Let's Argue it Out

Caveat: The approaching election is obviously getting to me, so don't take this one too seriously, and definitely not too literally...

The Lectionary Page that I use to review the upcoming Lessons for each Sunday uses the New Revised Standard Version. I notice that for Oct 31 the Isaiah chapter 1 passage is translated not "Come, let us reason together," like I grew up hearing, but "Come, let us argue it out, says the Lord." I feel a lot more like arguing it out with God today than I feel like reasoning, and so am very glad to see this invitation.

I've had a bone (or a whole spinal column of bones, actually) to pick with God for a long time. I have a severe case of juvenile idiopathic scoliosis, the kind that would have killed me given half a chance, and the kind that, no matter how well they corrected it when I was a kid, still leaves me as a "hunchback," a "cripple," or, as Leviticus 21 calls it in good Elizabethan English, "crookbackt" -- someone who might "profane the sanctuary."

Why would God create someone who was inherently, through no volition of their own, just by their very nature, fated to "profane the sanctuary" if they were to be accorded the privileges granted to others? Is God perverse? And more to the point for me, can't the God answer for Itself? My grandmother prayed for my healing every day -- made me pray with her -- agonized over her little faith or my little faith being the thing that prevented me from being healed. With all that she put into believing, and as much as I tried to believe for her, you'd think that if God was in the business of healing at all, it would surely have happened. Instead of the joy she anticipated each time she decided I was going to be healed this time, my being me caused her nothing but anguish and brought great doubts about her faith. That's another thing to argue about, God! I really loved her, but it didn't turn out so well, did it?

That bit about God answering for Itself is the rub for me, most of the time. I've actually given up asking this question of other people -- except now I will throw it out into the aether, where I fear my blog electrons perpetually swim in a sea of indifference. At least here I don't expect an answer. But, whenever I ask it of a friend, however close, I have come to expect yet another defense of God. Is God so weak that It must have men (and women) to defend It at every turn?

I asked myself the other day what kind of an answer I have been looking for, what is it that I continue to seek, and continue to set myself up to be denied yet again every time I broach this subject? I guess just a hug; an "I understand"; maybe someone to add a voice to mine and also question, "Hey God, what IS up with that?" This disagreement seems pretty lopsided -- would it be too much to ask to have a few on my side? I don't think God really needs all those defenders.

So OK God, step up to the plate -- without your cast of thousands. Just you and me, let's argue it out!

--AnnBarbie

Finding a Place of Springs

One line from the Psalm in today’s lections (Psalm 84:5) actively leapt off the page and grabbed me as I read it: “Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs.” I had thought of this as God’s presence replacing/overwriting desolate valleys with springs of water, but things I’ve been reading lately make me wonder whether it, instead, means that the springs actually require the desolate valleys as raw material from which they may eventually well up in us.

I guess this needs some explaining. I’ve been reading the just released book Discovering the Spirit in the City (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), for which my dear friend Raficq Abdulla has contributed a chapter. In addition to Raficq’s delightful essay [that goes without saying!], I found the contributions of Pádraig Ó Tuama and Mark Oakley to be profoundly moving. These two write with such compassion and grace, and seem particularly able to illuminate both the best and the worst of the human experience as we wrestle with the God we perceive as involved in and, perhaps, central to our being. I thought how wonderful and how valuable for the rest of us that there are such people who can enter so deeply into the experience of being human, and help us to see it in it’s fullness; from tragic to glorious, mundane to transcendent, and all things in between.

At the same time, I found myself reacting in frustration because they are both gay, and much of the compassion and vulnerability I sensed in them seemed to be bound together with the bitter pain of rejection and alienation they had both experienced in trying to serve God as a gay man in the Christian church. I’m not mad at them for being gay; I’m mad at the rest of us for not being more like them – so that not every damn time I discover someone who seems to fully embody the spirit of love that I believe to be God, they turn out, invariably, to be gay! I worry that then when I write, as in this blog, “Oh, these writers are great, you must read them!” people will just dismiss the recommendation with the thought that “They’re probably nothing special; those queers just stick together.”*

So, I had these frustrations in mind when I read the lections, and for the first time I thought, “Whoa! Maybe you can’t get to the point of being a ‘place of springs’ unless you actually go through the 'desolate valleys.'” Perhaps the thought is not so much replacing the desolation but transforming its essence into something beautiful and life giving.

Lately, in response to a recent spate of disturbing suicides, there has been a media campaign with the message “It gets better” (sponsored by the It Gets Better Project) and aimed at vulnerable gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender teens. The messages have been mostly oriented towards convincing desperate teens that their lives will be happier and much easier to navigate in the future – if they will only consent to stay alive long enough to find that out. Additionally, it may very well be these teens, who go through so much desolation in their bullied, taunted, dehumanizing valleys of despair, that will transform themselves into pools of living water for all of us in the future; our healers, priests, counselors, prophets and spiritual teachers – if they remain alive long enough to find their own unique "place of springs." For our own sakes as well as theirs, lets hope (and work towards making sure that) they do.

In the meantime, where are the desolate places in my own life that perhaps I can begin to transform into my own “place of springs”?

--AnnBarbie

*Whatever term one might ultimately create to define an appropriate demographic for me, because I am married to another woman people perceive me as lesbian. However, in this case I can’t claim the same early trauma that g/l/b/t youth generally experience, so I don’t feel that I writing about myself here.

Are We All In This Together?

Kathleen Norris, in her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2001), says something so profoundly true for me that I've quoted it over and over in the decade since she wrote and I read that book: "We go to church in order to sing, and theology is secondary." I thought of her again this week as I drove alone the 10 hours from home to DC. Per usual, I sang and carried on imaginary conversations in my head with people I've been reading or thinking about. Since I've been doing so much thinking lately about other religions, religion and politics, and interfaith dialog, I found myself wondering how I would explain being a Christian to someone from another faith. I realized that the best explanation I could give would be to just sing for them, all the songs I learned as a child as well as the ones I sing now. In my mind I thought of how my favorites have changed over the years as I have changed, and how I still relate to all the music on so many different levels. Theology is truly secondary -- that part of Christianity is all in my head. Music, and singing most of all, is the realm of my whole being.

And so, I sang. My voice only lasted for about 5 hours, but my repertoire of Christian hymns and songs could easily have carried me through the 10 hour trip without delving too far into the territory of "um's" and "la, la, la's" when I forgot the words. This heritage is that much a part of me. Nevertheless, what the songs say to me changes over the years as I change and, particularly, as I have become more aware of the perspectives of others. One of the first times I became particularly disconcerted about the words to a familiar hymn was when the Methodists decided that maybe Rise Up, Oh Men of God should be retired from regular Sunday worship. I was still young and it was new to me to question what it means to have the whole church singing as though only the MEN of God matter. But even though I never consciously felt excluded, the discussion made me realize that when I, like all the other kids of my acquaintance, played Knights of the Round Table or dreamed of going on the Crusades, I always wanted to be a Knight or even the King. I had no use for the women's roles and refused to play one in my mind or in our games. I had internalized our society's message that only men could grow up to do great and wonderful things. Of course, these days I am also squeamish about those Crusades that I so wanted to go on as a child. Though I still love the "DUM, dum, DUM, dum" rhythm of Onward Christian Soldiers, I cringe when I sing it not only for the lasting damage those historical episodes wreaked on Christian/Muslim/Jewish relations, but also for my comfort in adopting a decidedly militaristic outlook. Did I love the music I sang as a child because it reflected my very narrow world view? Or did the music I loved unconsciously write these attitudes so deeply on my soul that is has taken a lifetime to pry them up from under that bedrock and examine them in the light of day?

Whatever the cause and effect, my attitudes continue to require a lot of soul-searching and frequently go through sea changes that leave me reeling. It is still the music I sing that serves as my touchstone for interpreting these changes. During my trip, one of the songs that came to mind was John Prindle Scott's setting of Come Ye Blessed Of My Father. For a trained-but-not-spectacular singer like me it's a great solo piece. It's not vocally challenging and is both emotional and accessible -- the kind of music people like to hear. It's always been one of my favorites to perform, but I suddenly realized that I am not going to be able to sing it anymore, at least not until I can sort out my new antipathy towards the words. The song, if you don't know it, is a setting of Matthew 25: 34-36 ("I was hungry and you gave me meat ... naked and you clothed me ... sick and you visited me ... I was in prison and you came unto me.") The prison part, in particular, feels all wrong.

I've been teaching in the local men's medium security prison for several months, and am having the time of my life with "my guys." It's a great job, but it is also just that -- a job. I react viscerally when I tell people about my new job and they respond with, "What a ministry!" It happened again this morning. I mentioned my job and someone at church remarked, "Oh, I know a pastor who does prison ministry. It must be so rewarding." But it's not just that I don't "do prison ministry," on some fundamental level it seems just plain wrong to think of "ministering to" anyone. There's such an implied power dynamic, a "higher" and "lower" that I think has no basis in reality and no place in a healthy world view.

The truth, to me at least, is that I am a teacher. I can't be a teacher without students, and I need them at least as much as they need me. The fact of their incarceration is incidental, and I would also say, quite arbitrary. "My guys" are not much different than any other group I have known or taught. Some of them I would trust with my life, others no further than the edge of my field of view. Some I like, some not so much. Some work hard, some hardly work. Nevertheless we are all in it together, we are all part of each other. We would not be the same class -- we would not be whole -- with any one of us missing. That's just the way it works.

I guess what bugs me about the Prindle Scott song setting is that it seems to interpret the passage as God promising us a reward for doing good; God saying, "Come inherit the kingdom because you did all these good things!" I don't see it that way. Definitely not now. Especially not the prison part. I think the meaning of the passage resides in vs. 40 where Jesus says "as much as you have done this to the least of these, my brothers, you have done it to me." In other words -- or at least in my words -- whatever I do for anyone, anywhere, is both to and for myself and, in a wider sense, to and for God because we are all a part of each other and the image of God resides in us all. It's about "if you don't love your brother, whom you have seen, then how can you love God, whom you have not seen?" (1 John 4:20) And it's about looking for that sister or brother not only among those we admire, emulate, and wish to know, but also among all those that society tells us are underprivileged, outcast, and even beneath our notice.

In the song, the emotional center -- the high point -- is where the line crests at the word "came" in the line "I was in prison, and you came unto me" and then in its quiet echo "you came unto me." I'm going to be uncomfortable singing that until I can figure out some way to effectively convey to the people who accuse me of "ministry" that it would be just as profound a spiritual message to sing, "I was a teacher and you listened to me, you learned something from me!"

Who is Lovable, and Why?

For the past couple of weeks I've been thinking a lot about what it is that makes a person lovable.

Today's Old Testament lesson (Amos 6:1a, 4-7) and Gospel lesson (Luke 16: 19-31) seem to indict us not so much for our riches and luxury, but for our failure to love (Lazarus, in the New Testament, who was at the rich man's gate every day hungry and covered with sores; failure to grieve over the ruin of Joseph in Amos). We even sang a hymn promising God to "hold your people in my heart." But, as much as I might like to THINK that I mean it when I make such promises, that I can love a people or love humanity, it only takes one instance of the particular -- one person I can't love -- to trash that house of cards and prove to me that I am nowhere near that attainment. At least, I personally think that one can only meaningfully love "humanity" one person at a time -- alternatively, that the measure of how much I love "humanity" is whether I am able to love the specific example of humanity that may be on my plate an any particular moment. The Buddha, the Dali Lama, other saints may have gotten there, but I am still far away from affirming love in every instance. And yet...

I should digress to say that I am not, when I talk of love, talking about sexual or romantic attraction, or about affection based on similar interests, compatible personalities, family bonds, etc. I mean the "your neighbor as yourself" kind which really approaches the dissolving of my individual, ego-bound need into a space where the other's need, desires and priorities are equal to my own. I am nowhere near where I want to be on this capacity, and yet I do love -- often easily, sometimes surprisingly intensely.

Why are some people so easy to love and others so difficult? As the class I taught this summer came to a close I asked myself this question concerning my students. As usual, some I had come to care for very strongly. Most I felt that I had at least connected with to some degree. But a few I found it really difficult to love. I decided that whom I loved had very little to do with whether they were good students or even good people. [I teach in a men's medium security prison; it's not always a stretch to imagine why they are there, or to imagine that they may be back pretty quickly even when they finish the current sentence. They are not necessarily what society would call "good" men, but many are still eminently lovable.] It's not a matter of personableness or likability -- some of the most socially awkward and withdrawn sparked a real passion within me, and some of the most entertaining were difficult to respond to at any level of depth. While it might be a matter of need -- it's always nice to be needed and sought out for advice -- that also doesn't explain it. I loved some who needed me, but others who were entirely self-sufficient and academically so advanced that they needed me not at all, except to validate their pre-existent capability with a formal grade.

On the same question in another venue, I thought of the many speakers we heard at Chautauqua this year [I am not COMPLETELY over writing about the subject, but I think I am winding down now...], and of those who were especially memorable. Off that subset, there were a few who actually transcended memorable, and I simply loved.

A digression -- In Mark's telling of the rich young ruler visiting Jesus (Mark 10), he writes that "Jesus, looking at him, loved him." (verse 21). Hardly two sentences had passed between them (at least as Mark tells it), and Jesus just simply loved him. People slip under and around your boundaries like that sometimes, you're not looking and suddenly they are, deeply buried beneath your skin. How'd that happen?

So after pondering this all for a couple of weeks (and a lifetime, I guess), I have come to the conclusion that the essential factor in what makes people lovable, to me at least, is the amount they actually reveal who they really are. Huston Smith, in talking about the Jewish view of human nature, writes that "human beings, who on occasion so justly deserve the epiteths 'maggot and worm' (Job 25:6) are equally the beings whom God has 'crowned with glory and honor' (Psalm 8:6). There is a rabbinic saying to the effect that whenever a man or woman walks down the street, he or she is preceded by an invisible choir of angels crying, 'Make way, make way! Make way for the image of God.'"* I am reminded of this with my inmates; it's not whether they are "good" or "bad" people, whether they are trustworthy or manipulative, whether they try hard or goof off, but whether they reveal themselves to me or remain hidden behind their defenses and behind the person they want to project. Yes, that really fits! If they are open and I can understand, I can love. In a way, I can even see myself waiting and hovering around the edges of the boundaries of the people who withhold themselves from me, looking for a crack in the armor where I can catch a glimpse of the person, the "image of God," they really are.

Referring to the public speakers, I am reminded that the woman for whom I wrote speeches and presentations for 10 years was almost universally loved, despite whether we gave her good or bad material, whether she got her words crossed, knew her material thoroughly, or waxed eloquent -- or not. What she WAS was almost entirely transparent -- she could not be other other than who she is, no matter how she tried. She gave herself away to the audience (in both good and bad senses of the word, I guess), and they loved her for it. In the same way, at Chautauqua, the speakers I loved (in the above sense of the word) were just impossible not to love (I am thinking of Ken Burns and Ori Soltes, in particular), simply because they layer so much of themselves and their passion into their presentations that they transmit to the audience not so much thoughts and ideas but their own living souls. Hard NOT to respond.

So, I am left with a paradox. We all try, I especially, to present to others the person we'd like to be -- more, perhaps, than the person we are. But those projections, if I am correct in my hypothesis, are precisely what is KEEPING us from being lovable. However I try, the projection of the me I WANT you to see is flat and 2-dimensional, it leaves me dislocated from the "image of God" that is, warts and all, our birthright and nature. But, still, how scary to let that pretense go...

*Smith, H. (1991). The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Harper Collins, New York, NY. P. 323. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (first paperback edition), Lanham, MD. p. 280-281.

Addendum to "Tolerating the Intolerable" -- Godspell

After I wrote my Sept 5 post, I did more thinking about alternative interpretations of the ending of Godspell. While I am reluctant to interpret too far beyond what the show's creators intended, the modern (electric fence) crucifixion scene still leaves me feeling one can interpret it through the lens of the Holocaust and, even if not explicitly intended, find the questions thus raised provocative and potentially profitable.

I had written that perhaps the occurrence of the Holocaust (and, in general, humanity's repeated plunges into unfathomable evil) is an indictment of Christianity, and that we as Christians should ask ourselves whether two millennia (+/-) of our faith's dominance on the world stage has done us as a species all any good. I still think that's a valid question and, while hoping and believing that the answer is positive for Christianity, it's a question that I propose we should entertain more often than we do.

Another way to look at the symbolism, though, is as a comment on the parallelism of the Jewish and Christian sister religions. Soltes talks of the "relationship between Judaism and Christianity as siblings, children of the same Hebrew-Israelite-Judaean parent, each seeing itself as the legitimate child of that parent and the other as the bastard child."* Huston Smith counters that, at least in modern times, Christians have begun to view their sibling in a different light and recognize "the need for a continuing Jewish presence. Until the world is regenerated, the witness of a nation of priests remains relevant."**

Assuming, with Smith, that God has not been a fan of the primogeniture we two sibling traditions have been trying to assert to each other, it could also be interesting to ask if the play's ending draws an explicit parallel between the passion of Jesus and the Holocaust suffering of the Jewish people.*** However one comes down on the question, I think it might not be so bad to ask if the concept of redemptive suffering is commensurate in the two traditions -- more of a both/and than an either/or? If I were staging the musical, I think I would attempt to draw the parallel even somewhat explicitly, just to get people to consider the possibilities.

Anyway, just another thought...

*Soltes, O. Z. (2009). Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Searching for Oneness.

** Smith, H. (1991). The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Harper Collins, New York, NY. P. 323. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (first paperback edition), Lanham, MD. p. 18.

*** In particular, I am following H. Smith's assertion that "the deep meaning the Jews found in their Exile was the meaning of vicarious suffering" (p. 295), and that the traditional Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 53:4-6 ("he was wounded for our transgressions," etc.), where Christians see prophetic foretelling of Jesus' passion, is the that it points to the suffering of the nation of Israel on behalf of the world.

Tolerating the Intolerable

I'm not yet used to using the Rite One prayers that my little Episcopal Church here in the North Country still follow. Over time, the Episcopal Church has moved theologically to less groveling and more confidence in our public worship. Most of us now stand before God in the prayers and when receiving the Eucharist, instead of kneel in submission. And when we do confess our sins (which may be omitted), we confess only that we have done things we shouldn't and left undone things we should, and that we have not loved with our whole heart. We rarely talk to God anymore about our grievous sins provoking just wrath, much less "bewail" them. I do understand and generally agree with the Gospel of confidence, but I don't know, this week I still can't shake The Ashen Rainbow (Who could? --see my Aug 29 blog), and I wonder if sometimes we aren't just a little too quick to overlook our individual and collective capacity for utter, unqualified evil. What other episode in human history so clearly shows our talent for tolerating the intolerable, looking away when we calculate that the cost of truly seeing is more than we are willing to bear?


I also haven't been able to shake the image from the very end of Godspell where Jesus, who has been crucified on an electric fence is cut down and carried off on a bier to the chorus of "Long Live God." There doesn't seem to be any historical reason to believe that this musical was every associated in anyone's mind with Holocaust Art--nothing I could find, anyway. But the image for me of this buoyant and hopeful musical retelling of the optimism of the Christ story, which culminates with the death and subsequent exit of God on an electric fence, is a apt metaphor for the two millennia Christian experiment culminating with the death of 6 million Jews under the Nazi "final solution."


Before anyone gets too incensed, I realize that the Nazi ideology was thoroughly pagan, and that there were many Christian heroes and Christian martyrs who were engulfed in those years, and that many other groups besides Jews were targeted by the Nazis. I also think that neither God nor society have much need for self-indulgent brow-beating or even much in the way of active response at this point, except that we take up the responsibility for a clear eyed gaze at where we have been and where we might return if we again allow ourselves to cultivate the talent of the incremental tolerance of the intolerable.


But, I do say that thinking Christians would do well to ask ourselves whether this Christian experiment has failed. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were supposed to usher in a new age of the Spirit of God manifest on the earth in the community of the Church, God's new "light to the nations." Surely after a couple thousand years, it's reasonable to take out a tally sheet and ask, "Ok, overall impact: Good or bad? What's our score? Was there really something to this new cult of Jesus?" There is much on the positive side, of course, but there are these troubling little interludes like the Crusades and the Inquisition, for instance, or the subjugation of women, the defense of slavery... And, then, in the case of the Holocaust, there is the little problem of entrenched Christian antisemitism that cannot be explained away. If we sing Ein Feste Burg and take shelter in God's "Mighty Fortress," then we cannot overlook that Martin Luther believed and taught that the Jews are "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."* -- This is our Christian lineage; not an aberration, but the natural continuation of centuries of animosity and scapegoating that created a climate in which the utterly unimaginable and intolerable became inescapable history.

At the end of Godspell, Jesus cries out "Oh God, I'm dying" and the chorus answers "Oh God, you're dying." His lifeless body is carried off on the fence from which he was crucified, to the strains of "Long Live God," and a reprise of "Prepare ye the Way of the Lord." I hear the echo of "The King is dead. Long live the King!" and I at least have to ask, what is there to show that Christianity isn't dead and should be supplanted by some new, perhaps less tragically flawed religion? Are we an ultimately failed experiment in living out the incomparable vision of a great prophet who died too soon?

For me, the jury is still out on that question, although, on the other hand, I can bring myself to do nothing other than continue as a Christian. I am too thoroughly culturally grounded in Christian myth, symbolism, language, metaphor -- Christianity is so completely the vehicle that has conveyed me in my struggle to make sense of the world and my place in it that I don't think I could be separated from that identity and still be me. This background is still the filter through which I process and respond to the world. But, in all honesty, I still have to ask... And if, by some great mercy of the God I'm not so sure I still believe, the answer is that Christianity is still viable, then perhaps, on occasion, we would do well to be seriously troubled about the deeds against the "divine Majesty" of God's original chosen people that are on our heads and were (in the sense that we believe we are living members of each other in the community of believers) committed by our own hands:

"We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins

and wickedness,

which we from time to time most grievously have committed,

by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty,

provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.

We do earnestly repent,

and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;

the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,

the burden of them is intolerable.

Have mercy upon us!"

* Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies, 154, 167, 229, cited in Michael, Robert. Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 111.

More About Love...

"Love is not a pleasure garden, it is agony that leaps
Into your spirit, carries out its work that makes you dear
To yourself and to Him, ready to spark the Way in you
That lives beyond belief and unbelief, that merely reaps
Religious piety.  With love you shall change, make true
What your souls signify, singing psalms in the air with deep
Regard for the mystery that waits for you both out and in.
When you start the journey you wash away your shadow's sin."1

1. From The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, new interpretations by Raficq Abdulla.  Interlink Books, New York, 2003.