Category Archives: Notable Quotes

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.

Anointed by Art

I had to share this quote from the latest Image Journal e-newsletter, summarizing an article in their print edition about artist Makoto Fujimura:

Fujimura makes a powerful argument for art by citing the passage in the Gospels when Mary anoints the head of Christ with expensive perfume. He sees this as a warrant for art: something apparently luxurious and useless which somehow becomes an essential gesture of our humanity. The only earthly possession Christ wore on the Cross was the very aroma of the perfume Mary poured upon him.


Visit the website for Fujimura’s new book River Grace here.

More good stuff from Image: Read poet Franz Wright’s “Language as Sacrament in the New Testament” here. A sample:

Sin first results from all our attempts to escape or briefly elude the horrors of our physical condition here (which are part of free will’s gift, that is, an inevitable side effect and accompaniment to the gift of life, of sentience, just as pain and illness are an inevitable accompaniment to the gift of having a body). If we can come to see suffering as the norm, and spend our time alleviating it in others rather than causing more, we have mastered the necessity of sinning—there is no longer any need to do “evil,” which again just means trying to escape for a moment from suffering.


Sin results from temptation or disobedience only next—that is, when we have had our sight restored, see the true nature of things and the simple manner in which suffering can be accepted and transcended, and yet persist in giving in to wrong actions.


The main thing is, God gets it. He understands this, and part of his infinite love and pity for us is that he gets it—to the point where he was willing to come and (as an utterly sinless being, Jesus) participate in all the unhappinesses and horrors that drive us to do “evil,” to “sin,” to participate to the point of torture and death and in participating (which gives his teaching the ultimate credibility) to show us the way out of “sin,” the way to accept suffering, and how to transmute it into the energy required to be always alleviating rather than contributing to the suffering of others.


Literary E-Zine Highlights: Ginosko, The Rose & Thorn


Two favorite literary e-zines, Ginosko and The Rose & Thorn, have just released new issues. Some poems and stories that held my attention:


Penny-Anne Beaudoin, “The Morning Routine”
(The Rose & Thorn, Spring 2008)

I can feel her cool blue eyes on my face as I struggle to pull her pressure stockings over her clawed feet, her shriveled calves.

“You’re not very pretty, are you?” she says.

I should have seen that coming, but I hesitate before replying.

“No,” I say. “I’m not.”

…

Read the rest here.

****

Peter McGuire, “After ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes'”
(The Rose & Thorn, Spring 2008)

I love listening to bad poetry
Especially yours
The way you enunciate
Like a bus with cut brake lines
Veering for the bay
…

Read the rest here.

****

Dane Myers, “Sleeping With God”
(Ginosko, Issue #6)

Cynthia lifted her head from Dubliners and stared at the pale north wall, opposite their bed. Albuquerque’s April evenings were growing long and the fading light created a shadow that made the ironwood cross above her dresser appear crooked. A rare drizzle filled the air with a smell other than dust and muted the yaps of the neighbor’s three schnauzers. Cynthia tried to think how she could get out of sex, at least for the night. Wednesday had become the worst day of the week: Bible study and sex. That night’s discussion had been on Isaiah—her favorite prophet, until Jim had nicknamed his penis Isaiah.
…

Read the rest here (PDF file, p.76).

****

Randall Brown, “Let the Wind Have It”
(Ginosko, Issue #6)

I discover her in the basement, uncovered, her lips stained green. When the house ran dry, she drank mouthwash, then cough syrup, finally anti-freeze. I imagine her in the grave, still warm. Instead, they burn her, give her back to me in a vase, handing me the responsibility for the gesture that will define her death for me—the scattering of my mother.

A week after the funeral, my father calls. He wants the ashes. He will do lines of my mother until his synapses can no longer fire. She stopped loving him a year after the marriage— and told him so. He didn’t believe her, waited forty years for her to be proven wrong, forty years of asceticism and celibacy and silent waiting. He deserves the ashes, he really does, except my mother did not want to be with him, not in life, surely not in death.

Read the rest here (PDF file, p.10).

Depersonalizing Rejection


On the website of the literary fiction journal Glimmer Train, prolific novelist Catherine Ryan Hyde shares some helpful thoughts about not reading too much into those inevitable rejection slips.

Hyde writes, “I think the most damaging misconception about rejection is that your work has been judged as ‘bad.’ You feel insulted. You feel you’ve been told you’re not good enough for that publication. But in reality, you don’t know how it was received. You were not present behind the scenes to know.”

Taste is subjective, she cautions, and in publications with limited space, the difference between acceptance and rejection may come down to an editor’s quirky personal connection with the piece, or whether it diversifies the mix of already-accepted work for that issue. “It’s hard to quantify why we fall in love with a piece of writing. I do know this: If we dated someone who didn’t fall in love with us, most of us would not conclude we were unlovable. We’d assume others might feel differently.”

As a contest judge myself, I think Hyde describes the editorial process very well. Poems that didn’t make the shortlist one year have been resubmitted and won prizes in our contest later, mainly because they were competing against a different group of finalists.

The experience described below was also familiar to me, but I don’t think I’d draw the same conclusions from it:


Just about every one of my rejected stories has gone on to be published. Without further revision. Some were rejected a handful of times. Others garnered over 50 rejections before finding a home.

Here’s what I learned, and I wish I had understood it earlier: The more I like it, the more likely I am to have trouble finding a home for it. Who knows why? But it shows that my own perspective on my work doesn’t tell me enough. And if I rewrite it because an editor says the ending is too ‘resolution evasive’ (yes, I really have been told that—I couldn’t make a thing like that up), that editor probably still won’t take it, and the next one will say the ending wraps up too neatly. (If our dates don’t fall in love with us, we don’t keep changing ourselves until they do. Well, hopefully we don’t.)”


Like Hyde, I have some favorite stories and poems that have not yet found a home, while others that seem less innovative to me have been snapped up more quickly. Perhaps editorial subjectivity is most at work when we are sending out writing that is closest to the core of our unique selves. Rather than conclude that “my own perspective on my work doesn’t tell me enough,” I am most wary of rejection-inspired revisions when it comes to these special pieces, because this is where I’m most vulnerable to conflating my work and my life, and am therefore tempted to be untrue to my artistic vision in order to feel accepted. Hyde seems to reach the same perspective by the end of the paragraph, so I’m not sure what she means by that one sentence.


Read the whole article here.

M. Lee Alexander: Poems from “Observatory”

I’ve recently finished M. Lee Alexander’s poetry chapbook Observatory, published last year by Finishing Line Press, and found it to be an insightful and enjoyable book. Clear-sighted, modest and wise, the narrator of these poems takes us to London, China, Japan, and post-Katrina New Orleans, always with an eye for the moments of common humanity that open up intimacy between strangers. Below are two of my favorite poems from this collection, reprinted by permission.

Dress Rehearsal

Theatre in the Round

My father dyed
his hair red for the Claudius Play
(or so I called it, wanting him
to be the star–till mom told me
he was a bad guy–then I cried
and called it Hamlet). He would
come home from rehearsal

orange-headed, my father and yet not
my father, almost like a clown I watched
him practice falling. We went to see
the make-up place before the play where
mom said, It’s OK, the knives aren’t real,
but my father reaching for his rust-stained 
    comb
dropped the stageprop dagger, and 
    his toe bled.

I got to stay up late that night,
look down through shining dark
to watch Claudius rolling over,
my father and not my father
on the wooden O stage below.
His crown slipped down
and his head lay bare and still.

Now flying from Orly into O’Hare, where
the river’s dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day
and the stores are full of Shamrock hats,
I’ve been called home to the funeral 
    home
too late to watch Claudius rolling over,
my father and not my father,
his hair not even gray.

****

Thrift Store Elephants

Seeking a mystery for my journey
in the thrift store next to Union Station,
passing rows of bric-a-brac I saw scattered
an army of elephants, someone’s precious
collection, the alabaster white-jade figurine
the first to catch my eye, then the teakwood
one with broken tusk, and on another shelf
a plastic Dumbo, porcelain calf and mother
touching trunks, a Babar figurine, one cruelly
carved of ivory, all cast about the shelves
among the candles, mugs, and shards of 
    former lives.

Hard to think of a happy reason for their 
    presence,
unlike children’s clothes and toys outgrown–
someone labored years to assemble this herd
and would unlikely give it up without a fight.
I began examining each one in turn, wondering
    which
had been the first, the last, or the most beloved,
which the souvenir from the trip of a lifetime.
The clerk passed, saw me handling them, said
    Those came
from our Hospice box, we get some lovely things
    from there.

I longed to take them home to a place of honor,
somehow let their donor know they’d been
    admired,
but knew a dozen fragile ornaments to be 
    a foolish
addition to a traveler’s pack. Yet strewn across
    the aisles
hated to think of them going one by one to
    different homes,
maybe gathering dust for years, so I collected 
    them again,
cleared a broad space on a lower ledge and set
    them in
a festive circle tail to trunk, found nearby a carousel
    music
box and placed it in the middle, wound it up, in hopes
the circus animal parade might catch some younger eye,
a child might bring them home as newfound treasures,
maybe start a new collection round them, finding
    joy as
their first owner had by adding to their numbers by year.

Then forgot all about the elephants until I returned
from my trip a few weeks later, stopped in and saw
they’d gone, music box too. Hoped they went together
or at least in groups. On the way out saw the
    broken-tusk
bull tossed into a box of rags, took him home and named
him Hannibal, because he’d borne a war upon his back.

Walter Brueggemann: “Infallibility” Versus Faithful Imagination

Image #55 (Fall 2007) ran an interview with the notable Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann that led off with some questions on the role of the imagination in Biblical faith. His remarks, excerpted below, could serve as my own manifesto for how I read the Bible as an artist and a Christian. (The full article is not available online, so buy the issue and read their symposium on “Why Believe in God?” with Wim Wenders, B.H. Fairchild, Doris Betts and others.)

…[W]hat we always do with the biblical text, if we want it to be pertinent or compelling or contemporary, is commit mostly unrecognized acts of imagination by which we stretch and pull and extend the implications of the text far beyond its words.

I have come to the rather simplistic notion that imagination is the capacity to image a world beyond what is obviously given. That’s the work of poets and novelists and artists–and that’s what biblical writers mostly do. I think that’s why people show up at church. They want to know whether there is any other world available than the one we can see, which we can hardly bear.
…

The intrusion of the word “infallible” [into the biblical debate] is misleading and unfortunate. The endless temptation of orthodoxy in its many forms is to receive a glimpse of gospel truth and then try to freeze it as an absolute formulation. I think the creeds of the church and the catechisms are important, until we start treating them as absolutes. Then we cover over all the generative force of the biblical testimony and make it a package that we transmit to each other and use as a club on each other.

Now, I am not finally a relativist: I don’t think that any idea is as good as any other idea. I believe that there are truthful statements, but the truthful statements have to be continually restated in order to stay truthful. I see orthodoxy as an ongoing interpretative process; we never reach an end point in it. I would not want to say that imagination contradicts orthodoxy, rather that it contradicts certain temptations of orthodoxy to freeze and absolutize. If these texts bear witness to the living God, then we cannot freeze and absolutize the good word of the living God.

On a related note, Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments has been watching a lot of Bible movies and wondering why it’s so hard to avoid dreadful sentimentality in Christian music and film:

[S]entimentality — which is but a parody of deep feeling — is deadening. Nowadays, in mass entertainment, it comes in the really noxious form of easy, “sentimental” cynicism, when a banal remark with the form of a sniggering comback is supposed to elicit the cheap thrill of superiority, an easy confirmation of despair and meaninglessness, as of rich kids slumming in the precincts of hell. Yet I think there are connections to be drawn between that kind of sentimentality and the cloying, smothering sort that characterizes bad religous art, including the bad religious music we’ve discussed here before.

How to explain? We also watched a couple of movies by a director who, I think, is a great deal less cynical than he appears to be, as he is instead a fantastic storyteller with a heart for human shame, absurdity, and, occasionally, love and heroism — Billy Wilder (we watched The Apartment and Witness for the Prosecution). There’s no sentimentality in Billy Wilder, but there sure is a lot of sentimentality in what passes for Christian pop, and that sentimentality is the kissing cousin, or maybe the drippy smooching cousin, of easy cynicism. (By the way, I want to preserve a distinction between kitsch, which retains a bit of childlike innocence to it, and the self-indulgent sentimentality of our hymn writers, who do not even bother to affect innocence.) So when Bob Hurd writes, “What are you doing tonight? I’d really like to spend some time with you,” referring to the Son of God as if he were a very nice teenage date, he’s far less honest, and far less reverent, than Wilder is when he dares to show the hollowness of a man who wears decency like a well-tailored business suit (Fred MacMurray), to be taken off when convenient. Wilder is sharp, incisive, dogged; he wants the truth. But bad religious art, like bad art generally, flees from the truth. Wilder may not see what you’d like him to see, but he strives to see, and to show you what he sees.

In my opinion, the difference between good and bad Christian art, just like the difference between good and bad biblical interpretation, generally comes down to trust. Do we trust that the world is infused with Christian truth, or is Christian truth something foreign that we have to inject into the unredeemed facts? Do we believe that by following the road of honest inquiry wherever it leads, we will ultimately find a truth congruent with the gospel (and be forgiven for our missteps along the way)? Or are we so afraid to leave the church’s well-trodden conceptual paths that other outside sources of knowledge, such as evolutionary biology, are forbidden or irrelevant?

Today in church we heard the story of the apostle Thomas (John 20:24-29). We call him “Doubting Thomas” because he famously said he would not believe in the resurrection unless he touched the risen Christ’s wounds with his own hands. This has made him a hero to many liberal Christians, who look at fundamentalist fears of science and the artistic imagination, and see some truth in the secularists’ stereotype of the courageous freethinker versus the timid believer. Interestingly, Christ does show up in response to Thomas’ demand for personal proof, so perhaps he was making a point that healthy skepticism keeps the church brave.

But Thomas also knew when to stop doubting, recognizing the risen Jesus as “My Lord and my God.” He did not remain a perpetual doubter in order to congratulate himself on his open-mindedness; he wanted to know the truth, more than to feel good about himself. Jesus then says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” We’ve traditionally heard this as “more blessed”, but perhaps no dichotomy is intended. Somewhere between blind faith and bad faith is Christian imagination, which fearlessly probes the unknown, and submits to the truth it finds.

Uncertainty and Christian Writing


The new literary journal Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression continues a trend begun by Image and Rock & Sling, providing a home for creative writing that takes Christian faith seriously without sacrificing literary and moral complexity. My novel excerpt “Bride of Christ”, about a young woman torn between loyalty to her gay brother and her evangelical family, will be published in Relief later this year.

In this interview on their website, guest editor Jill Noel Kandel shares some perceptive advice about what separates Christian literature from doctrinal or inspirational writing:


Relief: A number of our nonfiction submissions are more like articles or even sermons and not what we at Relief think of as creative nonfiction. How can writers be sure their work is appropriate for Relief before they submit?

Jill: Christian writing has many avenues. Doctrinal, devotional, and magazine article writing seem to be prominent. I would say that Relief wants to publish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that is out of the Christian mainstream. If a piece is something I could read in Guideposts or Christianity Today for example than it probably isn’t right for Relief. I think that what I am looking for is of a more literary quality.

Relief is trying to do something different. I love the definition given by the Relief staff:

Relief- An architectural term referring to a raised projection of figures on a flat surface. It is an image of a reality caught halfway between 2D and 3D.

This is precisely the type of writing that I will be looking for. Writing that reflects the reality and honesty of the world we live in tempered by the hope given to us as believers. Leave the cotton candy at the fairgrounds….

****
Relief: What is it that makes a piece of writing absolutely Christian?

Jill: As a writer I am still trying to learn how to write faith. As Christians we walk by faith and not by sight. To write faith is not to write sight. What I mean is that as Christian writers we tend to want to write the end of the story, heaven, and angels wings. Throw in a little victory celebration. But as human beings living here on this earth we are often like Joseph sitting in Pharaoh’s prison. He didn’t know the ending of his own story. I try to write what I know today to be true.

I think I’m going to post that last sentence over my writing desk, with an emphasis on “today”. How do I know what is true? Try something and see what happens. Sufficient unto the day is the writer’s block thereof.

Holy Week in the Blogosphere


Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and this weekend, unbelievable as it seems to us in the Northeast who still see snow instead of crocuses on our lawns, will be Easter. Lent is my favorite season of the Christian year, a time when I can get serious about some spiritual problem or slackness of will. Since it’s only forty days (and it seemed shorter this year, somehow), I’m not daunted by the prospect of an open-ended vow, the promise to “never do that again” which undermines itself from the start by its very implausibility. It’s like Anne Lamott’s cure for writer’s block: rather than sit down to the monumental task of “writing your novel”, she suggests that you resolve every day to write as much as will fit within a one-inch picture frame.

Well, I didn’t do that, but I did more or less keep my Lenten resolution to stop talking to my novel characters instead of Jesus. What I discovered, when I no longer had my imaginary friend telling me “Girl, you look fabulous, and I love your defense of the Trinity!”, was that I still use others’ approval as a substitute for faith that God will either (a) bring to completion the good work He has begun in me, or (b) use my failures and humiliations for my spiritual growth and that of others, if I let Him.

My faith this year has been largely about “Not-That”. God is not Eros, not morality, not intellect, not the church, not my opinions, not others’ opinions. God is only authentic in the absence of all concepts about God. This is, after awhile, a dark and confusing space to inhabit. My plot problems, it seems, were really life problems, as I had fallen into radical doubt about all methods of knowing the right path.


That feeling found a companionable echo in Hugo’s latest post about his hiatus from church. I too have returned to the words of that old Negro spiritual: You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley/You’ve got to walk it by yourself/Ain’t nobody here can walk it for you/You’ve got to walk it by yourself. I keep wanting others to walk it for me, or at least with me, so that I can feel more confident that I am “right”. But only Jesus can make me right, or rather, lead me beyond rightness to God’s love. Jesus walked that valley for me, so why do I need anyone else to do it?

Kim Fabricius has posted a bracing Palm Sunday sermon about how the death of Jesus invites us to step into that emptiness, the place of not knowing and not being comforted:


So: for one Holy Week forget about the suffering of Jesus, the courage of Jesus, the wickedness of it all. Forget even about the dying of Jesus: it is not to the crucifix, or even to the deposition, that I would direct you – no! Rather look at the man – dead – gaze upon the corpse of Christ, fix your eyes on his cold and rigid body, laid out on a slab, already showing signs of decomposition. I am thinking of Hans Holbein’s painting “Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”. The Russian author Dostoevsky saw the painting, in a museum in Basel, stopping on his way to Geneva, and forever after it haunted him like a nightmare. He describes it in his great novel The Idiot. The character Prince Myshkin says: “Why some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!”

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

No one puts it more starkly – or more honestly and truthfully – than Bonhoeffer. We must recognize, he wrote from prison, “that we have to learn to live in the world ‘as if God were not here’. And this is just what we do recognize – before God! God himself compels us to recognize it… God would have us know that we must live as men and women who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us… Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross” – and then down from the cross and into the grave. “He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.” God a Super-Power? That god is a demon, the Devil. If that god is your Lord, this week is a call for “regime change” (Walter Brueggemann).

So, yes, lose your faith! For as with life, so with faith: only those who lose it will find it. Or rather may find it. Faith is a risk, and discipleship demands that we learn to live with insecurity and uncertainty, setting out on a journey without a map, with companions who are as lost as we are, following a leader who is always way ahead of us, beckoning mysteriously, “Follow me!”, and then vanishing just as we arrive. God is mystery, ineffable mystery, naming a reality that we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to un-know and rethink everything we thought we knew.
In an older post, Christopher at Betwixt and Between reflects on how Lent’s call to humility is heard differently by members of the dominant group versus those who are out of power. Traditional Christian rhetoric about “dying to self” has been addressed to those who already had a fully-formed, privileged self to lose. Without a nuanced understanding of the audience being addressed, this theology may further oppress those (such as women, children and sexual minorities) who have been forced to submerge their selfhood to the powers of this world.

Finally, Kittredge Cherry at Jesus in Love is running a Gay Holy Week series of readings and artwork that retell the Passion narrative with GLBT imagery.

Sara Miles on the Idolatry of the Family


Poet and journalist Sara Miles, whose conversion memoir Take This Bread has just been released in paperback, preached this sermon last summer at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church (San Francisco) about an all-too-common misunderstanding of Christian “family values”. Just as in Jesus’ day, “family” is not merely a sentimental tableau; it is a circle of power that defines who possesses status and purity, and who does not.


Jesus says, I’ve come to bring fire to the earth and destroy your family. Do you think I’ve come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. What’s burning up here isn’t just money, as it was in the Gospel last week. It isn’t just religion, as it was two weeks ago when poor Peter tried to make a shrine to the ancestors to protect him from the blazing fire of the transfiguration. What Jesus is burning up in this reading is the past, and the future of the world as we see it in human terms. He’s replacing it with the fire of the perpetual present: the fire of Christ, the fire of baptism through death. The fire of new creation. He is burning down the house….

In our cold postmodern capitalist world, family sometimes seems like the only place we’re safe. It’s home. It’s love. It’s a minivan full of blond children. But Jesus is not talking about a cozy, affective private household: he’s talking about a system of power.

In Jesus’ time, family ruled as much as the temple did….or the soldiers of the imperial army. Your very name, your identity, was determined by whose son or daughter you were. Your role in life was completely circumscribed by your position in the family. Your freedom as an individual was negligible in the family, and in the network of families that made up tribes and nations. The father ruled the mother, the mother-in-law ruled the daughter–in-law, the elder brother ruled the younger brother.

And central to the construction of family, of course, was who was outside it. Families existed—in fact, just as they do now—to define outsiders. Widows and orphans, illegitimate children—these people had no power, no authority, no place. They were not full humans, because they did not belong to a family.

Jesus is gonna burn that sucker down.

And, to the extent that we still think families are about private life, about controlling boundaries, about maintaining an inside and an outside, they are over. When we think they’re about knowing who isn’t family, who isn’t our brother or sister, they’re over. God wants to smash even our enlightened, modern families, and replace them with something new. Because family, to Jesus, is not just the family you’re born into. Not the family of history, but the whole human family Jesus is born into, the family he remakes in his own image. Family contains everyone who is a child of God. It is love without conditions. And that smashed-up family, the new creation, is what Jesus gives us to live in, once he’s burned down the house of exclusive, man-made families.

Visit Sara Miles’ website for more sermons, interviews, and an excerpt from her new book.

Jesus the Oyster-Man


Today in the Anglican cycle of prayer we commemorate the brothers John and Charles Wesley, whose revival movement within the Anglican Church gave rise to the Methodist denomination. James Kiefer at The Daily Office tells this story of one Wesleyan preacher’s creative misreading of the Bible:


[A]lthough Wesley found it natural to approach the Gospel with habits of thought formed by a classical education, he was quick to recognize the value of other approaches. The early Methodist meetings were often led by lay preachers with very limited education. On one occasion, such a preacher took as his text Luke 19:21, “Lord, I feared thee, because thou art an austere man.” Not knowing the word “austere,” he thought that the text spoke of “an oyster man.” He spoke about the work of those who retrieve oysters from the sea-bed. The diver plunges down from the surface, cut off from his natural environment, into bone-chilling water. He gropes in the dark, cutting his hands on the sharp edges of the shells. Now he has the oyster, and kicks back up to the surface, up to the warmth and light and air, clutching in his torn and bleeding hands the object of his search. So Christ descended from the glory of heaven into the squalor of earth, into sinful human society, in order to retrieve humans and bring them back up with Him to the glory of heaven, His torn and bleeding hands a sign of the value He has placed on the object of His quest. Twelve men were converted that evening. Afterwards, someone complained to Wesley about the inappropriateness of allowing preachers who were too ignorant to know the meaning of the texts they were preaching on. Wesley, simply said, “Never mind, the Lord got a dozen oysters tonight.”

God bless the human mind that brings order out of chaos, a humble imitation of God’s own creativity. Because he understood the heart of the gospel, this preacher wrestled with a text that initially appeared absurd, finding meaning, and birthing a fresh and powerful new image of salvation, where literalists would say there was only a mistake. How is Jesus like an oyster-man? (What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?) Poetry begins with the kind of deep seeing that such a conundrum provokes.

One of my favorites among Charles Wesley’s 6,000+ hymns is And Can It Be . Sing along at CyberHymnal.