton. In a way I was sad–because I treasure my faith, in another way I was glad–because I treasure the rights of non-believers, and yet in a way, I had hope–the vineyard is ripe.
When Jesus spoke with authority, it was to right wrongs, uphold justice, speak healing, and tell of God’s great love. In our baptismal covenant we are asked on behalf of a child or our own selves if we will continue in the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship…”will we proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?” We answered “I will with God’s help.” The authority has passed through the apostles of ancient times and to us–apostles of now.
There is a certain faction of people who call themselves Christians, and yet routinely fail to see the Good News of Christ. The same faction who denies justice and love and forgiveness, have helped to place Christians on the untouchable list of spiritually hungry people. Such an opportunity we have, more than opportunity, we are charged as Christians to make Love known. I think we have all met people who were non-believers who came to believe because someone demonstrated God’s love. I guess that really made them pre-believers….
Whatever you do or say remember that you were given authority to speak by virtue of your baptism. Speak of hope, justice, dignity, and the love of God.
Cat’s message raises another set of questions for me, questions that often get leaped over in the rush to trade warring interpretations of Biblical texts. It’s critically important, I think, to ask: Who has the authority to speak for and about gay people’s lives? How did we (heterosexual Christians belonging to established denominations) acquire the power to be considered authorities, and what structures of inequality maintain that power?
When Jesus had power, he “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave”. The greater our worldly advantage, the greater our obligation to enter humbly into the experience of outsiders, and afford them the presumption that their understanding of what homosexuality “is” is probably more accurate than ours. Most of the time, I don’t see that happening. In order to maintain that same-sex intimacy is sinful, non-affirming Christians perpetuate hateful myths and exaggerations (e.g. all gays are promiscuous and unhealthy); conflate homosexuality with sexual behaviors that are properly forbidden because they involve exploitation and betrayal (adultery, bestiality); and insist, despite all the evidence, that homosexuality can always be “cured”. Anything rather than see the other as the other sees herself.
Newsflash, people: As the coffee mug says, “wherever you go, there you are.” You can’t get away from yourself. Your knowledge of God comes through the filter of your own perceptions and thoughts. If you’re not the authority on your own experience, including your experiences of intimacy and love, then you also can’t trust your awareness of God. And indeed, this is the most terrible abuse that happens when the souls of gay people are divided from their bodies: indoctrination with the false belief that they’re not competent to know God for themselves. And of course, once you’ve convinced me that God is not there for me “just as I am”, I’m back to asking some convenient religious authority figure to tell me whether God loves me. No one, repeat no one, has the right to dole out or withhold that grace. We’re Protestants; I thought we knew that.
If the church focused more on awakening and training everyone’s capacity for spiritual discernment, and less on defending lists of prohibited activities, we might see more seekers and pre-believers coming to know the love of Jesus.
Alegria on God’s Two Natures, and the Nature of Love
Poet Alegria Imperial recently shared with me these thoughts inspired by my post about postmodern evangelist Peter Rollins, below. Since I’ve had to turn comments off, I’m reprinting them here. She writes (emphasis mine):
I fully understand what Peter is saying and what you said is his main point “that our priorities are often topsy-turvy”, and that the reason we are in such a bind is we cannot see—”beyond the color of their (other’s) eyes, beyond the contours of their political and religious commitments…”
I would like to take that main point further—that the reason for such “topsy-turviness” is that we cannot see the intrinsic nature of things but especially of man, which goes beyond what nature ordains. And Christ came to show this to us. Christ, who is God, by being born as man already defies two opposing natures as we understand: can God be man and man be God? As God and thus, king of the universe, Christ chose to be born poor, died poor and thus, ostracized because intrinsically, kings are born with power and wealth; he didn’t although his lineage had to be of David, a most powerful king. As man he belonged to a religion but which he changed by turning its essence around: “the Sabbath for man and not man for the Sabbath”, and thus was viewed as a rebel.
Christianity, the religion established on his life and words, ensconces compassion and forgiveness as intrinsic attributes of judgment: the essence of a human being is not who he appears to be but who he could possibly be or the sum total of what is hidden in the eyes and ears of others, or in Christ’s words, “his heart”. He then summed up the Ten Commandments in one the word, “love”. More than two thousand years after he died, we are still grappling with that word, pushing and bashing people and things we cannot understand, such as the intrinsic nature of man versus the intrinsic nature of male and female.
What is love, indeed? Christ who is God became Man out of love. Is there any place for that love in this utterly complex life, this entangled world we have created, a life and a world we have layered with structure after structure so much so that these have caged our heart, our intrinsic nature as human beings, which has languished beyond our reach, our recognition. Take all those dying if not bodily as those caught in raging wars, emotionally and spiritually as those abused by those deranged with power, or those misunderstood thus denied of rights to live like those who find love beyond their intrinsic nature as male and female. In trying to keep order, trying to keep nature intact, there is so much dying around us, so much killing, so much pain inflicted on each other….
What actually got me thinking about this absurdity of forcing “love” into a mold that cannot transcend physicality was a post on Dec. 7 in the Today in Literature column about the suicide of Hart Crane during a cruise. He couldn’t reconcile his feelings for the stewards of the ship and the presence of his fiancee—they were getting married. I imagined the same thing as I did while watching another same sex couple at the inner harbor in Baltimore how it must have shredded their souls to pieces and submitting to melancholia simply gave in as in this poem that wrote itself (published in LYNX):
melancholia
by Alegria Imperial
in the haze,
crow circling bare trees
finally alights
while sun
tints bay, i dive skimming
crimson-bottomed boats
duck pairs braid
shadows on my back—
i slurp refuse
gulls overhead fight
over what’s left,
screaming mute—
the same scraps
i tossed in my daze
a moment earlier
before i plunged
mesmerized by
melancholia
Poet Robert Cording on “Craving Reality”
The literary journal Image, a journal of the arts and religion, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year with an issue featuring various writers and artists addressing what it means to be fully human. I was moved by this essay by poet Robert Cording, “Love Calls Us to One World at a Time“, whose title is a riff on one of my favorite Richard Wilbur poems. Both poem and essay celebrate the inextricable union of finite and infinite, spirit and matter–a creative tension that the religious mind is so often tempted to resolve in favor of rejecting this world, not realizing that this disconnects us from direct experience of God and the people He has given us to love. Cording writes:
A few days before his death on May 6, 1862, Henry David Thoreau was asked by Parker Pillsbury, a former minister become abolitionist, that question so many would like to have answered. Noting that Thoreau was “near the brink of the dark river,” Pillsbury asked Thoreau how the “opposite shore” appeared to him. Thoreau, according to the biographer Richard D. Richardson, “summed up his life” with his answer: “One world at a time.” Thoreau’s reply, polite but firm, was in accord with the way he deliberately chose to live his life. Just months before his death, he was still collecting material for projects on the succession of forest trees and seed dispersal, newly taken with nature’s economy of abundance and its genius of vitality. Years earlier, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau had come to a similar understanding: we need, he said, “not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of the earth…. We need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born.” Thoreau, who is too often mistakenly placed under the convenient label of pantheist, was not choosing to be “earth-born” over and against being “heaven-born.” He believed, rather, that both births depended on each other. To be “heaven-born” did not lie in redirecting attention from the natural to the supernatural, but in seeing more deeply into the sources of the natural. Those sources, like creation itself, were always a mystery.
In his famous poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” Richard Wilbur enacts the way love calls us to extend ourselves toward a world which will always remain irreducible in its otherness and yet open to our understanding and recognition. In Wilbur’s poem, the soul cannot exist free of the body’s restrictions. Each day it must learn to keep a “difficult balance” in a world which asks us, as Wendell Berry has said, “to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is.” As Thoreau’s life had taught him, if we try to leave behind the earth, if we choose religion simply to quiet our fears and prop up our hopes rather than connect us with the sources of life, we ignore the call of love and heed only the usual summons of the self and its needs….
****
…Great art, according to Iris Murdoch, delights us “because we are not used to looking at the real world at all.” In her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she uses Plato’s system of thought to give, ironically, a place to art and the artist that Plato did not envision in The Republic. Murdoch argues that the moral life in Plato is a “slow shift of attachments wherein looking (concentrating, attending, attentive discipline) is a source of divine (purified) energy…. The movement is not, by an occasional leap, into an external (empty) space of freedom, but patiently and continuously a change of one’s whole being in all its contingent detail, through a world of appearance toward a world of reality.” We know, of course, that the simple exposure to and even the study of great art may or may not lead to transformation, to care for the other. Art requires our consent, and in Murdoch’s view, our “morally disciplined attention” in order to enact the change from “a world of appearance toward a world of reality.” What we may learn from art is its closeness to morals, since for Murdoch the essence of both art and morals is love. And love, as Murdoch defines it in her essay “The Sublime and the Good,” “is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real”; it is the “discovery of reality.”
Great art is the enemy of fantasy; fantasy always leads to the creation of idols. Our weakness as human beings is our tendency to make idols of whatever is at hand, whatever makes the world easier, more understandable, and meets our most immediate needs. Poets have always argued that the imagination is the opposite of fantasy. Imagination is an exercise in overcoming one’s self, of extending oneself towards what is different from ourselves. And, in their loving respect for a reality other than oneself, imagination and art call us to attend, with devotion and care, to a world which will always remain a mystery, but a mystery in which love calls us to the things of this world where we may become most fully human.
Mu!
At the start of our morning writing group, some friends and I were using a deck of Zen koan cards for writing prompts. I was pleasantly bewildered (a good Zen response) when the card I drew said, simply, “Mu!” Was this a message from the great feminist cow-goddess? The booklet explained that “mu” is a response meaning “not yes, not no” or “un-ask the question”. (See the Wikipedia entry.)
Lately I’ve been taking refuge in contemplating the non-conceptual, ineffable nature of God–prompted by dismay at how religious concepts so often harden into barriers between ourselves and others. As beings with finite minds, of course, we cannot avoid the specificity, and thus the deceptions, of conceptual thinking. Even to speak about “mu” is to risk turning it into another concept, an object among objects. If our worldview is a circle that contains some things and excludes others, “mu” is not so much an excluded thing as it is the general awareness that there is always something we’re not seeing.
Peter Rollins, coordinator of the experimental Christian collective Ikon, blogs frequently about this sort of negative theology, with a valuable emphasis on its radical ethical-political consequences. In a recent post, “Beyond the colour of each other’s eyes”, he writes:
The apostle Paul once famously remarked that in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. He does not say that there are both Jews and Greeks, both slaves and free, both men and woman. Rather this new identity with Christ involves the laying down of such political, biological and cultural identities. This is not an expression of ‘both/and’ but rather ‘neither/nor’. Today this idea can seem almost offensive to our ears. In many churches we find flags proudly hanging in acknowledgment of our nationality and we seek to express our political and religious ideas as a vital and irreducible part of who we are. But what if the church is called to provide a space where, just for a moment, we encounter one another as neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free? And what if Paul didn’t just mean these three categories, as if all the others remained intact? What if he was implying that there is neither black nor white in Christ, neither rich nor poor, neither powerful nor powerless? What if we could go even further and say that the space Paul wrote of was one in which there would be neither republican nor democrat, liberal nor conservative, orthodox nor heretic?…
Search YouTube for Peter’s thought-provoking short videos, such as this parable from his forthcoming book The Orthodox Heretic. I can’t wholly agree with his opposition between action and contemplation, since we do need Christian philosophy to help define “right action”, and to give us a secure foundation for resisting worldly beliefs that induce pride or despair. An incarnational theology, for instance, is (in my opinion) more conducive to social equality than a gnostic-dualistic one. But I think his main point is that our priorities are often topsy-turvy. We value the external signs of Christian belief as if they were good in themselves, when their only value lies in whether they produce Christ-like behavior.
…While we cannot step out of historical time and enter the eschaton, while we cannot enact this radical negation today (for we cannot really forget our gender, our job, our sexual preferences, our political opinions, our nationality etc), some emerging collectives have developed a space in which we are able to symbolically enact this step. A place where we engage in a theatrical performance of Paul’s vision. It is the creation of what we may call ‘suspended space’….
…[T]here is a call for all who have gathered to engage in the symbolic enacting of God’s kenotic moment, the moment when God emptied God-self in the person of Christ Jesus. This Kenosis is described beautifully in Philippians when we read, ‘our attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing’….
By forming a suspended space in which we theatrically divest ourselves of our various identities, we allow for the possibility of encountering others beyond the categories that usually define them. We encounter the other beyond the colour of their eyes, beyond the contours of their political and religious commitments…