The Underside of the Tapestry: Reading Christian Books for What’s Missing

May27

Nowadays, more often than not, when I listen to a sermon or read a Christian spiritual guide with friends, a moment will arise when my inner reaction to the text seems contrary to what everyone else is getting out of it. They’re seeing an inspiring picture on the right side of the tapestry, while I’m underneath looking at the loose threads and snarled knots. Like the optical illusion that’s either a vase or two kissing faces, one can at best switch back and forth between these two views, not hold them side by side. Or so I tell myself, those times when I keep my critique under wraps, not wanting to be the death’s-head at the feast who spoils the faith that others need for comfort.

I don’t know that I have less faith that my neighbors in the pews, just faith in different things, and perhaps too little patience with beliefs and attitudes that (in my opinion) distract from our most urgent afflictions and their best cures. Astute readers of this blog will remember that I’ve always been this way, but also notice that my priorities list has been more changeable than my fervor. This awkward mutability gives me another reason to think twice before challenging the group’s consensus.

As far as is consistent with kindness and timeliness, of course, I nonetheless believe every serious engagement with a spiritual text should eventually include the deconstructionist questions, “What is the power position of the author and his/her assumed audience?” and “What perspectives are being left out?”

Advocates of traditional, conservative education (and such a one was I!) have confused deconstructionism with moral relativism. Quite the contrary. The questions above are attempts to bring a consciousness of justice into how we read a text, to take responsibility for our standpoint and our blind spots.

True, in the prideful and competitive culture of academia, these questions have been deployed in bad faith, to dismiss intellectual rivals by labeling them “oppressors”, exactly as their conservative Christian counterparts would exploit the label “heretics”. But the inquiry into power dynamics and incompleteness need not be a bug hunt. It should simply be a nonjudgmental acknowledgment that no text is completely satisfying because the ideal community is always more diverse than one perspective can encompass. This acknowledgment would clarify that members who enter the discussion from an unrepresented standpoint are welcome contributors, not spoilers.

For instance, I belong to a weekly discussion group that’s currently studying the Examen, a daily prayer practice developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola. One of our members, a retired priest, observed that this practice was developed by monastics who had the privilege of contemplation because their daily subsistence needs were met by the community. We have a similar luxury of prayer time as middle-class Americans, if we choose to use it that way, of course. He wondered whether the Examen would be possible or relevant for a desperately poor person such as those he had served in his past congregation–someone whose entire attention was taken up with keeping her kids fed and her house from collapsing.

I found this question uncomfortable in a good way. It added another layer to the repentance and gratitude themes of the Examen by reminding me that my experience was not the center of the universe. It opened the door to other fruitful questions: Is contemplative prayer at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, worth considering only after basic physical security is established? Or is it necessary at every level of survival, so that (as the Buddha would say) we don’t add to our suffering by becoming entangled in fear, anger, and greed? If the latter, how would the Examen best be adapted to be useful and validating to someone living on the margins? To take that question seriously, we would have to work harder to include such people in our discussion group, instead of making guesses about their spiritual needs from our standpoint.

For further reading on these themes, I recommend:
James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Baker Academic, 2006)
John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Baker Academic, 2007)
Crystal L. Downing, How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith: Questioning Truth in Language, Philosophy, and Art (IVP Academic, 2006)

Poetry from Inside: “Of Father, From Prison”

May23

My prison pen pal “Jon“, who is serving a life sentence in California for a burglary-related homicide, continues his efforts to grow in self-awareness and spiritual maturity through writing. I thought this recent poem was one of his finest, expressing compassion for his child-self alongside remorse for the flawed path he took as an adult. It’s a simple but deep story that I imagine many troubled young men will recognize as their own.

Of Father, From Prison

I used to smile in wonder
at the barb of the fish hook
and however you managed to get worms
so delicately placed and pierced.
Then even when you showed me how
I still couldn’t do it on my own
and sometimes couldn’t bear to look.

I used to sit and wander
as the landscapes became cities
with people beneath the lights of day.
Drifting by in gusts of winds
of mountaintops and Mayberrys
and cow filled fields and stars.
Watching from the passenger seat
while you drove your precious truck
and I waited for my turn
that had finally never come.

I used to be amazed
at all the grand and well told stories
of the life you really never led.
I realized I never even knew you
when I noticed they were lies.
You were gentle, very quiet
always private and reclusive.
You could fix anything inanimate
yet never repair the troubled minds
of yourself or those around you.
And I can think of all the places
you would take me as I grew.
Leaving us with memories
of decaying and joyless days,
of worms, fish hooks and barbs.
And I would be amazed
if you ever came to know
how very much alike
we’ve finally become.

I do not wander in wonders anymore
but sometimes think of who you are.
You living in your solitude
and me stuck within my own.
Where computers are your company,
while books become my best of friends.
Your prison is in a house
and mine within a cell.
Inside the worlds of our own making,
trapped within our mortal shells.

Poetry by William J. Reiter: “Jimi & a hundred & one blue airborne rangers”

May14

I recently got an email from Bill Reiter of Iowa, a poet, Vietnam veteran, and National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient for playwriting. We haven’t been able to confirm whether we’re related, but all Reiters are welcome at the Block. He kindly shares this poem with our readers.

jimi & a hundred & one blue airborne rangers
(the summer of love 1967)

it was a hall
an old movie house really
in the city of saint francis
near the ocean called peace

a grace slick-like chick
was jumpin’ in blue white strobe lights
amorphous light shows pulsating walls
all just a prologue to hendrix

he came out at last
a ‘fro imitation of a black ragdoll
escaped from some absurd beckett cast
surely a tragedy or farce was about to unfold
in the silver screen-less seat-less theater
above a stoned blue clowning crowd

he struck left-handed
upside down strings
a bell-bottomed blue heron
with piercing dark eyes
heavy with one guitar wing

he looked down at us
as if into san francisco’s blue bay
from coit’s tower
as if to jump from another hughes burly bird

i pushed to the front to hear
his voice soft wings
on the wind cries mary
gliding around us
around the statue of saint francis
in the city of saint francis
near the ocean called peace
like a cable car hushing up telegraph hill

i wanted to know about over there
and he played alarums purple haze
murderous intent in hey joe
pain of rejection star spangled banner
with its true blue taps near the end

jimi left the stage that night
prophesying his own end
which came eventually street easy
a barbiturate permanent sleep

he was right-on however about over there
and as he knew coming back was worse

Mother’s Day: Honoring Our Complicated Families

May10

Who is like the Lord our God, the one who sits enthroned on high?…He settles the childless woman in her home as a happy mother of children. (Psalm 113:5, 9)

Mother’s Day has always been a difficult holiday for me. Unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving, there’s no larger goal to take the focus off one’s personal life and the ways it conforms or fails to conform to a Hallmark card.

Because of her trauma issues, my biological mother never felt sufficiently loved or special. On Mother’s Day, she was especially disappointed and confused by the contrast between how she was supposed to feel and how she actually felt. No matter what we did, it wasn’t enough. Now that she and my other mom are apart, her ex-partner has had space to grow into the mother I need, no longer forced into the shadows. But it’s been a long time coming.

Many infertile and waiting adoptive moms can relate to the loneliness of those years when Mother’s Day came around again and we still didn’t have our child. We belonged to an unseen minority who couldn’t help but recognize the complexity of this thing we call “motherhood”, so oversimplified by the sentimental mainstream. Birthmothers, too, may wonder what this day should mean to them. There are no words for loss in the language of this holiday, just pink flowers and brunch and cards that say “you’re the bestest”.

Last year, on my first Mother’s Day as a mom, I was depressed, and ashamed of it. I loved my one-month-old son. I was so proud to sit in the “parents with small children” pew in church for the first time ever. But the pain of our adoption journey hadn’t healed. I felt pressured by the rhetoric of motherhood to pretend that everything was hearts-and-flowers, that this moment made all the past betrayals worthwhile.

It didn’t help that it coincided with the date when our birthmother’s consent became irrevocable. Now it’s REAL. Help me, mommy! I called her up to give her good wishes and support. Her confidence in me, her comfort with her decision, made me believe I really deserved to celebrate, at last.

Just as I push back against aggressive projections of masculinity onto my 13-month-old (I swear, he comes by that cowboy swagger naturally), I continue to deconstruct the false choices inherent in popular ideas of motherhood. Adulthood and sacrifice versus immaturity and freedom. Being ridiculed for hypervigilance yet blamed for anything that goes wrong with one’s child. Mothering, as opposed to generic “parenting”, is by definition a female activity. And we all know what fun it is to be female in our society. Maybe that’s one reason I was so afraid of it.

Therefore, mothering, for me, is also an invitation to lean into the political responsibility that goes along with adulthood. This passage from the “Motherhood and Daughterhood” chapter of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born spoke to me during those early days of transformation into Shane’s Mom:

The “unchilded” woman, if such a term makes any sense, is still affected by centuries-long attitudes–on the part of both women and men–towards the birthing, child-rearing function of women. Any woman who believes that the institution of motherhood has nothing to do with her is closing her eyes to crucial aspects of her situation.

Many of the great mothers have not been biological. The novel Jane Eyre…can be read as a woman-pilgrim’s progres along a path of classic female temptation, in which the motherless Jane time after time finds women who protect, solace, teach, challenge, and nurture her in self-respect. For centuries, daughters have beem strengthened and energized by nonbiological mothers, who have combined a care for the practical values of survival with an incitement toward further horizons, a compassion for vulnerability with an insistence on our buried strengths. It is precisely this that has allowed us to survive…

We are, none of us, “either” mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both. Women, mothers or not, who feel committed to other women, are increasingly giving each other a quality of caring filled with the diffuse kinds of identification that exist between actual mothers and daughters. Into the mere notion of “mothering” we may carry, as daughters, negative echoes of our own mothers’ martyrdom, the burden of their valiant, necessarily limited efforts on our behalf, the confusion of their double messages. But it is a timidity of the imagination which urges that we can be “daughters”–therefore free spirits–rather than “mothers”–defined as eternal givers. Mothering and nonmothering have been such charged concepts for us, precisely because whichever we did has been turned against us.

To accept and integrate and strengthen both the mother and the daughter in ourselves is no easy matter, because patriarchal attitudes have encouraged us to split, to polarize, these images, and to project all unwanted guilt, anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the “other” woman. But any radical vision of sisterhood demands that we reintegrate them. (pgs. 252-53)

My little pea pod and me in April 2012.

“Crime Against Nature”: A Lesbian Mother’s Poetic Manifesto

Apr10

Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Crime Against Nature is everything a poetry collection should be. Politically urgent but never one-dimensional, in language that’s always clear but never pedestrian, this groundbreaking book recounts how the author lost custody of her sons when she came out as a lesbian, then forged a beautifully honest relationship with them later in life.

The speaker grieves, rages, yet bravely refuses to take the blame for the impossible choice forced upon her. “This is not the voice of the guilty mother,” she writes. Connecting her loss to other forms of oppression and violence against women, she dares to dream of a world that “will not divide self from self, self from life.”

Crime Against Nature was originally published in 1989 by Firebrand Press and won the 1989 Lamont Poetry Prize, a second-book award from the Academy of American Poets. A Midsummer Night’s Press, in conjunction with the lesbian literary journal Sinister Wisdom, reissued it this year in an expanded edition with historical notes and an author essay. It is the first book in their “Sapphic Classics” series reprinting iconic lesbian poetry that is now out of print. Subscribers to this excellent journal will receive future Sapphic Classics (one a year) as the equivalent of one magazine issue. Crime Against Nature does double duty as Issue #88.

Sinister Wisdom editor Julie R. Enszer has kindly given me permission to reprint a sample poem below. I chose this one because I could relate to the speaker’s dilemma between speaking and not speaking about trauma. In the end it is better to speak, even when it hurts. It sets free others’ “tongues of ice”, as well as your own. Thank you, Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Justice, Come Down

A huge sound waits, bound in the ice,
in the icicle roots, in the buds of snow
on fir branches, in the falling silence
of snow, glittering in the sun, brilliant
as a swarm of gnats, nothing but hovering
wings at midday. With the sun comes noise.
Tongues of ice break free, fall, shatter,
splinter, speak. If I could write the words.

Simple, like turning a page, to say Write
what happened, but this means a return
to the cold place where I am being punished.
Alone to the stony circle where I am frozen,
the empty space, children, mother, father gone,
lover gone away. There grief still sits
and waits, grim, numb, keeping company with
anger. I can smell my anger like sulfur-
struck matches. I wanted what had happened
to be a wall to burn, a window to smash.
At my fist the pieces would sparkle and fall.
All would be changed. I would not be alone.

Instead I have told my story over and over
at parties, on the edge of meetings, my life
clenched in my fist, my eyes brittle as glass.

Ashamed, people turned their faces away
from the woman ranting, asking: Justice,
stretch out your hand. Come down, glittering,
from where you have hidden yourself away.

Counties Hoard Prison Rehab Funding, Few Inmates Helped

Apr9

Two years ago the US Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison overcrowding, which had reached the point of unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment”. The state then released numerous low-level offenders and granted funding to county officials to run rehab programs for the probationers. The only problem, according to this article in the Sacramento News & Review, is that the counties actually hoard the state dollars instead of directing it toward non-state-sponsored rehab programs with a proven track record. Probationers wind up in a revolving door of re-arrests for petty offenses, because the high recidivism rate helps the county argue that it needs more state funding for probation officers and jails. From the article:

Tim Gene Sanders is about to get busted for possessing a saltshaker.

It’s February 2011, and Sanders is on his way home from a community center in Citrus Heights. He hangs a left on Auburn Boulevard when a patrol cruiser pulls him up short for making an unsafe lane change. The hangdog ex-con with the rebel-cool hair knows the drill. He’s on probation, so the cops get to toss his vehicle. Inside, they find a saltshaker and an empty sandwich bag. Sanders was snacking on hard-boiled eggs, but Citrus Heights’ finest assume the white granules at the bottom of the shaker are meth.

By the time the charges are dropped, the damage is done. Sanders spends 19 days in county jail and loses his car to a prohibitive impound fee. His house goes next.

“That’s the system,” Sanders says. “That’s how the system works.”

He would know. He got out of Sacramento County Main Jail only days ago for taking Tylenol with codeine No. 3. The pain meds—prescribed by a doctor after Sanders got out of the clink and hoofed it 10 miles on arthritic hips to his car—made it appear there was heroin in his system. Before that, Sanders went to jail for seeing the doctor instead of his parole officer.

Read the full story here.

National Child Abuse Prevention Month: Why It’s Personal

Apr1

The first day of April, the day after Easter. A breezy spring day, clouds speeding across the shining blue sky. Outside our town courthouse, a new flag has joined the Stars & Stripes atop the flagpole on the lawn. On a red ground, six paper-doll cut-out children, all blue except for one red body.

It’s National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

Awareness months and colored ribbons have their drawbacks. They can feel hokey and self-congratulatory, or smack of tokenism for issues that deserve year-round attention. But they can also provide a conversational opening to broach an uncomfortable topic. As my Lenten discipline recedes into the rearview mirror, I can attest that a month of anything is a manageable spiritual practice, while a lifelong resolution can seem overwhelming and self-defeating.

I had all those reactions, positive and negative, as I gazed up at the red and blue flag snapping in the wind. One child was different from the others. It didn’t help me to think about that. I guessed it was a reference to the “1 in 6” statistic, meant to send the message that child abuse is more prevalent than we’d like to believe. The logo was probably a gesture toward normalizing survivors, but my gut reaction was the opposite. It looked like a representation of how abuse victims feel–singled out, conspicuously tainted, separate from the human community. The logo reified this division. Red and blue. Us and them.

I don’t know how you’d put this on a flag, but my version of awareness would be more radical. It would emphasize what survivors have in common–with each other, across different kinds of abuse, and with everyone who breathes in abuse-enabling myths in the air of our culture. We may not all be in a position to identify abused children and find services for them, but we can all ask ourselves: What do I believe–about God, power, knowledge, sexuality–that contributes to the silencing and minimizing of abuse? What might I be telling myself to silence myself?

I didn’t realize I was a child abuse survivor until a few years ago, because the violations weren’t physical (as far as I can remember). My biological mother was physically abusive and controlling to her partner, which took center stage in how I thought about my childhood. I had to encounter abuse in other contexts, as an adult, before I recognized the pattern in my past.

First, vicariously, as an advocate for gay rights, I started to notice how the religious arguments against homosexuality would forcibly rewrite a gay person’s interpretation of his own bodily sensations and affections, trying to brainwash him into feeling pleasure as pain, integrity as brokenness. This is similar to how a sexual abuser teaches a child to dissociate, to disbelieve what her body tells her. As Martha Beck contends in Leaving the Saints, her memoir of incest in the Mormon Church, a religion creates split personalities when it commands adherents to accept demonstrably false facts. Such training primes people to be both abusers and victims.

I was raised by two moms, but the homophobic theology didn’t just offend me as an ally. It felt like it struck deeper. It was like a sword poised to sever me from my awareness of God. And I couldn’t explain why.

When I spoke up about this, I hit an emotional brick wall with some Christian friends. Our study groups were no longer a safe place for honesty, for me at least. Some conversations detoured around me as if I hadn’t spoken. At other times, my boundaries around discussing certain personal matters were ignored, because my feelings were merely human preferences that couldn’t stand in the way of my friend’s obligation to save my soul. We were adults sitting in a room having tea; why was I speechless with terror at my sudden invisibility, why tearfully desperate to wring compassion from a heart gone cold?

Searching for a better way to re-imagine my faith, I obsessively read feminist and pro-LGBT Christian websites. One of these led me to the “escape from Christian patriarchy” blogs such as No Longer Quivering and Love, Joy, Feminism. Though my upbringing included neither Christianity nor a patriarch, I was astounded to find how closely my experience mirrored that of girls raised in a fundamentalist breeder cult, right down to the “prairie muffin” dresses.

The penny dropped when these blogs did a series on emotional incest. I never knew that was a thing. I used to say, “Well, my mother was really really enmeshed and co-dependent with me…and OCD…and she hated it when I got married…and she had a breakdown when I tried to have a baby…and…and…” Now, I was like, “So that’s why I have so much in common with my BFF who just recovered her incest memories!”

The point is, I wouldn’t have been ready to face this truth about my past if I hadn’t been prepared with analogies to other forms of oppression, such as homophobia and spiritual abuse. These common factors gave me a sense of solidarity, overcoming some of the isolation and stigma I relived when I saw the courthouse flag today. I had a political outlet for my anger instead of expending it all in the secret confines of a therapist’s office. This solidarity continues to help me overcome the memories of being stunted, shut away, wasted, consumed.

Should I be telling you this, my readers? Should I embarrass the person who gave me life, whose own life is lonely and empty now because of a thousand choices to turn away from health? All I can say is, I could blog about “child abuse” in the abstract, I could link to a dozen resources run by “out” survivors whom I admire immensely, but I would still be dishonest if I kept silence in a way that implied, I’m one of the blue children on the flag, not that red one. No, I was just a child. This is my story.

Some Readings for Holy Week

Mar27

Reiter’s Block fans, I apologize for the shortage of original material lately. I have been keeping my vow to give up worrying about my writing for Lent, and accordingly have been working hard on a scandalous and completely unpublishable experiment in personal prose. I hope you have been enjoying the poetry reprints from writers I admire.

For Christians following the Western calendar, we are now in Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, when we commemorate and meditate upon the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Here are some timely links that I found helpful to my Lenten reflections.

At the Jesus in Love website for queer spirituality and the arts, Kittredge Cherry is showcasing a Stations of the Cross paintings series by Mary Button. These arresting images find parallels between the stages of Christ’s journey to Calvary and pivotal moments in LGBT history. For instance, Button pairs the nailing to the cross with a gay person forced into electroshock therapy to “cure” homosexuality.

Last week, a number
of Christian and former-Christian feminist bloggers participated in
Spiritual Abuse Awareness Week. Progressive evangelical writer
Rachel Held Evans has posted a good overview of the series. I particularly liked this quote from her interview with Boz Tchividjian of G.R.A.C.E., an organization that educates churches about how to combat sexual abuse: “In the nearly two decades I’ve worked as or with prosecutors, I never get asked about false allegations of burglary, robbery, arson or a host of other offenses. However, nearly every time I speak to lay persons about child abuse the question of false allegations is among the first things lay persons ask.” Yes indeed…why do abuse victims have the additional burden of convincing people that the crime really happens? Our uncritical acceptance of rape myths is a good place to start our repentant soul-searching.

Christian feminist blogger Sarah Over the Moon, inspired by James Cone’s liberation theology, rejects the abusive image of God in traditional “penal substitution” atonement, in favor of a vision of Jesus who stands with the oppressed, even unto death:

The cross cannot just mean that we are “saved from sin,” and “going to heaven.” Our speaking about the cross cannot just sound like those cliched platitudes that Christians often tell those who are hurting. The cross that Jesus reclaimed from the Roman Empire has fallen back into the hands of oppressors, becoming a tool of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of heterosexism and transphobia, of the military and prison industrial complex, of those who wage warfare on the poor.

But I want to reclaim it, like Christ did.

If we are to find liberation in the crucifixion, then the cross must stand as a middle finger to oppressive power structures.

The cross of Jesus reveals the ugly truth behind oppressive power, and then the cross mocks that power through the resurrection.

The cross of Jesus calls those of us who are oppressors (most of us–myself included–are oppressed in some contexts and oppressors in others) to humility, repentance, and a new way of living.

The cross of Jesus tells the oppressed–in a world that tries to convince us that we are not even human–that we are not only made in God’s image, but that God came to earth to be made in ours.

The cross of Jesus tells the oppressed that we can take up our crosses and our protest signs and join together, armed with the power of love, to defeat the powers that rape, abuse, and murder us.

The cross of Jesus tells us that they can kill our bodies, but that doesn’t mean they win.

Amen!

Poetry by Donal Mahoney: “Woman in the Day Room Crying”

Mar27

Reiter’s Block contributor Donal Mahoney describes the inspiration for this poem as follows: “Fresh out graduate school in English in 1962, I had a pregnant wife and couldn’t find a job. At that time, a degree in anything qualified a person to be a caseworker in Chicago. Seeing hundreds of clients, one sometimes suspected child abuse in the adult the child had become. PTSD isn’t the product of war alone.”

Woman in the Day Room Crying

Lightning bolts in childhood
can scar the soul forever.
They’re a satanic baptism
when the minister’s your father,
mother, brother, sister,
anyone taller, screaming,
shooting flames from the sky
all day, all night.

The years go by
but the scars remain.
The pale moonlight of age
makes them easier to see
and scratch until they burst
and bleed again,
another reason I wake up
at night screaming.

When the daylight comes,
I talk about the scars
when no one is around
to say shut up!
I draw the details in a mural
on the walls and ceilings so
everyone can see the storms
that never left a rainbow.

Ayn Rand, Trauma Survivor?

Mar18

Second only to Jesus for today’s Republican politicians, the libertarian novelist and popular philosopher Ayn Rand is their favorite author they’ve never actually read. If pressed, they’d mumble something about cutting welfare and returning to the gold standard. But that’s where the overlap begins and ends. Rand–an atheist, intellectual elitist, pro-choicer, celebrator of the sexual life force, and opponent of all state-sponsored coercion and pork-barrel politics–would shudder to be associated with the militarism, corporate welfare, and religious fundamentalism of our GOP.

However, most liberals viciously reject her, too. Some of it is guilt by association. Anyone Glenn Beck admires must be an evil kook, right? Another problem is that feminists have never known how to react to right-wing women. Rand frustrates feminist categorization because of her hyper-masculinity combined with sexual masochism. She brazened her way into the male-dominated field of philosophy, sang the praises of career women during the “Leave It to Beaver” era, and became a bestselling author and lecturer, but despised traditionally feminine characteristics (emotion, softness, intuition, “weakness”, altruism) and wrote sex scenes that anticipated 50 Shades of Gray.

Reiter's Block

The blog of poet and novelist Jendi Reiter

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